Read Cavalleria rusticana and Other Stories for Free Online Page A

for a good day’s work in the summer.
    The rags that covered her person by way of clothing served only to distort what otherwise might have been seen as delicate womanly beauty. It would have taken a vivid imagination to think that those hands, condemned to a daily round of unrelenting toil in burning heat and freezing cold and scratching a living through dense brambles and jagged fissures in the rock, or that those feet, accustomed to tramping bare in the snow and over rocks seared by the sun, torn by the thorns and hardened by the rocks, could ever have been beautiful. It was impossible to guess the age of this derelict human creature; poverty had crushed her from infancy with all the trials that harden and deform the soul, the mind and the body. It had been just the same for her mother and her grandmother, and it would be just the same for her daughter. The only trace that remained in her of her brothers was a sufficient amount of intelligence to understand their orders and carry out the hardest and most menial of tasks on their behalf.
    Nedda held out her soup bowl, and the steward’s wife poured into it the miserable helping of bean soup left in the pot.
    ‘Why do you always come last? Don’t you realize that the last ones only get the leftovers?’ said the steward’s wife in an effort to make amends.
    The girl lowered her eyes towards the steaming black soup in her bowl as though to acknowledge the reproof, then walked away very slowly so that none of it would be spilt.
    ‘I’d gladly let you have some of mine,’ said one of Nedda’s more charitable companions, ‘but if it goes on raining tomorrow I shall have to eat the rest of my bread as well as losing my day’s wages.’
    ‘No fear of that for me,’ said Nedda, with a sad little smile.
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘Because I have no bread of my own. What little I had I left with my mother, along with the few coppers I had in my pocket.’
    ‘Are you living on soup and nothing else?’
    ‘Yes, I’m used to it,’ Nedda replied simply.
    ‘A curse on this foul weather that robs us of our wages!’ swore another of the girls.
    ‘Come on, then, take some of mine.’
    ‘I don’t feel hungry any more,’ Varannisa retorted briskly, thanking her for the offer.
    ‘You there, who curse the rain of the good Lord, don’t you ever eat bread like the rest of us?’ said the steward’s wife to the girl who had sworn at the foul weather. ‘Don’t you know that autumn rain means a good harvest?’
    Her words were greeted with a general murmur of approval.
    ‘Yes, but it also means that your husband will be docking three half-days from our week’s wages!’
    This brought another murmur of approval.
    ‘What work have you done in those three half-days that needs to be paid for?’ replied the old woman triumphantly.
    ‘That’s true! That’s true!’ the other girls responded, with the instinct that ordinary people have for justice, even if it causes someone to suffer.
    The steward’s wife recited the rosary, and the monotonous mumbling of the Ave Marias ensued, accompanied by one or two yawns. After the litany came prayers for the living and the dead, at which point the eyes of poor Nedda filled with tears, and she forgot to say her Amen.
    ‘What are things coming to when you don’t say your Amen?’ said the steward’s wife in a severe tone of voice.
    ‘I was thinking about my poor mother so far away,’ Nedda replied, putting on a serious air.
    The steward’s wife bade them goodnight, took up the lantern, and went away. A picturesque array of pallets was made up in different parts of the kitchen or around the fire, the dying flames of which cast their flickering light over the various groups and the postures of the sleepers. It was a good farm, whose owner, unlike many others, spared no effort to provide a sufficiency of beans for the minestra, wood for the fire, and straw for the pallets. The women slept in the kitchen, and the men in the barn. But when