Soon the Giovanni came home, and took his cornet upstairs. Then he came to see us. He was an ingenuous youth, sordidly shabby and dirty. His fair hair was long and uneven, his very high starched collar made one aware that his neck and his ears were not clean, his American crimson tie was ugly, his clothes looked as if they had been kicking about on the floor for a year.
Yet his blue eyes were warm and his manner and speech very gentle.
'You will speak English with us,' I said.
'Oh,' he said, smiling and shaking his head, 'I could speak English very well. But it is two years that I don't speak it now, over two years now, so I don't speak it.'
'No. It is two years that I have not spoke, not a word--so, you see, I have--'
'You have forgotten it? No, you haven't. It will quickly come back.'
'If I hear it--when I go to America--then I shall--I shall--'
The landlord, who had been watching with pride, now went away. The wife also went away, and we were left with the shy, gentle, dirty, and frowsily-dressed Giovanni.
He laughed in his sensitive, quick fashion.
'The women in America, when they came into the store, they said, "Where is John, where is John?" Yes, they liked me.'
And he laughed again, glancing with vague, warm blue eyes, very shy, very coiled upon himself with sensitiveness.
He had managed a store in America, in a smallish town. I glanced at his reddish, smooth, rather knuckly hands, and thin wrists in the frayed cuff. They were real shopman's hands.
The landlord brought some special feast-day cake, so overjoyed he was to have his Giovanni speaking English with the Signoria.
When we went away, we asked 'John' to come down to our villa to see us. We scarcely expected him to turn up.
Yet one morning he appeared, at about half past nine, just as we were finishing breakfast. It was sunny and warm and beautiful, so we asked him please to come with us picnicking.
He was a queer shoot, again, in his unkempt longish hair and slovenly clothes, a sort of very vulgar down-at-heel American in appearance. And he was transported with shyness. Yet ours was the world he had chosen as his own, so he took his place bravely and simply, a hanger-on.
We climbed up the water-course in the mountain-side, up to a smooth little lawn under the olive trees, where daisies were flowering and gladioli were in bud. It was a tiny little lawn of grass in a level crevice, and sitting there we had the world below us--the lake, the distant island, the far-off low Verona shore.