by Ouida
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.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
ALL those papers that Pippo thought he abolished by burning them as he lit his pipes, were rising in a heap over him, in truth, at Pomodoro, till they grew into a mighty mound of contumacy, and under this pile justice required that the contumacious one should be buried alive.
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.