Read Cavalleria rusticana and Other Stories for Free Online Page B

you have a miserly owner or a small farm, men and women bed down wherever they can find a space, in the stable or anywhere else, on straw or a few rags, children alongside their parents, and if the father is well off and has a blanket of his own, he spreads it over his family. Anyone feeling cold will huddle up against his neighbour, or settle down with his feet in the warm ashes, or cover himself with strawas best he can. After toiling away for a whole day, and before beginning all over again on the next, sleep comes easily, like a benevolent despot, and the owner turns a blind eye to everything except for denying work to the girl who is about to become a mother, and unable to complete her ten hours of back-breaking labour.
    Before dawn the early risers had gone out to see what the weather was doing, and the kitchen door banged and swung continually back and forth, allowing rain and an icy wind to sweep in over the slugabeds who were still asleep. At first light the steward had come and flung the door wide open so that even the laziest would wake up, for it is not right to cheat your master out of a single minute of the ten-hour day that he pays you so handsomely for, sometimes as much as three
carlini
as well as the minestra!
    ‘It’s raining!’ The dread words were on everyone’s lips, repeated here and there in tones of sullen resentment. Nedda leant against the door-post, gazing sadly out on the enormous, leaden clouds that suffused her figure with the grey tints of the dawn. The day was cold and misty. Leaves curled up and separated from the trees, slithering along the branches, then fluttering for a while in the air as they fell to the muddy earth, and rivulets spread into puddles where the pigs rolled about in ecstasy. The cows pressed their muzzles against the gate of the shed, fixing their sorrowful eyes on the falling rain. From their nests below the tiles of the gutter, sparrows chirruped an endless mournful lament.
    ‘There’s another day wasted!’ muttered one of the girls, as she sank her teeth into a loaf of black bread.
    ‘Look, the clouds are separating from the sea over there,’ said Nedda, raising her arm in that direction. ‘Perhaps the weather will change before midday.’
    ‘Even if it does, that swindler of a steward will only pay us a third of a day!’
    ‘That’s better than nothing.’
    ‘Yes, but who’s going to pay us back for the bread we’re having to eat?’
    ‘What about the losses the owner has to bear on account of the olives going bad, and the ones he’s losing in the mud out there?’
    ‘That’s true!’ said another of the girls.
    ‘But just you go and pick up a single one of those olives that in half an hour’s time will be no good to anyone, to go with your dry bread, and see what the steward has to say about it.’
    ‘He’ll be quite right, because the olives don’t belong to us.’
    ‘Nor do they belong to the ground that’s making a meal of them!’
    ‘The ground belongs to the owner, doesn’t it?’ Nedda replied, her eyes aglow with pride in the force of her logic.
    ‘That’s very true,’ said another girl, who could think of no better way to reply.
    ‘If you ask me, I’d rather let it rain all day than spend half a day crawling through the mud in this weather for three or four miserable
soldi.’
    ‘Three or four
soldi
mean nothing to you, I suppose!’ Nedda retorted sadly.
    On the Saturday evening, when it was time to settle the week’s accounts, and the steward’s table was littered with papers and little heaps of
soldi,
the men with the loudest voices were the first to be paid, then the most quarrelsome of the women. The last of all, and those who were paid the least, were the timid and the weak among the women. When the steward had made up her account, Nedda discovered that after her wages had been docked for the two and a half days of forced inactivity, she was left with only forty
soldi.
    The poor girl dared not open her mouth, but simply