'
Then he told us how he bought goods in Brescia and in Said for the shop
at home, how he had rigged up a funicular with the assistance of the
village, an overhead wire by which you could haul the goods up the face
of the cliffs right high up, to within a mile of the village. He was
very proud of this. And sometimes he himself went down the funicular to
the water's edge, to the boat, when he was in a hurry. This also
pleased him.
But he was going to Brescia this day to see about going again to
America. Perhaps in another month he would be gone.
It was a great puzzle to me why he would go. He could not say himself.
He would stay four or five years, then he would come home again to see
his father--and his wife and child.
There was a strange, almost frightening destiny upon him, which seemed
to take him away, always away from home, from the past, to that great,
raw America. He seemed scarcely like a person with individual choice,
more like a creature under the influence of fate which was
disintegrating the old life and precipitating him, a fragment
inconclusive, into the new chaos.
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