THE LITTLE ACROBAT
A STORY OF ITALY
The July sunshine lay hot and golden over the fields of wheat on the Italian hillsides, and the deep shade of the chestnut woods along the road was more inviting than the white glare beyond. The sun stood directly overhead, and along the middle of that white, dusty road there was not an inch of shadow.
A small brown house on wheels crept slowly along this sunny way, drawn by a queer, ill-matched team of three—a plump white horse with long, silky mane and tail, a large spotted horse with fierce eyes and nostrils, and a lean, little brown pony, with strangely twisted neck.
Up and up, always a little higher up, the horses toiled with the house-wagon, as the road rose into the mountains. From the interior of the wagon came the sound of voices, mingled now and then with a complaining note, or an exclamation of pain. The travelers were very tired, and poor Pietro’s fever was rising with every turn of the wheels.
Several men and a sturdy girl of fifteen walked beside the horses in the powdery white dust. Behind the big wagon lagged a boy of eight or nine years. This was Natale,[1] a slight little fellow, with dusty lean legs and dragging feet. His light brown hair curled damply about his sun-browned forehead, and he wore an old, misshapen hat set far back on his pretty head. His loosely fitting clothes were dingy with dust but Natale did not mind, for, presently, they would come to Cutigliano, the old, old town on the mountain side, and there they would camp out on the soft, green grass. And Natale knew from much experience that nothing could clean the dust from travel-stained clothes so well as rolling down the grassy slopes of the chestnut woods, with Niero and Bianco as companions.
Of course the sun was hot; was it not always hot at noon of a summer’s day in the Apennines? But Niero did not complain, and why should Natale?
Bianco had tired of trotting along at Natale’s side, and at the last stopping-place, when Pietro had had a drink of water from the wayside fountain, the tired little black dog had begged to be allowed to ride, and had been willingly taken inside the wagon.
Natale never asked to ride in the wagon, unless he were very tired and sleepy. They were rather crowded in there even without him, for Pietro took up a great deal of room, now that he had to lie down all the time. Besides, the other children, good travelers as they usually were, sometimes grew quarrelsome and made the mothers and the grandmother angry. Natale did not like quarreling and loud voices, so he always preferred his resting times to be given him on the back of one of the horses. But now Tesoro and Il Duca were tired also, and they were so near Cutigliano, it did not matter if Natale did lag behind a little, always with big Niero for company.
Niero was a large, lean, white dog with a closely sheared body. About his neck, however, he wore a fluffy collar of long white hair, and bracelets of the same adorned his four paws, while his long tail ended in a tuft, having very much the appearance of a dishmop. Why this white dog should have been named Niero, meaning black, the clown who had also named the little black dog Bianco, white, could have best explained.
By and by, long after the gray church tower had come in sight and the red-tiled roofs of the town showed bunched together against the green of the wooded hillside, the travelers reached the arched stone bridge across the river at the foot of the mountain. Here the wagon made a halt before beginning the last steep climb to the town. Above, they could see the stone wall which was the boundary of the road winding by loops, one above the other, up the mountain side, but the town had now disappeared from view, so sheer was the rise of the chestnut woods.
This halt gave Natale time to come up with the wagon, and then he sat down with a tired sigh on a heap of mending-stones by the roadside, in front of the wagon door. His legs ached with weariness, but this was no time to think of riding, as even the women and all the children but Pietro must alight now, to relieve the horses in the last pull up hill. Natale watched them descend from the wagon one by one, by the steps one of the musicians placed at the door.
First came Nonna, the grandmother of Rudolfo and Tito and the five other children of the blond acrobat, Antonio Bisbini. She was not Natale’s Nonna, of course, yet everybody called her Nonna, and why should not he, who had no grandmother of his own?
Nonna carried Tito in her arms and led Rudolfo by the hand. Then came Tito’s mother, the three-months’-old infant, Gigi, in her arms, followed by Olga, who held little Maria by the hand. Next, Natale’s own mamá stepped down, glad to stretch her active limbs by walking, after nursing Pietro for so many tedious hours. Then the rest of Bisbini’s children scrambled out, aided by the music-man’s helping hands.
On they went again then, the clown, who was Natale’s stepfather, walking at the horses’ heads, and cracking his long whip, and chirruping to them while the other men strode behind the wagon, pushing upon it with all their might at the steep places in the road.
The women and children, meanwhile, left the road to climb the short cuts upward, leading directly from terrace to terrace,—mere paths paved with rough stones, here and there loosened and displaced by rushing rain-torrents of the past. The little ones bore the heat and the roughness of the way without murmuring, being allowed to straggle along as they pleased, now stopping to gather a red poppy from the edge of the wheat, now dropping on the ground to search for a briar afflicting some tired foot. Natale was not the last in the procession now, for he was anxious to get to the top and see what the tall wheat and the green slopes were hiding from his eyes.
At last they reached the wide turn in the road where the wagon must finally stop, at the edge of the town field. The wagon also came toiling upward, and now the good horses might rest. So these were unhitched from the wagon, and while one or two of the men led them up the steep, paved street into the village to find food and shelter for them, the others attended to the house-wagon, drawn close against the low stone wall inclosing the field, placing great stones against the wheels to steady it in its place. Now was Natale’s hour and the dogs’, and they understood this as well as he! Over the low wall they scampered and down on the soft, hot grass they lay, rolling over and over down the gentle slope of the field until, suddenly, Natale found himself landing directly upon his feet, with a whirring in his head, and the sound of distressed barking in his ears.
The dogs had had the wit to stop on the very edge of a sharp descent which Natale had not noticed, and now they stood on the bank, half-a-dozen feet above him, their forefeet firmly planted on the brink of the grassy precipice, and their tufty tails high in the air, begging with all their might to know whether their dear little comrade were hurt. Natale was not hurt, but the jar of the descent gave him a queer feeling under the waistband of his trousers, and he sat down directly where he stood, on the lower terrace, turning his back upon the dogs.
A fringe of bushes threw a narrow band of shade about him from above, and he made up his mind to stay there till something should be made ready for dinner. He hoped he would not be wanted to fetch anything from the village,—he was always fetching something for somebody. He had heard his mother calling to her husband to bring a little meal for the polenta,[2] when he should finish stabling the horses, and he knew there was wine left in the flask in the wagon.
From where Natale sat he could look directly down upon the roof of a house far down by the stone bridge and could faintly hear the rushing of the little river Lima over the rocks. Presently he eased himself out on the grass at full length, with his arms crossed beneath his head. As he dropped off to sleep, he was thinking how well it was that there could be no performance in the tent that evening. He was sure that Arduina would laugh more than ever at his stiff little feats on the circus carpet if he should have to turn somersaults after the long tramp.
Then Natale slept, with the great green mountains closing around him, and Bianco the black dog and Niero the white keeping watch above his head from where they had stretched themselves on the edge of the terrace in the sun.