one by Luigi Pirandello

Author:Luigi Pirandello [Luigi Pirandello]
Language: eng
Format: epub

Ah, what stiffness, weariness and squalor there was in that bank! All those glass partitions that ran in a row for the length of the three big rooms, partitions of frosted glass, with five yellow wickets in each one, the same yellow that was to be seen on the cornices and the woodwork of the broad plate-glass windows; here and there were ink-stains, and here and there a strip of paper or two had been pasted over a crack in the plate glass; the old terracotta brick pavement, worn away in the center, which ran the length of the three huge rooms; worn away, likewise, in front of each wicket—a gloomy corridor, that, with the glass of the partitions on one side, in each room, and on the other the dusty panes of the two broad windows; those strings of figures along the walls, scrawled up with pen or pencil, over the little ink-spattered tables, between one window and another, beneath the peeling frames of certain nameless old pictures, black with soot and dusty and distended here and there; and a smell of ancient mould everywhere, mingled with the acrid odor of paper from the ledgers and with the aridity exhaled by a furnace down below, on the ground-level. And the despairing melancholy of those few old-fashioned chairs upon which no one sat, over by the little tables; they had shoved them to one side and left them there where they did not belong, and for those poor useless chairs, it must have been an insult and an affliction to be left like that. How many times, upon coming into the place, had I had it on the tip of my tongue to remark: “But why those chairs? Why have they been sentenced to stand over there, where no one makes use of them?” I had, however, restrained myself, and not merely because I had reflected in time that, in such a place as this, any sympathy manifested for chairs would have struck everyone with amazement and would, not unlikely, have sounded like a bit of cynicism; I had restrained myself, rather, because I knew that I would only raise a laugh at my own expense; my noticing such a thing would certainly have appeared whimsical to anyone who knew how little attention I paid to business matters.

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