by Ouida
Gentlemen who so lightly make your rules, and pass your fines, do ever you remember that? I think not; I hope not; for your oblivion is your sole excuse, though such oblivion is accursed, and if ever there be justice or judgment, it scarce will hold you guiltless.
Ten days were given wherein to pay these charges: six of these days Pippo spent wandering wearily to and fro, up and down, telling his woes now to this neighbour, now to that, staring on the documents which he could not read, and wondering what on earth he could do. He could see no right at all which could force him to pay these penalties. He had done nothing that he had not been accustomed to do all the years of his life; how could he understand that all these charges had become due, just because a few men gathered together and said they were so? Dogs had been free, the rushes had been free, the water had been free, ever since Pippo could remember; why should they be taxed, and forbidden, and made sins of, just because those communal clerks and guards liked to have it so?
The justice of moral laws even the galley‐slave will admit; but the justice of municipal laws no poor man recognises, as indeed there is no reason why he should, since none of theses laws serve him.
There was no sense in it at all; it was only done to put money in the purses of rogues: Pippo, though a simple docile soul, rebelled.
Life had never been anything wonderful to him; he had always worked hard and eaten little; he had never seen anything beyond the vine‐paths about Santa Rosalia and the dusty stones of Pomodoro: wiser people might have wondered that he ever cared to take the trouble to get up of a morning and pull his breeches on, so very little did each day offer to him. But Pippo never wondered; he enjoyed his life very much when he was let alone; he had been very fond of his womenkind; he had once been a bright young fellow with lute and song, and light limbs to dance with, and he had not forgotten all that time; when he could lie in the shade at noontide, and get a little beaker of wine, and chat about nothing cheerily, and smoke his pipe, and hear his village news, Pippo was perfectly happy, and did not want to end his life as Nanni had ended his, with a pinch of charcoal, in a shuttered room, on a bare floor.
It was not much of a life, to be sure; and as wearing away now like a waning light on St. John’s Eve; but it was a fresh, simple, pleasant, little life, spent on the edge of the bright Rosa water, and amongst the waving beds of reeds; it seemed to Pippo that he would hear the sough of the rushes and see the glint of the river‐reaches even when he should be put away in a deal box against the church wall, or, as the priests said, should be in heaven.
When Dom Lelio would preach about heaven, Pippo sitting at mass on his wooden chair, would nod and shut his eyes, and dream of paradise, and would never be able to get any other idea of it than that shining water, those waving reeds, and the blue clear sky beyond them.
And he had always said to himself, ‘Come what may, God will leave me the river;’ and it had always been a great happiness to him tho think that this little cot, overlooking the river that he loved, would be dwelt in by him till the saints should bear him across another and a darker stream.
But now, — if he must borrow on it — Pippo felt that nevermore would it really be his own again.
‘You borrow twopence on a thing you have, and from that minute those two pennies will eat and eat and eat you till they swell like turkey poults at Ceppo, only it’s you who burst for it, not they,’ had Pippo’s wife always said to him; and the truth of the saying remained in his mind.
Yet what was he to do?
No doubt to you gentlemen, it is very absurd to want these few francs; you and I give as much for a plant, for a plate, for a chair, for a teacup; to face ruin because you cannot find it seems ridiculous, and yet it was ruin to Pippo.
If he did not pay, the Law would seize his rickety tables, and his earthen pumpkins, and his copper pots, and would sell them, and sell his house over his head, and his bed from under him. He had done no harm whatever, and he owed not a farthing; yet he would be treated as if he were the blackest thief, the most shameless debtor, and all the few rags and sticks that he owned in the world would go under the hammer.
Pippo sat on this threshold and leaned his grey head on his hands, and could not understand it. ‘If I had done anything,’ he said again and again; and, stupid old fellow that he was, could not see the crime.
‘They’ll fine the butterflies next, I suppose, for flying,’ he thought wearily, as those golden, and azure, and tortoise‐shell, and white flowers of the air spread their wings against him, or floated through the light above the rushes.
‘Could Carmelo’s father help us?’ asked Viola wistfully; but Pippo shook his finger in denial. He knew that the elder Pastorini had debts of his own from bad trade and the law costs attending his son’s trial. For some years the mill had brought in but slender returns, and the Pastorini were generous folks, and never grudged a neighbour a place at their board. This open‐handed way of living was well enough in the old times; but nowadays taxation sits like a ghost at every homely table.
No; old Pippo would not borrow of friend, nor of one whose son would wed his granddaughter. So he sat all alone on the settle in his little stone porch, and totted it all up after his own manner with a bit of chalk. He could not read or write, but he knew the look of figures, and he could sum up correctly. Many men, here, know arithmetic very well who do not know the alphabet. They learn it in self‐defence against cheating.
He had all these hateful papers in his hand; papers wordy, and covered all over with writing, which was as Greek to him, but he could understand one thing in them — the sum he was condemned to pay. There was twenty‐three, and then there was twenty‐five, and then there was thirty‐two, and then there was forty, and besides these were five different sums of ten francs each; these last five were for the reed‐cutting; and then there was the seventy for Raggi. He told them all up once more, as he had told them all up twenty times before, and he made them in all two hundred and forty‐three francs, and the total made his head reel, his eyes swim, his stomach sicken; he could no more get that sum than he could get a gold chariot and six white horses.
‘What will happen if I don’t pay?’ he asked of Cecco for the fiftieth time; and Cecco answered , ‘They will sell you up; sell you up as they did Nanni;’ and Pippo groaned.
Gentlemen, what would you feel if every week, or month, some power of the State could call on you for a thousand pounds, and if you failed to pay it could seize on your estates? Gentlemen, you do not remember it, but the five francs, or the five shillings to the poor is as that thousand pounds would be to you; nay, more, for the seizure of the large sum would be to you at worst a lost superfluity, some luxury, some purchase, some pleasure the less, but to the poor the loss of the little sum may be the loss of bread in health, of medicine in sickness, of the meat that is strength, of the clothing that is decency; the loss of the little sum may be the loss of the one frail plank that stands between poverty and death.
Think of this now and then, gentlemen who make the laws at ease, all the world over, and break the hearts and destroy the homes of the poor with the fines that the English magistracy, the French mayoralities, and the Italian municipalities alike so dearly love to wring from the poor man, standing ignorant, helpless, and utterly unconscious of wrong‐doing before these mockers of the majesty of Law!
What with pondering over the summonses about Raggi, and the summonses about the reeds in the river, and the summonses about the brook‐water, old Pippo was fairly crazed. He went about the village, shouting like a dazed creature, ‘My fathers cut the reeds before me hundreds of years; and hundreds of years the water has run, and God sent it; and the little yellow dog, why, she is known to every man jack of them, and all the babies play with her. What have I got to pay for? what have I got to pay for?’ —
And his neighbour always said to him,
‘You must always pay if you haven’t got a piece of paper. We’ll soon have to pay for drawing our breath, or lighting our pipes. I alway
s told you, you should have got a bit of paper.’
‘But I can’t pay,’ said Pippo, shoving his hat on the back of his head, and hitching up the band of his linen trousers with a little puckered, woebegone face, and his tears only not falling because they were dried by his rage.
‘If I earn a dozen soldi a day, it’s the best as I ever do; and, to be sure, the girl plaits, but plaiting isn’t what it was since all those machine‐made hats came in, and it’s barely enough for her dress that she makes at it; and there’s nought besides, nought; and its almost as dear to make your bread as buy it now the grist‐tax is on; and wine, Lord! wine that I remember twenty years ago you might have almost for the asking of it, there is now up to a franc, and not seldom a high as one‐thirty — who’s to pay, who’s to pay, with victuals and drink what they are?’
‘If you haven’t got a bit of paper you must pay,’ said the neighbour, into whose head long years of municipal despotism had hammered this one fact. ‘The house is your own, aren’t it? You’ve always said so. Well, you’ll have to get something on that.’
‘Jesus, help me!’ groaned Pippo, to whom the Galilean was not dead.
The house was certainly his; he was not very clear how; but his forefathers had dwelt in it, and he had been born in it; and in an old iron chest with rusty locks there were some old ‘bits of paper’ that he had been always told established his right to it. But to raise money on it! Pippo did not know much, but he had always heard that attorneys and strozzini were the legitimate children of the devil. True, everybody was everywhere raising money in these days; he heard say that all the big lands were writ down in the Mortgage Archives in the city, and half the little estates too; but to Pippo’s old‐fashioned ideas it seemed quite as shameful to get money on your bit of ground as to carry your pots and pans up to the Mone di Pietà.
Usurers.
He came of that stock of homely, honest, independent peasantry that is still existent in Italy, as in France and England, but which all the new‐fangled laws and schools are doing their best to destroy in each of these countries. To borrow, Pippo thought, was quite a thievish thing, and as bad and as mean as to send your girl to her nuptials without her share of house linen and her decent string of pearls.
Then he had not an idea what his little house was worth: whether twenty pence or twenty million pence. It was a little stone‐built place, sound and solid because raised in the old days when work was soundly and solidly done, but it had never a stroke for repair given to it, and it was very small, and had only a narrow kitchen garden behind it, with one aged fig‐tree past bearing, a few fruit espaliers, and some vegetables. Pippo did not think anyone would give much for it, and the thought of raising a penny on it cut him to the quick. ‘For the strozzini and the lawyers,’ said he in his perplexity, ‘if they do but smell at a peach, it is down their throats, stone and all, and never chokes them.’
He had not any dealings with such folks himself, but so he had heard, and so he had seen in this intercourse with his neighbours. Had not Simone Zauli, the money‐lender, who dwelt at the new white house with the gilded weathercock and the cast‐iron gates, on the Pomodoro road, made all his riches thus out of his fellow‐creatures, beginning as a ragged boy by stealing dogs and selling them alive, or their skins when dead, and then lending other boys trifling sums to lose at lotto or at marra, and so progressing upward in man’s and fortune’s favours?
Nevertheless little old Pippo said to him‐ self: ‘Nanni gave in without a struggle, but I will go and ask them to do right by me. Human hearts are good in the main, and what for should those gentlemen want to hurt a poor soul like myself?’
He thought these things were done because the gentlemen did not know of them; so he resolved to tell the gentlemen; and he brushed himself and put on his Sunday clothes, and betook himself on a round of visits. First, of course, he went to the Syndic’s villa, but there he was told that the Count Durellazzo was still away at the Bagni; if it were anything of business, Messer Nellemane down in the village would attend to it.
‘Nay! nay! as well send me to Lucifero himself,’ muttered Pippo, and turned back to descend the long four miles of stony, shadeless hills that he had painfully climbed.
Bindo Terri, who was up there, flirting and drinking with the Syndic’s pretty massaja, heard the muttered words and duly reported them.
Bindo had got about his duties once more, and though he had made himself some bruises very cleverly with iodine and indigo, he could not affect to be ailing any longer, and had indeed got sick of lying in bed, despite the fry and Vin Santo, and so had come up cheerfully to the Syndic’s farm to guarantee as ‘healthy meat’ a bullock just dead of pleuro‐pneumonia.
CHAPTER XII.
IT was too late that day to go anywhere else, but the next morning Pippo set forth again. He went to each of the gentlemen of the district who formed the Giunta; there were seven of them. Two of them, as said, were noblemen, two were small gentry; one was a doctor, one was a lawyer, and one was the money‐lender Zauli. Pippo tried the nobles first; one was at his estates in another province, and the other, who was at home, said he was very sorry, but he could not interfere; he had no power to alter the law; he was kind, however, and told his maestro di casa to send the old man into the kitchen to have a meal; the small gentry said much the same, a little more disagreeably; the lawyer said that they were determined to make their laws respected; and when the old man timidly asked why the law had been made, and suggested that they would be very much better un‐made again, grew angry, and told Pippo he was impudent, which was indeed, the last thing that Pippo ever dreamed of being. The doctor said much the same thing as the lawyer, and as for going to Zauli, Pippo knew that would be no good; as soon will you get peaches off an ant‐eaten tree as mercy out of the heart of a money‐lender.
In Pippo’s eyes, and in those of most in Santa Rosalia, Simone Zauli was as a great swollen dragon, gorged on the bodies and the souls of other men, and he was the only incarnation that they knew of usury.
Jaded, footsore, very heart‐sick, Pippo trotted through the ankle‐deep dust, carrying his boots in his hands; he had thought it only respectful to enter the gentlemen’s houses with his boots on, but that was no reason why he should wear them out on the common highway. He was very tired when he got home; for one way and another, up and down hill, and to and fro, he had walked five and twenty miles, if one. But he ate his bit of supper in silence, and went to bed. In bed another hope dawned on him; a faint one, but still something on which to act.
He said nothing to his daughter, for he held the old‐fashioned opinion that women had no head for anything, and had best be told naught, but next morning put on his festa coat and waistcoat, took his straw hat and went through the clouds of dust in the shaky diligence to Pomodoro.
‘They do say he is a liberal one and has a heart for the poor,’ thought Pippo, and boldly went and asked for Signore Luca Finti, who had taken a lodging in the town, for people were now saying that the new deputy, who was a bachelor, was thinking of nothing less than asking for the hand of Teresina Zauli, an ugly wench, indeed, brown, clumsy, with a bearded lip, and a chignon like a melon, dressed in all the colours of the rainbow, but worth her weight in gold, and owning all they jewels, too, of a dead countess whose affairs her father had managed; the countess, being a poor‐witted and sad‐spirited lady. Teresina Zauli had given her heart to a brave young bailiff who was floridly handsome as a dahlia flower, but that was not the match her father meant for her, and she had soon resigned herself to the idea of being a deputy’s wife, and living in Rome, and going to the Quirinal when a state ball was given, as Luca Finti’s wife would do unquestionably.
The ‘note’ of the new deputy being all things to all men, and familiar good‐nature to the entire population, the little old dusty figure of Pippo was shown into the chamber where the deputy was taking a light breakfast of stuffed onions and a risotto of liver and brains. Signore Finti, thinking the old man came to beg,
buttoned up his pockets, but saluted him with a sweet smile and words so bland that Pippo thought at a bound: ‘he will get me let off the fines.’
He was benignity and kindness itself, for this Luca Finti was to everyone; but when he found what the errand was he grew a little colder, a trifle less affable; for to the mind of the Deputy municipal law was sacred. The bureaucratic mind, all the world over, believes the squeak of the official penny whistle to be as the trump of archangels and the voice from Sinai.
That all the people do not fall down prostrate at the squeak is, to this order of mind, the one unmentionable sin.
With hope Pippo began his tale.
He was a long time telling it, and he told a good deal of it three times over; and he muddled it all together, and at the close of it he damned the State in general, and Messer Gaspardo Nellemane in particular, very finely.
Luca Finti listened patiently; but when Pippo, out of breath, paused in his cursing, he frowned, and drew himself up with the gesture he generally kept for the Tribune.
‘I fear you are contumacious.’
‘Eh? sir?,’ said Pippo. ‘That’s what they say in the summons‐papers. Con‐tu‐ma‐cious. It’s a mighty long word for poor folks that don’t know what it means. What have I done? Nought! Nought! He came prying and poking where he’d no business: he didn’t make the reeds in the water; God made them. He didn’t set my brook running; God set it. As for the poor little beast, every child knows her and loves her. I have done nought. That I’ll say if I die for it. I live peaceably, and I hurt none; and this Jack‐in‐office comes spying on me, and worrying me, and beggaring me, and then he calls it all con‐tu‐macy! What have I done?’
The Deputy’s face clouded and grew grave as he looked over the papers which Pippo had handed to him.
‘They seem all in order,’ he murmured a little severely: if the penny whistle has shrieked, who shall dare to find fault with its blast?