Heart/The Workshop
THE WORKSHOP
Precossi came last night to remind me that I was to go and see his workshop, which is down the street. So this morning when I went out with my father, I got him to take me there for a moment. As we neared the shop, Garoffi issued from it on a run, with a package in his hand, his big cloak, with which he hides his merchandise, fluttering in the wind. Ah! now I know where he goes to get the iron filings, which he sells for old papers, that trader of a Garoffi!
When we came to the door, we saw Precossi seated on a little pile of bricks, studying his lesson, with his book resting on his knees. He rose quickly and invited us to enter. It was a large room, full of coaldust, bristling with hammers, pincers, bars, and old iron of every description; and in one corner burned a fire in a small furnace, where puffed a pair of bellows worked by a boy. Precossi, the father, was standing near the anvil, and a young man was holding a bar of iron in the fire.
“Ah! here he is,” said the smith, as soon as he caught sight of us, and he lifted his cap, “the nice boy who gives away railway trains! He has come to see me work a little, has he not? I shall be at your service in a moment.”
And as he said it, he smiled; and he no longer had the savage face, the evil eyes of former days. The young man handed him a long bar of iron heated redhot on one end, and the smith placed it on the anvil. He was making one of those curved bars for the rail of terrace balustrades. He raised a large hammer and began to beat the bar, pushing the heated part now here, now there, between one point of the anvil and the middle, and turning it about in various ways; and it was a marvel to see how the iron curved beneath the rapid and accurate blows of the hammer, and twisted, and gradually assumed the graceful form of a leaf torn from a flower, shaped as though it were of dough which he had modelled with his hands. And meanwhile his son watched us with a certain air of pride, as much as to say, “See how my father works!”
“Do you see how it is done, little master?” the blacksmith asked me, when he had finished, holding out the bar, which looked like a bishop's crosier, Then he laid it aside, and thrust another into the fire.
“That was very well made, indeed,” my father said to him. And he added, “So you are working eh?—You have returned to good habits?”
“Yes, I have returned,” replied the workman, wiping away the perspiration, and reddening a little. “And do you know who made me return to them?” My father pretended not to understand. “This brave boy,” said the blacksmith, indicating his son with his finger; “the boy who studied and did honor to his father, while his father rioted, and treated him like a dog. When I saw that medal—Ah! thou little lad of mine, no bigger than a soldo[1] of cheese, come here, that I may get a good look at you!”
The boy ran to him instantly; the smith took him and put him on the anvil, holding him under the arms, and said to him:
“Scrub off the front of this big beast of a daddy of yours a little!”
And then Precossi covered his father's black face with kisses, until he was all black himself.
“That's the way to do it,” said the smith, and he set him on the ground again.
“That really is the way, Precossi!” exclaimed my father delighted. And bidding the smith and his son good day, he led me away. As I was going out, little Precossi said to me, “Excuse me,” and thrust a packet of nails into my pocket. I invited him to come and view the Carnival from my house.
“You gave him your railway train,” my father said to me in the street; “but if it had been made of gold and filled with pearls, it would still have been but a petty gift to that sainted son, who has reformed his father's heart.”
- ↑ The Twentieth part of a cubit; Florentine measure.