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(frontis)
BY
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. II.
London
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1881
[All rights reserved]
(front)
LONDON: PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO.,
NEW-STREET SQUARE AND PARLIAMENT STREET
happens, a whilom thief or an ex-forger, then indeed you have committed something very like high treason, and you must be tried and sentenced as speedily as may be, to pacify the outraged majesty of Law.
Italy is like M. Gambetta; with the cap of liberty on their heads
they both set up a policeman and say 'worship him.'
It seems hardly worth while to have upset all the old religions and
all the old dynasties only to arrive at this.
The crime of Carmelo having been therefore so heinous, the usual
snail's pace of the law was hastened, and by what was almost a
miracle of rapidity, he having done this crime in sultry June, was actually
brought up to trial at the beginning of October, having spent only four
months in prison on suspicion, which is, as things go, really nothing at
all.
The Pretore of Pomodoro put on his
black cap and robes, and mounted his curule chair, with his mind already made up as to Carmelo, before this state prisoner had ever entered the court-house.
Like the wolves in the 'Animaux Parlants,' lawyers,
guards, secretaries, chancellors and syndics make a compact party,
sworn never to quarrel, and to grip all that comes in their way. The
Pretore, Gino Novi, had never seen either accuser or accused in his life
before, but before he had heard two words of the case he had made his mind
up against Carmelo; all these officials are little Gambettas, and the Law
is their fetish. Offend it, and you are vile as a Jesuit; there is no point
in your favour possible.
It was with much impatience that this brisk and smart young man, who
had the administration of justice in his power over something like seven
thousand people, went
through all the forms of trial, as though there were any sort of doubt of the prisoner's criminality.
It was absurd, thought Gino Novi, not to be able to condemn the
wretch off-hand; but the law gave him a trial, and he, as I say,
like M. Gambetta, revered the Law; indeed, there is hardly anything to
which you may not stretch it, and hardly any end it will not answer; when
you hold it as a schoolmaster holds the taws you get quite fond of it. It
is so unpleasant to others, and so elastic and omnipotent. Carmelo's
advocate was fainthearted; he was equally sure of his fees whether his
client were sentenced or set free; and he was afraid that by taking up this
case he made himself obnoxious to the Pretore, and to the governing powers
generally. It is far more compromising to defend a free citizen who has
been wronged by a guard, than it is to defend a brigand who has only murdered travellers and violated women.
His advocate was fainthearted, and his witnesses were not
over-wise; they were his own relatives, who got passionate and
indignant, and were reproved, and neighbours, such as Gigi Canterelli and
Cecco, who were too eager in his defence to be believed. Gigi Canterelli
made indeed a bad impression on the court by swearing heartily that Bindo
Terri was a 'briccone' and a
'scelerato,' but that he was
set on by blackguards in black cloth higher than himself, and that
everybody knew, for the whole commune was a prey to this set of
oppressors and extortioners; for which violent enunciation of the truth
the impetuous old grocer was ordered out of court, with a bad mark
scored against his name, to be of use the next, time that he
should have a case at law there, against carriers who had stolen his bags of rice, or against octroi-duties falsely levelled on his cheeses. Never again would Gigi gain any cause that would be heard at the Pretura of Pomodoro.
It is not true that no Italian ever tells the truth, as commentators
on the country say, but it is sadly true that when one does he suffers
for it.
The trial went on all through the golden October day, wasting the
time of many men who should have been at work in the vineyards; and
throughout it Carmelo stood between the carabiniers, faint and sick
from past confinement and present fatigue, and his old father and his
brothers and Pippo listened trembling and indignant, with the sweat
rolling off their brows.
When questioned, the prisoner said only,
'I would do the same to-morrow; he poisoned my dog.'
But of this there was, alas for Carmelo! no proof, and if there had
been, what would it have served? It was the law of the commune of
Vezzaja and Ghiralda that the guardian of the public morals should be
the poisoner of dogs.
'I would do the same to-morrow!' said Carmelo with
eyes that flashed fire from out of the weary pallor of his face.
Gino Novi looked at him from under his black cinque-cento cap of
office, and scowled and shuddered.
'This is the stuff that makes regicides!' he thought.
It is certainly the stuff that made Tell; but the Pretore did not
think of it in that sense.
Carmelo's attorney had summoned two or
three men whose dogs had been poisoned, and who had traced their death to Bindo; and had also summoned Squillace, the apothecary who had supplied the poison; but when the people came up to the tribunal they were frightened, and hemm'd and haw'd and prevaricated, and scratched their heads and blew their noses, and ended in sheer fright by being sure of nothing, while Signore Squillace perjured himself as handsomely as if he had been a deputy arraigned for bribery, instead of a poor devil paid thirty pounds a year to doctor all the commune.
So the long, dull, sad, terrible day wore away, with the sun beating
at the thick panes of the casements, and the dirty, garlic-scented
crowd of Pomodoro pressed together behind the bar, thick as bees in
swarming-time. The advocate's heart was not in his work; it
put him in bad odour, and every now and then
the eye of the Pretore menaced him, and then he lost the thread of his subject, and began to think that a few months in prison would not hurt a young fellow, and to remember that he himself was a very poor man with a jolie ribambelle of hungry children.
He examined his witnesses badly, he helped to hush-hush Gigi
Canterelli, he pleaded loosely, spoke at random, showed he thought ill
of his client, and had not courage to bring into evidence any one of
the many rascalities of Bindo Terri's past, or the many villanies of
his present.
It was one of those trials common enough in Italy, where the verdict
is a foregone conclusion. No one except the Pastorini boys and old
Pippo was astonished when Gino Novi, with his sharp black eyes
glittering like lancets, sentenced Carmelo to seven months'
imprisonment for his assault
upon an officer of the law. He would have been better pleased to give seven years, but he was a wise young man, who never let his passions get the mastery of him, and kept himself close within precedents and statutes.
Seven months!
All the bitter winter, and part of the lovely spring, were to pass
over the young head of Carmelo in the narrow den of the prison.
When he heard, he opened his great blue eyes, with a frantic terror
in them, his lips grew blue, he shivered all over and dropped down in a
dead faint. He had eaten nothing all day, and he had been standing
many hours.
The elder Pastorini, a strong man, shook like a woman; his veins
swelled on his forehead; his eyes grew dull; the men around him forced
him out into the open
air; they thought he would fall in apoplexy.
When he was in the air he staggered, and gave a great gasp for
breath.
'This is for what we toil!' he shouted, 'this is
for what we give our last coin to the tax-gatherer, and our last
child to the barracks, and our last breath to the hospital! God above
us! We are meeker, duller, stupider fools than any sheep that crouches
to the shearing! Men, you have known me all my life. I have been
peaceable, neighbourly, respectful to law and State, heedful to pay
debt and impost; you have known me all my life. I have reared my sons
in honesty and simple worth. I have done no harm, I never wronged man,
woman, child, or beast. Have I deserved this that they do to me? Men,
as God lives, this night would I bear steel and torch through the
kingdom
to kill these wretches that ruin us, these worms that crawl to their masters, but sting the poor as the viper stings. As God lives, I pray--I pray--for revolution, for red blood, for bitter battle, for human justice; I pray.--'
Then his voice choked, and he lifted his arms in the air, and the
men caught him to save his fall.
Meanwhile, in the court old Pippo had risen on trembling limbs, and
with his hat doffed, and his white hair shining in the sunshine, called
aloud to the judge, 'Dear sir, most illustrious, you cannot mean
it; you cannot have the heart to mean it. The lad is good as gold. You
cannot brand him felon and bracket him with thieves? Dear
sir--honoured judge--do hear me. He is to marry my daughter. His
marriage lines are all drawn out, and the girl sits at home
weeping, and the bridal gown lies in a drawer, and the orange flowers are all yellow and shrivelled, and they lie on it to keep it from moth. Good sir! Most high and honourable sir, do hear me! The dear lad already has suffered four mortal months in the town gaol. It is enough. It is too much! He did no harm. If you only but knew the rogue, the thief, the impostor, the villain, that they make a guard--'
'Take that old madman out of court,' hissed the Pretore;
and Pippo was hustled and pulled down by the officials from where he
stood, and thrown, as if he were a stone, through the doors.
'Defamation of an officer of the law,' muttered Gino
Novi, as he closed his great case of papers and hurried from his
throne, as twilight dimmed the court, to go and eat a supper of robins
and tripe, fried ham
and lentils, in his own room behind the chamber of justice, where he had invited Messer Gaspardo Nellemane and Messer Luca Finti to pass a jovial hour with him, and lost a friendly coin or two over draughts and dice.
'Very insubordinate and revolutionary people in this commune,
I fear; no veneration for authority,' said he; and his two
guests, who quite forgot that but for revolution they would at this
hour have been respectively selling their father's battered iron and
rotting fish, shook their heads and said there was a bad spirit
abroad--the people certainly had no respect for authority.
For these good gentlemen were like all their class, the very oddest
mixture of Prussian despotism and Parisian radicalism. They hated all
those who were above them, and despised all those who were below them;
there was only one stratum of humanity that they thought worth consideration or preservation, i.e. their own.
When Italy shall purge herself of these, the opportunists of public
benches and public desks--the licensed and registered brigands of the
public purse--then, and then only may she. lift off the burden of her
taxes, and breathe freely, and have title to be a voice in Europe. Will
this day ever come? By the educated will of the people, perhaps.
Perhaps--never.
Nepotism and Impiegatism are as thorns in her flesh; fixed there in
festered wounds, and maybe, past all surgery. They are as thorns that
pierce, as leeches that suck; when the flesh is bloodless, then it rots
and the body falls.
The sentence had been passed; the doors had closed, the bolts been
fastened on him.
He was in prison for seven months.
Ah! judges and gentlemen of the council, who put youths in your
prison cells for bathing in a river in the heat, for rescuing a dog
from the slaughterer, from begging for a coin when their old mothers or
their young babes starve and perish, how much I should like you to
taste that prison yourselves! The Bastille was the royal dungeon of
the noblesse, and scarcely deserved the rage of the people; but these
petty bastilles all over the land, where by petty laws the honest, the
poor, the helpless, the courageous, for every trifling act of life are
thrown to break their hearts as they may, and from which they can only
issue with blackened names and ruined characters--when will
these accursed places, that mingle the righteous with the unrighteous, the godly and the innocent with the thief and the assassin, surrender to the summons of the nation, and be dismantled and destroyed?
Never so long as Messer Nellemane and his kind shall reign; and make
of every brave impulse of pity, of every despairing cry of want, a
crime.
Carmelo, lying on the hard narrow bed of the prison cell, recovered
from his swoon, stared with dull aching eyes up at the ceiling; the
prison had been an old palace once, and on the ceiling, which was a
section of what had been once a grand and vaulted roofing of a
banqueting hall, there was still in unfaded frescoes a little group of
angels bearing palms and flying up against the stars.
Those angels seemed an innocent mockery to Carmelo; the innocent lad
to whom the saints
and the sons of God had been no whit less real than the poplars on the river shore, hated them now, and thought them cruel deceptions, beautiful fair lies.
'If they were really up there beyond the sun, they would not
let these things be,' he said between his teeth, lying on his
back, and knowing that for seven long months he would be a prisoner,
treated like a felon, because a vile wrong had been done to him, and he
had justly chastised it.
Carmelo had always been in the open air, up whilst the skies were
still dark, on the road with the mule, at work under the trees, fishing
in the Rosa water, dashing the ruddy grain down into the black mouth of
the shaft; on feast days and holy days strolling through the lanes and
fields with a flower behind his ear, or thrumming his mandoline in the
moonlight under the porch;
a free life and a happy one, doing no harm and thinking none, enjoying vaguely but intensely, as the bull enjoys the pastures when the springtide grass is sweet in the dew of dawn; a natural life and a wholesome life, with free movement of the limbs and unpolluted air in the lungs, dumb in outward expression, but keen to inward pleasure from scent, and sight, and sound.
To him every moment in this close den, without a breath of air, with
scarce a gleam of sunlight, was despair. A day in a prison to a
free-born son of the soil, used to work with the broad bright sky
alone above his head, is more agony than a year of it is to a cramped
city-worker used only to the twilight of a machine-room or a
workshop, only to an air full of smuts and smoke, and the stench of acids,
and the dust of filed steel or sifted coal. The suffering of the
two cannot be compared, and one among many of the injustices the law, all over the world, commits is that it never takes into consideration what a man's past has been. There are those to whom a prison is a hell; there are those to whom it is something better than the life they led.
Carmelo lay on his rough sacking, and stared at the painted angels
that the last glow of the sunset had illumined, and he thought that on
the morrow he would be a madman and know nothing. That was his fear.
His brain boiled and burned in his skull, and his heart seemed to pant
and leap like a wounded hare springing before the hounds.
When the gaoler looked in at morning, the lad was in high fever:
they called the parish doctor of Pomodoro, he pronounced it to be
congestion of the brain. They took
him in a litter to the infirmary, a dark, foul smelling, ill-kept place, where the doctor tried experiments on the patients as he pleased, and cut up dogs and cats alive in a back room, and flattered himself that this was science.
When will the truth be written of hospitals anywhere? If ever it
were written, the faculty would swear it all a lie.
No one hardly ever recovered in this infirmary, certainly none were
ever the better for it. All Carmelo's auburn locks were shaved off,
and many ounces of blood were taken from him, and little else was done;
he was a prisoner, and really it did not matter. His father, who was
not allowed to see him, drew his last franc out of the Cassa di
Risparmio1
to bespeak the doctor's care for him and the doctor took the fees;
secretly, as
___________________1 Savings-bank.
Page 23
he was forbidden by the rules to touch a centime.
'The dear lad, he has ruined me!' thought the old man,
who was feeble and broken in health since the fit before the Pretura,
and who had spent nearly his all over the long account of the notary;
'dear lad, he has ruined me! Yet he is as innocent as a babe
unborn!'
The miller was not a weak man, nor given to such weaknesses, but the
hot tears rose in his eyes and fell down his furrowed cheeks as he
left the hospital bed. He was not allowed to stay there, nor to send
any sister or brother of Carmelo's to him, and he felt as though his
tough heart would break, as he got up behind his good grey horse and
jolted over the ruts of the road in the twilight of the November
afternoon.
Why had all this ever come upon him?
Who put these thieves and tyrants there on those stools of office?
The Government had done, he supposed. To him, the Government meant
the King. He cursed the King. How could he tell that the King had no
more to do with these things than with the melons and pumpkins that had
ripened with the summer sun under his garden wall?
It is the White Cross of Savoy which the ink splashes of Messer
Nellemane's documents stain in the people's eyes.
How can you expect them to comprehend the contradictions of
constitutionalism?
The King caused it all, and set Messer Nellemane on that office
throne; so thought Demetrio Pastorini, and so think tens of thousands;
but the thought failed to console the old miller as he went along the
dusky road that he knew so well; indeed it made
his pain the more bitter to him, because he had lost a dearly beloved and only brother in days when they were young, in those wars against the 'stranieri' which they were told had given them freedom.
So weary were his thoughts and so preoccupied, and so dim were his
eyes with tears, that if the good grey horse had not been acquainted
with the way for fifteen years, he might have missed it for aught that
his master did to guide him.
'Hè--o! Ouf!' cried the old man to
the horse in surprise, as his own mill-house loomed through the grey
shadows, and the horse checked his trot without the command.
In the mist of the autumn night that was closing in, he could see
the figure of his eldest daughter as she ran out to him; she was
sobbing, and the sound of her sobs was borne to him through the cold,
quiet, misty air.
'Oh father,' she stammered, 'Oh father!' and
then she came to the side of the cart, and lifted herself up on the
side of the wheel and caught his hand: 'Oh father' she
cried again.
The old man trembled.
'What is it new of sorrow?' he said: he spoke almost
roughly from very fear.
The girl standing up on the shaft caught his hand:
'Oh father, do not mind too much--the trees !'
'The trees!'
He said no more; he got down off the cart and threw the reins of
rope to the youngest boy.
'Lead the horse to the stable,' he said unsteadily.
'The trees? what of the trees?'
He strode off in the darkness towards the river, and the girl
followed him.
'Oh father!' she said again with a great sob.
There was very little light but the gleam of the moon as the clouds
swept by; it was enough to show him what had been done in his absence.
Three of the poplars had been felled.
'Oh father!' said the girl catching at his hands once
more. 'We did all we could to stop them, but they would not
wait. There were six of them with hatchets, and an
overseer. They said they had the right by law. Oh father!--'
When the wood-cutters and the overseer came on the morrow, he
was like one beside himself. He got down his old gun from the shelf, and
would have shot the first man that dared approach the
boschetto, but his young sons and daughters
weeping about him made his nerve and his purpose fail;
they got the weapon from him, and besought him for their sakes to be patient.
'Patient!' he cried to them. 'Shall we be patient
while we are stripped alive as the live lamb is stripped of her skin, she
bleeding at every pore? Patient? you are poltroons! You eat the dust!
You are no children of my blood. Let me be!'
But they clung about him notwithstanding, and pleaded that better
was it to suffer wrong than to do it, and sweeter in heaven's sight;
and so besought him, in the name of Christ and of their own, that he, being
a religious man, and one most affectionate, gave way at last, and dropped
into his wooden chair and wept, and bore as best he could the sound of
crashing axe, of falling trunk, of wrenching wood, of shivering leaf.
'Must the King, who has dominion from sea to sea, over all the
land and the greatness of it, must he grudge me my little all?' he
cried in his agony, as he heard the blows of the hatchet on the trees.
Messer Nellemane visited the spot often.
The municipal soul loves destruction. Whether it beholds a noble and
fair monument of ancient times being changed to dust and rubble by the
hammers of masons, or whether it sees a gracious sylvan haunt alter to a
desolation of sand and stones beneath the hatchets of wood-cutters,
the municipal
soul is equally full of an exceeding joy, of an unspeakable contentment.
Messer Nellemane, who possessed the municipal soul in its entire
perfection, was thus happy now; and his happiness was further pointed by
the acid pungency of a grudge paid off, a vengeance accomplished.
It was a sad sight to other eyes than his: the mossy bank where
Toppa had used to roam stamped down into mud, the brave trees felled, their
yellow leaves churned into a paste of earth and water, the branches piled
in squares to be sold for firewood, the tall trunks trimmed and set in rows
to be disposed of as timber; all the place unsightly, naked, miserable,
where all had been so lately freshness, and peace, and forest
loveliness.
The white wall of the mill-house stood bare and ugly, no friendly
shadows cast on it from waving boughs. The heart of the
miller seemed broken in his breast; he could scarce bear to pass his door; he could not bear to look across the stream.
He never spoke of it to anyone since the trees had gone.
Once his third son, little Dante, said timidly:
'Is it well, father, that they should sell the wood like that?
They have not paid you.'
Then Demetrio Pastorini said to him:
'If they sold your sister to the brothel would you squabble to
share the price? Pay? no, they will never pay. They are thieves. Thieves do
not pay for what they take.'
Then the young man was afraid, and did not dare to speak of the wood
again.
After a while the timber was carried away, and the boughs also; no one
knew where they went; it was understood to go
to the City. No one ventured to inquire, since the stern lips of Pastorini were dumb.
If he had spoken he would have learned little: he would have heard
that the engineers had valued his possession, and the municipality had
contracted to pay for it: that was all he would have been told. He
did not know that he was highly honoured, and that they were treating him
exactly as the princely owner of Farnesina was treated before him.
This destruction of the boschetto, which had been a favourite haunt for
feast days with the neighbours, and the dread of the iron way that was to
follow it, harassed and saddened all the people in Santa Rosalia, and added
to the gloom of a wet and stormy November, which was in turn followed by an
unusual and severe winter.
The harvest had been good, and so had
been the vintage, and so also proved the olive-gathering, rain notwithstanding, and as foreign papers innocently wrote, nothing was wanting to the happiness of the country.
But the foreign papers only read the statistics of corn, wine, and oil,
and did not try to see any further; indeed, having started with this fixed
idea of Italian happiness, would not have believed any explanations proving
the contrary. Foreign papers did not understand that, as the local taxes
always go up in proportion to the excellence of the harvest and vintage,
that excellence is not the unmixed gain which it is supposed to be, and,
indeed, is scant profit to anyone.
The more you have, the more I take, say the municipalities to the
communities; there can be no more admirable recipe for keeping a populace
poor.
flower, and changed to putrefaction the aloe and the cactus; snow that blurred out all the sunny pastoral loveliness, and made the landscape grey and sear.
In this sort of winter-time the poor are the first to pine and
perish everywhere, but soonest of all in this land of sunshine and south
wind.
The impetuous Rosa was as over full of water as it had been low and
shallow in the midsummer; it ran out over its banks and flooded the fields,
where Science brought in with Liberty had felled the trees and hedges that
had been used to serve as dykes.
There was no work in the flooded or in the frozen fields; the contadini
wanted no labourers; there was nothing to be done anywhere; there was a
score of empty hands ready if ever such a little job needed the doing.
The houses, all built for warm weather, with their open loggie and their
ill-fitting windows, were swept through by the north wind as though
they had been canvas tents. There was scant fuel; the old times were gone
when they could glean it on all the hillsides, for the best reason, that
nearly all the woods were felled. Wine was so dear no poor man could drink
it, and bread was frightfully dear, too. The people cowered over their
little brown pots of lighted brace, and did
not complain. When anyone gave them a coin they were passionately
grateful.
Most winters they suffered like this; but this winter the suffering was
greater than usual. A few said something about getting work in the
Maremma, where all the work is done in winter; but they might as well have
spoken of getting work in the
moon; they could as well get to the one as the other. They had no idea how to travel there, and nothing to travel with; besides, nine-tenths of them were women and children, for whom the Maremma had no need and no room.
Of course these people were very thankless and unreasonable. There was
a railway twelve miles off, there was going to be gas in Pomodoro, and
there was Messer Nellemane in their midst, all three monuments of
progress.
But these silly people persisted in feeling that they would prefer cheap
wine, cheap bread, and stomachs full of both, even to a railway, gas, or
Messer Nellemane.
The winter is never very long in Italy, yet this seemed very long
indeed. The mill wheels, after having been immovable from drought, were
now useless from ice, and the
miller, from a plump, jovial, strong man, had become thin, haggard, and silent, feeling the weight of bitter sorrow and the aching of money-cares.
In Pippo's little house the blue Madonna heard no laughter and saw
no fire-gleam.
The old man had grown taciturn and irritable. Misfortune is no sweetener
of temper or of bread. He would sit long together, crouched in a corner
immovable, and his lips were at such times always moving inaudibly; he was
counting up the sums of which they had robbed him; counting them again and
again; a hundred times a day, a hundred times a night.
They had but little to live on: no one bought straw plaiting in
winter, and, as he could not cut the osiers in the river, the
rush-working of Pippo bought but small profit.
When they could have a dish of oil and
beans they were very thankful; when they could not they boiled a little bread in water with a bit of garlic, and tried to believe it was soup.
Now and then they had a drop of bad coffee without milk: that was
all: as wine they had
mezzo-vino, that is, the last juices
of the already-squeezed grape-skins diluted with water, a
drink to which vinegar were sweetness.
The Italian poor know as little of the bacon, and potatoes, and tea of
the English labourer, as they do of the champagne and mutton of the English
mechanic.
In summer time they can do well enough: there is the gracious sun
shining on them, and there is always work to be had; but in winter there is
terrible suffering, the more terrible, I think, because so quiet: the
people die, that is all.
'Patience,' they say, to the last; but their patience brings
them nothing.
In Santa Rosalia there was great want, and there was nobody to succour
it: the nobles of the province were away in the City keeping
carnival, and no fattore ever cares for the
poor: he gets labour cheap if he requires it, that is his view of the
universal misery.
Vezzaja and Ghiralda possessed a charitable society; it was named after
that purest of all saints, the Confraternità di San Francisco di
Asissi, and it dated back to the thirteenth century.
Originally it had been a very noble society, and had owned broad lands,
of which many estates still remained to it. It had been
self-denying, generous, religious, in the highest sense of that
word, and gentle and simple had been proud to be
its ministers; but of this character there did not now remain to it so much as there did remain of its revenues. The rich were very willing to be on its staff; but the poor were not very willing to apply to it; it had a way of considering a case for three months, and then ordering as relief a few pounds of bread, which, when a whole family was waiting, and starving, and dying, was a little too dilatory to be very efficient.
But the fraternity of St. Francis still had its old palace in Pomodoro;
still had its historical archives and its pious repute; still had nobles
and gentlemen on its committee; and if it only gave a little bread now and
then--well--pauperism, they say, should not be encouraged; and if
its funds were never very clearly accounted for, we know these
mediæval institutions cannot be worked in the mediæval way
nowadays: St. Francis
saluted Lady Poverty; but we keep her well outside the door while we ask for her certificate.
Now old 'Nunziatina had an attack of bronchitis at this time, and
though she recovered, which was little short of a miracle, she was by no
means so strong again as she had been; and her draughty room under the
tiles, scorching in summer, and frozen in winter, shared with three other
old women, and without any stove, or any glass in the window, was not an
abode to favour convalescence. The vicario of
Santa Maria seeing this, bethought him of the Fraternity of St. Francis,
and gave her a letter to its committee, urging her age, and honesty, and
recent sickness, as fit reasons why she should benefit by this noble
charity.
There was a quantity of money locked up in the revenues of this
Fraternity, and it
had been intended for the poor; but then the present age, the age of Messer Nellemane, knows better than to spend it on the poor.
Those old times were so different to ours: different methods of
administration become a necessity in modern days. The Fraternity made a
great flourish, and printed long reports, and still charmed the province
into subscriptions and donations; but if St. Francis could have been
present when the accounts were made up, his benignant eyes would have
blazed with the fury of his offended God.
Annunziata blessed Dom Lelio, and took the letter and the sixty
centimes he gave her for the diligence, and betook herself, and her staff,
and her broad hat, and her short petticoat into the rickety vehicle with
much joy and hopefulness of spirit. If she could
get a certain little pension, if it were only a franc a week, she felt that she could praise heaven with a full heart. Her trotting round to all the outlying farm houses and villages with her basket was getting very toilsome to her.
Now, the President of the Fraternity was a certain most noble Count
Saverio, who had a high repute as a philanthropist, and whose villa was
close by to Pomodoro.
The Count gave his services, which were highly appreciated, nominally
for nothing, saying, with much eloquence, that all his life was dedicated
to service of God and the poor; and if he did do a good deal at the Bourse,
and buy a great many terni at Lotto, that was
his own affair, and in no way concerned St. Francis. Besides he did it
through agents; and his own name never was heard except in connection with
philanthropy.
This very noble and pious gentleman received old 'Nunziatina, who
made him a nice curtesy, and wished him every blessing in her cheery
cordial way, which was as pleasant to hear as a bird's chirping; he
was sitting surrounded with ledgers and folios, in the muniment room of the
castellated house of this ancient brotherhood; and he spoke so prettily and
amiably to her that she felt quite sure of ten francs a month.
He was a long time looking over her papers and reading the
priest's recommendation; and then he smiled, and fussed about, and
rang for his clerk, and whispered with him, and scribbled something and
slipped it in a drawer, and then, finally looking across his
writing-table at Annunziata, said very pleasantly:
'Money-charities we never give; but come again on this day
month, and we will
see if any exception can be made in your favour. I will put your case before the board: my compliments and reverence to the good Dom Lelio.'
The old woman made him another deep curtesy, and went away with a cruel
disappointment nipping her old heart.
She did not protest. Italians rarely do.
That day the Count Saverio met Messer Nellemane in the streets of
Pomodoro.
'Oh! by the way,' said the Count, 'one of the people
of your village was sent to me to-day by the
vicario. Perhaps you can tell me something of
her, for Dom Lelio's heart is apt to run away with his head. He wants
us to grant her permanent weekly relief; an old woman, an
odd-looking old trot, by the name Taormina Annunziata, a
widow.'
Messer Nellemane looked shocked.
'Dom Lelio is very unwise,' he said
gravely. 'The person you speak of is one of the worst people in the borgo. A professional beggar. A confirmed beggar. She is very well off, they tell me; but she has that passion and preference for mendicancy which is like a disease.'
'Dear, dear!' said the President. 'That is terrible.
We must never encourage mendicancy. Dom Lelio should not put the society
in such a position.'
'What would you, Signore Conte?--He is a priest!' said
Messer Gaspardo with that scoff which is always on the lips of the Liberal;
but seldom finds an echo in the hearts of the people.
The President smiled a little deprecatory smile, for of course he was a
Liberal too, but as he was head of a semi-religious corporation he
could not quite laugh at the priesthood.
The month passed over Annunziata's grey head painfully; it was
very cold, and she could make but little way about to those outlying farms
where they had given her the most food. But her niece spared her all she
could, and she said to herself every day, 'The gentlemen promised he
would think it over; he will be sure to do something for me when I
go;' and being of a very sanguine temperament, she managed to live on
hope.
Her most dazzling idea was that they might allow her half a franc a day,
but that she felt was too brilliant to be realised; if she got ten francs a
month she felt she could ask nothing better of the saints in heaven or the
gentlemen on earth.
It was with a glad spirit that she set out to Pomodoro on a chilly
morning on the day appointed; she had smartened herself up as
well as she knew how; she liked to look respectable. She had her black hat tied under her chin, with a yellow handkerchief and a blue woollen skirt that a fattoressa up in the hills had given her at Ceppo, and a little rough red jacket that belonged to Viola.
She was very smart, indeed, for Annunziata was far above the idea of a
professed beggar, that rags and dirt were more likely to provoke charity
than cleanliness and order. She was no beggar at all; she never stretched
her hand out for a farthing; she was old and people were kind to her; that
was all.
With a smile of happy expectancy she stood once more before the Signore
Conte Saverio in the muniment room.
But the President had no smile in return for her. He looked up with a
stern glance
from his books and papers, and he frowned as he saw who was the petitioner.
'You were so good as to tell me to come this day, sir,' said
the little old woman, as he remained silent. 'You were so very kind
as to say you would give me something, and all the month I have been living
on your word, sir, for the winter is hard.'
Count Saverio, who had such a
milk-and-honey-reputation to lose that an act of
severity was disagreeable to him, coughed and cleared his throat, and then
said with the air of a father reproving a child:
'Cara mia, it pains me very greatly to
have pained you, but I can say only that the good Dom Lelio has been very
much to blame. This honourable and charitable fraternity is established on
the scope and to the end of relief--the judicious relief--of the
deserving poor, of the honest poor, of the
laborious poor. It was never intended to support a beggar.'
'No sir?' said Annunziata, puzzled and not following his
drift, for she never thought of herself as a beggar.
'It was never intended to encourage mendicancy,' pursued the
President, gathering a heavier frown as he warmed with his theme.
'Mendicancy is a curse of the country. It is the heaviest sin to
foster it. All our efforts are directed to its suppression. The first
qualification to be fit to claim the aid of our society is never to
have begged. Now you--you are an habitual mendicant; you
habitually subsist on public alms. No doubt some frightful improvidence in
your youth has brought you to this pass in your old age? With that we have
nothing to do; all that concerns us is to obey the laws of the Fraternity.
You are not eligible for
election; you are not even eligible for momentary relief from our funds. You are a beggar.'
Annunziata stared hard at him, her little bright bird-like eyes
wide open with amazement.
'A beggar, sir? I?' she stammered. 'No, that I never
was. People are good to me and I bless them. As for spending when I was
young, sir, that I never did, for I was left a widow when I was
forty-two, sir--my man fell off a house-top, and I had
to bring up four children, and I did bring them up well, sir, all beautiful
grown men and maidens, though every one of them are in Paradise
now--and I always was very poor, sir, though it is true that when I
was young the land was happy and the people too, not starved, and pinched,
and squeezed like lemons in a presser as they are now-a-days.
But spend I never could, sir, because I never had but just enough to keep life in my children and me, and now that I am old, sir, seventy-six come the blessed day of St. Peter, the people that have known me all my life are good to me, and may the saints remember them for it, for what can a woman of my age earn, though I do say I can see to plait still?'
'Enough!' said the Count sternly. 'You may gloss it
over as you please, you are a beggar; you have no other means of
subsistence than by the charity of others.'
'No, sir; and that is why I come here,' said Annunziata, who
was not without a spirit.
'Beggars are ineligible,' said the President impatiently as
well as severely this time. 'You are a beggar. Dom Lelio committed
an offence against the law in recom-
mending you for the charity of this community. We have nothing to do with you. Our rules would forbid us if we were inclined. You had no business whatever to come here; I am occupied. I must request you to withdraw.'
'I beg your pardon, sir; pray do not hurt Dom Lelio for me. He
meant what he did in all goodness,' said Annunziata with a quivering
lip; and then she dropped her little curtesy and went out, and going across
the street, at the cold dark shelter of the opposite church sank on her
knees on the pavement before the nearest altar and sobbed bitterly.
We who eat and drink as we wish every day, and on the score of our
appetites suffer nought save perhaps something from the Nemesis of
dyspepsia, we can ill realise what the disappointment is of a denial that
refuses
daily bread, and leaves an old and painful life alone to the menace of a death by hunger; we cannot understand, try how we will, what they mean--the empty cupboard, the cold hearth, the bed of sacking, the gnawing pangs, the famine faintness, the slow, long, cruel hours that creep on from dawn to dark, from dark to dawn again, and bring no friend, no food, no hope, no rescue.
These all faced Annunziata in her future: that poor little
sorrowful future that stood between her and her grave; so short in years as
it must be, so long in misery as it would be.
Rheumatism racked her bones, and she knew that soon she would be
bedridden, and then--well--the people gave to her when they saw
her cheery face and her empty basket, but when she lay in her bed, and they
saw her no more, they would forget.
They would none of them come to her, any more than they would go to her
tomb, when it should be made, a mere nameless hole under the rank grass of
the common burying-ground.
The world does not take into account people who have nothing. They
should be provident enough in their youth, and save money even if they have
not enough to hold body and soul together, and never enough to satisfy
hunger!
They should save money.
Stentorello is the type of Italian on the stage, and the people in truth
are perhaps too miserly and fond of gain; but is there much wonder at that
in this country? There is no poor rate, and no workhouse, and nothing for
the honest poor except a metre or so of ground in the cemeteries.
That is not a prospect to strengthen bare
arms in the battle of life, or moisten parched lips dry with toil. The dead wasp is thought of by its kind, but the dead poor have no such remembrance from theirs.
Viola was watching for her as the diligence rolled heavily into the
piazza at Santa Rosalia. The girl sprang to her and looked in her face,
and her own face fell at what she read there.
'They have refused you!' she cried.
'Yes, dear,' said Annunziata with a quiver in her voice.
'They think I am a beggar, and that I never am and never was, as you
know, for I never ask aught; never, never! they give me what they like to
give me, and I am thankful.'
'When you have nothing, how can you help that?' said the
girl, with a sob of indignation.
Annunziata bore up somehow or other
against her lot and endured her hard pallet, her damp chamber, her dry atom of bread, because she still believed, against all witness to the contrary, that her God cared for her; that somehow or other when her soul should leave her little shrivelled, brown body, she would see the light of a gladder day than ever shone on earth.
She was an old woman, and had been bred up in the old faiths; faiths
that were not clear indeed to her, nor ever reasoned on, but yet gave her
consolation, and a great, if a vague, hope. Now that we tell the poor
there is no such hope, that when they have worked and starved long enough,
then they will perish altogether, like bits of candle that have burnt
themselves out, that they are mere machines made of carbon and hydrogen,
which, when they have had due friction, will then crumble back into the
dust; now that we tell them all this, and call this the spread of education, will they be as patient?
Will not they, too, since this short life is all, insist at any price of
blood that it shall be made sweet and made strong for them?
Will not they seize by violence on violent drugs, and drink themselves
drunk on the alcohol of communism?
Why should they not? Since there is nothing beyond this life, why
should they toil that you and I may be at ease?
Take hope from the heart of man, and you make him a beast of prey.
The philosopher stands at his desk in the lecture hall, and demonstrates
away the soul of man, and with exact thought measures out his atoms and
resolves him back to gas and air. But the revolutionary, below in the
crowd, hears, and only translates what he
hears thus to his brethren: 'Let us drink while we may; property is robbery; this life is all; let us kill and eat; there is no God.'
The philosopher may cry to the winds, 'Love virtue for its own
sake.'
The communist is more logical than he.
He had recovered, but he had a worse poison in him than even the poison
of fever,
for in the bed next to his there was lying a German with anemia and other ills, and this man talked to him in his own tongue by hours together in the long watches of the night, when they had no other companions than the newts and the rats and the beetles that ran over their couches. The German, a travelling mechanic, was a socialist and an internationalist; and into this ignorant virgin mind of Carmelo, all seething and fermenting now under an unendurable sense of wrong, he poured the black stream of his own beliefs and desires.
Carmelo did not understand a tithe part, but he understood enough, after
many a night's colloquy, to breathe in eagerly this vengeance on
society which looked like justice, this insanity for equality which looked
like reason. Until wrong had been done to him he had been a perfectly
contented lad,
troubling himself about nothing outside his own duties and occupation, for scarcely knowing how to read, he knew nothing of any other world beyond that of the mill-house. He had been bred up to be respectful to the gentry and the clergy; to be decent and honest in life, and to be quite happy so long as his father was pleased with him. This had been always Carmelo, until that hapless hour when poor Toppa had been treacherously done to death.
But injustice and despotism change the pure blood of youth into a dark
and sullen current. Carmelo who had only rightly punished a poisoner, was
treated like a criminal and thrown amongst thieves and assassins.
One of the cruellest sins of any State, in giving petty and tyrannous
authority into petty and tyrannous hands, is that it thus
brings into hatred and disgust the true and high authority of moral law.
'Where is God? He cannot hear, He cannot care; nor can the
saints, since He and they let me lie here and make a king of Bindo
Terri,' thought Carmelo, lying on his bed, with all the bright and
vigorous force of his young limbs gone out of them.
If they were indeed throned in heaven, as the priests always said, would
they let the poor suffer, and the scoundrels thrive, and the fines be wrung
out of starving bodies, and the parasite of the public torture and arraign
and sentence honest winners of their daily bread?
Carmelo still shrank from the bold blasphemies of the socialistic
doctrines; but the German was wary and skillful, he softened for this
foolish young Christian the atheism of the texts he quoted upon all
religions,
and only recited again and again their condemnations of all existing laws, and their invitation to a perfect future, when there would be on all the earth 'only free men in a free fraternity.'
Carmelo listened, and his sick soul was seduced by the dangerous
stimulant of these doctrines, whose greatest danger lies in the fact that
there is in all their exaggeration an essential, an undeniable, truth.
He was at war with all the world, with all these unknown, unseen, forces
which had been stronger than he; his ear and his heart were open, to words
that told; him of the tyranny of property, of the favouritism of law, of
the sins of society by which millions groaned in want, and died
unpitied.
The German, exiled from his own country for his opinions, was a keen and
restless
student and an ardent propagandist; he was a disciple of the most extreme creeds and deemed, as most of those men now do, all remedy useless save 'pan-destruction.'
Well aware that he was dying, and a prey at times to great agony, he
beheld in the young Italian his last proselyte, and threw all the last
energies of his waning life into the rescue, as he deemed it, of this dumb
soul, into the effort to give light to the blind eyes of Carmelo, for he
found that Carmelo was ignorance itself; thought heaven had placed the king
upon the throne; thought heaven had made one set of men to toil, and
another set to do nothing and enjoy; had a vague idea of the Government as
of a sort of god hedged round with cannon; fancied the good weather and the
bad came from divine pleasure or wrath, and was certain
that grain would not come up unless the priest made the round of the fields and blessed them.
The autumn nights were long and cold; in the infirmary they were allowed
no charcoal and no light, but the fiery utterances of the Internationalist
lit up and warmed the darkness. Carmelo who knew naught that occurred
outside the hedges of Santa Rosalia, listened as in his childish days he
had listened to the priest's wonder-stories of S. Ursula or
SS. Cosmo and Damian, to the recital of the movement going secretly onward
in Italy; of the insurrections of San Lupo, of Gallo, of Calatabiano; of
the 'Circoli Barsanti,' and the section of the 'Figli di
Lavoro;' of the memorable words of Garibaldi in 1873, that were there
a society of devils to combat despotism, he would join it; of the
Internationalist federa-
tion of Rimini which decrees 'the earth to who cultivates it, the machine to who uses it, the house to who builds it;' of the programme of Piacenza, 'everyone has right to what is necessary, no one has right to what is superfluous;' of the declaration of the fraternity of Montenero, Antignani, Ardenza, and San Jacopo that 'the State is the negation of liberty; authority creates nothing and corrupts everything; change of government is useless; if a man have a thorn in his foot, it is of no use for him to change his boots, he must pluck out the thorn;' and, with these, of many a burning and bitter paragraph from the Plebe of Milan, from the Petroleo of Ferrara, from the Proletario of Turin, and the unhesitating dictate of the Campana, that 'all authority, human and divine, shall perish and disappear, from God downward to the last agent of police.'
The innocent soul of Carmelo revolted from these arguments which tore
down his Christ from his crucifix, and dashed his stoup of holy water to
the ground; yet the wrong that festered in him made his mind open to all
these dreams of freedom and of justice, all these promises of a millennium
upon earth.
If such minds as Rousseau's, Fourier's, Proudhon's
Bakounine's do not see the falsehood that is mingled with this truth,
how shall Carmelo see it, or the like of Carmelo?
The Italian is as I say, not by nature a revolutionary, but when he is
one he goes beyond all others, because, perhaps, he has more than all
others to suffer in the contrast between his dead hopes and his present
misery. No one seems to remember that the Italian Socialists have rejected
Marx
and decreed Mazzini a reactionist, whilst they subscribe blindly and without change to all the terrible creed of Bakounine.
No one seems to remember this, or heed it; yet Bakounine's is a
creed of nothing less than universal destruction. The disciples of it grow
every day in numbers throughout Italy, but since the arrests of 1874, they
call themselves by a harmless
name1 and so no one is afraid.
No one is afraid; and the State continues to give them justification by
leaving in every commune the breed of Messer Nellemane and of Bindo
Terri.
'It is a question of hunger,' the Marquis Pepeli said once
of the revolts of Budria and Molinella.
Perhaps partly: not altogether. But who makes the hunger? who
keeps the
___________________1 Circoli per i studi
sociali.
Page 73
stomachs empty, the hearths cold, the box of the commune full by fines?
The Municipalities.
Here is the thorn that must be pulled from the foot of Italy if the
canker and fester of it are not to spread through the whole body.
Carmelo, of course, could not understand a hundredth part of what the
German unfolded to him, but the vague meaning that he gleaned dazzled and
awed him, and the poison of injustice already given him to drink had
left him thirsty for this other poison of revenge.
Carmelo was a brave lad, a lad honest, clean-living, and harmless
in thought and deed; he was dealt with as if he were a criminal, and the
bitter sense of his wrongs made it precious to him to hear of sovereign
rights that he shared with all mankind.
He had been dimly conscious of a right to live in his own way so long as
he did no harm to his fellows; he had been by nature independent and of
fearless spirit; but of late the petty tyrannies enfolding the lives of the
poor had been to him like a choking chain, and he had begun to tremble. He
saw men impoverished, and hunted down to beggary, or death, by this thing
which they called Law, and which he knew only to be extortion; and he had
lost hope and manliness; and in the stead of these there had come on him a
moody and morbid resentment, chilled with dread.
He was as ready for the tempting of his teacher, as clay is made moist
for the hand and the wheel of the potter.
One night, when the moon was shining in through the grated hole that
served as casement, the German mechanic died.
Carmelo was too feeble to rise; he sat up in his bed and saw the ghastly
agony, and heard the death-rattle, of this man, who seemed to him
his only friend. He strove to call for help, but his tongue clave to his
mouth, and when at length he could find his trembling voice he shouted in
vain; no one heard.
The horror of that hour aged him by many years.
He dragged his weak limbs out of bed and strove to hold the man in his
convulsions, but death was stronger than he, and flung him backward rudely
on his own mattress.
With the moonlight on his ghastly face the German struggled with his
doom, choking and vomiting blood. Once only, with consciousness in his
eyes, he stared upward in the eyes of Carmelo.
'The people--the people--suffer,' he muttered
through his clenching teeth.
Then he gave a bitter cry and died.
Carmelo was alone through all the long chill night with the body of the
dead man beside him.
She had but little blood in her veins, and but little bread in her
cupboard; she and the three other old souls huddled themselves together
over a single scaldino of charcoal that they
clubbed their pence to get, and spent most of their time in bed, in hope of
so keeping their slow circulation frown absolute stagnation. They were four
miserable little
pallet-beds, one in each corner, and the spiders and beetles and mice ran over them, and the old women were too feeble to chase them away.
Dom Lelio did all he could and Viola went daily, and denied herself that
she might keep her great-aunt from starving, but when all was done
that could be by these two, Annunziata had but little of all that old age
needs. Dom Lelio had but a franc a-day, and in Pippo's house
want was a ghost that had no rest and gave none.
'They cannot call her a beggar now,' said Viola bitterly, as
she stood beside the hard bed in which the old woman was stretched, with
her legs useless from rheumatism.
The heart of the girl was sick with hope deferred, and that vague fear
of something yet worse to come which a long succession
of undeserved misfortunes will leave on the brightest nature.
It was now the end of February and the weather, as it often does here,
grew colder by far than it had been when the days were short. The village
was a sorry scene, the ill-made roads were little better than bogs,
and the angry river went swirling and rushing, yellow and muddy with all
the clay that it washed down from its treeless banks.
'One would say the Rosa were mad to think the
boschetto is gone,' thought the eldest
girl Dina Pastorini, as the north wind, without that screen of trees, beat
with all its might against the millhouse.
Her father had changed as greatly as Pippo.
He was never irritable, because he was a sweet-tempered and just
man, who could not bear to farther afflict his children.
But all the honest mirth and cheery content were gone out of him; he
who had been so loquacious and mirthful now never smiled and seldom spoke;
his brow was always dark and his eyes were always dull. Missing that glad
and pleasant shade, so green through three of the seasons, that had been
before his eyes ever since he had opened them at birth, seemed to him to
have made him half-blind.
Besides, he was always saying in his thoughts: 'How shall we
tell Carmelo? how will he bear it when he sees?' Carmelo, who beyond
them all had loved the bright boschetto, and
had passed so many a holiday hour sitting on the mossy edge of it with his
square net floating on the stream below, and white Toppa sleeping by his
side or hunting lizards in the flower-filled grass.
The father dared not think of it. He
had suffered greatly himself, but he feared that his son would suffer yet more.
As for such solace as might have come to a man struggling with many
burdens from the help of money, none was given to him. The municipality had
offered a certain sum of money indeed for the riverside wood, but they had
not paid it. In Rome they were five years paying for the Farnesina gardens,
destroying them, as it were, on credit; in Santa Rosalia they would
probably be twice as long paying the miller.
If he wanted to make them pay he would have to go to law with them, and
that no one of the class that the Pastorini belonged to would ever dare to
do, knowing the remedy to be worse than the disease. The Giunta was
supposed to deal with these matters, but in reality it only met to give
adhesion to what Cavaliere Durellazzo said,
and what he said was what he had been prompted to say by his right hand and chief counsellor, Messer Nellemane.
Now, as everyone will understand without saying, they could scarcely be
expected to find money for Demetrio Pastorini, since they were obliged to
pay beforehand all those gentlemen who had opposed the tramway.
So the miller's empty pockets were not the heavier by a coin at
the present for the expropriation of his wood, and he suffered in a time of
peace and, as the foreign newspapers had it, of prosperity, precisely what
he would have suffered had an invading army encamped in Vezzaja and
Ghiralda and burned it right and left on leaving it.
'Ah, my girl,' he said once to Viola, of whom he had grown
fond in their mutual trials, 'I almost would sooner our dear lad
stayed on in prison than that he should come come to see what he will
see.'
Viola sighed heavily, and did not say that she felt otherwise, only in
her young heart there was that hope which is in youth like the golden
gorse, always in bloom, even in bad weather and on barren soil.
She thought always: 'When Carmelo comes home things will
change; all will be well.'
It was now the close of February; she was counting the weeks, the days,
the hours till Carmelo's release.
She could not read much, but she had one of those little calendars which
are the oracles of the poor, and she could make out their signs and the
days of the months, and in this she had marked each cruel week as it
crawled by and left her lover shut in prison walls.
There were only two months more now to divide them, and though Carmelo
truly
would return to trouble and pain, she could not, like his father, wish him absent.
Yet so many sorrows fell upon them, that the bit of charcoal with which
she marked evil days in her calendar had made almost every page a smudge of
black.
Early in the year her grandfather had received a long and formal printed
paper, calling on him to remove the nuisance of the water before his door.
Pippo had crammed the thing on to the top of the live cinders in the
brascie bowl, and there had let it smoulder
into ashes.
A few days later Pierino Zaffi had been seen about the place, examining
the little spring and measuring it, and in the name of the commune had
entered the house and traced the offending water to its source amongst the
frozen orto ground. He had said nothing and had gone.
In a week's time there had come another document, and that Viola
took to Cecco to read, her grandfather being absent at the time.
This one ordered Filippo Mazzetti forthwith to execute works that would
direct his spring underground; to cover it was forbidden, because no means
by which it could be covered would fail to obstruct the public path.
He was ordered to commence this work within thirty days; if delayed, the
offender would be fined for every day's delay.
The spectacles rose on Cecco's nose, and the hair upon his head as
he read, and his face grew aghast with horror.
'After all that money that I paid for Pippo,' he gasped;
'after that bit of paper which set him free of all!'
He who was disposed to revere and obey the law was paralysed with
terror.
Was this its justice ? this the way it kept its troth with men?
Cecco gave up faith in humanity, and almost abandoned faith in
heaven.
Viola was crying bitterly.
'What does it mean?' gasped Cecco wildly. 'What does
it mean? Can your grandfather pay masons and plumbers for six months like
a duke?'
'It means ruin!' sobbed the girl. 'He has nothing in
the world; how can he put the water under the earth? And Carmelo coming
home in a month!'
Of this new calamity they were compelled to tell Pippo. He heard quite
quietly, but there was a savage wild light in his eye.
He stretched his hand out and took the paper and folded it up once,
twice, thrice; then the held it in the palm of his hand and spat on it;
then he lighted a lucifer match and set fire to it.
It blazed a moment, then curled up, and became a little heap of black
ash on the stones of the floor.
He stayed Viola and Cecco with a gesture as they would have spoken.
'Never a word,' he said, 'never a word. If they send
me a hundred such, so will I treat them all. They cannot get blood out of a
post. Let them do their worst--'
'But'--his friend began.
'Not a word,' said Pippo, and he spat on the ashes.
Then he went on with his work.
Half an hour later he looked up from his weaving, and his eyes were
shining savagely from under his white hair.
'Girl,' he said to his granddaughter, 'I call to mind
a night before you were born. There came news of a great battle; they
called it San Martino.1 They
told us to light
___________________Solferino is so called by the
Italians.
Page 88
up; so did we all. In your little window I set the oil flaming. They said we were free--God have mercy on us for being fools!'
Then he went on plaiting his osiers.
The girl wept.
If any dog be hunted by boys, be thirsty for water he cannot find, or be
gaunt or faint from hunger and ill-treatment, straightway is he
declared arrabiato, and up on the walls there
appear placards that every dog seen about will be killed. Then Bindo, with
his poisoned polpetti and his pistol, is busy and happy all over the
land.
A woman was bitten the other day by one of these mad dogs, and was
recovered by the bone of a saint being laid by her pillow, but present
municipalities are not desirous to bring out the virtues of saints, and
they do like to sell the skins of dogs; so they scream at every possible
wag of a tail or sign of a growl, and fly to poison and to pistols.
Such a panic seized the municipality of Vezzaja and Ghiralda in this
month of February, when Pippo was being summoned again and again for little
Raggi and putting the summons in the fire.
If you tunnel a mountain and stifle a score of men you are a public
benefactor; if you keep a factory, in which no one lives over thirty years
of age from the notions dust or noxious gas inhaled in the work, no one
finds human life at all too precious
for you to use up as you like in your own interests; but if ever a dog snap at somebody--ah! then of what sanctity is human life! what horror is anything that menaces it!
Messer Nellemane, in the absence of Cavaliere Durellazzo, who was at his
candle-warehouses, took fright now, nothing loth to do so, and had
placards stuck up, announcing that the guards were authorised to destroy
every dog they saw loose.
The dullest imagination can conjecture the 'lovely time'
that Bindo and Angelo had in the commune, and no one dared to check their
slaughtering hand, remembering the fate that had befallen Carmelo.
Viola, terrified, kept little Raggi in the house, and shut her up in the
house, and kept her out of danger all she could, and at night would start
up and feel for the little floss silk curls of the dog as it lay at the
foot of her
bed, waking from a dream that Raggi had been seized and killed.
'I said the dog should never be kept in for those devils,'
growled her grandfather: but the girl pleaded to him that her trouble
for Raggi's own sake.
The old man let her do as she would; he was growing apathetic, yet
desperate; though he had burned the Giunta's order about his brook,
the memory of it and the dread of what they might do to him haunted him
night and day. And he was so very poor; he did not so much mind depriving
himself of wine and tobacco, but it hurt him terribly to see Viola's
clothes mended till they were but patchwork, and her feet going bare.
Viola had always been the neatest and cleanest as well as the comeliest
maiden in the province. Clean she was still, but neat
you cannot be when you are so very poor that even to buy a few pins, a little thread, a bit of tape, is quite beyond your means.
This is the poverty that the world does not understand, and, not
apprehending, does not pity; famine it understands, the famine that
desolates Cashmere and Bombay, but not the poverty which can just put
enough in the body to keep life alive uncomplainingly, but has not a coin
beyond for any need or pleasure of life.
It was a great sorrow, too, to Viola not to be able to be decently
dressed for mass as she had used to be; but she did not think so much of
that as she did of her inability to give her grandfather a scrap or two of
meat in his broth and her equal powerlessness to defend Raggi.
At Christmas she had sold her little string of seed pearls to a richer
maiden, the
big butcher's daughter, and the money they had fetched had long since gone in charcoal and bread for themselves and soup for Annunziata. Money runs away so fast when it has no companions in your drawer.
One morning whilst the placards concerning dogs were still upon the
walls, and the reign of terror still dominated all Vezzaja and Ghiralda,
Viola had her week's washing to do. She needed not to go for this, as
most had to do, to the edge of the river, or to the springs on the
hillsides, because the brook that offended the Giunta filled a tank in
their own little garden.
There she washed the sheets and shirts and other linen that she and
Pippo used, and washed her great-aunt's linen, too, if such
poor little rags can be dignified by the name; and she was at this work all
the chilly forenoon with the bitter north wind whist-
ling round her head and nipping the red flowers of the almond trees near her.
She had shut the house door, and Raggi was with her running loose about
the little place; Pippo was out trying to get an order for skips or baskets
or the osier-covers of wine-flasks.
Viola looked often for the little dog and saw it lying out of the wind
under the wall, but about eleven o'clock, having wrung out her linen,
she was so busied hanging it up on the clothes' line, tied to the
delicate almond trees, that she never heard the wind blow open the entrance
door, and when her work was done at noon she missed Raggi.
The little dog never left her side usually, but Raggi had a little
friend in Cecco's youngest boy, a gentle mite of four years old, a
cripple with a cherub's face and curling golden hair.
Whenever Raggi heard the tic-tac of the poor little man's
crutch, she always trotted out to it, for Lillo, as they called the child,
would share his bread and milk with her, and throw his little wooden ball
to please her, and loved her dearly. Raggi--perhaps with that divine
pity which dogs have--divined the sad destiny of crippled Lillo, and
so gave him her preference.
This forenoon she heard the sound of the crutch on the stones of the
threshold, and got up and went to it, not knowing she was doing any
harm.
Lillo, delighted to see his playmate, covered her with kisses and
hobbled along to his father's house, and there got a bit of bread;
and hobbled farther with the dog by his side out to the few willows that
there fringed the river bank, and sat down in the sun and shared his bread
with her.
Lillo and Raggi were very merry, indeed, about nothing; seeking stones
in the grass, making a feast of the crust, and playing with the dry twigs
that the wind scattered so plentifully. Raggi's yellow curls blew,
and Lillo's blew, too, and the one barked, and the other sang and
laughed, and both were as happy as two little mortals could be, with that
sweetest of all happiness which is born out of nothing beyond the mere glad
sense of living.
But along the road by the river there came a grim shadow; the shadow of
a man in grey clothes, with a feather in his hat and a sword by his
side.
His eyes flashed over the little child and the little dog sitting
together under the willows, and his ear caught the sound of that quick
little bark, that gay little laugh.
He drew his pistol and shot the dog.
As the dog dropped on its side the child fell backward, screaming
violently.
People ran out from their houses, and Bindo Terri walked away as one who
has done his duty and earned his wage.
Viola had run out with the rest; she fell on her knees by Raggi.
Blood was pouring from its mouth, but it moved its little curly tail
feebly in welcome and farewell. Then the little bright eyes glazed and
seemed to sink into its head, its heart beat convulsively through a few
seconds more, it stretched its limbs out feebly, and then was still for
ever.
It lay dead in a pool of its own blood.
Never more would Lillo laugh under the willows, and break his bread with
Raggi. Never more would Raggi dance to the children's piping. And
little Lillo, never very wise, was imbecile from that hour; a frightened,
cowering, mindless thing.
But what mattered that? The law had asserted its majesty and vindicated
its rights.
When the old man Pippo dug a small grave under the blossoming
almond-trees, and laid the blood-stained body of the little
dog in it, covered with moss and grass, he groaned as he turned each
sod.
'Assassins and thieves are set above us, and work their wicked
will, and no one cares. How long, O Lord? How long?'
As he had neglected to answer the summons for contravention, the charges
against him for contumacy had been taken as usual to the senior court, and
had been proved and assessed against him with costs.
Two francs for every time that poor little Raggi had been seen loose
soon told up to a
high sum total, and the public accuser who officiates for the commune on such occasions had stated that, but for the mercifulness of that administration, the number of summonses would have been much greater. They regretted, they said, to be severe on a poor man, but the law must be respected. The law must be respected, said all the officials in a chorus.
That document, like the others, found the fire.
'They may kill me as they killed the little dog,' said
Pippo; ''twould be less trouble, and done once for
all.'
Viola was weeping as though her tears would, to use Dante's words,
destroy her very heart; and in the cooper's house a sad mother sat by
a little bed where a golden-headed child, with vacant, terrified
eyes, was pointing for ever in the air, and stammering
uncouth, shapeless sounds, and then shivering as though with ague, and cowering down under the clothes.
Bright-haired Lillo's body lived, but his mind was as dead
as Raggi's, buried in her grave underneath the almonds.
'Carmelo must not know,' said Viola over and over again in
the darkness of the night, sobbing and missing her little furry friend, who
for seven years had slept upon her bed; and when the morning dawned she
begged of Lillo's mother and father, and of all about the house, that
never would they let Carmelo know that Raggi had been killed by Bindo
Terri, and the child thus lost his wits from terror.
All promised her, but she could not be sure that the promise would be
kept, for she knew how every little story leaks from the dry cask of empty
heads, and she was afraid,
terribly afraid. Sometimes she thought that she would lose her brain, like little timid Lillo.
Her father, too, was for ever saying, 'Let them kill me as they
have killed the dog. They have made me a beggar.'
The cold was passing away. The damp was drying up, the corn lands were
green with young wheat, and soon amidst the grass the violets were giving
place to the daffodils, and on the hill-sides the peach-trees
and pear-trees were throwing out their sprays of blossom, making the
steep slopes beautiful.
But spring brought no joy to the small house of the Madonna; and by the
mill upon the river, in lieu of lovely pillars of lightest green,
thickening and deepening with every day, in lieu of that leafy screen, full
of the nests of doves and merles and nightingales, there was a waste land
of mud and shingle,
barren spot, of no use or good to man or beast or bird.
Nothing had been done with it. The holes yawned where the trees had been
uprooted, and the water-beetles crawled undisturbed over the heaps
of mud. The tramway was not made; the foreign speculators and the home
municipalities were quarrelling, and until their quarrels were ended the
work could not be begun. The speculators said the municipalities had
cheated, and the municipalities gave the speculators a tu-quoque. It
was a quarrel like a croupier's and a gamester's.
Of all these things the population of the commune understood nothing;
they were like a horse who has his mane docked and his chin singed; he
feels uncomfortable, but he does not know what is done to him.
Italy is always being docked and singed;
being amiable, she does not kick her groom, but she is always smarting, and the flies are always raising gall upon her loins.
The sweet spring came; and so sweet is it, here, that it is joy enough
to live only to go out into the fields all laden with blossom, and feel
your heart dance with the daffodils in the full sense of Wordsworth's
words.
But the poor have not leisure for this, nor have they insight for it,
and the spring brought no solace to Santa Rosalia.
Another trouble, and a yet greater anxiety, fell on Demetrio Pastorini
at this time.
There was another miller on the other side of the village, who had never
done very much work, because the water was so much shallower there, and who
indeed did not care about it, being a very well-to-do man,
owning an oil-shop and warehouse in Pomodoro. His name was Remigio
Rossi; he had never been
looked on at all as a rival by Carmelo's family, and did not seek to be one.
But one fine day four oxen appeared on the river-edge dragging a
huge, black, shapeless, uncouth-looking object behind them; and a
few days later, Pippo and Viola, looking out of their house door, saw a
long black chimney, and a cone of black smoke, coming out of the roof of
Remigio's mill, which was within ten yards of them.
Pippo ran and shouted with all his might that the place was
a-fire, but people standing on the bank, looking on, said to
him,
'Be still, you, for an old fool; that is the new machine
a-grinding.'
Demetrio Pastorini, who was a home-biding man, and never went to
public-houses of any kind for gossip, and so never heard anything
that was going on until a dozen days after all Santa Rosalia knew it, saw
this
black thing spitting smoke, and heard all at a blow, as it were, that the miller Remigio Rossi had obtained a steam-engine from the city, by means of which he could grind grain in fair weather or foul, and snap his finger and thumb at all shallow waters.
The steam-mill was a hideous blot on the landscape, and its ugly
iron chimney vomited filthy odours and darkening vapours over all the green
country and glancing waters, and made a mass of ash and cinders and general
blackness and sootiness all about the pretty grass bank on which the
building stood.
The engines were set going with plenty of last year's grain, by
favour of the Cavaliere Durellazzo; and hearing their whirring and booming,
and seeing the heavy veil of its smoke, the eider Pastorini turned away,
'death in his heart,' for hope was for ever gone out of
him.
How could he wrestle against this thing? he with his mill wheels high
and dry, for five months out of the year, since the woods had been cut on
the banks?
'So you bring devils of fire and iron to ruin your old neighbour,
Remigio?' he said reproachfully when he met him at mass on the
Sunday.
Remigio, who was a good-natured man, though, like most of them,
he loved money too well, looked sheepishly.
'I do not wish to injure anybody,' he said, with some
embarrassment. 'But one was sorely wanted now the Rosa is such a
captious thing; and as the Giunta find half the cost, it being for the good
of the place--'
'Oh, the Giunta find half the money, do they?' said
Pastorini, with his heart sinking heavier and heavier. 'And I
suppose they will take half the profits too?'
Remigio winked, then shuffled into church.
The next day Pastorini, who was by no means behind the scenes in these
matters, went and asked innocently for an audience with the Cavaliere
Durellazzo: it was the syndic's day for audiences.
As usual, the Cavaliere Durellazzo was absent; but his secretary would
see anyone. After a little delay the miller found himself in the presence
of Messer Nellemane, who smiled affably, and, without rising from his
writing chair, said, 'Can I be of any use to you, my
friend?'
Then Demetrio Pastorini, not being glib of tongue, except under pressure
of excitement, with some hesitation, and with great repetition and
amplification, related the object of his coming, and set forth the fact
that his people had been millers on the
Rosa water over three hundred years, well counted and proved, and very likely many more; and then he proceeded to urge that having thus a kind of inherited fief and ancestral right as it were in the stream, it was beyond all justice, not to say all law, to have a steam mill set up in face of him.
Messer Nellemane listened very patiently; and when at last the miller
paused for want of breath, said gently:
'You are under an entire misapprehension, my friend. Did not
Remigio Rossi occupy the mill by the piazza for very many years?'
Pastorini admitted the fact.
'And you never, that I heard of, objected to that water mill being
there ?'
'It did no business,' said the miller.
'Excuse me,' said Messer Nellemane, 'that is quite
beside the question. If it had
done, you could not have thought of compelling its removal?'
'I never should have asked it,' said Pastorini.
'Live and let live is my motto. That mill was an honest thing. It
worked by water; and it was in worse water than I was --'
Messer Nellemane grew a trifle impatient; the obtuseness of the public
always irritated him; but he kept his serene smile.
'All that is beyond the question. You contest the legality of
Rossi's mill. Now, whether it be a water mill or a steam mill, it
has, or it has not, the same rights to the ground it stands upon: you
do not seem to me to see that; yet, if you reflect a moment, dear sir, you
will be persuaded that the manner of working the mill has nothing at all to
do with the matter.'
'Merciful heaven!' cried Pastorini,
goaded into torture by this mild and logical reasoning. 'It has everything to do with it. The mill had the same rights as mine--no less; no more. When Rossi was content with the seasons God sent, and the whim of the Rosa, I had nothing to say: the river is free.'
'A moment ago you claimed it as the property of your
family,' said his listener very gently: the miller did not
heed.
'Fair contest I would never be a foe to, nor would any son of
mine,' he said, a little hotly. 'Come rich, come poor, the
river is free; a prince and a beggar may strip and sport in
it--'
'More pity,' said Messer Nellemane, whose propriety was
often offended by little, live, dancing
amorini bent on a bath in the heat of
midsummer.
'The river's a free thing; but use it
fair,' said the miller, growing heated. 'Don't put a hissing boiler on it, and grind, when it's God's will that the water's out; why do you come on the river to do that? it's like the men I've heard of that blow fish out of the waters with gunpowder, and rob all honest anglers with their nets and rods.'
'Dynamite,' corrected Messer Nellemane. 'It is not
allowed by our rules.'
'Then why do you allow the steam mill?' pursued Pastorini.
'It's to me what the blasting is to the fishers. One man will
gorge, and all the others starve. I never said I had a right to the Rosa;
but I do say I have a right to grind grain for Santa Rosalia and all the
farms around. This thing isn't fair; it isn't honest; it will
eat me up, and make my children hunger; for, of course, all the folks will
go where the work is done quickest.'
'You have precisely expressed the reason of its invention,'
said Messer Nellemane blandly, and toying with a pen. 'In these
times work, to please the public, must be done quickly, and done at any
moment. It is most painful to me that this innovation should be displeasing
to you; but we are compelled to think of the general interest, not of
individual aims. It is absurd that, in these times of great inventions, a
whole commune should have to wait with its harvests unground because a
little river has run dry; so many complaints have been made on this subject
to us that we have deemed ourselves bound to find some remedy for them, and
as Remigio Rossi was a public-spirited man with some capital, the
most excellent the Cavaliere Durellazzo and the Giunta decided on giving
him some help to the better carrying out of this project.'
Pastorini stood confounded and dumb. He had intended to cast the loan
for the steam mill in the face of this representative of the municipality;
but lo! it was boasted of to him as an act of public utility and
benignity!
His slow gentle wits were not quick enough or keen enough to combat
those of Messer Nellemane.
He stood turning his straw hat in his hands, and stammering
stupidly: 'But the thing's not honest, It's not
fair. It is to be beat by devils--' till his auditor amiably
reminded him that time was precious, and that there were many persons
awaiting audience below.
'Can I do nothing then?' said the miller, staring blindly
about him.
'Nothing in this matter. When the Giunta has once given its
approbation--'
'Damn the Giunta, and damn you!' said Demetrio Pastorini
bitterly. 'You have thrown my poor lad in prison, and you will now
take the bread out of our mouths.'
Messer Nellemane rang a little bell, and Bindo Terri appeared, and
showed the miller the door.
'All that family is a little amiss here,' said Messer
Nellemane, touching his own forehead with a commiserating smile.
So Pastorini bade him, in mercy's name, draw up the petition,
which was done, and cost forty francs.
The Prefect's secretary read it, and referred it to the Consiglio
Provinciale; the Consiglio Provinciale referred it to their engineer, who
was the engineer of the commune, one Pierino Zaffi. He informed the
Consiglio Provinciale that the mill was
necessary, not insalubrious, and very advantageous to the commune; the Consiglio Provinciale said so in turn to the Prefect, and he certified that he could not go against the decision of the provincial council.
In such a circle does the poor mill horse of the public turn.
Nothing was to be done.
Pastorini knew very well that Ruin would soon look over his white garden
gate.
The steam-mill would take all his custom away, and now that the
trees were felled, the water would most likely be shallower, and sooner
shallow, every summer. Besides the Pastorini felt themselves growing
friendless: for the first time for many years the big butcher had
been asked to direct the procession of Corpus Domini instead of the miller;
people were cool where they had
been cordial. Without more selfishness than is common to human nature, Santa Rosalia felt that it was perilous to be good friends with a family so marked out for punishment by Providence and Messer Nellemane.
'A tin-kettle threshing the corn, and an iron pot grinding
of it! Oh Lord what times!' said old Pippo, as the mill smoke came in
through his window and smothered him in his bed.
Messer Nellemane was in good and affable spirits; all things were going
well with him. The new deputy, not unmindful of the tampering that had gone
on with the election lists, and the plurality of voting achieved by the
gendarmerie, and other signal services to the State, in which the secretary
of Santa Rosalia had been of no small use, both in invention and execution,
was more than cordial to his humble ally, and predicted all
manner of great things for the future of so intelligent a public servant.
'In a free country like this,' said Signore Luca Finti,
'industry and talent can never long fail to obtain recognition. When
these miscreants are out of office, and our turn of power comes, you will
not be forgotten, my dear friend.'
And Messer Nellemane was so clever that the Prefect of the province, who
had been put in his place by the miscreants, also commended him for his
discretion and zeal in certain things that had been convenient to the
Prefecture in those elections, and the sub-Prefect said to
him:
'So long as we are in power, you, I promise, shall not be
forgotten. Such servants of the State as yourself are quite invaluable in
these times when we have so much to fear from the Reactionary and Clerical
element, and yet on the other hand must avoid being swamped by the deluge of Communism.'
Messer Nellemane said earnestly that he had no feeling except of horror
either for Clericalism or Communism.
He thought the good of the State required the strictest moderation and
impartiality, and, as he said it very truthfully, he felt quite safe
whether the Ministry went out or in, and especially as the new deputy and
the sub-prefect would never compare notes because they abhorred each
other as only Ministerialists and Dissidenti can.
Messer Nellemane's Utopia was like that of most Liberals of the
present era; it was a neat cut-and-dried despotism, which
should call itself a democracy, and in which the people should have as
little voice as the nobles, and the church be only permitted to
exist if it became a school-house for the semination of State doctrines.
This Liberalism keeps one eye on Gambetta and the other on Bismarck, and
is so absorbed in these two, and in trying to combine an imitation of both,
that it never sees coming after it with seven-leagued strides the
avenger--Bakounine.
Plentiful rains had fallen in the night; the tall, green-waving
wheat, the mulberry and walnut trees, the willows along the river, the
moss-grown grass between the poplars, all were green and sparkling
with moisture; here and there an acacia rose up in blossom like the white
column of a fountain, here and there glowed a Judas
(circis siliquastrum), with the roseate blush
of its abundant
flowers; over all was blowing a sweet sea wind from the west.
Demetrio Pastorini said to the maiden:
'Alas! that he should come home to see what he will
see!--'
'He will see us all well,' said Viola, with a true
woman's belief that this must compensate for all.
'The lad is sorely changed,' said the father with a sigh;
'remember that, Viola. When wrong is done to a man it changes the
honey of the human heart to gall. He is no more the bright, soft, innocent
youth that you and we have loved. He will need much wisdom from you, and
much consolation.'
'I will try my best,' said the girl, 'I will try to
win him back to his old self, and teach him to forget.'
'That is not easy,' said Pastorini; 'when
the mildew is on the grain, who shall make it fair wheat again? And he comes to two sore troubled households. But he is young and you are good.'
'I love him dearly,' said Viola, with tears in her large
eyes.
'That I know,' said his father.
Then he kissed her, and got ready the grey mare, and Dina walked back
with her to her own little house while the men went on their way.
'That young Pastorini will be out of prison to-day,'
Messer Nellemane was saying at that moment to the brigadier; 'you
will keep him under your eye, for I think he is a dangerous
character.'
'Of course,' said the gendarme.
Once in prison, you are for ever down in the books of the police, and
subject to examination and interrogation at any word or
act that seems to them to be suspicious. You never wholly escape. You are as a bird let loose, and flying with a recall-thread tied to its foot. Human justice is a sadly deficient thing.
Pippo and the Pastorini, father and sons, went to Pomodoro to meet him;
Viola stayed in her house; there is enough of the old sentiment amongst the
people, still, to make them think women should not parade their persons, or
their affections, or meddle with public things.
When they greeted Carmelo, and the formalities were fulfilled that set
him free, he grasped his father's hand and Pippo's, but said
never a word. He walked out into the open air, into the broad sunlight,
with an uncertain step as if he were purblind; his face had a stupid look,
and his mouth, that had been so fresh and smiling, was pale and
sullenly compressed. All his youth seemed to have gone out of him; he was wasted and thin, and his clothes hung on him loosely, twice too large. Only twelve months before he had borne the Maggio so merrily with carol and chant!
'You have had a long time of it,' said the Usciere jocosely
to him. 'You will take good care how you touch a guard again,
birricchino mio.'
Carmelo looked on the ground; there was a fierce fire in his eyes; he
kept a sullen silence.
'My son has been cruelly wronged,' said the elder Pastorini
with tears in his voice. 'If there were any justice in the land, not
an hour would he have spent in your accursed place.'
'The law never wrongs anyone,' said the Usciere, who lived
by the law.
'The real good honest law perhaps does not,' said Pastorini,
'but these rogues who make laws out of their heads that they may fill
their pockets--'
'Hush! or they will lock you up,' whispered Pippo, who ever
since he had mortgaged his house had been timid and yet sullen. 'Let
us be going; there is Viola at home.'
At the maiden's name a momentary light passed over Carmelo's
face and into his heavy eyes; but it soon faded and left again unillumined
the sullen gloom that months of imprisonment had brought there.
'Let us go,' he said, and glanced back over his shoulder
with a shudder at the prison.
They had brought the mill-horse and cart to meet him, and he felt
a sob rise in his throat as he saw the familiar old grey
beast, and heard the whinny of pleasure with which the poor thing recognised him.
Their hearts were rather heavy than joyful as they drove behind the grey
along the dusty road, with the vineyards on either side of them, and the
long low azure forms of the mountains beyond those.
The father felt a bitter pang that one of his sons should go back thus
to his birthplace; his name had always been stainless, and though he knew
that Carmelo had done no wrong, still in all prisons there is a taint of
shame that clings.
The young man never spoke; his brother had the reins; he sat behind with
old Pippo, his face turned backward, so that he saw the red roofs and dusky
towers of Pomodoro grow less and less, until the rise of the road hid
them.
'Accursed place! accursed place!' he
muttered once; then his head dropped on his breast, and lips never unclosed till the cart had jolted over a bridge that crossed the winding Rosa and entered his village. Then he put his hand on his brother's arm, and motioned him to check the horse.
'Let me get down; let me see her alone.'
They let him get down.
He stood an instant, and looked at the white, square, bald building that
was the Palazzo Communale. He looked and lifted his hand in the air.
'I would do the same again were the time to come again!' he
said solemnly. 'My poor dead dog! do they think the prison has made
me forget you--or forgive them?'
His face was very pale and very stern; his eyes had a great darkness and
yet a great
fire in them, as the skies have when behind the purple rain-clouds flash the lightnings.
The men in the cart were afraid.
'He is not in his right mind,' said Pippo in a frightened
voice to his father.
Pastorini shook his head.
'Let him go to his girl. She will be his best cure. We should but
do him harm. You will bring them both up to us a little later, when he is
calm. He is sorely changed, my lad, my poor lad!'
It was early morning; no one saw Carmelo return. He went across the
threshold of the house of the Madonna, and fell at the feet of Viola, who
watched and prayed for him.
His father followed him wistfully with his eyes, shading his own with
his hand.
'What will he say of the trees?' he cried in a sort of
despair. 'I have not broken it
to him. What will he say? what will he say!'
Pippo answered nothing: he thought the trees but a trivial woe
beside his own dead weight of ruin; but he would not say so; he had a kind
heart, which was awake, though his head was failing.
The miller drove on slowly through the village; and Pippo slipped down
and glided away by himself, and sat down by the river-side under the
willows by the reeds.
It was early, and no one scarcely had seen the miller's cart come
through the village, and those who had seen, had kept behind their
door-posts and their casements, saying to themselves, 'Will it
be prudent to be friends with the lad?'
For whosoever would be friends with the liberated criminal, the whole
borgo knew well, would be marked and cashiered in the
black books of the oppressor rusticorum. Their hearts were altogether with Carmelo; he had done thoroughly right, so they all thought, but who would dare to say so, or dare to act as if he thought so?
In these modern times of cowardice, when great Ministers dare not say
the thing they think, and high magistrates stoop to execute decrees that
they abhor, it is scarcely to be hoped for that moral courage will be a
plant of very sturdy growth in the souls of carpenters and coopers, and
bakers and plumbers and day-labourers, who toil for scarce a
shilling a day. A bad name with the guards, a series of fines and taxes,
the loss of municipal work or gentlemen's patronage--these soon
ruin a poor tradesman or workman.
So we will not be too harsh against the little folk of Santa Rosalia
that they hung back somewhat, and were not quick to look
out of their doors as usual when the miller's well-known grey horse trotted slowly through the street.
Only Gigi Canterelli ran out of his shop and waved his hat, and shouted,
'Bravo! benone!' and fearful
Cecco, who was standing at the entrance of his workshop, having no work to
do, seeing Pippo sitting disconsolate amidst the rushes, ran to him and
cried, 'Dear friend! Is he home? Oh the joy of it! Never mind the
gaol now; never mind it a bit; everybody knows the rights of the
tale!'
And when Pippo, who did not think it right to leave the youth and the
maiden together more than ten minutes, got up to go into his house, Cecco
would go with him, and shook the hands of Carmelo, and kissed him on both
cheeks, and said, 'Now you are home all will go well,' and then
kissed Viola
and went on his knees before the crucifix and blessed Christ, and got up again, and laughed and cried, and sang and danced, and behaved altogether so foolishly for a staid old cooper of sixty years, that Pippo could not help laughing too, and the young man and maiden were glad of this cover to their own too great emotion.
'Let us go,' said Pippo, 'your father will be
wondering--'
Carmelo, with Viola's hand in his, looked more as he had used to
look; his eyes had a soft and tearful light, and his lips had something of
their old smile on them. He spoke but little: even for her he had few
words.
But when Pippo said to him that it was time they should be going to the
mill, and thereon the three went out from the house into the piazza, the
harder, darker look came once more upon his face, and his eyes
grew fierce as he strode through the dust with his head erect as if in challenge.
'I could kill them all!' he muttered, and his hand clenched
hard on the hand of Viola.
As they went across the threshold, Carmelo looked over his
shoulder:
'Where is little Raggi? She always jumped about me so.'
And he began to call and whistle for her as of yore.
Viola burst out crying and caught hold of his arm.
'Oh Carmelo! oh, dear one, don't do that! Raggi is
dead.'
'Dead! what did she die of? Poor merry little Raggi!'
'She died of--of--old age,' said Viola between her
sobs; 'don't talk of her, please don't.'
'Of old age?' said Carmelo doubtingly;
'She was not a pup, to be sure, but she was so full of pranks and
play. Poor little Raggi! Are you sure it was not poison?'
His face grew overcast again, and the gloom of it did not lighten as he
moved into the street and saw the neighbours hurry inside their
doorways.
'One would say I brought the plague,' he said savagely.
'Come on, never mind them. They are afraid the guards are looking,
that is all. It will all be again just as it used to be when you shall have
been home a week,' said the cooper hurriedly, and they passed across
the square.
It was now the hour when all Santa Rosalia was up and doing; when every
door was open, and every window unshuttered, when the children were
trotting to school,
and the mothers gossiping as they made their small purchases for dinner at noon. But now the women hustled away into holes and corners, and the men became suddenly very busy with casks or barrels, with brushes or pails, with meat or flour, with a mule in a cart, or an ox at a butcher's door, with anything and everything so that no one saw Carmelo.
He raised his head higher, and his eyes grew sterner and fiercer:
he knew very well why these lazy laughter-loving people were all so
suddenly busy and engrossed.
There was only Gigi Canterelli who ran once more out of his shop door
and welcomed him with both hands.
'The beasts of the Municipality will never sup or dine in my back
room any more,' thought he, 'but what matter--they
must ruin me if they wish; I cannot let the good lad go by without a greeting.'
But his was the only greeting that welcomed Carmelo in all the length of
the village street, though women and men both looked wistfully after him
and said one to another: 'Poor lad, he was in the right; will
it do to be friends with him, think you? God knows he is good as
gold.'
He understood what they were thinking, and so did his companions.
'Oh, the shame of them! the cruelty of them!' thought Viola,
trying not to let her tears fall. 'Instead of giving him welcome and
sympathy!'
'Men and women are just like sheep,' thought her father.
'A crack of the whip and they scatter: they never stay by one
that falls on the road.'
'It is not to be expected that they will
get into trouble for the lad,' thought Cecco; 'and yet one would have fancied they would just have given him good day.'
Now on the steps of the Palazzo Communale there was lounging Bindo, in
his guard's uniform, with his short sword swinging at his side, and
his big memorandum book bulging out of his pocket; his hat was cocked on
one side, and his moustaches were curled up to his eyes, and he looked very
much as if he had stepped off the stage from taking part in an opera
bouffe.
He saw the four persons coming past the building on their way from
Pippo's house to the mill on the Rosa. He said to a carabinier who
was also at the doorway, 'Come along with me, there is that
blackguard out of prison.'
He swaggered down the steps and stood in the middle of the road so that
they were obliged to pass him.
The face of Carmelo grew crimson and then livid as he saw the poisoner
of Toppa.
'Here is this gaol bird,' called Bindo Terri out loud to the
carabinier, as they went by. 'He will think twice before he assaults
us again; but I will be bound he will end in the galleys. Keep your eye on
him, brigadier, for he is dangerous.'
But for the pressure on his hand of Viola's entreating gesture,
and the low supplication of old Pippo's quavering voice, the
municipal guard would once more have measured his length on the dust under
the weight of Carmelo's avenging arm.
For their sakes he mastered the passion that convulsed him. They passed
on in silence, submissive to insult and to injury, as the people have
always to be before the petty tyrannies that are called Law.
'Heed him not, my beloved,' said the
maiden near him. 'Be calm and strong. That will be your best vengeance.'
They were words of wisdom, but life cannot always be guided by
wisdom.
Old Annunziata met him now also. She had begun to hobble about again
with the warm weather; she cried as she welcomed him: 'Oh my
dear lad,' she said, 'I shall always think it was myself with
that basket of eggs that was the beginning of all your troubles.'
'Not you,' said Carmelo, kindly. 'Eggs or no eggs,
these beasts would have done for me somehow.'
'But they brought it against you--'
'Yes, with lies tacked to it as you tack paper to a kite's
tail to carry it higher,' said Cecco the cooper.
Then they all went on again together.
They were all silent.
They were all thinking, What will he say when he sees the trees are
down?
Carmelo, full of bitter thoughts and tender memories, did, indeed strain
his eyes eagerly along the road for the first sight of his father's
house.
'There it is!' he cried eagerly as a turn in the
river-road brought the white building with its red-tiled roof
into view; then he stopped and drew a deep breath.
'But there are no trees!' he cried. Everyone was silent.
'Has father cut them down?' he cried, staring all the while
straight before him.
Then Viola took courage and answered him.
'They were taken by the municipality, dear; it seems there is some
public thing to be done; they want the ground--'
She was dumb, as one of the terrible
oaths of Italy that burn and harrow like vitriol, rolled out of Carmelo's lips and made the listeners shudder.
He uttered nothing more, but walked on towards the mill-house
where his father and his brothers and sisters were waiting for him at the
little low gate.
They hung about him, and they kissed him, and wept over him, but he made
them no caress in answer; he did not respond to them by any word or sign;
even his youngest sister, little Isola, clinging about his knees, got no
kiss from him; he looked only at his father, and from his father to the
heaps of rubbish where the wood had been.
'You let that be done?'
'Son of mine,' said the miller, humbly and wearily,
'could you fight against the pricks? I could not.'
Carmelo dropped on the wooden bench
by the door above the stones where Toppa was buried, and buried his face in his hands. It was a sad home-coming.
The day was beautiful; the fields were in all their first summer
greenness; the waters were green, too, with the reflection of them; the air
was full of the scent of new-mown hay and of the
vine-blossoms. His sister had made ready a plenteous meal;
blackbirds and chaffinches sang in the hedge of arbutus and bay; the old
place looked bright and kindly, but nothing changed the cloud on
Carmelo's face, nothing made him smile.
He had been wronged, and a great wrong is to the nature as a cancer is
to the body; there is no health.
Carmelo leaned his head on his arm and noticed none of them. It seemed
to him that twenty years had rolled over him since
the morning when, thinking no evil and fearing none, he had gone out on the grass to call the dog for his bread. It seemed to him that his very soul had been changed, and that in the stead of his heart there had been put into him a burning stone.
He loved Viola; the old happy, innocent, simple affection was still very
sweet to him, but even that was dulled and dwarfed by his own immense
anguish and wrath. A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom
does, but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
All pleasure in his future was gone out of him; all joy was dead. Some
animal passions had awakened in him during his long isolation, but all
peaceful serene happiness had perished. He did not reason on this, because
he was but a simple unlearned youth,
but he felt it, and he hated the world of men and doubted God.
The cooper Cecco, and the elder Pastorini, and the youngest of the sons
tried to make a little mirth and gossipry; but in vain old wine was poured
out, in vain the men strove to laugh and chatter; a great heaviness of
sorrow and of dread was over all. Viola's face was as white as the
narcissus poeticus hanging their fragrant bells in the strip mill garden,
and Carmelo scarcely tasted bit or drop. In the midst of the meal his
youngest sister Isola, only seven years old, burst out crying.
'Carmelino has not kissed me once!' she said, amidst her
sobs.
Carmelo looked up and his mouth and eyelids quivered. He rose, caught
the child in his arms, and hurried out by the open door, and there, on the
old oak seat above
the stone that covered the body of the dog, he bent his face over the golden head of his little sister and wept bitterly.
Within doors Demetrio Pastorini struck the wooden table heavily with his
clenched fist.
He had all his life been a most peaceful man, and a more harmless,
jovial, kindly, easy in temper, and patient from sense of duty and love of
quiet; but now all his blood stirred darkly within him.
'We are mules and bats, blind and dumb, and knowing not when we
are smitten,' he said, with a deep rage in his thickened voice.
'We are more foolish than the beasts that perish, since we live and
submit to our tormentors.'
They were all silent.
It was a sad home-coming.
'Our people do not understand their rights,' said a prefect
to me. I thought: 'When they do--well,--there will
not be many prefects.'
This is the fact: they do not understand;
they let their sons go to the conscription, their bread money to the municipal extortioners, their last tool in fine to the tax-gatherer, their last shirt in pawn to the Monte di Pieta, and then shut themselves up and die of hunger secretly, or throw themselves in the river without a word of complaint to anyone. They do not understand their rights, and they are not at all envious of the pretty happy people driving by with prancing horses. The cursing envy of Irish or French poor is not in the Italian; if he can sit in the sun and cut a slice of melon in summer, a slice of sausage in winter, he is content, and ready to laugh and be merry with you.
Foreigners judge the Italians by Menotti's restless emigrants and
Mazzini's mystic disciples, but in real truth these make up but a
small portion of the nation; to the great
bulk of it revolt is alien, and a good-humoured and docile obedience most natural.
Now, no doubt it would have been far better had Carmelo gone elsewhere
to seek a living. But to the higher sort of Italian poor it never occurs to
leave their home. The same love that bound Dante to the
cerchio antico binds the Italian cotter or
workman to his native village. When they are taken perforce away as by
conscription they hunger ceaselessly till they see their hill-side
farm or cottage in the plains. Emigration does not attract them; even a
change to a near city or a neighbouring province appals them as a kind of
expatriation.
'I want to go to my native country'
(paese nativo), said one of the men in my
employ. 'It is such a long-time since I was there.'
By his native country he meant an olive-
clad hill that rose in sight about two miles off; he had not been there since Pasqua, and he spoke on S. Giovanni's day!
The paese nativo is what they love, and to
this sentiment their rulers owe their incredible and illimitable patience
which forbears from revolution. Leave them in their
paese nativo, and you may do almost any
oppression or extortion to them that you will.
Therefore neither to him or his did it ever occur that Carmelo would do
well to leave Santa Rosalia. Besides he was the elder son, and had always
been promised that the mill should pass to him, after an old rule of the
family that ignored all the primogeniture-abolition of
'48.
The eldest Pastorini had always had the mill, and the others had always
lived there if they liked, and worked at other trades; and Demetrio
Pastorini was strongly conser-
vative, as indeed every rural Italian is in mind and blood, abhorring change, and never understanding it, or being willing to allow for it in any way.
Therefore, as I say, there was no thought that Carmelo would do well to
put some breadth of strange land between himself and his foes; but although
things were going so ill at the mill-house, his marriage was never
doubted or spoken of as a matter that would brook delay.
'They have suffered enough,' said Pastorini, 'and
nothing will chase away the gloom that has gathered upon him like the face
of the woman he loves always by him by day or by night.'
'My son,' he said therefore to Carmelo that night.
'You are come home to us in evil times. The trees are down, and never
a soldo will I see for them. That is certain.
The steam mill of Rossi's is taking all our custom away; some go because it gets done quick, and more go because they think to please the Syndic, and the gentlemen, that set it up there. I am not at all sure, my lad, that the place will bring us bread a year more. And I owe money, that I will not deny to you. I owe money, but I have not heart to stand in the way of the only joy you can grasp. You shall wed the girl tomorrow.'
So the very morning after his return, all formalities having been gone
through well-nigh twelve months before, they went quietly and with
no mirth up to the church of San Giuseppe, and were wedded before the altar
by Dom Lelio.
There were few dry eyes there amongst their friends: she had
thought of little Raggi, and had put an almond sprig in her
bosom off the tree that grew by the little grave, and the two old men stood beside her, careworn, and with a vague and ghastly dread weighing on their souls.
Would these two, whose lives were made one, find anything in the future
except toil and pain? Would their children be begotten for anything beyond
hunger and care? Would they be allowed to see their years go by in such
peace as sweetens labour? Would not their hearts be harrowed and their
cupboards bare?
There would be enough if they were let alone, but not enough for tax and
fine, for torment and extortion.
Carmelo said very little. He felt scarce any joy. The dull, sullen shame
of his captivity was still on him. The bitter rage of his wrongs suffocated
almost all gentler thoughts, all tenderer emotions. He loved
the maiden who had been so true to him; but the days of dalliance seemed gone for ever from him: he said to himself, 'Have I a right to procreate innocent creatures to be as wretched as I have been, and to bear the burdens that our people bear?'
For he had learned to think, in the long watches of those nights, in
hospital and in prison; and all that the communist had taught him was for
ever fermenting in his mind.
The marriage service was said and over very early in the morning, for
they wished to make no fuss, and draw no eyes upon them, save the kindly
ones of a few old neighbours who had known them both from their birth. The
child Isola had gathered a great bunch of the wild narcissus, which filled
the church with its fragrance; that was their only rejoicing. Viola wore
the grey gown she had laid aside in the past summer; and the good vicar blessed them with a quiver in his voice, and they went as quietly and sadly home again; the stick of old Pippo keeping tune and time on the stones with Annunziata's crutch.
Then every one went to his work again, and there was no attempt at any
kind of festivity: it would have been unfitting, and Carmelo would
have had no heart for such a thing.
He and Viola went home and with the old man to the little square house
to break bread with him ere she departed for ever. They had offered to
live with him there a few months before taking up their abode at the mill;
but Pippo had refused the offer, sweet as it was to him, for he said to
himself: 'They will distrain all I have: the girl will be
best away from that.'
He had a little meal for them, and they sat at it silently: no one
had appetite to eat. It was like a funeral rather than a bridal feast. None
of the broad jokes common at such times were heard, and no levity could
lift its head under such sorrow.
It wrung the heart of Viola to leave the old man all alone to do his
chores, and make his bread and bed; but Pippo, harshly at the last, said
that he would have it so, and so best liked it: and she
submitted.
The mill was but a half-a-mile off down the river:
she promised herself that she would run in to him a dozen times a day to do
all that was needed. With the miller's three girls there would be
little for her to do in her father-in-law's house, and
Carmelo was fond of Pippo.
Pippo filled a glass with wine and lifted it solemnly upward.
'My girl,' he said gravely; 'be as good a wife as you
have been a good child to me, and you will be as a vein of gold to those
you go to dwell with. You have had sore trouble here. May it never find you
where you go now. Demetrio, drink with me: health and long life to
your son and your son's sons when you and I be underneath the
sod.'
Then with twilight, the young people went away to the mill-house,
where there were now no nightingales safe in leafy trees to sing through
the hours of their nuptial night; and old Pippo was left alone in his
little, dull, and quiet place, where there was not sound but of the Rosa
water breaking on the sand beneath the willows.
He looked through his back door at little Raggi's grave.
'My wee dog,' he said to it. 'I shall
soon be like you now. Let the thieves come and seize; they cannot get blood out of a post; and it does not matter for me, since you and the girl are gone.'
Then he sat him down by the cold hearth, with his hands on his knees,
and his head on his breast, and never stirred till midnight came.
The poor soul had always been certain in her own mind that her basket of
eggs had been at the bottom of Carmelo's troubles, and she never
could forgive herself for having complained about them, especially as when
the case was brought on at Pomo-
doro, where it had been sent by Messer Nellemane, she had been forced to attend as an accuser, and had cried so much that the Pretore had abused her, and had felt a great deal more remorse than Pompéo of Sestriano did when they ordered him six weeks' imprisonment.
'And know another time, you, that it is a breach of the law to
conceal a theft, and that such concealment on the part of the person robbed
makes such person liable to heavy penalties,' had thundered the young
judge at Annunziata, who had cried again as if her heart would break, but,
being an obstinate old woman, would insist on answering that she could not
for the life of her see why anybody should mind her being robbed if she did
not.
'That shows how lamentably, how culpably, ignorant you are of the
first rudiments
of morality and public duty,' said the Pretore, who was as like Messer Nellemane in his ideas and his expressions of them, as a green bunch of grapes is like a ripened one. He was exactly like him, without his mellowed suavity, and exquisite patience with foolish people, which were gifts of time and nature that Messer Nellemane had carefully cultivated with a view to the future, when he should be a Minister, and hold the heart of the State in his hands.
Annunziata had still gone on crying, having seen the smith of Sestriano
led off by carabiniers.
'And he will murder me when he comes out,' she had cried,
'and small blame will it be to him, the poor thing, for he was drunk
as drunk could be, or never would he have touched the eggs!'
'If he murder you, he will go to the
galleys,' had said the guards as they took her away.
'And what good will that be to me when I am dead?' had said
'Nunziatina. 'And he is a good man enough when the drink is not
in him; that I have always told you.'
On the whole, the ungovernable resolution to have her own way, and the
answers that she had thus made to those in authority over her, had produced
an impression against her in the minds of all the officials, who had agreed
that she was an insolent and cantankerous old woman.
'If there were but a Vagrant Act, I would consign her to the
lock-up at once,' had said the Pretore to Messer Nellemane,
who said in his turn:
'I think the Cavaliere Durellazzo will bring something of the
kind; we are over-run with beggars; but, of course, unless this
larger commune do the same, it will scarcely be effective.'
'I will speak to our Syndic,' had answered the Pretore.
The Syndic of Pomodoro was the elder brother of that excellent Count
Saverio who was the president of the charitable Confraternità di San
Francesco di Asissi.
'Are there many mendicants about?' the Syndic had asked his
brother, after having been spoken to by the Pretore.
Count Saverio had thrown up his hands, implying that they were many as
the sands of the sea.
'They are a great anxiety to us,' he had added, 'for
they are always applying to us, and you know our rules do not permit us to
relieve beggars. If there were any law by which one could deal with
them--'
'There ought to be one,' had said the
Syndic of Pomodoro. 'I will speak to Durellazzo.'
So in the council chamber of the Giunta in the Palazzo Communale, Messer
Nellemane had known very well that it was the marriage day of Viola, but
was at the same time enjoying such a victory of reason over prejudice that
he had no time to indulge in any of the sentiments of a passion
disappointed and outrivalled.
By his representations to the Cav. Durellazzo, and the Cav.
Durellazzo's representations to the Giunta, he had succeeded in
having adopted for Vezzaja and Ghiralda, as he and the Pretore had desired,
the laws of the cities against vagrancy and mendicancy.
There had been a strong prejudice against this course in the Giunta; for
Italians, until their humanity is effaced by Impiega-
tism, do not incline to severity; climate and custom alike making them lenient.
But Cav. Durellazzo read a report prepared by his secretary, and
endorsed by himself, that presented quite appalling evidence of the persons
who lived by beggary or alms of some sort. The order of which Messer
Nellemane is the type, is never greater or happier than when preparing a
report of this kind, which, dealing with the exact science of statistics,
deals a death-blow to those unproductive and erratic classes which
every bureaucracy abhors.
The report concluded with a short moral essay on the beauties of
providence and industry, and the patriotism and public spirit that were
required in all members of the public to enable them to extinguish their
individual sentiments and private pity, and look on the question from the
higher standing-
point of general interest and the good of all humanity.
It was a very warm day in March; the council chamber was small, and, as
children say, stuffy; the Giunta was half asleep, and all that was awake of
it was longing for a flask of wine; the voice of the Cavaliere Durellazzo
was sonorous, but provocative of somnolence; the Giunta assented to the new
law with the pliancy of men whose bodies are moist, and whose throats are
dry; it was embodied in an appendix of thirty-five new regulations
and sent to the Prefect to be approved.
This is a mere form, like sending a death warrant to a sovereign.
The Prefect approved of course, naturally; first of all, it was not his
interest to quarrel with the commune; secondly, he assented to these new
rules without even
thinking what the long documents forwarded to him meant. He was in a hurry to get to the city races, and he also was warm.
The prefect's secretary sent them to the Home Minister, but he was
in all the fiery heat of conflict on Montecitorio, and had much to do to
keep his own place, and had no time to give to the affairs of a remote
municipality hidden away under corn and vines. He assented too: it is
always the strongest possible point with ministers and prefects that the
country communes are autonomous. When somebody remarked to him that they
were ill governed, he said it was their own fault: if they chose to
elect asses, they must; it was no business of anybody's. So the law
against vagrants was incorporated into the code of Vezzaja and Ghiralda,
and was pasted up upon the walls in large letters, which, as
nine-tenths of the popula-
tion could not read, was not to any great purpose.
There, alas! were a great many old folks too old to do anything, who
lived with their families, and who, to avoid being a burden to them, went
about to all the villas and got pence here, bread there, a cup of
mezzo-vino, or an old bundle of scraps, as it
might chance. If you had called these people beggars, they would have been
amazed. They were all well known, never asked for what was not offered to
them, and had been hard-working man and women until their sight or
their limbs had failed them.
These old folks the new rules stunned and slew like a
pole-axe.
They did no harm; not a mite of harm; and as the State provided no
poor-house for them, they could not see that there was any such very
great guilt in taking from their
richer neighbours a little aid that the richer were never harmed by, and gave willingly.
But, in these days, Christian Europe decides that not only the poor man
lying by the wayside, but also the Samaritan who helps him, are sinners
against political economy, and its law forbids what its religion
orders: people must settle the contradiction as they deem best; they
generally are content to settle it by buttoning up their pockets and
passing by on the other side. This was the consequence of the new rules for
the suppression of mendicancy in Vezzaja and Ghiralda.
Now the suppression of mendicancy is a very good thing; but, as you
never can suppress poverty, it would be better to provide a substitute for
him before you shelve the Samaritan.
I know a very good man last winter
who gave away soup-tickets to all who asked him; and he could not understand how anybody wanted anything more. Now a bowl of soup is a very good thing; but I never knew anybody who could live on it, and I have known a good many who felt ashamed to present the ticket and take the soup there in public. Why are you expected to have no sensitive nerves and no pride because you are starving? I cannot see why you should be myself; but it is a fact that such things are not permitted to you.
Messer Nellemane went a step farther than my good man: he thought
people should not have soup at all unless they bought it.
His rules were framed on this principle, which he considered to be a
sound and healthy one; and as they were also adopted for the larger commune
of Pomodoro-Carciofi, he thought they would sweep the land as
clean as a steam reaper-and-binder sweeps a corn field, leaving gleaners empty-handed.
As none of the old men and women involved, understood anything at all of
these fresh laws, printed up in big type on the walls of the Communal
Palace, they were swept into the net as easily as quails are at Naples.
If a regiment of the blind, the infirm, and the very aged would have
been any use to the Minister of War, he could have had a large one from
these nettings of Messer Nellemane.
But, alas! they were of now use for anything; and, being nigh their
end, so took it to heart when they were locked up that most of them died
incontinently; and thought nobody really would believe it, for it sounds
too absurd, many a humble little home under the pines of the
hill-side, or
down amongst the maize and vines of the level ground was the sadder, because an old granddam or grandsire sat no more on the wooden settle cheerily telling the tale of his day's wanderings.
These laws came into effect on the first day of June, just twenty days
after Carmelo and Viola were married, and one fine afternoon, as Annunziata
was trotting about with her stick, feeling happy because her rheumatism was
gone for the moment, and because her girl was happily wedded, she was
touched on the shoulder by Bindo Terri, the municipal guard, and
arrested.
In vain she wept, and prayed, and sobbed, and moaned that she had always
been an honest woman. She was a mendicant under the Act; she had no private
means of subsistence, nor did she work for her living; she was clearly a
mendicant.
She was taken off to the guard-house with her basket, full of
scraps and pence and odds and ends, as proof of her guilt, found upon her,
and without any more words or any hearing at all, was carried away to
Pomodoro and there consigned to prison.
'It is the new law,' said Bindo, and that was all he would
say to her: he was very stern and very arrogant, and very much puffed
up with this addition to the joys and powers of his office.
'Do not tell Carmelo; for the love of God , do not tell, or he
will come burning the town down to get me out!' cried the simple soul
to Bindo.
And so distraught and wretched was this poor old trot at the thought of
the disgrace and sorrow she should bring on those she loved, that she
fretted herself in half an hour into such a state of body and mind, that
the
gaoler forthwith pronounced her in his own mind to be mad, and sent her to the same hospital where young Carmelo had languished through the winter nights and spring-tide days.
It was precisely for such cases as hers that the Confraternità di
S. Francesco had been instituted, but, as the modern moralities of that
society forbade them to encourage beggars, the Count Saverio, though he
heard of her case, could not on principle bestir himself on her behalf.
He was, indeed, at the moment he heard of it, occupied with his
stock-broker, who interested him much more, and he said quickly to
the clerk who told him of it:
'A vagrant; a confirmed mendicant. Now we could not interfere; it
would be an injurious example. We are bound to take broad views: to
consider the public.'
Meantime, Bindo hied quickly homeward and said to his young brother, who
resembled him as one pea resembles another:
'I took up the old 'Nunziatina this morning. Let some lad go
say so at the mill house; best not go yourself.'
The lad winked and ran off; half an hour later, as the family at the
mill were sitting down to their frugal noonday meal, Viola and Carmelo at
the places that would be theirs all their lives, a grinning youngster
looked in at the house door and cried to them:
'Your old woman is in prison--the new law's out
today!--they have taken her to the town--'
Then he ran away swiftly to escape from the chastisement he merited.
They all rose to their feet; Viola was trembling very much:
'It cannot be true. It cannot be true. They never would touch
'Nunziatina. All the world knows her!'
'I will go and see,' said Carmelo, and his face was very
dark.
'No!' said Demetrio Pastorini. 'Get not yourself into
more trouble. Most like it is but an idle word. Stay you with your wife;
and Dante, do you harness me Bigio.'
'Nay, Father, that cannot be,' said Carmelo. 'It is
Viola's aunt that is in peril and misery. Come with me if you will,
but let me go.'
'Be it so,' said Pastorini. 'But remember, for the
love of the saints, no violence. You are not alone in life now.'
Carmelo looked out of the door at the bank of mud, where once had been
his bright boschetto.
'We are slaves,' he said bitterly. 'Slaves can but
submit.'
'What did my brother die for in the wars?' said his
father.
Viola entreated to go with them, and, being not a month after her
marriage, neither man could find heart to refuse her.
The way to Pomodoro, as the way to all things southward, lay along that
river road which was to be disfigured by the tramway at such time as
speculators and municipalities should have finished their squabbles. There
was a short cut that passed by her grandfather's cottage, too narrow
for waggons and carriages, but broad enough for a little
baroccio like the miller's.
They passed that way to save time, and say a word to Pippo.
But as they drew nigh the cottage, close enough to discern the blue
Madonna, Viola, whose eyes were quickest to see their beloved little,
humble home, cried out:
'Nonno is moving away!--moving
away and never telling us!'
Carmelo checked the horse and sprang to the ground: his cheeks
grew very white; his teeth clenched; he had caught sight of other figures
than Pippo's amidst the chairs and tables, the mattresses and
saucepans, the bowls and jugs that were put out in a heap beyond the
door.
The figures he had seen were the Usciere and his assistants, two
straggling do-nothings of the place, who lent themselves to this
despised office for sake of the two francs a day they got by it, and the
pleasure of seeing the pain of better people than themselves, which is a
joy to scoundrels, always.
'Your grandsire is only cleaning, Viola,' he said hurriedly.
'Only cleaning his things. I think I will go and help him if you will
go on with father to Pomodoro.'
But Viola also had seen what he had seen.
'They are selling his things!' she said, with a
piercing scream, and ere either man could stay her she had sprung off the
cart on to the shaft, and from the shaft on to the ground, and had run
onward across the path into the house.
The elder Pastorini threw the reins on his grey steed's back, and
got down likewise. Carmelo was already on the grass.
'Oh nonno, nonno, what is it?'
cried Viola, as she ran into the entrance room, and saw her grandfather
sitting there in his basket chair by the cold hearth, just as he had done
through all the long, lonely evening of her nuptial day.
Pippo lifted her head; his face was set and stern, but calm.
'They are selling the old things,' he said.
'I thought they could not get blood out of a post, but it seems they can.'
Then he put his pipe in his mouth again.
Viola threw herself on her knees by the old man, and hid her face on his
arm.
'Oh, nonno, nonno!' she
moaned, 'Why did you not let me stay with you? I would never have
left you if I had known.'
'No,' said the old man, with his mouth quivering a little on
the pipe stem that it clenched. 'I knew well you wouldn't, my
lass. You were aye thoughtful of me. But you could have done not a mite of
good, and you would only have lost your own joy.'
On the threshold Carmelo had seized by the shoulders one of the men who
was carrying out the bed that had been Viola's, and was shouting in
his ear:
'Thief, and the servant of thieves, let go!
Carry off one of these things from this house and I will brain you all--'
Then old Pippo rose, and struck on the floor with his stick.
'Carmelo, son of Demetrio,' he cried in a stern loud voice.
'You are wedded mate to my girl, but you are no master of mine, and
in my house have no voice. What I bid you to do, do; but nought else. Come
quiet to my side, and let them work their will.'
Obedience and respect to elders are fine old primitive virtues that are
strong, like the olive and the chestnut on their hills, in the heart of the
Italian. Carmelo heard, and hesitated a moment, then took his hand off the
man's shoulders, and looked wistfully at Pippo.
'You will not resist?' he muttered.
'Where is the good of resisting? When
you cannot make resistance good, it is but a silliness and a paltriness. They are stronger than we. They take the goods. Let them, and go your ways. Make not your wife mourn for you in the Murata; that would be harder to bear than loss of cup and platter, bed and board.'
Carmelo stood still, like a chidden child.
Outside the elder Pastorini was speaking with the Usciere, begging for
delay, and praying of him to put back the goods into the house.
'If you pay me this sum down now, I will, though it is
late,' said the Usciere.
Demetrio Pastorini felt a mist in his eyes, and a ball in his
throat.
The figures that he saw were a total of nigh two hundred francs, nigh
8l. if you put it in English sovereigns, and
Demetrio had no money at home, nay, was in debt to more
than one, now that the steam mill took from him the wheat of more than half the peasantry; for folks will run to what is new, and what is popular, and what brings them credit.
He stood irresolute, meditating whether he could raise money by any
means, and the men went on with their work, hauling out into the open air
the poor sticks that made the furniture of Pippo. Rich and rare things look
sorry when thus treated and thrown together in the sun and dust; these poor
little things of Pippo's looked little more than fit for firewood or
the dust-heap.
'They give us all this trouble,' said the Usciere, like an
ill-used man. 'They give us all this trouble with their
obstinacy, and we take all they have, and then when it is all put together
it is not worth a kick from a dog.'
He gave a shove as he spoke to the
mound of things, and a copper vessel or two rolled down in a clatter.
They were all silent; the assistants were making a great noise bringing
down the steep stone stair an old chest of drawers, older than Pippo
himself. It was the chest in which Viola had kept her mother's
wedding gown until the day of her own marriage, with the orange leaves and
the lavender to drive away the moths.
Viola, on her knees by the old man's side, was rocking herself
violently to and fro, weeping.
'And Annunziata, Annunziata!' she murmured in her sobs.
Carmelo stood aloof; his arms folded, his face very dark.
'What of her?' asked Pippo.
'They have taken her up; she is in prison; they call her a
beggar.'
Pippo gave a short hard laugh, as his teeth still held the pipe
stem.
'Why don't they get out the guns, and set us all in a row
and fire us down? 'twould be quicker done, and easier.'
'It is the new law,' said the voice of the Usciere, who was
lending a hand to get out the walnut drawers.
'Law, law, law!' muttered Pippo, with his eyes savage like a
wild cat's, under his white eyebrows. 'There's law for
this and that and t'other, till all the land is sick; but
there's no law against the poor starving to death:
there's no law against their dying naked on the naked floor. Will you
tax the mother's breasts next, or the babe's swaddling clothes?
You're ripe to do it. But the mothers should cheat you, and dash out
the brains of their sucklings on the house wall, ere they be old enough to
sweat and
pine and drag the cannon for the State that curses them.
'Then the old man dashed his pipe upon the ground and rose.
'Get you all gone to Annunziata,' he said, as he forced
Viola roughly from the ground. 'Get you gone to her, and leave me
alone with the thieves. I have the roof above me yet, and I am not a maiden
to mourn for a lost looking-glass. I can lie on the floor well
enow, and a bit of dry bread needs no platter. Get you gone.'
They had no choice but to obey him. Carmelo's downcast lowering
eyes, and compressed and pallid lips told his father with how violent an
effort did he keep down his arm and his words; his father knew, too, that
this effort was strung, nearly to breaking point, and he was thankful that
Pippo's will set him free to carry away the
lad ere he should do to these enemies what no man could absolve or efface.
They got up into the cart again, and drove on by the edge of the river;
Viola was still weeping convulsively.
'Grandfather, who has led such an honest, hard-working
life, and never owed one penny!' she said amidst her tears.
'And what is it all for? It is not a debt. It is no debt, and who
has any right to make these claims?--'
Carmelo's hand grasped hers.
He could not speak.
All the words of the dead German were echoing in his ears, and he was
saying to himself, as Pippo had done,
'How long, O Lord? O Lord?'
Viola thought to herself with shrinking and sorrow:
'If I had let Messer Gaspardo make a
bad woman of me, all these my dear ones would not have suffered thus.'
And no doubt Messer Nellemane was the cause of all their woes.
But what shall we say of the State and the Law that make Messer
Nellemane possible?
'Two and three make five, and four is nine, and six is
fifteen--'
And so on through all the numerals; he
was adding up all the sums that the municipality had claimed from him; those that had been paid by him and those for which the law was now seizing his goods.
It was a long sum, and it bothered his head; he had never been good at
figures.
He sat there till it was quite dark; long after the distrainers had
ransacked every hole and corner, and carried off every pot and pan and gone
away leaving him nought but his four bare walls and the roof above him.
When it was quite dark, and the stars were beginning to tremble in the
summer skies, the cart came by his door again and stopped and Viola came to
him.
She was shivering very much and sobbing. Pippo did not either hear or
see her at first; the figures were in his ears, in his heart, in his brain
before his sight. She had to shake him by the shoulder to rouse him; and
even then he looked stupid.
'What did you find? he said then, and he thought his mouth moved
with difficulty, and his tongue seemed fastened.
'We found her locked up,' sobbed his granddaughter.
'And we could do nothing, nothing. They will not let her out, and she
is so wretched, and I feared all the while that Carmelo would break into
some violence; it was all his father and I could do to keep him
still--'
'They have locked her up have they?'
'Yes! And she is always crying to them to let her see the
sun!' and Viola's tears choked her voice as she spoke.
'They have locked her up, have they?' said Pippo stupidly.
'And they have taken all my things. Well, I do not know, my lass why
folk should try to be decent and honest; we are fools for our pains.
Then he turned round to the cold fireplace once more and began
counting.
'Two and three make five, and four is nine, and six is
fifteen--
Viola went to the door and spoke.
'Let me stay with him this night; I cannot leave him alone;
indeed, indeed, I cannot!'
'I will stay too,' said Carmelo; and he came down from the
cart, and bade his father drive home.
Pippo did no notice him; he was always counting.
There was no light but from the moon, for the men of the law had taken
away both lamp and oil. There was nothing to use; nothing to serve; no
table to spread.
Viola, checking her bitter sobs, sought in the old wall-cupboards
she knew so well for a broken plate or a bent spoon, but all was
gone. There was only a little rusty tin can and a half-loaf of bread; nothing else anywhere was to be found in all the house.
Carmelo stooped down and made a little fire with some
charcoal-dust that lay in the stove, and she pumped some fresh
water, and put it, with some of the bread, and an onion, from the garden in
the little pot to boil. There was not a stoup of wine nor a pinch of rice
in all the place.
All this while Pippo was busy counting. The young people crouched
together on the ground, and the old man sat on the wooden settle; the white
moon shone in through the square window; the room was full of smoke and bad
smells from the steam-mill; in other years at this season every
chamber had been sweet with the scent of the lilacs by the river.
Suddenly a mouse ran across the feet of
Pippo; the mouse roused him; he lifted his head from his breast and saw the figures of his children crouching together on the stones in the moonlight.
Then he looked round the empty, naked room, and laughed a little
harshly.
'They have got blood out of a post; they have got blood out of a
post, have my gentlemen. They think I'll kill myself like Nanni.
It's four hundred and sixty-five francs in all, and I am to
drive my brook underground, and spend all my mint of money on masons and
engineering folk. What would the king say? what would the king say? And the
old woman locked up like a purse-lifter or a trull. This is what we
lit up our oil for the day after San Martino! There's the moon, but
where's the lilacs? I don't smell them. What's that smoke
coming in my house? What smoke is that? Get
out, you foul thing, get out! They have sold me up, but I am master here yet!'
He got on his feet struck at the smoke wildly, beating the air with his
hands; then, finding nothing resist him, he looked round angrily, and
slowly recognised Carmelo and Viola.
'Why wait you here?' he said thickly. 'Go you home, my
dears. You are lovers still, and the night is sweet to you; get you home.
Nay, I would be alone. I have my house over my head; I am not out in the
street yet.'
And he would take no denial, but thrust them away almost roughly, and
shut to the door; then he sat himself down again, and again began counting,
'Two and three make five, and four are nine, and six make
fifteen,' and so on through all the figures they had brought against
him, repeating them over
and over again, all through the dreary hours of the night.
'He will lose his mind, saying over those figures!' sobbed
Viola, as they stood in the night air, no more, as of old, clear, silver
and sweet, but full of noxious steam and stench.
Carmelo wound his arm about her; he dared not trust himself to
speak.
The Juggernaut having been set in motion by Messer Nellemane, it rolled
over Pippo quite regardless of his circumstances; and a few mornings after
the Usciere had taken away everything except the little rusty pot, the law,
which is never conscious of being ridiculous, served a summons to this old
destitute man to pay sixty francs for a month's delay in executing the work above the running water commanded by the commune.
Pippo could not read, but he knew the look of the summons paper with the
arms of the province a-top of its long pages. He laughed a shrill,
hard little laugh, and twisted the paper up and lit his pipe with it.
He had a stupid and vacant look on his face, and he was very taciturn;
and when alone at work could always be heard muttering over and adding up
those figures; but he had set his back up straight against his lot; he
would not die like Nanni.
He went on with his basket-work and vegetable garden; one
neighbour brought in an old chair, and another a kettle, and another some
cracked plates, and Dom Lelio lent him a mattress; and so Pippo began life
again at nigh seventy years of age; an age
when hope is only a remembered thing, like a fair bird flown away long down the golden mists of the valley of youth.
They had been allowed to see 'Nunziatina once more, but the
interview was but added pain to her and to themselves. She was almost
distraught; her dim eyes were streaming with tears, and her voice was
hoarse with screaming. She could be made to understand nothing; she could
not fancy anything except that they thought her guilty of some crime.
'Let me get out; let me go free!' she was crying with all
her force. 'I want the air; I want to see the sky. This is the day I
am always to go to Varammista for my bread, and the pretty foreign child
comes and gives me something more herself, and smiles with her blue eyes;
let me get out; I have got a rose at home on purpose for the little miss;
let me go to my own home. I shall die away from the my own house.'
The little musty place where she had cooked and worked, and eaten and
slept for forty years, ever since her husband's death, was dearer to
her than her palace to a queen.
'Dear lad, don't you get into trouble for me,' she
said to Carmelo. 'But let me out they must. I have done no harm at
all. I only want to go home; I don't want a cart or anything; I can
walk every step of the way.'
But no one would let her out; and there they had to leave her. But for
the entreating pressure of Viola's hand upon his arm, Carmelo would
have done that day what would have lodged him anew in the Carcere of
Pomodoro. Sadly they had left her, and sadly they had returned.
Carmelo had only one thing of any value
in the world; it was a watch that his grandfather had given him, leaving it to him by will as to his favourite. It was an old silver watch, two hundred years old, with fine répoussé work of cherubs and foliage around it: it went well still, and was as big as a peach. Carmelo loved and honoured it so that he never wore it except on feast-days and Sundays. He wound it up only on those rarer occasions; at other times it lay in his drawer, wrapped in a silk handkerchief.
The day after he had seen Annunziata for the second time, in the prison
of Pomodoro he waited carefully till Viola was busy washing linen and his
father was out of sight; then he stepped upstairs, took the watch out of
its drawer and slipped it in his pocket. Then he went and harnessed the
mule.
'I am going to take that flour back to
Varammista,' he called in at the kitchen window.
The flour had been ground for the fattore of that place. His brothers
helped him up with the sacks, and he drove away, no one thinking that he
was on any uncommmon errand.
He drove to Varammista (where unhappily he found the owners who liked
Annunziata were absent), and left his sacks with their fattore, then on
into the town that he hated. His face was flushed, and he carried his head
high as he went through the streets. He fancied everyone was pointing at
him.
There was a shop in the place that was a jeweller's and an
antiquity seller's, both in one, kept by a man of whom in the happy
weeks before his marriage Carmelo had brought some little coral and silver
earrings for Viola.
Carmelo walked into the shop now, and held out the watch. 'How
much?' he asked.
The jeweller stared, and took the watch in one hand; he had often seen
and often coveted it.
'Twenty francs?' he said, hesitatingly. 'You know it
will only sell for old silver. No one will buy a watch that is not
new.'
'That is a lie,' said Carmelo, 'for you told me
yourself that all that work round it made it of value; yourself, you said
so two years ago, at the wine fair, when I showed it you.'
'I only said that to please you,' said the jeweller, who,
however, longed for the watch.
After chaffing and disputing a quarter of an hour, Carmelo was sick of
heart, and said passionately:
'Give me fifty francs, and you shall have
it. You know well enough I would not let it go but for some dire necessity.'
'You are always in trouble,' said the jeweller testily; but
he paid the money and locked the old watch up in a desk: he knew a
collector of such things who would give him ten napoleons any day for
it.
Carmelo went out of the shop; his face was a dusky red; he felt ashamed.
But he kept to his purpose. He took the fifty francs and went to the
prison. If anyone would pay so much caution money as guarantee that the
offence would not be repeated, those guilty of begging were let go out
again.
'My father has sent me to pay the money for
'Nunziatina,' he said unsteadily to the gaoler. 'May she
come out with me now?'
'Ugh! We do not do things as fast as all that,' they said to
him.
Nevertheless, they were obliged to abide by their own rules, and the
next night Annunziata, weeping and laughing, was home in her own room.
Viola missed the watch.
'Oh, my love, how good you are!' she cried.
Carmelo blushed and shook his head.
'Do not praise me, sweetheart. Your people are mine.'
After that action something of the gloom and bitterness that had been on
him, lifted, and once or twice he smiled his old merry smile, and little
Isola threw her arms about him, and cried:
'Oh, Carmelino mio! Forget all the wicked men, and let us be
happy.'
'I will forget them if they will let me, dear,' said
Carmelo.
And so he would, and, thus forgetting,
would have been a blameless, useful, and contented man.
But the State, which creates Messer Nellemane, does not care to have
useful, harmless, and contented men in its cities and communes. It thinks
it of far greater importance that no dog should be seen in the streets, no
poverty be exempt from a tax, and no man be able to call his soul his own;
it likes to have its gros bataillons of
unwilling conscripts, and it thinks it more profitable to have its galleys
and its hospitals full than to remit a tax, or cease
to keep ten clerks to do the work of one.
he foresaw, as I have said, that with the summer the water would be shallower than ever now that the trees were gone; and in effect it had become so as early as June, a thing never known before, and the big black wheels stood high and dry with the weeds on them dying in the sun, whilst farther below on the Rosa the black devil, as the people called it, vomited smoke and worked all day and night.
It was a hideous blot on the landscape; it spread dirt and dust and
poisonous vapours all around it; and the little children near it grew
pallid and sickly little things instead of the Correggio-like loves,
all rosy and brown, that they had been. But Messer Nellemane, sitting
before the Nuova Italia (though, if had confessed the truth, he was choked
by the smoke as well as lesser people) said to everyone:
'What a pleasure it is to see that pillar of progress arisen in
our midst;' and all Santa Rosalia understood, by his look and his
smile, that whosoever would wish to please the municipality must carry his
grain to Remigio Rossi.
The place had been, of yore, sweet with the scent of the flowers on
the river-bank according to each season, of the meadow-thyme
and the fragrant yellow tulip, of the vine-blossom and the sturdy
rosemary, of the acacias and the catalpas, of the magnolias and the Chinese
olives; now there was only a stench of oil and hot iron, and the smoke of
burning lignite; but the present generation has been taught to think this
is a change for the better, and Messer Nellemane was essentially a man of
modern mind.
An engine smelt sweeter to him than a lilac-bush; and he
thought hurry, strife,
noise, and money-making much finer things than 'fair quiet, and sweet rest.'
Dear Old Leisure, with his smile of peace and hands of blessing, was
but an old-fashioned obstructionist to him.
The last day of the past month of March had been the day on which
the first half-yearly payment of the interest of his mortgage was
due from Pippo; an interest of fifty per cent., which, on a loan of three
hundred francs with all the costs thereof--as he phrased it, a hundred
scudi--was a hundred and fifty every twelve months.
Pippo had by no means understood what mortgages were; the law of
hypothec was Greek to him; when the day came round, of course he had not
the money, and truly had never in any way realized the arrangement to which
he had put his cross before witnesses. The time went by without any great
dis-
quietude, except that uneasy sense of debt and burden which was so new and horrible to him. His head had got muddled, and as he could not read he could not clear himself by any study of papers.
When the Usciere had seized his things he had said to himself:
'I shall have to tell the advocate down in Pomodoro, for I never will
be able to pay him aught yearly.'
But his head never seemed right now; he forgot things, and could not
recollect words very often when he wanted them, and so the matter kept
slipping his mind, and when he remembered it he thought to himself:
'Well, he will get the house at my death, so he will be no
loser.'
That was his unlearned view of hypothec.
The lawyer neither sent nor wrote to him,
so naturally he was confirmed in his delusion. It was now August, and in his empty home he was making a good fight against fortune. His work brought him in, on an average, not eighty centimes a day, but that was enough for his few and frugal wants.
'If my health only will serve,' he said to himself, weaving
the osiers that he had now to buy, 'I should like to see
Viola's boy on my knees.'
That fancy kept up his spirit, though his head would always buzz. The
child would be best unborn, he knew, but still he wished to live to see
it.
Now to Messer Nellemane there were a perverseness and almost an
insolence in this old man, so very small, poor, and helpless, presuming to
live on, and lift his head up again after such a series of deserved
chastisements as he had received.
To see Pippo sitting at work in the doorway was irritating to him, and
not atoned for by the fact that Pippo was surrounded as he sat by all the
foul fumes and vapours of the steam mill across the river. And there was
the running water, too, always bubbling across the roadway, and the months
slipping away one after another, with the old man still at liberty to sit
in the air and mock the municipal majesty by disobedience.
What was to be done?
Messer Nellemane was for ever turning over the problem in his mind,
and even stooped to the humility of asking the advice of the deputy of
Pomodoro, who was in the neighbourhood, being on the point of marriage with
the Zauli heiress.
'I should have the work executed if really necessary for the
public good,' said Signore Luca Finti gravely, 'and then I
should debit
the offending proprietor with the cost of the works. That is the usual course taken in Rome.'
Messer Nellemane thanked his distinguished adviser cordially, and
proceeded to get out several blank forms, signed by the Cavaliere
Durellazzo, which it was needful to fill in before acting.
The whole of Santa Rosalia was in a mess with public works; those
for the steam mill had left heaps of black rubbish about, those for the
tramway had left many mounds of as yet unlaid iron rails; the old bridge,
which was as firm as a rock, and quite wide enough for the bullocks and
mules that alone passed over it was being pulled about and widened by the
Giunta; altogether the pretty little green village had that dusty unkempt,
stony, desolate look which so many 'improved' places have in
Rome and Venice,
and which is an aspect always as sweet to the municipalic mind, as the wasted province is to a conqueror.
The conqueror sees his victories in the smoking fields; the
Municipality sees its commissions and concessions in the rubbish heaps.
So one day Pippo had several workpeople whom he knew, masons and
plumbers and the like, come about his premises; and they made as though
they would pass through the house into the kitchen garden behind where
Raggi was buried under the willows. But Pippo slammed the door in their
faces.
'No, no,' said he, 'they have taken all I had out
of it, but the four walls are mine still. Into it not a man comes without
my leave and license.'
The men beat on the door, and told him through the door that they
came to work for the municipality.
'You don't come to work for me; and into my house you come
not,' said Pippo. 'A hundred scudi your municipality has robbed
me of, and I do not open my door to the thieves of a thief. Get you
gone.'
Most of the workmen were old neighbours of his, and were for going away
in silence, but amongst them were two masons from another part of the
world, employed and brought there by Pierino Zaffi.
These called to him to let them in, in the name of the law, and, as
he made them no reply, they went and asked Messer Nellemane permission to
open the door by force.
To them Messer Nellemane replied: 'I do not love force;
it is the weapon of the barbarian. I think we will wait a few days.
Mazzetti may hear reason.'
So he postponed the execution of the
work, and counted up the days that had elapsed since Pippo had been ordered to begin the work; and the many times he had been summoned to appear and answer for his transgressions; all those various summonses which the old rebel had put in the fire.
Then he took the diligence over to Pomodoro, and had a little talk
with the advocate Niccolo Poccianti, who lived by the Pretura.
'I am afraid for your grandfather,
carina,' said the cooper to Viola.
'Always alone like that, and the house so miserable, and over the
wall I hear him always muttering, muttering, muttering those accursed
figures over and over again; I am afraid for him, my lass.'
'And I too,' said Viola, with a sob in her throat.
'But what can we do? Carmelo
and I would go and stay with him, but he will not have us; he thinks we are happier here.'
'I am afraid for him,' said Cecco. 'He is made of
stouter stuff than Nanni was, but the best pipkin breaks with much knocking
and much fire.'
'What can I do?' said Viola, in despair.
She would have gone through flame and water to help her grandfather,
and would have borne any trouble to save it for him, but she could not tell
what to do.
Sickness, sorrow, trial burdens of poverty and pain, these the poor
can understand well enough; they are familiar companions that have rocked
their cradles and will go with them to their graves; but these oppressions,
these exactions, these harassing debts that they are sold up for, yet which
they know they never owed and never ought to pay,
these bewilder them, break their nerve, and dull their brain.
Viola would have gone and besought the mercy of the Syndic, but she
knew that she would only see his secretary.
She took a pilgrimage barefoot to a famous Madonna ten miles away
on the hills, and there knelt and prayed humbly, and set up a candle in the
shrine, all glittering with ex-votos, and the gems and metals of
similar devotees, and she asked nothing for herself; she only asked for the
old man.
'For Carmelo and I are young,' she said to herself,
'and we love each other, and we are together: that is so much;
we ought not to want any more.'
Whilst she was still on her knees in the chapel on the side of the
mountain, with the plain below like a sea, so grey was it with
olive woods, the inspiration came into her to go and find the Prefect of the province at his own palace in the city.
It was to her as strange, as daring, and as distant, a travel as it
would be to us to go through the terrible cañons of the Colorado, or
scale the height of Chimborazo's summit. She had never been even so
far as Pomodoro, and the mere thought of the great glittering city whose
domes she could just see on the farthest edge of the plains, was one quite
awful and terrible to her.
Nevertheless, when she came down in the twilight from the holy
place, and met her husband at the foot of the hill, her mind was made up,
and she said to him: 'Our Lady has told me to go to the city
and see the Prefect, and that there I shall find help for
Nonno.
Carmelo would not say her nay, but he smiled a little bitterly.
'You may walk barefoot, my love, from here to Rome; nothing
will avail, until the people write their rights in blood upon the soil that
should belong to them.'
Viola shuddered.
'Hush! That would be doing evil that good might come.'
'It is what we must do,' he answered gloomily; and they
spoke but little more, as they trod the long tedious ways between the stone
walls and the cropped trees.
A day or two later she had her way, and her father-in-law
drove her to the city. Carmelo stayed within the mill.
She had put on her grey gown that she was married in, and had an
amber-coloured handkerchief tied over her raven locks. She looked
very pale, but she was a beau-
tiful woman in all the charm of youth, though careworn, and too grave for her few years.
They started very early--at dawn, indeed--for the sake of
Bigio, and the way seemed very long; Viola's heart beat hurriedly,
and with fear and hope alternately, as she saw the great marble dome of the
basilica of Santa Maria, famous in history and in art, rise with its golden
cross higher and higher, as Mont Blanc looms white across the foliage of
the Val d'Aosta.
'And I will say a word for myself, too, if we get audience,'
said the miller, as they drove under the massive brown gateway through the
crowd of chattering people, and the market-carts waiting for the
weighing and taxing of their goods.
Before the city can eat anything, drink any wine, burn any fuel, the
country-folk
who bring in what it wants are treated as contraband traders, and made to wait through vexatious hours of heat, or rain, or snow, as it may be, till they are taxed and fined. In this year of grace 1880, the machinery of the State is still so clumsy that it can devise no wiser means to maintain itself than to employ the antiquated dragon of the Octroi, which often obliges the people, and their horses, and mules, and cattle, and fowls, to wait all the long wet night in the highroad, so as to be ready against the opening of the gates. They have pulled down all the fine old towers and walls; but they keep up the barriers of the Gabella.
Viola was awed by the noise, the width, the height, the crowds
around her, but she was scarcely sensible of any of the grandeur of the
frowning palaces, the foaming foun-
tains, the spacious bridges, the marble statues; all her soul and mind were absorbed in her errand. A great purpose gives a sense of invisibility.
Pastorini stabled the grey horse near the market place, and then
they sought the Prefecture. There it was in the centre of a square, a
grand, solemn mighty place, that in olden times had been the abode of
mighty men; half fortress, half palace, built in the thirteenth century and
faced with variegated marbles, and with one once gorgeous frescoes on its
frieze.
The miller and Viola entered the vast courtyard where water was
rushing from the open jaws of stone lions: the Italian peasant has
nothing in him of the vulgarity of trepidation before greatness and its
emblems; the instincts of liberty and art are in him, all stifled though
they be, and
he stands graceful and unabashed before a monarch.
They asked to see the Prefect: they were told his Excellency was
out; what did they want? They were sent here, sent there, a servant saw
them, a clerk saw them; they were indolently told to wait.
They sat down in the court; a janissary, splendidly clothed, and with
a gilt stick, told them they could not sit there.
Pastorini knew that the Prefect had in his day been a soldier of
liberty, that he was very liberal, even 'red' in his opinions;
that he had all the medals and ribbons of the wars of independence on his
breast; that he was a trusted friend and ally of that advanced Ministry
which the party of Messer Luca Finti was always trying to dislodge:
Pastorini had heard this, and he hoped much
from this soldier in power. His own brother had died at San Martino; the miller was simple enough to think this must be a link to all the Liberali.
They went outside and sat on the stone ledge that ran round the
pediment of the palace. They sat there one hour, two hours, three hours;
then they grew faint; they went into a little by-street, and took a
bit of bread, and a little wine; then they turned back to the Prefecture
and sat there again. Troops went by, cartloads of flowers, carriages with
fine liveries, a band passed playing, the great sonorous bells of the
cathedral boomed over the city, the hours drifted on; still they
waited.
So many hours had at last gone by that their patience, even the
illimitable inextinguishable Italian patience, had begun to get ruffled.
Pastorini had got up and gone so
often to the gorgeous guardian of the doors to know if the Prefect had come home, that the functionary at last got angry and --in irâ veritas.
'His Excellency has never been out at all, simpleton,'
said he. 'But you do not suppose he or the secretaries are here for
the like of you? Mercy alive! If once they began to see the public, they
would have the whole province here screaming. He has never been out, I tell
you. He has got his guests with him. He will now be coming out soon,
because it is the time to drive in the park.'
Pastorini went back to Viola.
'He is coming out soon,' he said: 'they told us
a falsehood; we will wait and watch the staircase. We cannot miss
him.'
By this time all the long golden drowsy day was drawing near its
close. Viola felt
feverish and stupid; her head spun with the coming and going of the crowds, the noise of the carriages and carts, and the unwonted closeness of the city air. Her peachlike complexion grew yellow with the heat and fatigue, and her great eyes had a strained reddened look.
Presently there came into the courtyard a handsome equipage, with
liveried servants and fine horses; it waited at the foot of the stairs.
'Now is our time,' said the miller; and he and his
daughter-in-law stood up by the entrance.
In a little while there came down a lady very superbly dressed in
surah of old gold colour and laces of price, and behind her a
good-looking, smiling man, with long moustaches and a glimpse of
ribbon at his buttonhole.
Breaking past the janitor of the gates
the girl rushed to the foot of the stairs; her father-in-law behind her.
'Oh, let me beseech of his Excellency to hear me,' cried
Viola, stretching out her arms with a piteous gesture; and his Excellency
paused a moment on the lowest step.
'What is it, Cuccioli?' he said, glancing interrogatively
over his shoulder to a slim young gentleman behind him, who was indeed his
private secretary.
Cuccioli murmured that he did not know; he would inquire; and he
looked unutterable furies at the porter.
Meanwhile Viola was sobbing so that she could not speak; and
Pastorini, with his head uncovered, said beseechingly:
'Your Excellency, my brother died at San Marino! We are
come--'
'Oh, a pension, a claim?' said the
Prefect, lighting a long cigar. 'Based on military service? My good friends, you must apply to the Minister of War. We have nothing to do with such things--'
'But I thought,' stammered the miller, 'I thought that
as his Excellency fought himself--'
Now, unhappily, there were few periods of which it pleased the
Prefect to be reminded so little as this period, far behind him, when he
had been a soldier of fortune. He frowned a little impatiently, and moved
to get into his carriage; but Viola stood in his way.
'Oh dear, my lord,' she pleaded; 'if you would but
hear me: my grandfather is such a good honest soul, and all he has is
sold up, and he never owed anyone a penny, and he is going mad; and if the
money could be got back--'
'Cara mia!' said his Excellency caressingly, because she was
a woman, and handsome. 'Believe me, these matters are not in my
department. If I listened to petitioners I should be deluged with them.
What is it you want? If it be a pension--'
'It is not a pension,' said Pastorini. 'It is the
cruelty of the municipality, your Excellency. They have ruined me; taken my
ground; never paid me; and this poor old soul of whom the girl rightly
speaks has been treated--'
'Oh, I cannot hear anything of that sort,' said the Prefect
very decidedly. 'The communes are autonomous. Whilst they are within
the law no Prefect has any right to interfere in any way. Your commune,
wherever it is, is self-governed: if you do not think it ruled
well, change your Giunta; change your Syndic.'
Which was as though he had said to one who complained of bad
weather: 'Change the sun; move about the moon.'
'But your Excellency--' began Viola and the miller in
one breath.
'Make them understand this, my dear Cuccioli,' said the
Prefect with a wave of his hand towards the slim youth: then he
smiled affably on the upraised face of Viola, and hurried to rejoin his
wife in her carriage: the tall high-stepping horses pranced
rapidly from the court to the street, and he was gone.
His Excellency had a rough time of it in those early wars, and he
wanted to enjoy himself now. Why else were rewards given to men for public
service?
The slim youth turned to Pastorini with the true official
expression.
'It is quite beyond our department.
No one can interfere with municipal administration. It is quite impossible. You have your Syndic. You must rely on him. Pray be so good as to remember in future that the Prefect never can have anything to do with any personal grievance.'
'Who has then?' said the miller desperately.
'Well, no one exactly: you see the government of every
commune depends on itself. Nothing can be more satisfactory. Each commune
has the rule it desires. Good day,' said the youngster; and he too
slipt down the steps, and went his way to saunter in the park, and turn his
eyeglass on the ladies.
'We must go home, Viola,' said the miller with a
groan: he would not reproach her; but in himself he thought if the
Virgin could not help them better than this she
might as well reveal nothing. The cost of the horse's stabling and of their own noonday meal was all that this pilgrimage in search of justice had brought to them.
Carmelo said nothing when he heard. He had guessed very well how it
would be.
Viola stole down to her grandfather's in the moonlight, weary and
worn out though she was, and made a little supper in a little earthen pot;
her tears falling all the while.
'It is a hundred scudi they have taken from me in all,' said
Pippo to her for the five hundredth time, following the old mode of coinage
that he had been used to as a lad, and which indeed country people most
naturally use still.
'I know--I know!' sobbed Viola.
'A hundred scudi; it would buy a cow,' muttered the old man,
with his hands set on
his knees, and his eyes fixed on the boiling pot. 'I am sorry to hear you are with child, my dear; there'll be no bit or sup for it when it grows up; and it will have to sweat, and toil, and hunger, and then at the end they'll sell the bed from under it. That is what they'll do.'
Viola could not see the burning charcoal nor the little brown pot,
for the thick mist of her tears.
It was true: what use or joy was there in the children coming to
the birth to know only pain, and privation, and hard injustice of God and
man?
In this lovely land that brims over with flowers like a cup
over-filled, where the sun is as a magician for ever changing with a
wand of gold all common things to paradise; where every wind shakes out the
fragrance of a world of fruit and flower commingled;
where, for so little, the lute sounds and the song arises; here, misery looks more sad than it does in sadder climes, where it is like a home-born thing, and not an alien tyrant as it seems here.
Then, whilst so lovely is the land, most unlovely does this tyrant
make the homes of the poor; the alternate dust and mud of the roads, the
greed-clipped trees, the human filth strewn over the fields as
compost and putrefying in the sun, the dark, grimy foul-smelling
houses, the starved and beaten animals panting in the heat or shivering in
the cold; these all come in the train of this alien misery, and are more
horrible and comfortless here than anywhere else on all the earth. More so
because, as you look on it all, you know that it is the greed of the State,
and the greed of the landlord and his steward, which, working side by side,
and
striving to outwit each other, do it all. Get away from the grasp of these, and it is the Italy of our Raffaelle still, and smiles as his child-Christs smile, with a light on its face that is of heaven.
completed; the diligence man said he would cut his throat come Pasqua, and no one was content except Messer Gaspardo Nellemane who found all the new laws and new inventions working well, from the steam-mill that poured its black vapours down the once bright Rosa water, to the mendicancy clauses which had cleared the land of some scores of useless old people.
Messer Nellemane, sitting behind his desk, felt that he had in him
the soul of a statesman. In his mind's eye as in a magic mirror, he
beheld himself already at Montecitorio, already with his portfolio,
demanding a hundred millions for military manoeuvres, and increasing
the grist tax by an added third.
He was only a clerk, it is true; but what of that? He had studied to
perfection the modern science of success, and he knew
that he had in himself all the modern requirements for eminence. Already the prefect and the sub-prefect had murmured to him, 'You are wasted here, you shall not be forgotten;' and already Luca Finti had promised him, 'When we are in office you will be remembered.'
Here in the little room of the communal palace, with his maps around
him and his piles of papers before him, Messer Nellemane, though his
imagination was slow, was almost deluded into imagining himself a minister
already; and his fancy leapt at a bound the stairs he had still to
climb.
Besides, Messer Luca Finti, with his father-in-law, were
bringing into notice a scheme for turning the catacombs of Rome into an
underground railway; he had got a syndicate of Jew, American and Scotch
bankers to consider the matter, and he could
trust to his own party's power of worrying the Government into a concession. The sale of concessions is as flourishing nowadays in Italy as ever was of yore the sale of indulgences, and Messer Nellemane, in a strictly private manner, had been associated in this great project which promised well, as it was thoroughly adapted to the temper of the hour.
There was a fine flavour of desecration and utilitarianism about it
which would be quite certain to take with the Press and the Bourse. All
the Liberi Pensieri would be delighted at the use made of the early
Christians. To an age which has decided that martyrdom was a kind of
hysteria, and faith a sort of meningitis, there would be something
peculiarly fascinating in making of SS. Gianetta and Basilla a booking
office, and of St. Hippolytus a junc-
tion. To drive an air shaft and a corkscrew stait straight through the soil that Scipio and Gracchus trod, down into the twilight, where the ashes of S. Agnes and S. Felicita rest, would be an enterprise full of peculiar sweetness and suitability to a generation that submits to the March Decrees, Irish murders, Cook's parties, the pickelhaube, and wooden nutmegs, and Paul Bert.
Europe, as it is at present constituted, would be seduced in a
second at a prospect that would turn the Quattro Santi into a chief
station, and make of the Callimachus--last resting place of so many
martyrs and early popes--a depôt for the
goods-trains.
Messer Luca Finti knew the motto of his generation was a paraphrase
of Voltaire: 'Souillez, souillez, souillez! Toujours
quelqu'un gagnera!'
And when M. Jules Ferry is a Minister,
and M. Herold lives in the Louvre, why should not Messer Nellemane be a statesman and Messer Luca Finti date his letters from the Consulta or the Palazzo Braschi?
The deputy had that first and most useful of talents: he knew how
to hit the tastes of his own times, and he foresaw that the Catacomb
Metropolitan would be a name to seduce the world and sell a million
actions. He had paid Messer Nellemane the
great compliment of divulging this grand scheme to him and even employing
his command of florid language in the composition of a prospectus. Messer
Nellemane had proved himself equal to the task, and was assured he should
be entitled to preference shares. He felt that he was already passed many
milestones on the high road to public greatness, and when he slept at night
dreamed of portfolios and grand cordons.
As for his passion, he had conquered it with that strength of will which
was his characteristic. Messer Nellemane was nothing if not moral; when
Viola Mazzetti had wedded another, he had said to himself virtuously that
it would never do to compromise his career; besides, after all, she was
very thin, and her mouth rather large, and she had been only a common,
hard-working girl: so he dismissed her memory and saw her
reality pass by him without emotion. But passion departing left hate behind
it; the not uncommon ashes of unholy fires.
His love was a short-lived thing, but his hate smouldered on,
unquenchable.
The little square house with the blue and white Madonna was a blot in
the landscape to him. True, he had accomplished much against it; the mill
smoke drowned it night and day in black vapours and foul smells;
the tramway cars would plunge right across its very doorway, and to lay their rails down, the trees of the bank that had shaded it were felled; inside it all was bare and desolate.
Yet the sight of the little old man sitting on the threshold weaving his
rush-work was to the eyes of Messer Nellemane as the vineyard of
Naboth to the great king. Old Pippo was not crushed into the earth, his
sturdy little spirit was not stamped into the dust; he was very miserable
indeed, and his brain was dull and his hand infirm; but still he lived on,
and seemed to the irritated pride of the ruler of Vezzaja and Ghiralda to
have an insolent jeering pertinacity of existence.
As Messer Nellemane sat this day before his desk, he perused some long
law papers with satisfaction; 'a quarter of a year more,' he
thought, 'and that stubborn old fool will know what mockery of the
State costs people.'
For through all these months he had had not been idle. He had been on
the contrary constantly employed in the affairs of Pippo; constantly
engaged in the courts of Pomodoro in the old rebel's affairs; the
impudent brook still ran across the road, and the impudent old man still
existed: but in three months Messer Nellemane promised himself that
the law should have to be respected.
Law is a slow and complicated luxury to indulge in everywhere; in Italy
it is especially so, but Messer Nellemane loved it, and in this great love
knew how to caress it and cajole it, so that it became for him a pliant and
almost quick-footed thing. He had not been clerk in a notary's
office without learning how to get on the right side of the Law, and it was
this knowledge especially which made him so efficient a public servant.
Now again and again had legal summons
of all kinds been brought to Pippo, but he was all alone now; there was nobody to see what he did, and he lit a match and burned all these papers and chuckled as he did so. 'They can't get bark off a peeled pine,' he said to himself. 'They may call, and call, and call; they won't get nought any more out of me.'
And the simple old soul thought that if he did not answer, they would
get tired of calling, and he never knew the nature of these many
documents.
'It is all along of the water,' he said to himself, and
thought so; but what could he do to the water? 'And I would not do
anything if I could,' he said obstinately, as he sat all alone.
One day Cecco the cooper said to him: 'You have never paid
your interest on your mortgage have you, Pippo?' and the old
man answered him: 'Not I; he will have the house after me; where is the harm? I have not got any money to pay with, he knows that; if I get a bit and drop, and a snip of tobacco in my pipe, it is all as I ever can do: lawyer knows that.'
Cecco scratched his head thoughtfully; he was afraid. He did not
understand these things, but he knew that Pippo's name was often
spoken at Pomodoro, and he was afraid, Pippo gave him no heed; he
understood even less than his friend, and it was of no use at his age to
learn he said angrily.
'My house is my house,' he said doggedly. 'They will
get it when I am dead. They can't get it before.'
So he believed.
Hypothec was as Greek to him, and of all that these law-papers
said which rained in on him and which he burned, he had
no idea. He could go about, and he could make his wickerwork, and he could do his little bit of cooking and mending, but he grew rather childish, and no one could make him understand things.
He left off going to mass.
When the priest sadly reproved him, he said always: 'I
don't see as any one of them cares about me.'
By them he meant the Trinity in which he had been taught to believe, and
all their holy army of angels, of martyrs, and of saints.
'For sure nobody ever would disturb you, and you nigh
seventy,' said Cecco the cooper a little uneasily, for he had heard
rumours that had troubled him.
'Disturb me? what mean you, you ass?' said Pippo hotly.
'The house is mine, it is all mine. I pay no man rent. I thought it
would go, when I die, to my girl, but I
suppose now it will go to the lawyer. He will want something for his money.'
'But if they should take the house?' said the cooper, very
timidly.
'Take it?' said Pippo fiercely. 'Take it? you
long-shanked fool. How can they take it? It's mine, and I
carry the key on me always when I go out. Take it! one would think
'twas a basket of eggs.'
The cooper said no more, being a shy soul, and not at best clear as to
what he had heard, or what were the measures and powers of law. Pippo was
huffed, and would not speak of the matter any more. He went and dug in his
garden where the almonds were once more in bloom over Raggi's
grave.
His head felt queer whenever he stooped, and his ears had always a sound
in them like bees swarming, as he said himself; but
he would never complain, and he managed to keep his bit of ground tilled, and in order. ''Tis mine till I die anyhow,' he said fiercely, as he struck in his spade.
Meanwhile, at the house of Pastorini things were nearly as bad as with
him. With the unequal rivalry of the steam mill no water-mill could
compete, and all that the year had brought to Carmelo's people were
debts, and the promise of a new inmate in the shape of a small swaddled
child.
'Your children will come on sad times,' said Demetrio
Pastorini to his son; 'God knows whether they will find a crust or a
drop of goat's milk.'
A great despondency had fallen on the mild and mirthful man; he grew
helpless and weary, only not apathetic, because of his strong affections
for those about him. The accursed iron rails had been laid down
on the ground where his trees had been, but no money had been paid to him.
They knew very well that he could not go to law to command it, and that
if he did there would be long delays granted to them, for they called
themselves 'public utility,' and so claimed public respect.
Like the Duca di Ripalda before him, he saw his trees carried away to
fill the furnaces of factories or rot in ship-yards, and never
received a penny for them from the law.
All destruction is condoned under the parrot phrase of 'public
utility.'
To the municipal mind of Italy all that is new and artificial is good;
all that is old or natural is worthless. They say of Rome like M.
Cardinal: 'C'est une ville à faire
disparaître de la surface du globe. Je n'ai jamais vu Chicago,
mais je préfère Chicago.'
The great wheel of the Pastorini mill
was motionless on nine days out of ten, for there was no work; novelty and expediency alike took the neighbours to the iron wonder of Remigio Rossi.
Cesarellino, the next son to Carmelo, came home from his
conscript's service much the worse for it, as country lads usually
are; they go away innocent, homely, laborious, dutiful youths, and they
return from the camp and the barracks too often vicious, lazy,
discontented, contaminated by vice, and utterly unwilling to work.
'As well send a lad to the galleys as to the army,' say the
country people, and they are right.
You cannot take a man away from his duties for three of the most
impressionable and important years of his life, or even for the lesser term
of eighteen months, and expect him to return to those duties the same
docile and industrious creature that he was. He will have brought with him many a low sin, many a foul oath, many a vile memory; he will be unhinged, moody, good a little; that conscription does not make a blackguard of every lad that falls under its curse is due to the good and kindly temper of the nation, not to the system, which is a very factory of devils.
Cesarellino, coming home to the mill, with bad words in his mouth,
coarse talk on his tongue, and a nature for ever stunted, soured, and
vitiated, added to the gloom of the household; the youngster had seen Milan
and Turin, and was disposed to be insolent and contemptuous of the
stay-at-homes. Now that Cesarellino was home, the third son,
Dante, had to go; he was a gentle, timid lad, and suffered greatly.
'What a pack of slaves we are!' said
the father bitterly. 'Has a man not a right to refuse the flesh and bone he begot to the makers of war?'
'There is no war going on, father,' said the returned
conscript with scorn for his father's ignorance.
'Then where is the excuse to take our boy from us?' said the
old man. 'Nay, nay, we are a pack of slaves! no better that I see for
driving away the stranieri.'
But kicking against the pricks was of no avail. The drawing of the year
had given Dante a bad number; there was no money to buy a substitute, if
even they had dreamed of such a thing, and the poor little fellow went off
weeping like a girl.
'If it were not for Viola,' said his eldest brother,
'if it were not for Viola, I would wish I were of the age to go in
his place. I would do it.'
'But Viola you have, as you wished to have her,' said his
father, 'and many children, I daresay, you soon will have too; you
must do your duty at home, my son. Would to heaven it had not been made so
bitter to you. You have to eat fennel with sour bread, but you must bring a
man's courage to it.'
'I lack not courage, father,' said Carmelo simply. Then with
an effort he added:
'What cuts me to the quick, is to see the old man so poor and ill
dealt with; and you so tried, and the mill wheels motionless, and that
rascal Bindo strutting to and fro as a cock on the
green:--father, sometimes I fear me I shall never hold my hand
off him.'
'Yes you will,' said his father tenderly; 'yes you
will for your wife's sake and mine. But you brood on these things too
much, my lad. Thinking makes no bread.'
'Thinking may make free men,' muttered Carmelo; he dared not
tell the miller all he dwelt on; all the schemes, and hopes, and views with
which the German mechanic on his sickbed had filled his mind. Carmelo knew
that down in the city there were many of the same way of thinking as
himself, and not long before he had received a secret bidding to join an
association there that was a branch of the Figli di Lavoro: that
international league to which no one pays any heed because it has so
harmless a title.
All the nature of Carmelo, all the temper he had been born with, bound
him to his native soil; to a simple and pastoral life, to innocent
affections and pastimes, to the old roof-tree, and to the familiar
ways and habits that had been his forefathers, well as his.
The Italian is homely and strongly con-
servative, as I have said often before, and Carmelo, let alone, would have asked nothing better than to live and die as his grandfather had done before him, by the Rosa water. But it is the policy of Messer Nellemane to let no one alone anywhere; and the result is that the peaceful become restless, and the patient become restive, and in the stead of content there is rebellion, or at the best a profound if impotent disaffection.
What would Mazzini say if he were living?
I believe he would curse the oppressor
rusticorum as he never cursed the Austrian or the Frenchman, the
soldier or the priest.
We put up statues to him, but we forget this.
In a word, as he did not appear and did not reply, and no one appeared
or replied for him, the lawyer who had his mortgage, and the lawyer who
acted on behalf of the municipality, had it all their way, as no doubt they
would have managed equally to have if
he had appeared and had replied; and after the many ceremonies and formalities of the law had all been observed, he knowing nothing of it all the while, due notice was sent him that his property would be sold to satisfy the just demands of the mortgagee, and of the debts due by him to the commune for works not done by him, and repeated contraventions and fines for the same, all unpaid for a term of eighteen months.
But as this notice also took the form of a paper half printed and half
written, and was delivered by the Usciere, Pippo twisted it up, set light
to it, and pushed it blazing and smouldering under the little earthern
pipkin containing his dinner, then boiling on the fire.
He was no wiser than before.
The lawyers and Messer Nellemane had had a great deal to do at Pomodoro
in this
matter, and all the engines and battering rams of the law had been set in motion against the poor little house by the river, but Pippo knew nought of it.
'They can't get bark out of a peeled pine,' was all
he said; and when the man of law left these long papers upon him, with all
their formidable array of writing and printing that he could not read, he
set light to them and thought that was an end.
'They will tire before long,' he thought. 'They
can't get anything more out of me, and they'll give
over.'
Pippo often went days on only a bit of bread, and once passed
twenty-four hours without eating at all; but he shut up his pains in
his own breast and would not take them to worry the girl: she was
always the girl to him.
To Carmelo he did speak a little, for he
and the young man were victims of the same torturer.
'Lord's sake, lad,' he said one day, 'when I was
a middle-aged man, even so near as that, the land was all at peace
and fed us all. Wine--why you could get it for the asking, or buy it
for a soldo a flask. Bread--ay, there was bread for the dogs and the
pigs then; loaves were as thick as stones in Rosa's bed. We were all
quiet and happy. The gentlefolks didn't go roaming away to foreign
parts, and didn't dine nigh midnight as they do now. They all got
their dinners at three, and there was plenty for a hundred, if a hundred
came by and wanted sup and bite. They bided in villa all summer, and they
went down to their own city, whichever it was, for winter. Oh, lad! Then
the cities were alive and pretty, with all the money spent honestly in
them, not taken out to this, that, and the other foreign place as it is now. All the old feasts and fairs were kept, and the laughing and dancing all winter, and the pranks and bravery of Carnival kept the cold out, and, Lord! on a holy day, what poor soul denied himself a chicken in his pot. It cost but two soldi. Now a chicken--why you might almost as well talk of getting down the moon to eat. The fowls are packed off to foreign parts, and here we are all starving. Can you tell me the right of it?'
'I can tell you the wrong of it,' said Carmelo, his mind
reverting to all the German communist had told him. 'The pot has
boiled till all the scum is up; the knaves are saddled on us because they
bellow "Liberty!" while they cudgel our bare bones. As our
gentlefolks don't care how we starve so long as they go and cut a
figure in Parigi, so the knaves don't care how we perish so long as they get soldiers and ships, and put money in their purses.'
'I suppose that's it,' said the old man, not much the
wiser.
'I know twenty years ago there was a rare screaming about
"Italy for the Italians;" and who's got Italy
now?--the Jews,' said the elder Pastorini. 'Jew here, Jew
there, Jew everywhere; and the poor sicken and die and what d--d Jew
dog of them cares? It is all the fault of the gentlefolks; they flare
through their money to look fine, and then, when they're all burning
up to waste, the Jews come in behind them. I never knew much, but that I do
know. Look at what the old Marchese was, Palmarola, I mean; every soldo
spent by him amongst his own people, and every hour spent by him here on
his own soil. What's his son?
A monkey-looking thing that scarce ever comes nigh his land, squanders all he gets out of it in Rome, or that place you call Parigi, and is whittling away every bit of the old property in gaming and harlotry, and trying to look like a foreigner. It's all the fault of the gentlefolks. Why didn't they send them adrift with the stranieri?'
'Ah,' said Pippo. 'Palmarola died in time; it would
have broken his heart to see that youngster, always dwelling with foreign
folks, and keeping bad women as they say he does. And what a
fine-looking man was the old Marchese, and what a shrivelled up
looking monellino is this youngster! It seems
to me as if the men now were all so small--'
'Of course they are,' said the miller. 'They smoke at
fourteen, and they keep bad women as you say, at sixteen, and they
gamble all night long, and they drink strong spirits to get their courage up in the morning. Of course they are weaklings, that is all that the foreign craze has done for our nobles. And those who don't do that, are like Count Saverio there in the town; all they think of is buying scrips and stock, and they would sell the Madonna herself to get a share or two in a foreign railway, or be the first to suck the gilt off a bit of jobbery down in the city. But I don't know what we're to do; I have heard that the Inglese and the Americani have done it all, bringing in their mad ways and midnight dinners, and their craze for killing things: it may-be.'
'I've heard tell the Inglese worship foxes. They're
heathens then,' said the cooper Cecco timidly. 'I never knew
much about them.'
'This I do know, for I have been told it,' said Carmelo
scornfully, 'that they're such poor shots that, if they want to
hit a bird, it has to be shut up in a box, and let fly right in front of
them! But oh! father, not Inglese nor Francese nor anybody would be able to
hurt our Signori if they bided at home as of old, and had human hearts in
their breasts, and clean hands. But they have not, they have not! They will
not trouble themselves about anything, unless it is to get money, and they
give us over into the claws and teeth of the Impiegati as a shepherd gives
over his lambs to the butcher's knife. They do not care whether we
live or die. What they care for is their own ease, their foreign travel,
the money in their bank--'
'I remember a chicken two soldi,' said Pippo, reverting to
his original thoughts.
'Two soldi, and fine and fat; not a thing blown out just for market. And now they send all the poultry away by the rail.'
Then he fell to recalling in silence all the easy plenty and merry,
simple festivities of his youth, when black Befana had knocked at all doors
at Epiphany and when the Maggioli had brought in the spring to every
village.
Carmelo with a sigh got up in his cart and went on his way; he had some
sacks of 'torbo' (lignite), to leave at one of the very few
farmers who still were bold enough to show friendship to the Rosa
mill-house, and employed the young Pastorini in divers homely ways;
the 'torbo' was wanted for the threshing-machine that
would soon be in motion on the hills; one of the 'pillars of
progress' that came to break up for ever the old gracious pastoral
ways which were like pictures from the Bible, and,
making labour less, make hunger more, and benefit the few to distress the many.
The farm was many miles off; on one of the green hillsides, clothed
first with the olive, and higher with the umbrella-pine, that
stretched along both sides of the plains through which the Rosa wound.
It could be seen from the valley, a long, low, white house with an old
tower, and the pines standing all around and above it.
The way to it was steep and long; a good, well-made Roman road of
the ancient times when work was not 'scamped,' since engineers
'scamping' it, would have been beaten with rods or hung to a
cross.
The mule was fatigued, for the lignite was very heavy, and it had been
fetched from Pomodoro.
Midway on the hill road Carmelo, who was by nature merciful to beasts,
checked the
poor thing, lightened the cart of three sacks and set them down by the roadside, meaning when the mule had, thus relieved, climbed to the top of the steep slope facing it, to carry them up one by one on his own shoulders.
The road wound through wild scrub of myrtle, and cistus, and arbutus;
young chestnut trees were growing in clumps; it was quite solitary; no one
ever scarcely came there except a woodman, a sportsman, a hill hare, a fox,
or a flock of goats.
Carmelo left the sacks by the wayside and began to walk up beside his
mule, encouraging it in its toil with kind words and a bunch of sweet hill
grass.
He was busy thinking: very simple, honest thoughts; of how best he
could labour in the future for his own children, and his brothers and
sisters, for Carmelo foresaw that, with six months more, the
mill-house would most likely be no more over their heads, his father being no more able to pay his way. He had a stout heart and strong affections; he tried to think how best he could carry his father on his shoulders away from the peril; a humble Æneas bearing a homely Anchises.
He never saw coming through the myrtle and bay the figures of Bindo
Terri and old Angelo; their pistols in their hands: when they had any
leisure from tormenting the public, they took a turn at shooting thrushes
and merles.
'Stop!' shouted the rural guards.
Carmelo glanced up, grew red, then white, and continued to pace beside
the straining mule.
'Stop!' thundered the officers of the law.
Carmelo for all answer went behind the cart, and pushed it to aid the
mule.
The men went in front of the beast and checked it with a jerk; the
incline was great; the cart recoiled, the mule reared, the lignite rolled
most of it on the ground; it was with a great effort that Carmelo saved the
animal and the baroccino from destruction. He clenched his hands and ground
his teeth in his struggle not to resent and avenge the offence done
him.
Bindo Terri, keeping his pistol at full cock stood in the middle of the
road.
'You are in contravention,' he said, with pert authority.
'Your sacks are lying on the public road. It is an offence against
the municipal police. See Art. XV. of Rule 103. Angelo, inscribe the
dereliction.'
Angelo opened his book and pretended to write. In real truth he wrote
very ill.
Carmelo, whose heart was heaving and whose whole body was shivering with
rage,
stooped over the fallen 'torbo' and employed himself in thrusting it back into the sacks.
He would have given twenty years of life to have been able to wrench the
pistol out of the hands of the murderer of Toppa, and blow his brains out
on to the turf. But he remembered Viola, he remembered his father, he
controlled the justice of his bitter wrath, and bore in silence all the
insults and jibes of his tormenters. Tired at last, as they could provoke
him to no retaliation, they left him alone with his mule and his fallen
lignite and went away across the chestnut woods: the land lay within
their beat, being within the commune of Vezzaja and Ghiralda.
The next day the Usciere served a summons on Carmelo, citing him to
appear for contravention of the law in having obstructed the public
road.
'If my poor dead man knew!' she would say, with a burst of
sobbing. It seemed to her as if she were branded with an ineffaceable
infamy. But never would she allow she had been a beggar.
'Not I,' she said, 'I only take what they give me. I
never beg.'
All the winter she was very quiet; quiet perforce, because her old enemy
of the 'rheumatics' seized her and pinned her down on her low
pallet-bed. Carmelo and Viola and the Pastorini children did their
best for her, and the old women in her room were always sisterly and kind,
though racked themselves with nearly every ill that flesh is heir to; and
in her exceeding joy at being at home in that cold tumbledown corner of a
room again she was quite content, and bore her pain and nibbled her bit of
bread cheerfully, Dom Lelio being as usual good to her, and going with a
patched cassock and a rusty hat that he might spare from his meagre means
for all those who had nothing.
No doubt it seems a very stupid and incredible thing, but old
'Nunziatina was happy so long as she could see those four walls and
the square casement, that was filled with the
poplar boughs, and hear the other old women chatter, and chatter too, and see the scrap of charcoal in the copper-pan warming the pipkin of bread-soup. Yet it is a fact, and it is a fact also that life, which goes out of youthful queens, and bright children, and cherished heirs, who have all done to save them that wealth and science and love can dream of, often keeps itself alight in these old, worn, and half-starved frames.
'You must never go about, dear, again to the villas and the
farms,' said Viola, weeping, to her. 'They will be on you again
if you do. You know they think it begging.'
'I never ask for aught,' said Annunziata sturdily; 'I
take what they give me.'
And for her life she could not see that she did anything amiss.
All the winter she had kept perforce quiet from her rheumatism, and
Viola begged and
prayed her so that even when the tulips were all yellow in the fields and all the force of old instinct and old habit moving her, she still kept within doors, or only just went and sat under the deep shade of the old ilex that had the shrine set in its trunk.
She cared not at all for the municipal laws, this old rebel, but she
cared to please the girl, as she still called her, 'who was getting
so near her time that one can't cross her,' she said to her
four old friends in the little room.
And indeed with the March tulips Viola's little son came into the
light of the bright spring days, and promised to resemble his father in his
big blue eyes and fair complexion, and was a happy little child that seldom
cried.
This child was a source of great occupation and absorbing interest to
its old great-
grand-aunt, and 'Nunziatina spent most of her time at the mill-house with the little closely-swaddled bundle on her knees.
But also, indirectly, it was a reason for her to be more restless, and
to wander a-field again; for she said to herself that now there was
a baby, and no doubt dozens to follow, and so much trouble and straits at
the mill-house on the Rosa, she could not and would not rob them of
so much as a bit of bread, when all the people on the hillsides and down in
the valley farms would be willing to give to her out of their plenty.
Carmelo and Viola endeavoured to make her understand that this taking of
free gifts was her offence in the eyes of the law, but they could not
succeed. She could not understand that she did anything wrong, and the
habits of forty years could not easily be shaken off her daily life.
'I only take what they give me,' she said persistently.
By vigilance and persuasion they kept her in a few weeks, but their
lives were too full of work for them to have leisure for perpetual
watching. 'I never did do a bit of harm,' she said to herself,
and she could not stay indoors this bright weather of the opening summer,
and though she left her basket at home, as they told her to do, she began
to wander about as of old. She was much weaker than of yore, and, like
Pippo, her head buzzed.
'It's always like the bees in the acacia trees,' he
and she agreed, sorrowfully. She did not readily comprehend what was said
to her, and she confused names and dates. 'I want to be in the
air,' she said to the old women, her companions in her little square
room. 'I have always been in the air all my days.'
So she took her stick and trotted hither and thither, and naturally her
feet, of their own accord, wandered into the old familiar paths, and up to
the old houses. All her old friends at the farmhouses were delighted to see
her, and gave her bit and drop as she wanted it. She would not take
anything home.
'No, they tell me not; the dear lad who took me out tells me
not,' she said always, and all she would do was eat a plate of soup,
and drink a little mezzo-vino when it
was offered her. Her brown wrinkled face, all crinkled up like a walnut
shell, had lost its mirth; her mouth often
trembled, and she had grown very deaf; but she was as sensible as ever to
kindness, and brightened up under it.
She was a picturesque little figure still in her round black hat, and
her clothes that
were made of all colours, and of odds and ends that had been given her.
One day, when Viola's boy was some three months old, and the
weather was growing sultry, she had been up in the hills to a
massaja,
1 who was very fond of her, and
she had done some work up there with the poultry by way of payment for
sitting and eating at the long table where all the contadini dined off
maccaroni and salad and broth, and on her way home was so tired that she
sat down to rest above the village, on a felled pine by the edge of the
hill-road.
There was a pony carriage coming slowly up it, and in it, with a
servant, was the pretty foreign child with blue eyes, who lived at
Varammista. When the English
___________________1 The
massaja is the woman (usually the wife of the
fattore or bailiff) who is set over all the
womankind on estate and directs their labours.
Page 284
child saw her, out she sprang, and came lovingly up to the old woman, her golden hair hanging about her shoulders.
'Oh, 'Nunziatina!' she cried to her, 'We have
been away all the year, and we are just come back, and we have heard you
have been in prison. It is not true? It cannot be true?'
'Yes, carina; it is true,' said Annunziata. 'They took
me the very day I was coming to bid you good-bye, and I had got a
rose for you--such a beautiful rose. Yes, dear, I have been in prison,
and perhaps your mamma would not wish you to speak with me.'
'Oh, mamma would!' said the English child, with
a quick breath of indignation. 'You never did anything wrong? I am
sure you never did.'
'No, carina, not I. I took what they
gave me, and they said that is begging. I never have understood it.'
'Oh, what a wicked thing!' sighed the child, with her fair
cheeks hot. 'I will tell mamma. Do you come up to Varammista and see
her, and, dear 'Nunziatina, I must not stop, because it grows dark so
soon, but take this and come up and see us.'
'Is it your own to give me, dear?' said Annunziata, holding
the two-franc note with hesitation.
'Really my own,' said the child. 'You know I have so
much money; and buy something nice with it, will you?'
'The saints bless you, carina,' said Annunziata, 'and
I'll tell what I will buy with it. I will buy a little shirt or two
for Viola's child, that was given to her when the daffodils
blew.'
'Oh, do!' said the child, 'and you will
come and see us soon, Annunziata; to-morrow, won't you? I will tell mamma all about you and she will be so sorry, so sorry.'
Then the glad little girl went away up over the hill, with her little
rough pony, and the old woman went down it quite light of heart.
'I will buy something for Viola's child,' she thought,
and slipped the money in her apron pocket.
That night, when Carmelo drove through the village with some flour, Gigi
Canterelli ran out of his shop and stopped him.
'Do you know they have taken 'Nunziatina again?' he
said to him. 'They say she was begging; they say they saw her take
money on the hill yonder, just coming into the town; she is gone to
Pomodoro.'
Carmelo turned crimson, then pale.
'But I paid forty francs for her!' he cried; 'I sold
my watch.'
'What has that to do with it?' said the grocer. 'They
have got her again. They will want eighty francs this time.'
'How shall I tell Viola?' said Carmelo, and he trembled
like a girl. 'Oh my God! Oh, my God, Gigi!--when shall we get
justice or pity?'
'My lad, we have big ships, and sham battles, and a hundred men in
every office door to kick us out when we ask a civil question,' said
Gigi Canterelli. 'That is as much as we shall get for twenty years to
come, I am thinking. Your mule is tired; I will harness my own beast, and
go over and see where 'Nunziatina is. Go you home, and tell your wife
to keep up her heart.'
Carmelo thanked him, and drove to the mill-house with a bitter
spirit, and a broken one; the old grocer did as he had promised, and went
to Pomodoro.
There he found that the old woman had been taken by Bindo Terri, for the
offence of begging for money on the road; she was in prison, and no one
would tell him more, or let him see her. He returned to the
mill-house and made the best of the sad facts that he could.
'To-morrow we will have her out,' he said cheerfully
to Viola. 'Never you fear, my beauty. We will have her out. The
foreign folk at Varammista will stand her friends, and we will all club
together, somehow or other if pay she must.'
Now as officials, all the land over, are convinced that the public never
should be told the truth on any occasion--the public, in fact, having
no business ever to inquire for it--they had not told the truth to
Gigi Canterelli in the town.
Annunziata had been taken there by
Bindo Terri, and told by him very sharply that nobody was ever let out after a second offence; she, for her part, was dumb with horror and amaze, and only found her voice when they took her two francs away from her as pièce de conviction, at which she screamed loudly.
'The little lady of Varammista gave it!' she shrieked,
'and I am going to save it for Viola's child!'
But no one attended to this; she was bundled away into the prison, and
her case was to be heard in the morning. However, the Count Saverio
chanced to see her, and took the matter into his own hands. He had always
regretted that he had been cold to her; he was a man who set great store on
his charitable reputation, and he knew very well that he had seemed very
indifferent
when they had worried him about her, just as he was in council with his stockbroker.
Now the Count Saverio was a man who was nothing if he were not
charitable. He had made himself conspicuous solely by charity; it had been
a career to him, and a successful one; these professors of that divine
virtue which covers a multitude of sin are common to every country. They
may be said to flourish especially here, because there are so many
fraternities and endowments in which they can plant themselves as snugly as
a scolytus in an elm tree. So he saw an admirable investment in this old
woman whom he had refused to assist, and he exerted himself so greatly, to
the admiration of everybody, that he obtained her removal from the prison
of Pomodoro to the Montesacro of the city.
The Montesacro was also one of those in-
stitutions which had come down from obscure ages, and had been illumined by the light of modern common sense. It had originally been a purely charitable asylum for aged folk, with large funds bequeathed by a pious prince, who was also an abbot. But the State had taken a good slice out of it at that illustrious period of the Birth of Liberty, when Garibaldi and others were driving Scialoja to madness by drawing cheques on the public funds every day, and this modernised Montesacro nowadays made perpetual appeals for assistance, private and public.
Most people said it was managed magnificently.
Count Saverio said so, for his cousin was at the head of it; a few
grumblers averred that the frescoes had been cut off the walls of the
vestibule and corridors, the oak seats of its chapel gone, nobody knew
where, and
its altar-piece by Sodoma vanished from its place. A famous gold Reliquary, also, the work of Benvenuto Cellini, had disappeared: it was supposed to have been destroyed by rats.
But no one can help what rats may do, and these grumblers were not
attended to, and Montesacro was always pointed out to strangers as one of
the features and glories of the glorious and lovely city. It was divided
into two parts; it had youth which did a great deal of work that was sold
for their support, and the profit of its direction; and it had age which
served as a reason for all kinds of donations, subscriptions, bazaars,
lotteries and theatricals on their behalf. Count Saverio, whose cousin was
director-in-chief of this beneficent asylum, had old
'Nunziatina carried there in the ambulance of his own fraternity, a
coffin-like cart drawn
by a weak old horse; and she was deposited on one of the narrow little beds of the dormitory, and expected to be grateful.
She was a stubborn old soul, and she was not so.
'What have I done, what have I done?' she screamed at every
minute. 'Let me get back to my home. Let me get back to my
home.'
For his silly old woman would persist in calling her corner in a room,
with her bit of sacking for a bed, her home--casa
mia.
She was in a long corridor, with those white-washed walls, off
which the frescoes had been cut; there were some seventy iron beds all in a
row; there were some lofty casements carefully blinded, with grey shutters,
through which little chinks of light blinked, as a cat's eyes blink
in the darkness; as long as she would live, she would be set in
one of these big rooms, have broth and bread found her, and be allowed to go outside once a fortnight for three hours.
Instead of being gratified and grateful, perverse old 'Nunziatina
screamed till she was black in the face.
'Casa mia! Casa mia! Take me there.
I am not a criminal. I won't be put in prison! I want the air, I want
the sun. Take me to casa mia!'
If Messer Nellemane had been there, she would have had once more
occasion to moralise upon the ingratitude of the poor.
A female likeness of him, who was there, gently gagged Annunziata
without more ado, observing that discipline in an institute must be
preserved at any sacrifice of the individual, and as the aged rebel tore at
the gag with her hands, they tied those down to the bed rails.
Then the unwilling old woman was told that she ought to be piously
thankful; tens of thousands of old woman died, and there was no account
made of them; she was exceptionally fortunate and blessed in having been
selected to enjoy the refuge of Montesacro.
In the night she was delirious.
In the morning she was stupid.
But as no one thought her ill, and everybody knew she was stubborn, they
paid her no attention, till an attendant shook her, made her get out of
bed, and tumbled her into a bath. Annunziata, who had the common horror of
her nation as to water, shivered, and was very sick, but as she had ceased
to scream, they thought she was getting reconciled, and put her on the
clothes of the institute, and placed her in the common room of the the old
women.
There she sat quite still, and dumb, shivering all over.
The old folks around her were busy working, some plaiting, some sewing,
some knitting, some picking linen to make lint, some only staring vacantly
and mumbling--who shall say what wishes, what regrets, what
memories?
Annunziata stared with her eyes at the dull wall, the high barred
windows, the great, unfamiliar, hateful chamber, but all she really saw was
her own little den with the poplars waving green against the little window,
the sunny roads where her feet had carried her so many years, the green
hillside where she so long had wandered, the broad blue radiant light, the
rose of day-break on the plains.
You cannot cage a field-bird when it is old; it dies for want of
flight, of air, of
change, of freedom. No use will be their stored grain of your cage; better for the bird a berry here and there, and peace of gentle death at last amidst the golden gorse or blush of hawthorn buds.
When night came, and they made her go to bed amidst all those other beds
again, Annunziata was very cold; cold as marble. No one had been unkind,
for she had been quite mute and passive all though this long dreary
colourless summer day behind the grey blinds within the four walls.
'Casa mia, casa mia,' she
murmured feebly, when they laid her down on the hard pallet: it was a
stifling midsummer night, but she was till quite cold.
She was so cold that the woman in attendance called for help:
there was no doctor near at hand, and the director was away at a dinner
party for the Prefect.
They tried to put some warm drink down her throat but she spat it out;
her lips began to grow blue, and her eyes fixed.
'Let me get out, let me get home,' she muttered, with a
tremulous voice. 'There is no air here; I can't
breathe--'
The women were not frightened, for they were used to death-beds
in Montesacro; yet, awed to some show of gentleness, they lifted her up and
opened a casement to let in the coolness of the night.
But Annunziata knew nought of that. She gasped for breath still, and the
little life there was in her was chilling into stone. All at once she
opened her eyes wide and forced herself free of their hold:
'Lord! let me see the sun again; let me see the hills!' she
cried aloud, stretching out her arms; and in that last prayer she died.
Will she see the sun again, free from all cloud, a sun that never sets?
Will something greater than ourselves, and more pitiful than the State, let
that poor, dumb, tired little soul of hers arise and rejoice in the green
hills of an everlasting world?
If this be the last of her, this death on a strange bed, in a prison
that hypocrisy calls a refuge, then let us weep for her indeed; ignorant,
valiant, true, busy and most harmless creature, almost dumb as the dogs,
quite as cheerful as the birds, having borne heat, and cold, and hunger and
pain without complaint so long as she was free.
'Be good to me, O God, for my boat is so small and the deep sea is
so wide,' is the prayer of the Bréton fisher. Alas, how many
boats go down, and where is the pity of God?
reason. He took the good grey horse to a distant market and sold it, being reluctant to keep it to want; the old mule he knew would soon have to follow; without grist to grind the mill only cost what it could not pay; the usciere began to call with summonses for trifling debts, for when one tradesman turns crusty, all turn so.
The little butcher Sandro had become bankrupt, and had disappeared from
Santa Rosalia; the big one, he who was in good odour with the municipality,
would give nothing without money down on the nail. The old man was
shrunken out of all likeness to himself; the baby alone throve in the midst
of the desolation, and there was likelihood of another coming; more hungry
mouths and no food for any of them was the future that faced Carmelo and
his father. The summons for having encumbered the
road with the sacks of torbo had been served on Carmelo, and as he had not appeared to answer it, and could not employ any man of law to dispute it, it was passed as a matter of course on to Pomodoro, where the Pretore, merely seeing that Carmelo Pastorini was in question, decided without further examination that his late prisoner had been at fault, and so the matter with fines, penalties for contempt of court in not appearing, &c., ran up to a matter of thirty-eight francs. As for looking for thirty-eight francs in the millhouse till, you might as well have looked for emeralds and rubies. After due course a gravamento was instituted for the payment, as it had been done with poor old Pippo; and Carmelo, possessing nothing of his own in the world except a gun, his clothing, and the little coral earrings he had given his wife in the bridal week, these were seized and taken
off by the usciere. Carmelo laughed aloud when he saw the distraint warrant.
'He set down three sacks on a hillside road to lighten the mule
for a minute!' said his father piteously. But he himself said
nothing. He only laughed till those were frightened who heard him. His
father, without letting him know it, persuaded the usciere to take some of
his own clothing instead of his son's. If he had still had the mule
he would have sold that, but three months had gone by since the offence had
been committed, and the mule had now gone to other masters, and the price
of him and the baroccino had brought food for the many mouths round the
mill-house table.
Viola, who could do nothing, grew so wretched that she reproached
herself bitterly for having married Carmelo; alone, she thought, he might
have done better; he
could have gone away, he would have had only himself to keep. It began to seem to her that she had done nothing but harm to all she loved.
When on this day of Annunziata's removal to Montesacro they heard
only that she had been once more arrested, Viola felt her timid and patient
soul grow desperate.
'Oh, Carmelo,' she sobbed, 'and it was they who killed
Raggi, though I never told you!'
'Dear,' said the young man with a bitter smile, 'I
guessed that long ago. These are the wretches that have hour lives in their
keeping; dog-butchers, thieves, extortioners! The people are like
the steer who goes peaceably to be murdered when he could toss and
gore.'
'But would it be any better if the people rose?'
'Who can tell?' said Carmelo gloomily.
'I have heard say that twenty years ago, when
they first drove out the stranieri, it was
our people, the soldiers of the people, the leaders of the people, who were
the first to plunder and pillage all the people's treasuries. And how
can we do anything; we who have no union, no chief, who cannot read, who
can only struggle blindly just as the birds do in the nets? That is the
misery of it. Our people are timorous. They scurry like mice before a
uniform; they crouch and crawl before a drawn sword. Yet anything were
better than this. It would be an easier death to be shot down by artillery
than to be bled to death slowly like this, a drop every day.'
'But what will be the end?'
'Who shall tell? This I do believe, that when they deal with us
as with criminals for
every little action of our days they will make us devils. If the army were with us, then, indeed--I have heard tell that the soldiers are muttering and growing restive; but alas! there will be always men found who will point the cannon on the poor.'
Viola listened, and understood enough to be alarmed and very disquieted
for the safety of her beloved.
This day, made bold by the pains of what she loved, as does will be and
mother-birds, she took heart of grace and resolved to essay a last
chance for help and hope. It was a very faint one, and if she had not been
a simple, ignorant, and most trustful creature, would never have dawned on
to delude her for a moment.
As it was, she tied a handkerchief over her shapely head, took her
little apple-blossom of a boy in her arms as a shield and
prayer in one, and went straight, unknown to any of her family, towards the communal palace, and there asked with beating heart if she could see Messer Nellemane.
Now Messer Nellemane was growing very indifferent to Santa Rosalia; he
knew very well that he would soon leave it for some higher official
grindstone under which to squeeze the body-politic; and he was
beginning almost to be high and might with his own master, the Most
Worshipful the Cavaliere Durellazzo. Therefore he very seldom deigned to
see any petitioner of the populace, and such were always dealt with now by
the chancellor, the conciliator, or Bindo. Nevertheless, when he heard that
the wife of Carmelo, the granddaughter of Pippo, wished to see him, he bade
her be shown to him; Messer Nellemane not being one of those who believed
in the virtue
of women , had a sudden evil notion come up in his mind of what her errand might be. But she would come in vain, he said to himself; such philandering was not to be indulged in; ambition was his sole Venus; he knew the mischief that one weakness may work in a public career; he meant to go through life with a blameless, a snow-white morality. There is nothing more useful.
Nevertheless, he let her enter.
When he saw the baby in her arms he frowned, and his face flushed
angrily; when Helen comes to woo, she does not thus cumber herself.
'Signora mia!' he hastened to say, however, with benevolent
courtesy, 'it is long since we met. I have been so much occupied.
Un bel bimbo davvero! What is his
age?'
Viola, trembling very much, and with
her great dark eyes wide open and strained, took no heed of his words.
'I am come to beg you to be merciful to us,' she said in a
low gasping tone. 'Sir, dear sir, we are in great wretchedness. My
father-in-law is ruined. My husband thinks of going to
Maremma to work as a day-labourer. My poor old aunt is taken again,
and my grandfather--oh, my grandfather--'
There her sobs choked her.
Messer Nellemane's black eyes shone with a pleasure he could not
conceal, though all his features were composed into a regretful and
sympathetic gravity.
'I am very pained at all this,' he said blandly. 'I
had heard something of it--'
'Oh stop, stop it! you can!' murmured Viola, her whole form
trembling, and clasping the baby to her convulsively.
'I!' cried Messer Nellemane in amaze-
ment. 'I! cara mia signora! What have I, what can I possibly have to do with the misfortunes of your relatives? Alas! would I could say they were altogether undeserved misfortunes, but when the law is obstinately set at defiance--'
'Oh, it is you!' cried Viola, forgetful of all wisdom, and
borne away on the tide of her own strong feeling. 'You rule all; at a
word from you all is done or undone. 'Nunziatina would be left in
peace, and my husband could stay in his own place, if only you would cease
to persecute us.'
Messer Nellemane drew himself up, the most rigid monument of offended
dignity and unutterable surprise.
'Persecute?' he repeated; 'persecute? I?
Signora mia! you cannot know what you are saying! What am I here? nothing.
The mere instrument of the will of the
council and the syndic; the merest pen in the hand of an unblemished and most benevolent magistracy! You must see, if you reflect a moment, that the troubles of your relatives all rise from their own neglect of repeated warnings that, if they pursued certain modes of conduct, the law--the law which is absolutely impartial and impersonal--must take its course.'
'No!' said Viola, stung out of all prudence and holding her
little child close to her breast as she spoke. 'No, no! these are all
words. When I was a maiden you had wicked and cruel thoughts of me, and you
have revenged yourself on me and mine. If I had taken your gifts, and
hearkened to your dishonest wooing, you would have spared my grandfather
and the Pastorini and the old woman, who has no sin in all the world except
to belong to me!'
Offended majesty and insulted virtue reigned together on every line of
Messer Nellemane's countenance.
'You are mad, woman!' he said very sternly. 'How
dare you use such indecorous language to me? I never saw you but twice, and
then I regarded you as the betrothed of the youth Carmelo. Foolish fancies
are not my foible. My time, like my heart, is in the service of the
nation!'
Viola was vibrating and throbbing with passion. She scarcely heard
him.
'It is because the dear old creature brought your presents back to
you that you hate her, that you hate them all!' she cried with
tremulous indignation and emotion. 'It is because I feel they suffer
through me that I know not how to bear to see them suffer. Carmelo and I
can do well enough; we are young and strong, and we have love and
health to bear us up; but old people--the old people--and it is all because you hate them. It is all through me!'
'This is insanity!' said Messer Nellemane, lifting his
hands. 'It is worse: it is defamation! You are using the
language of libel. All, I repeat, all that has befallen your family is the
simple and inevitable result of their inattention and disobedience to the
laws of the land. Their contumacy has met with its natural, and I must say,
however private compassion may plead for them, its just
chastisement.'
'Oh, hypocrite!' cried Viola, with her pale cheeks flaming
as the sun flames in the west on an autumn night. 'I did ill to come
to you. You have a face of brass, a heart of stone!'
'You are excited,' said Messer Nellemane, coldly. 'I
am sorry that you ever miscon-
strued my charity to a poor man's granddaughter. I should have hoped that innocent country maidens had had purer thoughts. I fancied that it was only women of light life who put evil constructions on simple courtesies! Your child is crying. Will you excuse me if I request you to leave me now?'
The child had burst out sobbing loudly. Viola pressed it to her bosom
and turned and left the room.
Messer Nellemane had been to the last victorious; he had made her feel
an unwomanly, unwise, ill-spoken creature, who had fancied an unholy
passion as existing in a mere commonplace and benevolent compliment!
Her cheeks burned; her hot tears fell.
'O bimbo mio! she wailed to the
wailing
child. 'Is it indeed only the law? Will the law follow us out in to the sickly Maremma and seize our last crust there? O bimbo mio! if you were not so dear, so sweet, so fair, almost for your sake I could wish you had never been born!'
'What a fortunate thing I resisted my momentary infatuation for
her,' thought Messer Nellemane, left alone with the prospectus and
estimates of the Catacomb Metropolitan. 'Really she has grown quite
plain, and how very painfully thin! If factories were established, there
would not be this class of useless, hungry and most unhappy
women.'
And he stretched out his hand and unearthed from the mass of the
Catacomb circulars a plan for the Giunta to turn the old Convent of S.
Francesca Romana into a
manufactory: it would be hideous, it would pollute the river, and it would bring to the municipality a clear forty per cent. per annum. What could be more public-spirited?
Still, even their scanty education enabled them to perceive very clearly
that the miller was deeply in debt, and that, unless things mended, they
would share the fate of Pippo. And there was no chance that they would
mend; the steam mill would every month take more and more. Santa Rosalia did as bigger societies have done a million times, and followed self-interest and the breeze of the hour.
The father and son felt this bitterly; both had fancied it would have
been otherwise, for they were simple enough to expect that, as the whole
village hated the oppressor rusticorum, the
whole village would have courage to show their hatred; neither of them had
great knowledge of human nature, and both had simple and trustful
characters.
'Who could have thought all our folks would be so mean?'
muttered Pastorini.
'They are taught to be mean,' said his son. 'They are
ruled by a spy and a sergeant of police. What would you? All the fault is
with the government.'
Pastorini sighed; he was thinking of all
his dead brother had fought for; he did not understand politics, but it seemed hard.
Carmelo had his elbows on the table, and his face was resting on his
hands. The yellow light of bad oil, the dregs of the oil jar, flickered on
his hair and on the papers before him. It was midnight; Viola was upstairs;
the moon shone in through the kitchen lattice.
'Father,' he said abruptly, 'it is no use my staying
here; I cannot help you; I only do you harm. Alone, when Dina is married,
there will be enough perhaps for you, and Cesarellino and the girls; and
the others, when they are grown up, will do for themselves after they have
gone through the hell which they call soldiering. Father--never did I
think to do it, but I see now that I must. I will go away, and try and work
elsewhere, and my girl will go with me, and perhaps the old
man, for he will lose his mind where he is--'
'Go away? You? The eldest son?'
Demetrio Pastorini grew ashen white, and his breath came shortly; never
in all the course of the centuries had the eldest son gone from the
mill.
'It will be best so,' said Carmelo, sadly; 'there is
not enough for us all. There is ruin here, he added, striking his fist on
the book. 'Unburdened, may be you may pull through it. As for me, I
am
strong, I can do anything in the way of work.'
'A bracciante! groaned his
father.
'A bracciante, if need be,'
said Carmelo. 'I will go into the Maremma next month. There is plenty
of work there, they say. I do not know rightly where it lies, but one can
ask. I have no money to go over seas, or else I would. But anyhow, I have a
strong arm. I will not let Viola starve, nor her children when they come, nor the old man if he will trust himself with us. You will let me go, father? You will not say nay?'
Carmelo, if his father had forbidden him, would never have stirred; he
was as obedient as though he were still a child; in those old homely
families, the old homely virtues linger.
Demetrio Pastorini was silent: his mouth was quivering with an
emotion he repressed:
'Do what your conscience tells you,' he said huskily.
'I would not check you, not I; I have nought for you at home but
bread, broken with bitterness. And yet--O Lord--the pity of
it!'
Then the old man laid his grey head down on the table and wept.
He would not say that it would not be
best for his son to breathe another air than Bindo Terri; but it cut him to the quick. For so many years he and his had dwelt here, father and son, one after another, the old broad house-roof sheltering all. That his eldest born should be driven out like an Ishmael, and be forced to wander and work on other land than the place that had given him birth, seemed so terrible to him that, for the moment, he thought that he would sooner see Carmelo dead upon his bed. Yet he would not say him nay.
'Go if you will,' he said to him. 'When the trees
went, I knew the luck of the house went with them. As for me, I shall soon
be no more.'
'Nay, nay,' said Carmelo gently. 'It is I who bring
ill-luck to the house. Our honest hearth should not have a gaol bird
by it. Cesarellino will be better master
here after you than I, father. Though I lived for fifty years, they would never take the iron out of my heart, nor the blot from off my name.'
His hands clenched as he spoke; and in his soul he cursed those who had
cursed him.
He panted to be gone: it wrung his very heartstrings to leave his
own land, to think that he should live no more by the water that had sung
to him since, in his babyhood, he had pattered in its shallows with rosy
tripping feet; yet he thirsted to be gone.
He feared at every moment that rage would master him, and some
utterance, or act, of it again fling him to his foes. The glance and the
gibe of the guards, the estrangement of old comrades, the sight of the
waste ground by his father's house, the shrug with which the
youngsters went away
and left him on the first Sunday afternoon when he had gone to take up his old place on the palloneground, the sufferings of old Pippo and of 'Nunziatina; all these things were to him as is the fly in the galled side of the horse. He was afraid of what his pain and rage might make him do.
He was very young, and he panted for a fresh field, a free life, a place
were he could work and play without a neighbour's pointed finger and
an enemy's jeer.
He was very ignorant, and knew nothing even of other communes than his
own; but he said to himself that anything was better than bringing ruin on
his father; and he felt that he had strength in him to cut a new road out
for himself, and get bread for his wife and the old man. He thought that
somewhere there must always be bread enough for a willing labourer.
So little did he know, so little did even his own poverty make him
realise, the poverty that gnaws tens of thousands of empty bodies in this
land, eaten bare by the locusts of the State.
That night Carmelo sat up long by the little window that looked over the
river, talking to his wife of this new hope of his. Viola had never heard
of Ruth; but Ruth's heart throbs in every loving woman, and she said
in her own way, 'Where thou goest I will go.'
'But grandfather?' she said, almost as soon as the idea of
flight to other land had ceased to scare her, for another province to her
was stranger than it would be to us to go to lands behind the sun, could we
get there.
'We will take him with us,' said Carmelo stoutly.
'Nay, sweetheart, never would I ask of you to leave him. They are
driving
him mad here amongst them. We will persuade him to trust us.'
'I think he never will come away,' said Viola with a sigh.
'His very life does seem as if it were wedded to those stones, as the
roots of an aloe are fixed to the rock--'
'Dear love,' said Carmelo bitterly, yet tenderly.
'They will soon tear him off those stones I fear. The beasts will
never leave him in peace, and besides the house is mortgaged.'
'Then, perhaps, he would come,' said Viola, 'only he
is old; you cannot get new ideas into him any more than you can get new
resin into a dry pine. And there is 'Nunziatina too.'
'Father would let her live here,' answered Carmelo; 'I
know he would; he is so good; and she would have our bed and our share at
table.'
Viola kissed him with tender passion.
'As long as father lives he would always find a crust to keep an
old woman out of prison,' said Carmelo. 'And to-morrow,
Viola, I will go over and tell her so; and perhaps they will let her come
out if I promise she shall never go again on the highway. I have no
money.'
She kissed him again; and as they leaned there one against another,
looking at the white moonlight on the Rosa water and the bats that were
flying in and out of the ivy upon the wall, they were almost happy.
'If,' murmured the young man, 'if we can only go where
we can get bread enough to eat, Viola, and where your children will never
hear that I was once in prison. Not but that I would do the same over
again; just the same; yes. Poor Toppa!'
There is a great fair in August in Santa
Rosalia; a cattle fair, a horse fair, and a merry-making all in one, that is always opened by a service and procession of the church.
It comes once in three years, and so does not lose its attraction from
too constant repetition. It lasts two days, and all the country folk for
twenty miles round come to see it.
There used to be at this gathering only good chaffing and good
fellowship, followed by blameless mirth; now there is often a good deal of
quarreling, in which the knife is arbiter, and a good deal of drunkenness,
for people's tempers are on edge in these days, and the wines and
other drinks at the caffès are not wholesome and unadulterated, as
they were before shopkeepers had to pay such taxes that they must
recuperate themselves by cheating.
The preparations had been already made
for this fair, and the booths and the flags enlivened the dusty piazza, and there were already groups of bullocks, white, dun, and grey, shaggy ponies and lean asses, bearded rough shepherds, and goats as bearded and rough, and lean sheep that fed on what they could crop by the road-sides; and little, indeed, is that, in these days, when the communal regulations forbid the poor creatures ever to pause in the highway.
The place was full of movement, sound, and laughter, and the noise was
increased by the lowing of the cattle, and the braying of the asses, across
which sounded now the chimes of San Giuseppe, and now the bells of San
Romualdo.
In other years there had also pealed from across the river the
beautiful, solemn, deep tones of the convent bells, but they were gone far
away; they had been melted down
into cannon which rusted on bastions that no one ever dreamed of attacking.
Carmelo, going towards the house of the Madonna to see how Pippo fared,
had a heart less heavy than it had been since his return.
He had talked with the cattle drivers and the shepherds, and all had
told him something of different places; he had also met with a horse
dealer, bringing in a string of young horses from the Maremma, and he had
asked the road from this man, and had been assured that a strong young
fellow was always welcome in the woods there all winter. It was very far
away, and very vague, but still it comforted him.
Here were men who came from the place he had thought of, and told him he
might find bread there; what they related of the wide, marshy plains, of
the great blue sea, of the dark forests of pine and chestnut,
sounded to him wide, and fresh, and alluring. Surely, he thought, there would be no petty laws there to sting at you all day long, like a mosquito swarm in a swamp.
He was so young that any touch of hope was enough to lift him from earth
like wings; he thought he would make haste to tell the old man; it would be
hard, he knew, to get Pippo away from his little square house, but still he
would try. He would urge it for Viola's sake. She never would bear
the thought of leaving her grandfather to die alone.
He brushed his way through the crowd on the piazza, his thoughts intent
on this, and not noticing that the people were all looking, not so much at
the cattle or the booths, as at the iron rails that had recently been laid
down along the river-side.
'Take care!' said some one roughly, and
pushed him off the line just as a great, black smoking traction engine roared along with some cars attached to it. It was the first journey of the tramway.
'The accursed thing!' cried Carmelo, while the people around
him stood sullen and sorrowful, and a few partisans of the novelty tried in
vain to shout and wave their hats, and excite enthusiasm.
In the cars were seated in triumph the Cavaliere Durellazzo, Signore
Luca Finti, Signore Zauli, the Giunta, and others who had profited by this
form of progress; Messer Nellemane sat in a corner of the first car, a
smile upon his face, and a crimson rose in his buttonhole.
The ugly thing rolled out of sight amidst the dead silence of the
people.
'I'm ruined,' said the diligence man, very quietly.
'I'll as well go and smoke
myself out of the way as Nanni did. Nobody will miss me now.'
'Why do you let those things be settled and done behind your
backs?' said Carmelo, with suppressed fury, as his eyes flashed.
'You are like the poor sheep yonder; you go to the
slaughter-house as much as you go to your bed. Who rules here? A few
knaves who have the wit to get on your backs, and ride you as we ride an
ass.'
'And that is true,' said the people, ruefully; 'but
what's to be done? They talk a deal down in the
city--'
'Talk! Any fool can talk,' said Carmelo passionately.
'Talk is reeled out here by every rogue and every dunce, as thread
reels off the women's wheel. It is action that we want. Every
householder, every honest man, should dare to use his vote in matters of
his borgo; things should not be
done by a few picked knaves behind the backs of all the people. Can't you understand that much?'
'Yes, yes! Bravo! bravo!' the people nearest to him said,
and the cattle drivers shouted to him to go on, and Carmelo, warmed and
touched by the applause, and having all these months longed to pour out
what he had heard in prison, threw his head and raised his
voice.'
'I have thought much about these things,' he said simply.
'Prison is a rude teacher, but one that tells no lies. There was a
dying man there, who told me that we are all slaves. And what are we else?
We sweat and labour from day-dawn to night, only that they may wring
out of us the last penny that we have. Our mothers weep, and our fields lie
half-tilled, whilst our youngsters are borne off to swell the army
and starve under their knapsacks. Our shipping lies idle in our ports, they tell me, weighted with taxes, till their owners dare not go afloat, and their timbers rot in the harbours. Inland, our little tradesmen are beggared like the merchantmen, and put their shutters up, and go and starve somewhere unseen. Here, in the country places, no man can say his soul is his own; if his dog stir a foot, or his child spin a top, the brutes are down on him; he must pay or be sold up. The King, say you? Nay, he knows nought; he is set round with liars and deceivers like a hedge of aloes and cactus that lets nobody in; the Queen, in mercy, they say many a time pays the fines to redeem the workmen's tools, for these devils seize the spade, the pickaxe, the hammer that the man works with, if there be nothing better. If a man make ten centimes a day
he pays the tassa di famiglia! you all know that. We are free, are we? And in the cities the barracks are full of bersagliere to shoot us down if we say a word, and in the country there are blackguards with little swords to spy on every act of our days! Our lives are no more our own. We must pay, pay, pay, till the sweat of our bodies is blood. They grind down our hearts and our lungs, and make them into money to squander. In the accursed factories they have built, the women work for forty centimes a day, and the children for half of that. They tell us we are prosperous and happy, and they tell the world so, at their banquets, and all over the land the people are sold up, and turned adrift and left on the highway, groaning and dying--dying in silence, because they are foolish as sheep, or holy as saints!'
The tears rolled down his face, the dew
stood on his forehead; he was but echoing what he had heard in his sick bed in his prison, but he felt every word he uttered with all his heart, and with all his soul.
The people listened to him, entranced; the guard, Bindo Terri, on the
outskirts of the crowd, heard too.
'They are true things that you say, lad,' muttered the
diligence driver at last. 'But what can we do, my dear? If we say a
word, if we fire a shot, there are the soldiers, as you say, and the
prisons.'
'Then let us say we are slaves, and bow our heads,' said
Carmelo, bitterly, as he pointed to the flag that floated from the
caffè of Nuova Italia, 'and let us say that flag is the flag,
not of freedom, but of famine, of oppression, and of fear. We starve, and a
million leeches are sucking our mother Italy dry. We starve, and a million
idlers sit
in the public offices and fatten, and do nothing all their lives, and then are pensioned. We are cowards all.'
'Go away, my dear, they are looking at you,' said Gigi
Canterelli in his ear. 'And if we all rose, what could we do, my
dear? We have no weapons except a few old guns to shoot thrushes, and they
would bring cannon against us like lightning.'
'What use would their cannon be if they could not get our
conscripts?' said Carmelo; his breast was heaving, his eyes were
shining.
Bindo Terri advanced to him.
'Instead of talking sedition before witnesses,' he said,
very sharply, 'you had better keep your wife's folk out of
want. 'Nunziatina died the night before last in
Montesacro.'
Then he slipped behind the shelter of a carabinier.
'What?' said Carmelo, with a scared
glance on those around him. 'That brute is saying this only to hurt me. Tell me--tell me quick, some of you. She is not dead? She cannot be dead!'
Gigi Canterelli, who was nearest to him, put his hand soothingly on his
shoulder.
'Dear lad,' he said, with hesitation, 'I did hear
something who came from the city, but surely they would have sent you
word?'
'No, no,' said Carmelo, stupidly. 'No one has said
anything to us. Who took her to the city? We knew nought of it. If she be
dead--oh, if she be dead! What shall I say to Viola?'
Bindo Terri, safe behind the shelter of the armed carabinier, answered
him.
'We had the official notice of it this morning from Montesacro.
You will get it by post this afternoon. She is dead, that you
may take my word for; and you had better have worked, and kept her in bread and soup, than come chattering republican balderdash that will clap you in carcere again.'
The young man sprang forward to seize the ribald throat that mocked him,
but Gigi Canterelli and the others held him quiet.
'Dear lad,' cried Canterelli, 'remember your young
wife. Get not into trouble again through this fellow. You will only rejoice
his wicked soul if you do.'
'The old woman dead,' muttered Carmelo. 'Dead
so, without one of us!'
His voice failed him; he drew his hat over his eyes and turned away.
'If you loved her so much, why did you not keep her off begging on
the highway?' called Bindo Terri after him, but he did not hear.
'For shame, Bindo!' said Canterelli,
sternly, and the crowd listening around echoed the reproofs.
The guard stuck his feathered hat on one side of his head, and thrust
his short sword under one arm.
'If you jeer at me you are summoned,' he said, with the
pertness that he thought was dignity. 'I represent the
Law.'
'Lord, Lord!' muttered Gigi Canterelli, 'and the times
that I have spanked you for stealing my string and my sugar.'
Bindo, in his majesty, had his head too high to hear.
Meanwhile the tramway cars were rolling through the
summer-scorched fields towards Pomodoro, and there were met by the
Count Saverio, and the Syndic his brother, and the officials and gentry of
that place; all, in fact, who had got a nice little pat of butter to
sweeten their daily bread out of the con-
cessions and the commissions of this iron apostle of progress.
Carmelo went across the piazza blindly; he was stunned and broken down
by the tidings of the death at Montesacro.
She had been only a poor old woman, indeed, but Viola had loved her, and
Carmelo himself had grown fond of the cheery, sturdy, little soul, blithe
in privation as a robin in the snow.
The poor lad went on rather by instinct than by sight across the square
to the house of Pippo.
'He will come with us now,' he thought; 'surely he
will come with us, or he will die as she has done.'
When he reached the house his heart stopped with a spasm of fear; the
door was shut: a thing never seen except at night, and the wooden
outside shutters were closed and fastened too.
What could have happened to Pippo?
'He is ill!' thought Carmelo, but then he remembered that,
were he ill within, he could not have fastened to those shutters, and never
since he had been a child had he seen those windows thus closed.
He shook the door, and tried to force himself against it; failing in
that, he looked round at a few loiterers who were near; the crowd was all
on the other side of the piazza.
'What has happened to Pippo, do you know?' he asked of
them.
'Not I,' said the man he spoke to, but he grinned as he
answered.
Carmelo went round, vaulted over the wall enclosing the little back
garden, and saw the house was shut in the same way.
'Good God, what can have happened?' said Carmelo in his
bewilderment and terror.
Had the old man been murdered? But who should murder one who had nothing?
Remigio Rossi from the mill-house across the river saw him thus
standing, rigid and gasping, staring at the house. He shouted to the
youth:
'The house has been seized for debt. They turned your grandfather
out of it last night. He went away. I thought he went to you. Did nobody
send you word? But, to be sure, it was nobody's business. Come in, my
poor fellow, and take a drink of wine.'
Carmelo hurled a bitter curse at him.
'Where is he gone?' he shouted.
'Nay, that I know not,' said the owner of the
steam-mill. 'We though he came to you. Lord, boy, I mean none
of you ill-will because I put up this black servant of mine and fill
my pockets--'
But Carmelo had no ears for him. He had left the garden as he had
entered it, and was gone across the fields. He had seen in the damp ground
a print of a foot without shoes: he thought it was Pippo's.
'I never can meet my girl's eyes again if both are
dead,' he thought. 'Surely he has killed himself like
Nanni.'
He heard a step in pursuit of him and the friendly hand of Gigi
Canterelli touched him.
'Carmelo, Carmelo!' he cried to him, 'I have just this
minute heard that your grandfather was turned out last night. They did it
so quietly, none of us knew. It seems that lawyer in Pomodoro had a right
to the place because the interest on the mortgage was not paid, and there
were sums Pippo owed to the municipality, fines and what not, God knows,
about the water, and so the usciere came and
took the thing, and locked it all up, all in the name of the law, and it has been sold at auction: so they say. That is what Angelo, the beast, has just old me. He saw you coming here. How it was we none of us saw or heard I cannot think, but the lawyers and the other folks kept still tongues in their heads, and the door of the house is turned to the river, and Pippo can never have made a sound--'
'He is gone away to kill himself,' said Carmelo under his
breath.
He paid no heed to what was told him of the seizure of the house; all he
thought of was that Pippo was lying dead in the Rosa water, or hanging dead
from some bough in the fields.
'Nay,' said Gigi Canterelli in a hushed and solemn way,
'I think he will not take his life. He is a God-fearing man,
is Pippo,
and he thinks that in the matter of our living or dying it is the good God that fans our breath or stills it.'
Carmelo did not hear; he was looking to right and left of him wildly, as
though he saw the corpse of the old man swinging in the air.
'If he be not dead,' he said, with a burst of weeping like a
woman, 'he has gone to try and hide, so that we should not know.
Look, here is a footmark; it goes along the fields; he would not stay by
the river, I think, to see that iron beast roar along it; he would get away
into the fields, away from the accursed smoke.'
He strode away as he spoke, and his old friend followed him.
'His brain was not right,' said Carmelo with a sob.
'It has never been right since he signed away his house to pay the
thieves
yonder. And I, who came to ask him to go with me to a new life--'
'O Lord, have mercy on us,' groaned the other. 'Nobody
ever killed themselves when I was young; but nowadays the rivers are choked
full, and the charcoal is used for naught but death.'
'Let us look,' said Carmelo in a low tone. He felt as if he
were choking.
He broke off with a loud cry.
Under one of the maples of the vinefields that stretched all around he
saw the old man sitting. The tree was heavy with green grapes, and the
leaves were golden with sunbeams. Pippo was bare-headed, and his
head was sunk on his breast.
Carmelo ran to him and threw himself beside him.
'Grandfather, don't you know me?
Speak to me! look at me! Don't you see me, me, Carmelo? don't you hear?'
The old man's clothes and long white hair were wet with dew; he
had been out all night. He lifted his head, but his face was quite vacant.
He chuckled a little; and he kept a great old rusty key in his hand.
Carmelo saw it, and understood, and his heart stood still.
'They won't get in,' said Pippo in a whisper,
clutching the key. 'They won't get in; I've got the key.
It is my house, and I am master. There were many of them, so I took the key
and hid. It is my house; it is my house.'
That was all he said; he hugged the key against his breast and
chuckled.
'It is my house; they'll find I'm master.
They've taken a hundred scudi from me, and all the things, and the
bed that the girl was
born on, and the bit of glass she saw her pretty face in; and the little dog is dead, and the reeds in the river are wanted for the king; but they won't get in the house; I've got the key.'
His hands clenched the thing closer and closer; he laughed a little
feeble laugh of foolish triumph.
His mind was quite gone.
When the law had seized his house it had given the death-blow to
his poor old brain, that for so long had been 'buzzing and
muddling,' and seeing nothing anywhere in the air or in the water, in
the sky or on the land, but those figures that had puzzled him so.
'I've got the key, they can't get in; it's my
house, it's my house; and when I'm dead you'll bury me
under the almond-trees where the little dog is, and you'll
make the
house into a chapel,' he muttered, clasping the key to his bosom, and looking with blank and foolish eyes into the sunshine that played with the vines.
At that moment, at the banquet in the Pretura of Pomodoro, the Cavaliere
Durellazzo was reading out with much applause an oration compiled for him
by Messer Gaspardo Nellemane.
In this eloquent speech he spoke of the prosperity of the country, of
the excellence of the laws, of the admirable economy that was observed in
every public department, of the necessity for Italia to be heard and
respected in the councils of Europe, and of the large army that must be one
of her chief glories as a great Power.
The discourse was received with great enthusiasm, and was duly reported
in the
local press, and praised in the organs alike of the Opposition, the Dissidenti, and the Ministry.
'I recognise your hand,' whispered Signor Luca Finti to
Messer Nellemane. 'You must become a deputy at the next election; and
I make no doubt that you and I some day shall sit as Ministers round the
same council table.'
Messer Nellemane smiled modestly as he slipped away to send a telegram
in the name of the two Syndics to the King, announcing the completion of
the great work opened that day.
He saw no reason why the prediction should not be fulfilled; nor, I
confess, do I see any. He has every qualification for he honour.
Viola was so unnerved and distracted at the calamity befallen her
grandfather that she fell into a fever, which, coupled with her
distress of mind, killed her as it killed young Mercédes of Spain: but Viola was not so soon forgotten and replaced. The little 'bimbo,' bereft of his young mother, soon followed her to her grave. Carmelo, maddened with grief, joined himself to some few fiery and chafing spirits, nourished like himself on the bitterness of endless wrong; they tried to burn down the communal palace which held all those accursed documents against the poor, and, failing, were taken prisoners, and after a long trial sent to the galleys. The Italian and English press described them as a band of ignorant and brutal socialists; and then no one remembered them any more. They are in the mines of Sardinia.
Demetrio Pastorini died broken-hearted; his sons were unable to
compete with the steam-mill, and sold the old place to the commune
for a pittance; they are some of
them day-labourers, and some are taken as conscripts.
Cecco is dead, and his sons are also conscripts. Gigi Canterelli, having
the municipality against him, became bankrupt, and is now a beggar; the old
convent on the hill is a factory where the women and children earn a few
centimes a day with loss of all their health. The little house of the
Madonna has been bought and enlarged by Bindo Terri, who has married well
and entered into a wine business with the money he saved in his service of
the State. His brother succeeded to his uniform and sword, and is as like
him as one ferret is like another.
Messer Gaspardo Nellemane meanwhile flourishes like a green
bay-tree in the service of the State: he is full of ambition,
and in all probability will live to attain all his aims and die in all
honour.
Santa Rosalia soon became too small to hold so great a man.
He has been translated to Rome.
When the Dissidenti become the Possidenti he will be with them in power.
If, on the other hand, the Right return to office, Messer Nellemane will
know how to take profit from the fact that he has always been moderate; he
has been always on the side of order and the law.
Whatever party reign at Montecitorio it will be said of him,
'Verily he has his reward.'
(appendix)
No doubt the public will be tempted to think that the municipal
tyrannies, here depicted, are over-coloured, but I can assure them
that I have in not the slightest degree overdrawn the power of those little
communal councils, and the terrible suffering that they entail upon the
poor people of this beloved country.
Travellers, and even foreign residents, do not, as a rule, know anything
about this. You must know the language intimately, and you must have gotten
the people's trust in you, before you
can understand all that they endure. The system is, as I have said, professedly autonomous, but practically it works in the manner I have depicted. The frightful taxation of the noble and gentle is bad; the taxation of the commercial interest, of the shipping and the trades is still worse; but more cruel by far than all is the municipal extortion by tax, by fine, and by penalty, that crushes out the very life-blood of the peasant part of the nation. There are, of course, communes where some good and wise man is chief proprietor, and then it is fairly well governed. There are others in which the blacksmith or the carpenter is at the head of affairs, and then, though things may go ill, the populace cannot complain. But these are few exceptions, and, in the main part, the twopenny Gessler that I have endeavoured to sketch disposes of the destinies at his will.
It is entirely useless to change the ministries of Italy so long as this
municipal system remains what it is. It has ruined Venice, Florence, and
Naples, and is ruining Rome; as it has done on a great scale in the cities,
so it does on a little one in the small towns and villages. An enormous
bureaucracy enriches itself at the public cost, and the people perish.
I believe that these municipal tyrannies might often legally be
combated, but the populace cannot afford to do this. I won a cause lately
against a municipality, and a shoemaker said to me, 'Oh, there is one
law for you rich folks, and another law for us poor!'
And practically it is so; the poor man cannot afford to employ an
advocate, and his pleading against false charges or extortion is never
attended to; the tax-gatherers or the communal clerks are believed,
and the poor man is beggared at a blow. Against the decisions of these
small courts also, there is no appeal.
It is no question of the Right, or of the Left; it is a question of a
method of so-called self-government, which goes on and
impoverishes and distracts the country just the same, whether Cairoli or
Sella, Minghetti or Nicotera, rule at Montecitorio.
It is this which the public of other countries never understand, and
which the correspondents of the foreign Press never endeavour to point out.
Here Garibaldi does in vain rail against it; nobody
attends to him. In vain has he again and again declared the misery of Italy to arise from the locust-swarms of the impiegati, and the crowds of pensioners who live on and bleed the State to death. If I ruled Italy, I would ship nine-tenths of the impiegati and the pensioners to New Guinea: we might then get public business done, and the public coffers filled, without wrenching his last coin from the day-labourer. When the pensioner dies, his pension dies with him; but when the accursed impiegato leaves his stool of office, another of his breed is ready to spring on to it. He is an alligator that the hot sands of sinecure and corruption generate, and he multiplies without end. All political parties nourish him alike, as all alike continue to allow the local despotisms to cramp and starve the body politic.
One man arose and said this nobly in Montecitorio in the last
session: no one listened to him; he was even shouted down; all they
care to hear about there is Tunis or Albania, or a new loan.
It is a common remark that Italy wants a Bismarck: she wants
nothing of the kind: she wants a minister, temperate, just,
indifferent to bombast or display, resolute to destroy corrup-
tion, and convinced of the great truth that the first duty of a State is the prosperity of her children. But, alas! when a good man comes, he has no chance; his party split into schisms; the Disssidenti, disappointed of place, sting him like wasps; to be popular with Parliament and the Press, he must talk big of armies, of ships, and the councils of Europe, and, even if he be premier, it is fifty to one that the great bulk of the populace never even know his name. Harassed, weary and impotent, he will leave his good intentions to pave a lower deep than Dante ever visited, and, out of heart with all things, will let them drift on in their old fashion, knowing that you must be a demigod ere you can sweep clean this Augean stable.
I know the Italian people well; I mean the poor, the labouring people; I
am attached to them for their loveableness, their infinite natural
intelligence, their wondrous patience; they are a material of which much
might be made.
They are but little understood by foreigners, even by foreign residents;
they are subtle and yet simple; of an infinite good nature, and yet sadly
selfish; they are very docile, yet they have great
sensitiveness, and I see no more greed in them than in the poor of all countries; if we had not bread for our hungry children, I daresay we should be greedy too. There are sundry people, very, very poor, to each of whom I give a little sum weekly; not one of these people has ever asked for more than the allotted sum, not one has ever made it an excuse to plead for further gifts. Dear readers of mine, can you say as much of your countrymen?
They are ignorant, no doubt, and they are likely to remain so, for the
public free education is a farce; the communal schools, when they have
taught a boy his letters, set him to teach some smaller boy, and so on
ad infinitum. They are ignorant, no doubt,
and it is the interest of the municipalities, as much as ever it was that
of the priesthood, to keep them so. As it is, they endure all these
extortions and tyrannies that I have endeavoured in some measure to depict;
endure them patiently, knowing no remedy, and incapable of the general
action that can alone make a people's strength felt. Now and then
there are clamourers for bread, but very few and gentle ones; there are
troops and carabiniers
everywhere ready to shoot them down, and if they murmur they are clapped in the Murate, where poor diet and low fever do the rest for most of them.
The nobility and gentry are supine, where they are not tyrannical.
Consequently, the municipalities conduct all affairs high over the heads
of the persons concerned, and all sorts of important public works, sales,
demolitions, or constructions are effected against the will of the people,
who stand helpless.
The Left is inclined to make each commune still more
self-governing and independent of the State: should this be
done, the effects will be distressing on the populace; on the contrary, it
would be far better to confine the syndics of all districts within the
limits of imperial law. Their changes and caprices are a source of
continual distraction to the country; for instance, at Genoa, a syndic (a
well-known general) forbade dogs being given by the city to the
vivisectors; a few weeks after came another syndic, who decreed that all
dogs found loose should be seized and sent to the vivisectors'
laboratories. This is only one instance out of many.
The illimitable and captious powers of these
momentary rulers are a source of worry, grief, and extortion to the people, greater than I can hope to make anyone believe. The whole system is execrable, and leads to endless abuses.
The greater number of the nobles are so absorbed in their own grievance
of paying 45 per cent. impost, that they have no ear and no inclination to
pity any woes of the poor. The inexhaustible generosity of France has no
counterpart in Italy. Even subscriptions for a charitable purpose are very
niggardly given, and when given are usually filtered through so many hands
in their passage to the poor that little reaches them. Save here and there
an asylum, to which it takes strong interest and recommendation to get
admitted, there is nothing for the poor; the man or woman who is starving
has nothing to do except to die. The great difficulty in Italy is the
apathy of the higher classes, and their absolute indifference to the state
of the poor. When they do take interest in public affairs, it is too often
only for the sake of the personal advantages, the nepotism, the contracts,
or the kudos that may grow out of it. An
Italian, in office of any kind, will always hear you amiably and
courteously
but when you plead for the people he will only think you a fool, and say, 'Cara mia, why trouble yourself? They do very well, and they are all of them cheats.'
'How can you write books about these
birbonaccie?' said an Italian nobleman
to me, meaning about the contadini in Signa. 'They spend
their whole lives in fleecing us. You should never believe a word that they
say.'
Now, I would be far from declaring that this is the only view that the
proprietor takes in Italy, but it is, alas! a very general one.
The number of vagrants and idlers is largely increased by the absurd law
of the code which forces every parent to maintain a son, every brother a
brother, every husband a wife, &c., however vicious, vile, or incurably
lazy they may be; a law which indeed puts a premium on idleness, and
attaches a penalty to industry; a law which in its effects on the youth of
the country, is beginning to be dangerous. On those who are industrious and
saving, the insatiable taxes bring oftentimes wholesale ruin; every trade
and every employment is taxed as if it were a crime; every labouring man
must pay his quota, and if he
do not pay, his tools and all that he has are forfeited.
A recent Italian writer on the terrible state of the Romagna and the
Marches observes very rightly that the great bulk of the people derive no
sort of benefit from all the mass of money thrown away in the alterations
of the old streets, and introductions of new methods in the cities. He
justly observes that where the pilgrimages, once so continual, took money
into all the villages and small towns, the railways take it all away, and
render nine-tenths of the provinces through which they pass
poverty-stricken. The tunnels of the Alps have the effect of drawing
away the food that the nation itself requires. A few contractors are
enriched; but the markets of the populace are denuded, and only the worst
of the products of the soil, and of meat and poultry, finds its way to the
nation's mouth. Any night that you go down to any railway station
when the goods-trains pass, you will see tons on tons of vegetables,
fruits and butcher's meat going to France or Germany. What can be
more disastrous, also, for a country whose populace chiefly depend for all
their bodily strength on wine, to
sell their grapes to French and German merchants? Yet this is what the landowners have been doing this year right and left. Dazzle the eyes of an Italian with a little immediate profit, and alas! you may plunge him headlong into any folly, make him consent to any speculation.
It is irritating to see the foreign press, which knows nothing actually
of the conditions of things, laying down the law on Italian affairs. The
English press attributes all the official evils of new Italy to the
transmitted vices of the old régimes.
Now I did not live during the old
régimes, and cannot judge of them; but
this I do know, that the bulk of people regret passionately the personal
peace and simple plenty that were had under them. The vices of the present
time are those of a grasping and swarming bureaucracy everywhere, and of
the selfishness which is the worst note of the Italian character.
'Why do you care for that horse being hurt? It is not your
horse,' everyone will say to you; an impersonal interest is a thing
they cannot conceive.
'Una vanità enorme, un' aspro
cinicismo ed i suoi interessi,' says an Italian journalist
of a living Italian minister, alone govern his
conduct. Substitute for the bitter cynicism an indolent amiability that never exerts itself, and you have the characters of most Italian public men. The well-meaning have no power to cope with the vast inert mass of nepotism and corruption that block the way to all real economy, to all true justice. Whatever names and parties change in the government, these always remain the same. Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose.
As an ounce of example is said to be worth a pound of precept, I will
cite the following cases which have come under my eyes in the last three
months:
1. A man living in one commune, but on the borders of another, having
paid his taxes in the first, naturally refused to pay them over again in
the second. As he would not submit to be twice taxed, the commune got a
summons out against him with its usual result of distraint. He had nothing
of any value but a gun; they seized that. A gentleman took the case up, and
obliged them to confess the man had been in the right; they promised to
return the gun, but as yet they have 'not been able to find
it.'
2. A contadino was going up a steep hill with
some very heavy barrels of wine. Being a merciful man, to lighten his beast, he placed two barrels by the roadside, meaning to fetch them later. He was seen by a rural guard, though it was in a wild and lonely part of the hills. He was subsequently summoned and fined ten francs! There is a rule in rural police laws that a man must never let his horse pause in the road to rest; it would be an obstruction.
3. The wife of a navvy who remains in a city of central Italy while her
husband is gone to work in Sardinia is in very great necessity and almost
penniless; she has only a few sticks of furniture in a wretched room. One
of her children fell ill with fever, and a gentleman sent her in a little
bed for the sick child. The officers of the law saw the bed going in, and
immediately assessed her for eight francs tassa di
famiglia. She had not eight pence for the week's bread.
They might as well have asked her for a million.
What can one say of a municipal government in which such a state of
things is possible?
Meanwhile, in the public offices, tens of thousands of dawdling
youngsters lounge in for a
few hours, and are subsidised at from a thousand to two thousand francs a year, to be entirely useless and grossly impudent.
A respectable man went the other day to pay something at a public
office. Three young men were gossiping on the ground floor. They said,
'it is not our business, go to the first floor;' the first
floor sent him to the second, the second to the third; the third to the
fourth; the fourth told it was business for the ground floor. When he
returned there they yawned and bade him 'come back
to-morrow.'
At the customs-offices, again, no one can be seen till nine; at
three a great bell rings, and away they all go and the place is shut; a
gardener of mine went to get a little parcel weighing half a chilo, and
pre-paid from Germany. They kept him four hours, then sent him away
without it because the bell rang. He was kept from eleven to two the next
day, and finally, with a sheaf of signed papers long enough to sign away a
kingdom, he got the little parcel, which was only a book. Garibaldi used to
curse the 'black shoals' of the priesthood; the 'black
shoals' of the impiegati are a more
ravenous, more idle, and far more cruel class; they are
an unredeemed curse to the country, and if I could I would send nine-tenths of them to hard labour to-morrow. When a poor man goes to pay a tax for a dog there are all sorts of excuses from the impiegati; it is not the time to pay it, the books are being revised, he may come in a month, the streets are being renumbered, he had better call again when they are finished; anyhow, he cannot get his receipt. A little later down comes the Esattore of the commune for arrears of the dog tax. In vain the poor man protests; no one believes him. When he has paid, the demand is made over and over again. They assessed a poor baker the other day for two years' dog tax with penalties; happily, I had paid the tax for him and so worsted them, as I produced the receipts. But if he had been alone, his receipts would have been insufficient to protect him.
This whole, enormous, and insatiable bureaucracy is like a sytaris; a
sytaris, as you know, hides on a bee's back, gets taken into the
hive, then slips into the cell where the bee larva lies steeped in honey,
and tucking itself snugly up in the cell, kills the larva and sucks all the
honey;
one fine day, having grown fat and mature, it flies away.
To the bureaucracy the whole public is what the bee larva is to the
sytaris grub; a means of growing plump and living in sweetness. This is no
question of ministries; it is a much deeper question; that of a gangrene
putrefying in the body politic of the nation.
There is a little Almanac sold for a soldo and bought by tens of
thousands of the poor of Italy, which, in a very well-written little
article addressed 'Ai Signori Ministri,' speaks of the
unutterable misery brought on the industrious and honest classes by the
frightful taxation which makes the peasant of Italy scarcely better than
the fellah of Egypt.
Referring to the projected law of Seismet Doda for relieving the poor of
these burdens (a law which is for ever being 'considered' by
the Chambers, but never passed), it proceeds to point out how all the small
proprietors and the respectable poor are being utterly destroyed off the
land. All the working people who are ordered to pay fines, six, seven,
eight, or ten lire to the tax-
gatherer, or the municipal police, are sold up if they cannot pay--sold up to the very tools of their trade.
The Esattore (examiner of taxes) published in one day for the little
borghetto of Rocca Magna no less than
fourteen forced sales1 of the
houses or land of very poor men, which had been seized in the name of the
State; little houses of three hundred or two hundred
lire in worth, and in one instance the
tax-gatherer seized and sold a piece of arable ground at the price
of a hundred and ten francs. Everything is confiscated, because, to the
simple tax due, there are added all the expenses of fine, or execution, of
law-dues, and the costs of auction!
Let no one think that my poor old Pippo is an exaggeration. Pippo has a
thousand, and ten thousand suffering likenesses of himself all over the
land.
The little Almanac adds, bitterly and justly:
'If all these working people, once content and labourious, thus
dispossessed and driven out, cumber the prison, whose fault will it be? Who
has caused them to change from peaceful, happy, country folks to despairing
beggars? In the last
___________________1 Vendita all'asta,
or, al incanto.
Page 374
few years, nearly two million small proprietors have been ruined and sent into beggary; at the same time all beggary is treated as a crime deserving imprisonment.'
It concludes with the threat, Guai a voi, Deputati e
Ministri se meriterete la maledizione dei poveri!
This is no vice of an old régime.
In the old régime there was scarcely
any taxation; it is the vice of a hard, grasping, and greedy bureaucracy,
and of the fatal appetite for devouring public money, and manner of
regarding every public place as a mere opportunity and occasion for private
enrichment, which are the characteristic of all the public and political
life of the country.
In addition to this overwhelming taxation, there is the black mail
incessantly levied from the poor by the penalties that the municipalities
assess at their pleasure and discretion. Half of these go to the municipal
guard, and in the advertisements in newspapers inserted by communes who
want a candidate for this noble office, this share of the fines is
advertised as one of the attractions and perquisites of the post. It is
easy to imagine what the public suffer
three or four of these legalised and interested spies are allowed to stalk about every country lane, and peer into every hedge and spinney.
The timid purchase immunity from their torment at heavy cost of bribes;
the courageous suffer incessantly from their espionage and hatred. By the
police regulations of these gentlemen every harmless act in a day of
country life may furnish food for fine and penalty. The testimony of the
guard is taken as witness enough; and the poor man, harassed and fleeced by
those set over him, and who should protect him, has no resource but to
submit and pay. It is not too much to say that this daily and hourly
tyranny and extortion of the myrmidons of the municipalities are, all over
Italy, sowing the seeds of a bitter hatred of the Law.
The honest peasant sees himself ceaselessly spied on, worried, summoned,
fined for all sorts of of harmless little things; his dog barks on his
wall, his child spins a top on the road, or bathes in a river, he lays an
armful of brushwood on a lonely forest path, he rests his old horse a
moment by the wayside; forthwith the spy is down on him, and he has to
deliver over all his wages for
the day, perhaps all his wages for the week, to the petty officers and judges who are banded together in a body to pillage him. If he will bribe, he will be let alone: if he will not, he will be persecuted for all time till they make him a beggar.
Until the system is entirely abolished and replaced by something of real
freedom for all honest men, I see no peace possible for the people; and
were their rulers not blind as moles they would hasten to pluck out this
'thorn from the foot' ere its canker spreads over the whole
body.
But alas! no one in office cares about any of these things. A week ago a
famous Italian doctor rose in the Chambers and drew attention to the
destruction of the woods of Latium and the rural guards' connivance
at these repeated infringements (for base reasons) of forest-law. He
was listened to with apathy; and the minister concerned coldly
said--he would inquire!
But all those present could see that this inquiry would be the last
thing that he would deem it worth his while to make.
It is strange that with the present state of Ireland before their eyes
the whole of the public
men of Italy should be as indifferent as they are to the perpetual irritation of all the industrious classes at the hands of the municipalities and their organisation of spies and penalties. But indifferent they are: whether Bismarck approve of their Greek policy, or Gambetta do not oppose their doings at Tunis is all they think about; the suffering of a few million of their own people is too small a thing to catch their attention; they think like Molière's doctor--'Un home mort n'est qu'un homme mort, et ne fait point de conséquence, mais un formalité negligée porte un notable préjudice à tout le corps de médecins.'
No one can accuse me of any political prejudices. My writings have
alternately been accused of a reactionary conservatism and a dangerous
socialism, so that I may, without presumption, claim to be impartial; I
love conservatism when it means the preservation of beautiful things; I
love revolution when it means the destruction of vile ones.
What I despise in the pseudo liberalism of the age is that it has become
only the tyranny of narrow minds vested under high-sounding phrases,
and the deification of a policeman. I would
give alike to a Capucin as to a Communist, to a Mormon as to a Monk, the free choice of his opinions and mode of life. But this true liberty is nowhere to be found in Europe, and still less to be found in America; and this pseudo liberty meddles with every phase of private life, and would dictate the rule of every simple act.
Every noble-hearted theorist of a future of freedom has died in
heart-broken disillusion; from the Girondists of the past century to
those, who, with high hopes, shouted in chorus to Silvio Pellico the
Bianca croce di Savoia! Thousands of gallant
and goodly lives are thrown away like water in the effort to create a fair
Utopia of free action and untroubled peace; and all that, in the end, is
born of their sacrifice is a horde of weazels and of leeches, who suck the
body of the nations dry; vermin who bear upon their backs a swarm of
smaller parasites as pestilent as themselves.
Gianbattista Niccolini, walking with Centofanti one day in Florence,
shouted to two monks:
'Go and get a spade and dig, you
good-for-noughts!'
This is what, nowadays, the poor man--laborious and
honest--seeing the idle eaters of
the public funds swarming in and out of every public office, every municipality, every custom house, mutters in his soul against the accursed impiegato.
It is a change of masters, it is true, but it is no deliverance. It is
the old tale of Jeannot's knife; blade and handle have both been
changed, but it is the same knife still, and here it cuts the hand that
forged it.
Yet again one of the deepest sins of the State against the public is the
Government lottery.
It is difficult to imagine a more absurd anomaly, a more entirely
indefensible contradiction, than the severity exercised by the State
towards all private games and street games, and the selfishness with which
it continues to be itself the centre of the most demoralising system of
gaming that can be devised for the ruin of the people. The interference of
the State with private gambling is carried to an inquisitive and
impertinent excess; yet at the same time, for sake of profit, the
Government carries on a gigantic machinery more fatal in its effects on the
populace than any Casino like Monte Carlo. In the Casino it may be said
that none are victims save those who
voluntarily seek the pernicious attraction, and they are most of them people, who, if they could not play there, would play at home. Paris baccarat is ten times worse than Monte Carlo's roulette; but the public lottery is ten times worse than Paris baccarat, because the State comes out and seeks the poor man as he takes his hard-earned wages, descends amidst the populace, wooes, entices, enervates, intoxicates, and beggars them.
'Ah! the State is a clever one,' said a working man to me
the other day. 'It sells everything else to the Hebrews, but it takes
good care to keep the lottery itself.'
And this is true; everything else, down to the rights of Octroi at the
gates of cities, are sold to the Jew syndicates, but the Government retains
the lottery; and it may be safely affirmed that so long as it does retain
this vile thing, so long will the sin and the sorrow of the multitudes lie
at its doors. Not merely does it foster the fatal superstition which makes
the study of 'lucky numbers' and 'dream omens' the
sole thought of the people, but in the rare cases where the poor man wins,
the sudden delirium of riches has an effect like poison on him, and he
spends all in a brief summer
phrenzy to perish afterwards in beggary or a madhouse. The lottery takes all the earnings of the labouring classes in all the cities, usurps all their mind and hopes, keeps them for ever in that fever of longing which is in itself a moral disease, and encourages in them alike the lowest greed and the most enervating indolence.
No one seems to dare to lift up a voice against it, but until a minister
shall arise who will destroy it, the nation will have no faithful public
servant.
I would sooner see a Casino like Monte Carlo in every city of Italy, if
thus the lottery could be abolished, than I would see as I do, daily and
hourly, the legalised publicity of this accursed destroyer of the people
allowed all over the land, whilst boys playing
morra for coppers are seized by the
police!
The system, too, to which I alluded above, of selling the Octroi and
other public taxes to individuals or companies, is productive of evils
which it would be impossible without volumes of statistics, fully to
describe. A grasping speculator, or group of spectators, buys up the rights
of taxation over a city or a province, and makes the most out of the
speculation that can be made. I ask the
reader to think over for a moment all that this implies, all that this permits.
Yet who speaks of all these terrible and frightful evils--evils by
which the country is impost-laden till it sinks like the
over-weighted camel?
No one. The journals write beautiful threnodics over the grave of
Ricasoli, and Rochefort shakes hands with Garibaldi, and who amidst the
mouthing and the posturing of it cares one straw for the nation, for the
people?
The ranting demagogues of Milan care as little as the
amnistié of the Cité
Malesherbes or the satrap of the Palais Bourbon.
The one shriek for Universal Suffrage and the others shriek for the
Commune or for the March Decrees and the Scrutin de Liste; but when does
the one speak of abolishing the lottery or the other of abolishing the
conscription?
When Madame Roland spoke her farewell words to liberty, she prophesied
the whole hypocrisy of the century to come.
I want people to get these facts that I have narrated well into their
minds; to turn their eyes a moment from the Italian
men-of-war joining the Naval Demonstration of the Powers, and
the
Italian troops deploying in the Val d'Aosta and the Mugello, 1 and look into these million humble homes, darkened and naked, and see these children without food, these men without hope, who suffer that the pomp and parade of an empty boast may throw dust in the eyes of Europe.
I cannot think to make you care for these people as I care for them; I,
who know that they see their radiant sun for ever through a mist of tears,
who know that their hard-won bread is eaten with the gall of fear
and of oppression tainting the sour crust, who know that their little
children tremble in their town alleys and country lanes, and fly with their
hunted dog from the armed myrmidon of a relentless and ignominious law; I
cannot think to make you suffer for them as I do, but still I think you
will not refuse to feel some pity for them and some pain.
Italy is essentially a pastoral country. Those who would turn it into a
manufacturing one would be as those who should turn a tabernacle
___________________1 The manoevres in the
Mugello alone cost the country two millions of
lire; yet the men had but one ration in
twenty-four hours, and were on one occasion kept from one noon to
the next fasting, and without even a drop of wine. These few days of sham
battles cost precisely as many francs as there have been small proprietors
ruined by the taxes!
Page 384
of Giotto's into a breeding hutch of swine. The people thrive on their pure ambient air, they pass their lives under their unsullied skies, they love laughter, song, dance; and still--with the pipe of Corydon and the smile of Adonis--welcome the harvest night and the vintage morn. Up in the hills and in the green places remote from cities, the old, simple, contented, pastoral life still prevails, and there the husbandman follows Christ and recites Tasso; maybe he cannot read the words of either, what of that? Raoul Rigault and Passantante, the murderer Prevost, and the murderess Virginie Dumaine, could all of them read. Were they the better for it?
In its simplicity, in its freedom, in its purity of family affection,
and in its Greek-like habits of husbandry, I believe the unspoiled
country life of Italy to be the best that remains to humanity on the face
of the earth. When the childish pettifoggers of the new school scream with
puerile ecstasy at the sight of a tramway, of a steam thresher, they know
not all the beauty, content and pious peace that they destroy only to
enrich some Scotch contractor or some Hebrew usurer. There are 40,000 Jews
in Italy, and to them are
going all the old estates, all the old palaces, and all the old heirlooms; the Italian noble, no more content to dwell as dwelt his forefathers, aspires to be beggared by the belles petites of Paris or the baccarat of some fashionable hell; the Italian people beholding all their old plenty and ancient rights slipping away from them, stand sullen and full of futile wrath to see all that for twice a thousand years has been their own, passing into the coffer of the foreign speculator or moneylender. This ruin is called Progress--and the whole land groans, and the whole people curse.
Beyond all else, I repeat, is Italy a pastoral country. All its peace
and its joy lie amidst its smiling fields. The conscription that takes all
its country lads from plough and spade, from vineyard and chestnut wood
because its leaders are bitten with the mania of meddling and marring in
the councils of Europe, does the same evil to the land that do the foreign
speculators who cover the country with unfinished rails and demolished
buildings in that cruellest of all greeds, the greed of the hungry gambler
of the stock-exchange. The
temptations to the peasant to leave his hillside for the cities, which those gamblers for their own ends put before him as improvement, is as merciless and fatal as any tempting of Satan to innocent souls of old. Most unhappily the rural life all the world over is spoken of now with scorn; yet it is certain that the rural life is the safest, the healthiest, the sweetest, and above all it is so here where the climate makes the mere living out-of-doors a poem and a picture.
Compare the mechanic of Wakefield or Blackburn with the pall of black
soot hung for ever between him and the sun, and his superficial repetitions
of Darwin or Bradlaugh urged as evidence of an enlightened mind; compare
his automatic hideous toil, his hard hatred of all classes save his own,
his dwelling one amidst rows of a thousand similar, his wilderness of dark,
foul-scented streets, his stench of smoke, his talk of agnosticism
and equality narrow as the routine of his life, his shallow sophisms, his
club, his strikes, his tommy-shop; compare him and these with the
Italian labourer of the Luchese hills, or the Santa Fiora forests, or the
Val d'Arno
farms, rising to see the glorious sky glow like a summer rose, dwelling in his wide, stout, stone-built house old as the trees around him, following in their course as the seasons change his manly and healthful labours, reaping and binding, sowing and mowing, guiding his oxen through the vines, having for ever around him the gladdest and most gracious nature; at noontide sitting down as the patriarch sat amidst his family and labourers to a homely plenty; at eventide resting to see the youths and maidens dance, and listen to the old pastoral love songs sung to the thrum of the guitar or the story of the Gerusalemme Liberata passed down by word of mouth from sire to son. Compare these two lives; they are no fancy pictures. You may see either of them any day you will; and tell me whether I am wrong when I dread, as the plague was dreaded of old, the false teachers, who, to fill their own purse try to persuade the southern peasant to covet the northern workmen; who try to say gas is fairer than the sun, and the oiled piston sweeter than the honey breath of the cattle, and the anathema of Fourier
and Bakounine lovelier and wiser than the strophe of Ariosto and of Dante.
Italy for the Italians! yes; with the municipal extortions made a thing
of the past like the Inquisition, and the Jew usurer, and the English and
American speculator, denied the soil they covet and pollute. This would
well be the fitting war-cry of the Italy of to-day, who has
darker foes made welcome in her midst than even the Austrian and the
Bourbon that she banished.
Let me give but one example of the delightful natural intelligence which
the new schools are striving to replace with the scientific smattering of
the factory and foundry mechanic, and I will weary you no more.
In a letter published in 1859 to the celebrated Tommaseo, Professore
Giulianni narrates the story of a woman called Beatrice in the Pistoiese
Apennines--a woman he knew well--a poor, hard-working,
country-bred creature, who knew not a single letter of the alphabet,
but who improvised on the death of a beloved son, in a passion of grief and
weeping, the most perfect poem in the
always difficult ottave. This woman was but one amidst others, who all had, in a greater or a lesser degree, this grand poetical faculty, and harmony of ear, and who, when asked to teach their power to a stranger, would answer with a smile.
Volete intender lo mio imparare?
Andar per legna or
starmene a zappare.
What can the communal schools substitute for that one half so ennobling,
so inspiriting, so sublime, as those natural bursts of song amidst the
solitudes of the everlasting hills?
'If you would learn to sing like me,' she says, 'come
with me to gather the hillside wood, or stay beside me to hoe the earth;
this rich and kindly earth which flowers for ever for you, making the
almond bloom in the winter cold, and the cyclamen in the autumn mists, and
all spring and summer shower on you blossoms with both hands.'
How right she is, this wise old woman eloquent!
What can the schools give us that will equal what Nature offers? Let us
dwell, as she does, face to face with the blue sky, the mountain solitude,
the forest freedom, and we shall see as
she sees. This is what I would keep for this lovely land which has become mine, for these beloved people who are now my own, this fresh, natural intelligence, this healthful Greek-like life. And this is what day by day is perishing, crushed out under the weight of the impost of the municipalities and the engine wheels of the greedy contractor. As an Italian writer1 has said aright: 'As little by little our beautiful forests and green woodland growth fall before love of lucre and greedy desire, and give place to the smoke and the stench of the machine and the shaft, as our hillsides crumble and fall away, and our flowering meadows and our fair cultured fields vanish with them, so does equal craze for gain possess our people in the cities, and, bringing amidst them a strange and foreign element, corrupts our hearts as it corrupts our tongue.'
She, who on the mountain side mourned for her son as Tasso might have
mourned, is ordered to give place to the parrot-phrase and
automaton-learning of the school-crammed puppet; the old
happy innocent nights in the valley and on the hills, when the youths came
with violin and
___________________1 Professore Tigri.
Page 391
mandoline to bid the maidens dance trescone or galletta in the moonlight, or gathered about the wood fire in the winter time singing romanzetti and strombetti,and telling the old-world tales of the Queen of Cyprus, and the Ginevra, and Piramo and Tisbe, are bidden to change and render up their place to wordy dispute of windy politics, and feverish suppers in crowded winehouses, where the pure juice of the grape is lost in alcohol and chemicals.
The peasant-improvisatrice is to become the hollow-cheeked
toiler of mill or machine; the happy husbandman is to become the sullen and
savage mechanic with rotten lungs and watery blood; the songs, sweet and
strong as wild birds' notes, are to be drowned in the hoarse shouts
of the proletariate; and the luxuriant, vigorous, natural intelligence is
to be poisoned with the false logic of communism or stifled in the lifeless
mechanical repetition of the schools.
Forbid it, O Apollo Cytheroedus! here, where the echo of thy divine
lute still may be heard at evenfall, when the shepherd pipes, and the
maiden sings, in the green myrtle hollows and on the pine-
crowned heights! Arise and protect these thine offspring!
Let the false guides not take from thy children alike the bread that is
life, and the pure air that is health, and the music that is laughter and
is love!
THE END.
LONDON: PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND
CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE AND PARLIAMENT STREET