by Ouida
‘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 togethe
r, 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.
CHAPTER XXI.
MEANWHILE in the prison of Pomodoro, Carmelo, thanks rather to his youth than to his leech, recovered despite the bleeding, the camomel, the stench of foul drains, the diet, and the obscurity; in six weeks’ time he was almost ready to go back to his prison cell, he looked but a shadow of himself; he was thin and pale, his eyes were moody, and cast downward; his ruddy, sun‐tanned skin had grown pallid and yellow.
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 cu
ltivates 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 name 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.