HUNTING THE PANTHER
BY threading one crooked back street and another he came out behind the
Cathedral, upon whose southern wall and forest of spires a moon almost
round poured its light. That he might keep in the shadow of the great
Gothic pile he went to the northern side and walked there. The organ
was pealing for even-song, and its strains floated out sublimely as he
passed the transept door. He reflected that the last time he had heard
those tones they sounded for his wedding march; and, his impulse to
square accounts with Mario Forza quickened, he struck across the square
at faster pace.
To the bright Victor Emanuel Gallery, its throng of promenaders, or
the laughing, talking men and women at the outdoor tables of the
cafés, he gave no heed. The news of the day--set forth in the journals
hysterically--was not taken with much seriousness in that company.
The conflict of the morning, in Milan, between the workers and the
soldiers was no worse in its result of killed and wounded than like
conflicts in other towns of the kingdom that day and the day before.
All of the newspapers appreciated the importance of what had befallen;
a small number were sensitive of the danger that seemed to be in the
air. An alarmist editor declared that from one end of the Peninsula to
the other the word had passed to revolutionary centres to rise against
the Government.
The trouble was due chiefly to the dearness of bread. In the country
districts it was aggravated by the strike of the agricultural
labourers. Tuscany and Sicily, Naples and Romagna were seething with
discontent. Parma, Piacenza, and Pavia in the North, Arcoli, Malpetra,
and Chieti in the South, had been scenes of bloodshed. Nevertheless, in
the luxurious harbours of life there was a tendency to discredit the
journals, to judge them over-zealous in the concocting of a sensation.
Tarsis gained the busy highway that leads toward Porta Ticinese.
Passing a man he knew, he looked at him squarely to test the efficacy
of his disguise; the other gave no sign of recognition, and he went
on with renewed confidence. He was aware that the Milanese carried
themselves with an odd mien to-night. There was a certain anxiety
in the faces of some, notably the better-dressed class. Those who
belonged to what is called the lower populace had a saucy, lightly
defiant air; they walked with a swagger and stared the better-dressed
out of countenance; some of the young men had in their gait the swing
acquired by service in a regiment of Bersaglieri, but when they passed
a conscript from the barracks they made sport of him.
Tarsis’s course lay past the Chapel of Santa Maria delle Grazie, where
the _Last Supper_ of Leonardo da Vinci survives. Thence, by one or two
turnings, he reached the Corso Porta Ticinese. Never had he seen that
thoroughfare, always teeming with life, so crowded. The people swarmed
in from all directions and overran the sidewalks. He encountered groups
of workmen singing labour songs or listening to heated oratory which
was a confusion of old prejudice and new thought.
A little farther and he was in the heart of the quarter. There were
now no vistas of gardens through arched porticos. Here and there a
withering flower on a window ledge struggled for life. The champion
of vested interests was vaguely sensible of a sneer in the air--an
impalpable ghost that grinned at stock ideas. A dead cat whizzed from
somewhere and struck a passing carbineer, who looked back with a curse,
which the men returned in kind and the women with hisses. In a café
that had a marionette show a drama was under way. It was called _The
Man and the Master_. Every time the Man belaboured the Master with a
club--which was very often--the bravos of the audience were loud and
long.
Tarsis was seeing the social picture at close range, but it did not
give him a new appreciation. His mind was not receptive that night.
He had not entered poverty’s region for observation and study, but to
seek out the one human creature in the world to whom he was willing to
intrust the task of exacting payment from Mario Forza. For the time
being his whole existence was centred upon that design.
He came to the old octagonal church of San Lorenzo. From a pulpit
outside a priest was preaching the gospel of peace. Most of the
auditors were bare-headed women, whose faces, as they listened, were
blank; some of them wore a look of dull scepticalness. On the skirts
of the assemblage younger persons larked among themselves or scoffed
in an undertone at what the priest said--an irreverence that did not
seem to grate upon anybody’s sensibilities. At times the preacher’s
voice was drowned by the _Marseillaise_ coming in mighty chorus from a
tavern. When a bag on the end of a long pole wielded by a brawny-armed
sacristan was passed among the congregation the coppers chinked, as of
old, to the honour of the Lombardian proverb, “The hand of the poor is
the purse of God.”
News-sellers shouted the name of a revolutionary journal. In big
headlines the revolt of the silk workers was heralded and the military
berated for shooting down the window-smashers. The papers were so held
in the arms of the vendors that Tarsis saw the cartoon that had been
dashed off and published on his wedding day. The editor “had judged the
events of the morning a fit reason for recalling it to patriotic use,
as the Minister of War had recalled some of his reserves to service.”
Wherever Tarsis looked he beheld his punched nose and the flow of gold
pieces.
Beyond the church, serene in the moonlight, as if a spirit of the
eternal chiding men for their vain turmoil, rose the ancient colonnade
of San Lorenzo, the only large fragment of her remote past that Milan
possesses. The great Corinthian columns had stood there since the
third century, when “Mediolanum,” second only to Rome, was affluent in
the dignity and beauty of an imperial city. An orator of the quarter,
sowing discontent, once made use of the noble relic to point a moral.
“There are two sorts of ruins, my comrades,” he said; “one is the work
of time, the other of men.”
The place for which Tarsis was making lay a little farther on. It was
a café of the cheap and gaudy grade; its large front windows bore the
legend in yellow and green, “Café of the Ancient Colonnade.” Before he
could traverse the Corso there swung into view from another street a
vociferous collection of men and women marching without order of line.
They were the striking silk-workers. Tarsis had no taste for breaking
through their ranks, which he must have done to reach the point upon
which he had his eye. He waited until they had gone by.
They made a great hubbub with their songs and outcries against facts
of the existing order. At their head a blacksmith bore a huge banner
inscribed “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Men and Women.”
Scattered through the jumbled mass of marchers were placards bearing
such declarations as:
“We are the golden geese.”
“We want more of the golden eggs.”
“Down with the tax on bread.”
“Down with Tarsis and his gang.”
From windows and sidewalk the onlookers filled the air with their
shouts of “Bravo!” Now and then a group of them would join the
marchers. One placard read, “We Are the Heart-blood of Wealth,” but to
Tarsis the demonstration did not seem a pulse-beat of society; in his
view it was merely another howl from the ungrateful proletariat. He was
annoyed because he had to wait and indignant that the authorities did
not put a stop to the incendiary display. In due course it was broken
up by the carbineers--_ultima ratio legis_. Grape shot was scattered
freely, undertakers enjoyed a revival of trade, and the wards of the
General Hospital were over-crowded. Tarsis heard the firing from a
distance, and thought it high time the authorities took the case in
hand. The last of the marching mob had passed before that act of the
drama was played, leaving him free to cross to the Café of the Ancient
Colonnade.
He saw the Panther--the man he sought--seated at a table by the
window engrossed in a game of _mora_. While he had faith enough in
his disguise as an outdoor device, he was unwilling to tempt fate by
entering the café. It was possible, he reflected, that one of the rough
fellows there, playful in his cups, might pull the goggles from his
eyes. That the sound of his voice alone would be sufficient to make
the one he wanted recognise him he felt sure, but it might reveal his
identity to others as well. So he walked on, to return again and again.
For two hours he passed and repassed the place, striving to catch the
eye of his man and give the signal that would not fail to bring him
forth. When at last his perseverance bore fruit, the fellow who came
out did not look suitable for the employment that Tarsis had to offer.
He was small of stature and of sickly mien. His eyes were those of a
fish, but he moved with the tread of a panther. Tarsis kept on walking,
and the other followed at a discreet distance. In that order they
proceeded amid the throngs of the corsos and in the streets so quiet
that they caught the sound of each other’s footfalls.
So certain was Tarsis of the Panther that he did not once glance
behind. Before he turned to speak to him they had crossed Via Pier
Capponi, the last illuminated street, and were beyond the roofs of the
town standing in the great level plain of Army square. There was no
mincing matters. In the Sicilian patter, which was the mother tongue
of each, Tarsis unfolded his scheme. The wind had blown an opaque
shade over the moon and stars. To the northward, where the long line
of barrack buildings stood, they could discern lights flitting to and
fro and the shadowy movements of men. They hushed their voices once
or twice when there came out of the blackness near by the tramp of
manœuvring soldiers, the clank of arms, the low-keyed commands of the
officers.
When the affair had been arranged, to the smallest detail, the Panther
closed his paw on a thousand-lira note and vanished in the darkness.
Tarsis waited a minute before he made off; then took a path around
by the cavalry barracks, and came into the light of the street lamps
behind the Dal Verme Theatre. There he found a cabman dozing on his
seat. He roused him and named a certain wine-shop hard by the Monforte
Gate beyond the walls.
“Don’t drive across the city,” he said.
“How then, signore?”
“Go by the Girdle Road. I wish to have a drive.”
“As the signore desires,” said the other, clucking to his nag.
Soon they were moving in the wide thoroughfare that girts Milan without
the ramparts. The night was far spent, but men and women kept it alive
in the taverns that clustered about the Ticinese and other gates that
they passed. Tarsis had no intention of visiting the wine-shop, and
when the cabman had set him down there he tossed him his fare and
walked away. Entering the city at once, he followed the Bastion drive
as far as Via Cappuccini, and by this reached the rear gates of Palazzo
Barbiondi. Before stopping to press the electric button concealed in
the iron-work he took off the goggles, turned up the brim of his hat,
and removed the muffler. Beppe answered the summons, rubbing his eyes.
He was about to close the small opening he had made to admit his master
when Tarsis commanded him to throw wide both the gates. The astonished
retainer obeyed, and wondered what new sensation was brewing. Presently
he saw two streams of light shoot from the garage, then the swiftest of
the motor cars with the master at the lever.
“I will return in an hour,” he said, rolling into Via Cappuccini.
Quickly he was beyond the walls on the highway that he had travelled
often in his visits to the Brianza. The moon hung low, but the road
was all his own, and he let his machine go. When he stopped it was
before the post-office in Castel-Minore. The village was asleep and the
post-office was dark; but Tarsis knew of the iron box set in the wall,
with its slot for letters, and, assured that no eye beheld him, he drew
from a pocket the forgery he had prepared with such patience and skill.
A moment he held it in the light of the motor car’s lamps to make
certain that it was no other than the missive addressed to Mario Forza;
then he went to the box and dropped it in. The hour which he told Beppe
he would consume had not elapsed when he was back in Via Cappuccini
touching the secret button at the palace gate.