Delphi collected works o.., p.442
Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated), page 442
‘Will they let us drink our soup, I wonder?’ grumbled the old man. ‘Shall we have to pay a tax for that next? Don’t you let that prying jack‐in‐office come spying here again. The saints above us! In my young days he’d have been knifed before he could have turned the place into a nest of wasps and snakes like this. Leave to cut the osiers! You’ll have to ask leave to wear your own hair next!’
And he scalded himself with his broth in his haste and his wrath.
Viola went away inside their little back kitchen and cried a little, with a vague dread and pain upon her. She could not forget the bold admiration of Messer Gaspardo’s black eyes, and she was afraid.
She did not say anything of her fears to her grandfather, nor to the young man Carmelo; she was of a reticent, prudent, serene nature, and she thought it could do no good to tell anyone, but might produce danger and dissension.
Meanwhile her old grandfather, having scalded himself with his soup, cooled himself with a draught of watered wine, acid as vinegar, and, after giving himself his wonted midday sleep, went outside, taking some rushes to plait, and sat on the threshold with his chair on the pavement, disregardless of the municipal rules and the fate of law‐breaking Nanni.
It was a lovely afternoon, and waned into a lovely evening in the village; the swallows were coming home, the shadows were lengthening, the sweet smell of the rosemary and the vine flowers was fresh on the wind. The people had ceased working, and stood and leaned against their doors, or out of their windows, and gossiped; all was as peaceful as a pastoral: only along the sunny dust a dark shadow went, and the people looked askance at it, and it took all mirth out of the jests, drove all tranquility from the hearts; it was the shadow of the oppressor rusticorum; it was the figure of Bindo the guard, walking to and fro with a carabinier and looking for contraventions.
To the rich it may seem nothing: this going of the guard to and fro, this system of inquisition and condemnation that comes up with the sun and never ceases with the fall of the merciful night. To the rich it is nothing; it scarcely ever touches them: they live behind their own gates, and if ever they are fined send their lawyers to pay the fine. But to the poor — with their threshold, their cradle, and their club, with their dogs and their babies tumbling together on the pavement, with their hard‐gathered gains hidden under a brick or in a stocking, with all their innocent bewildered ignorance of the powers of the law, with all their timid patient helplessness under oppression, with all their unquestioning submission to great wrong in fear lest resistance should bring them wrongs still greater — to the poor this figure of the poice‐spy for ever in their midst, observing their coming and going, seizing on every industry and pittance, watching the lighting of their candles, the gambols of their children, the usage of their tools, the frolics of their dogs, the trailing of their house‐creepers, all to one single end and object— ‘Contravention’ — to the poor I say this figure of the tyrant of the tribunal darkens the light of the sun in this our Italy, hushes the laughter of the home and fills the leisure moment of the toilsome day with a weariness and carking care never to be thrown aside. The rich make these petty laws, and the parasites of the public offices carry them out; they are as thorns in flesh already bruised; they are as the gadflies’ bite in wounds already open. In vain do the poor suffer these things: no one cares.
When the Socialist burns or the Nihilist slays, then wise men wonder!
Blind and mad, no doubt, are the Socialists and the Nihilists, but as blind and as mad are the rulers of the people who treat the honest citizen like the criminal, and of the innocent acts and careless sports of his children and his beasts make whips to scourge him by his own hearthstone.
The law should be a majesty, solemn, awful, unerring; just, as man hopes that God is just; and from its throne it should stretch out a mighty hand to seize and grasp the guilty, and the guilty only. But when the law is only a petty, meddlesome, cruel, greedy spy, mingling in every household act and peering in at every window pane, then, the poor who are guiltless would be justified if they spat in his face, and called it by its right name, a foul extortion.
Bindo lounged about in the village streets (taking care to have a carabinier and the carabinier’s musket at his elbow) and looked out for all whom he might devour; were there a ladder leaning against a wall, a child at play on this bare piazza, a log of wood outside a door, a dog disputing with another dog, any trifle of the hundred and one trifles entered as cardinal sins on the books of Santa Rosalia — then was Bindo happy, and happy also Messer Gaspardo Nellemane.
Bindo used a wise discretion, it is true; and so did Messer Nellemane, as in the matter of the big and little butchers. Filth stank unrebuked before the pizzicheria door, because some good cheese and some toothsome pasta found its way thence to certain cupboards as a mere compliment of Easter; the apothecary’s Spitz snarled on unchidden up and down the street, for that worthy knew well the panacea that lies in gilded pills; and the baker had his fuel in a heap before his door, and sold short weight, and adulterated his flour with ground peas and acorns, because the baker had been wise enough at Christmas to offer to Messer Nellemane some fine contraband tobacco and brandy (a present, he said, from France), and to Bindo had said, ‘If you like a fila of white bread every morning you know you are always welcome; we are such old friends, I could not take your money,’
Of course, the pizzicheria man, and the apothecary, and the baker, all thought the commune of Vezzaja and Ghiralda admirably managed, or at least were bound to say so. They were the discreet, judicious, docile, reasonable people of the place. ‘Why was not everybody the same?’ thought Messer Nellemane and his colleagues and his myrmidons.
Now many of these people of Santa Rosalia were of ancient lineage and place; there were many families very poor, but who lived where their forefathers had done in centuries passed away. Pippo was one of these. In that house his forbears had dwelt for many generations, and there was a rivulet of water that passed through his wash‐house and out at his door in which he himself had seen his great‐grandfather soak the canes and osiers before him; his great‐grandfather who had been an old man when Murat’s horsemen had been stabbed in the church of San Guiseppe.
This spring rose somewhere in the earth of his strip of herb and fruit garden, and had been allowed to run through the house and out of it and across the road to the river. Everybody always thought that it was the saint’s blessing which had made the spring run there, just where there was a basket‐maker and rush plaiter always want‐ ing to soak his willows and reeds. It never occurred to anybody that the little old house had been built over it for that use purposely.
This bright evening Bindo Terri, sauntering about with poisoned cates in his pocket for the dogs, and sharp eyes roaming everywhere in search of misdemeanors, caught sight of the water running merrily across the road, a narrow shallow brooklet, pleasant to see and carrying cleanliness with its presence. Water running out of a house and across a public roadway! Bindo was not sure whether it was a crime against the code, but he was quite sure that, if not, it ought to be. He opened his book of the Regulamenti Municipali which he always carried with him carefully; and though he was not a good scholar he could spell through its clauses. He studied it now, travelling with his finger under each word as the peasant‐ manner is in all countries. He found, as he expected, printed in Rule CCLVIII. of his beloved code, that it was forbidden to throw or let run any water on any public way. Bindo certainly had never read Shakespeare and never heard of him, but he said to himself, ‘Twill serve.’
Pippo was sitting weaving in the doorway.
‘Stop that water,’ said zealous Bindo.
‘Eh?’ said the old man, in amaze.
‘You must stop that water; water must not run across a highway,’ said Bindo with stern authority. Pippo stared the more.
‘God set it runnning there, and I doubt He won’t stop it for you, jackanapes,’ said the old fellow to the young one.
‘You must cover it in, or drain it,’ said Bindo, getting into a high official rage. ‘It is against the law to have water in the public road. One has to step into it or step across it. You must cover it or drain it, or I shall report you.’
‘Youngster,’ said peaceable Pippo, very patiently, ‘that water has been running as many years as the world is old; my father’s fathers let it run and thanked heaven for it, and so do I. Go your ways, Bindo Terri, and don’t you come teaching a man sixty‐six years old.’
For a guard to be called youngster! The insult made Bindo livid, and, had he dared, he would have crammed one of his poisoned polpetti down the throat of the offender.
He muttered some unintelligible words, at which old Pippo irreverently whistled, and he went on up the little street, if street it could be called, since it had no pavement, but only a path of cobble stones, and on one side of it was the gray‐green Rosa.
‘Dear Lady and all the saints!’ cried Pippo to his neighbour: ‘that young popinjay is saying now that water mustn’t run as God set it running! I suppose our heads mayn’t wag on our shoulders next!’
‘Have you anything to show that the water may run?’ said the neighbour nervously. He was the cooper Cecco (Francesco Zagazzi), a timid meagre man, who had just had to pay a fine because his dog had sat outside the door instead of inside it, the dog being a terrier so small as scarcely to be discerned without a magnifying glass.
‘Lord’s sake, Ceccino,’ said Pippo, fairly in a rage. ‘The water’s run three hundred years if one. Do you think the Almighty asked Bindo Terri’s leave before he set the world a‐going?’
The neighbour spat with anxious face into the dust. ‘Almighty made dogs with four legs and didn’t glue them down on their behinds,’ he said wistfully. ‘But according to Bindo Terri—’
‘Bindo Terri have an apoplexy smite him!’ shouted Pippo, which is the Italian way of saying ‘you be dd;’ and he bundled together all his osiers and withes and went in and screamed to Viola; ‘Child, do you hear this? They’re calling on me to stop the water! The Almighty’s own stream, set a‐bubbling in the beginning of the world, is to be stopped! That’s a sight worse than telling me not to cut osiers!”
Viola grew pale.
‘Bindo must have been joking, grandfather.’
‘Lord knows!’ said Pippo with a gasp. ‘The world’s topsy‐turvy and the scum’s all atop, when Bindo Terri can go about cheeking and trouncing a man of my years.’
‘You must speak him fair, grandfather,’ said the girl, uneasily.
‘Nay, nay, that I’ll never do,’ said the little old man. ‘I’ll break his head. Stop that stream of water? Stop the sun a‐shining, stop the wind a‐blowing, stop the moon a‐rolling! Why they’re daft.’
‘No, they aren’t daft,’ said the neighbour who had been fined for his terrier, and he shook the ashes out of his pipe very sadly. ‘They’re not daft; they’re very sharp; they are too sharp for us, and that’s the fact. Haven’t you any bit of paper that’d show you might have the water?’
‘Bit of paper? Bit of paper?’ said Pippo, with a sort of ferocity. ‘It ran for my father, and it ran for my grandfather, and it ran for my great‐grandfather, and that’s enough for me. Bit of paper? Who talks about a bit of paper? The brook is mine.’
‘Perhaps they will forget all about it,’ said Viola, with an effort at consolation.
‘Bit of paper?’ echoed Pippo, unheeding. ‘Do you want a bit of paper to let the church stand in the square? Do you want a bit of paper to let the stars go on their courses? Bit of paper? The water runs through the house and out again and it’s a free thing, a free thing.’
The neighbour shook his head.
‘If you haven’t got a bit of paper—’
All the world to him was made up of bits of paper, he had been so often summoned and fined; happy people had bits of paper that released them from everything; unhappy people had bits of paper that condemned them for everything; to this much harassed man the world was chaos, and only this one idea was to be grasped out of its confusion. Pippo told him fiercely that his mother had been a female ass, and his father a galley‐slave; but the neighbour bore the insult meekly, and went into his own door saying, ‘that they never would let him alone about that water unless indeed he had a bit of paper—’
The populace, as I have said, can very well understand the law that punishes it when it thieves, when it slays, when it forges, when it fires; it can understand its chastisement well enough, and does not question the justice of it. But the law that punishes it for sitting in the sun, for running with a dog, for letting its child whip a top, for stopping its tired horse to rest in the shade of a wall, for letting its starved goat crop a bit of wayside grass that is nobody’s and so is everybody’s property, this it does not understand; at this it grows stupid and sullen as poor puppies do when cruel keepers beat them, and thus the guards get their fines, and the galleys their captives, and the graveyards their nameless tombs.
Bindo Terri went on into the piazza, and as the carabinier, who was no friend to him, told him somewhat roughly that he himself must loiter no more but go and look round the outlying country for the thieves that everywhere are ready to rob hen‐roosts and granaries, the rural guard was disinclined to adventure his person alone amongst the populace, and went into the smaller Caffè of Nuova Italia, and called for wine and tobacco, and sat down and played cards with some kindred spirits.
‘Diamine!’ said Gigi Canterelli (he was the grocer, and dealt beside in drugs and paints, and also had a sort of trattoria in his back‐parlour), standing on the sill of the shop and speaking in a low tone as the figure of Bindo, deserted by the carabinier, was seen disappearing through the Caffè doors. ‘Diamine! many’s the time I’ve kicked and cuffed that rascal when he was but a monellino, for stealing plums and treacle, and knives and string. The saints bless us! And now he takes a turn at us all and does not gorget old grudges! The other week or two past, ay, what did he do, think you?’ added Gigi, turning to a young soldier just come off his term of service, who had been buying some gunpowder of him. ‘The law bids me stick a light outside my door of a night (the Lord know why — for there aren’t a child twenty miles round that couldn’t find me blindfold), but, however, there’s the law, and I am not saying anything against it; I suppose the wiseacres made it for some good reason or another, and every night of my life I’ve lit that lamp since the order about it came in when we were all made free. But that night, it maybe a month ago, there was such a lot of folk in my shop, and they were all talking about the murder of the goldsmith in the city, and what with one thing and another, having nigh a score to serve at once (and one said the man had been murdered with a knife, and the other said he was shot, and another would have it he was strangled, and another said no, he had been brained with a hammer), I clean forgot the lamp — first time in fifteen years! I know the time because that order about lamps came in just the year after we got our liberty. Well, I forgot to light the lamp. Next morning comes that upstart, Bindo Terri, to me: says he, “What is your name?” “I should think you know it,” I say; and I think to myself your breeches have felt my switch times enough when you were a pickle. “Don’t answer me,” says the upstart as bold as brass. “What is your name?” “Luigi Canterelli,” I say to him, feeling like a fool seventy years old, I, and having smacked that rogue often for robbing me! “Luigi Canterelli,” says he, as though he were the Pretore in his black cap; and writes it down! Sure as fate, upon the morrow a summons comes to me— “contravention” — and bidding me go up before the Conciliatore, and the hue and cry out after me if I do not, and the pains of the Upper Court threatened! Then when I go, there is the blackguard himself witness that my shop was black when the moon came up, and twenty‐seven francs in all are run up against me: and if I had said a word of the treacle and the string and the pocket‐knife of the old time, the jackanapes would have been down on me for disrespect to an officer of the law. Oh! Lord save us!’
Gigi spat solemnly into the dust and filled his pipe which had gone out in his oratory.
‘We’re all fools,’ the young ex‐conscript said gloomily. ‘What have I had? Black bread, and ne’er enough of that, and set freezing in a cotton jacket up in Milan, in March, because the fellows down in Sicily had put on cotton jackets and so must we; though Sicily’s as hot as hell, they say, and Milan’s just an ice‐house; and I all the while was sore needed at home here, and father has had to pay a labourer all three summers because I was taken away! — ugh!’
A friend nudged his elbow; Messer Nellemane in high silk hat and city‐cut coat was sauntering by; Messer Nellemane looked the young soldier in the eyes.
‘You are no patriot, my lad,’ he said severely. ‘I fear you have been but an indifferent soldier. You were a clod; the government made you a man. Be grateful!’
The young man coloured; he was wounded and ashamed; he was a peasant who had been taken by the conscription just as a young bullock is picked out for the shambles, and he had never understood why very well; his heart had been always with his fields, his homestead, his vines, his sweet‐heart; he had hated the barrack life, the dusty aimless marches, the drilling and the bullying, the weight of the knapsack and the roar of the guns; he had been a youth ere the government had made him a machine: he had not actively or outwardly rebelled, but he had hated it all, and he had come back to his native place, a harder, a crueller, and a moodier lad than he had left it; and when he thrummed his old mandoline by the farmhouse door, it had no longer any music for him; it seemed to him as if the beating of the drums had got into his ears and deafened him — and Messer Nellemane told him to be grateful. He looked down, shuffled his feet, doffed his hat, and was silent.
Messer Nellemane spoke with the serenity of one who never had served. Fortune, which took pleasure in favouring him, had made his mother a widow, when the time had come for him to enter his name, and he had been an only son, and so exempt from all military service.
