Phœbus, who had now eaten nothing for three days, and sat in the
chimney-corner, yawning and stretching his arms to such an amazing
extent, first in one direction, and then in another, that he looked like
the castle of St. Angelo when the fireworks are being let off on Easter
Day. A miserable hen, which sat motionless, not daring to attract
attention to itself, and a cat which seemed to have nothing more to wish
for in this life, having now reached the very utmost degree of leanness,
and lay curled up, with half-closed eyes, on the dead ashes of the
hearth, were the only creatures not audibly complaining in the
melancholy darkness of the hut, which covered so much misery. It seemed
as though they were meditating on the infinite vanity of things. But not
so Phœbus’s wife, nor Vittorino, his little son; for the one, by
continual whimpering, and the other with her reproaches, added notes of
sickening despair to the symphony of those sonorous, expansive, and
well-nourished yawns of the blind man. Yet the wife had not the
slightest reason for envying the cat; she was dry and thin as though she
had nothing left for hunger and grief to gnaw at;—she was near her
confinement, poor soul, and, with her face the colour of sodden dead
leaves, and her black eyes, greedy, feverishly bright, and sunken in
their sockets, she was a very different person from the comely young
Rosalinda whom Phœbus had married when he returned from serving in the
_Bersaglieri_. That was six months before the accident at the quarries;
and now she was more like one of the thirsty, dropsical wretches in
Dante’s “Malebolge.”
[Illustration]
“Go to Sor Vincenzino,” said Phœbus.
His wife did not reply.
“Go to the doctor.”
“Don’t you know that a hundred poor sinners might die before either of
_them_ would stir a finger? Don’t you know that the doctor keeps on
asking me for a franc for that tooth he pulled out last year?”
Phœbus moved his jaws for a little while, like an animal chewing the
cud; then he gave seven or eight more yawns, and rubbed his hands as if
he had just concluded a good stroke of business.
“Go to Nannone—go to the chaplain, to the archdeacon, to Lisetta—only go
to some one!”
“I went to Nannone this morning—he was not at home. I went to the
chaplain yesterday, and he gave me that bread. I went to Lisetta the day
before yesterday, and she gave me that _polenta_. And who’s going to the
archdeacon’s, with that vixen of a Modesta there? Not I!”
“Then, you ugly slug, you cannot be hungry, and must just eat your own
talk!”
The wife rose, sobbing and muttering curses, and went out, dragging the
water-jar with her as usual, as an excuse for knocking at people’s
doors. When they opened, however, it was something more than permission
to draw water at the well that she wanted—her errand was more serious
than that.
To-day she did not find them disposed to listen to tales of misery, for
it was the last day of the carnival, and the weather was bright and
clear. A cold wind kept the sky cloudless, and the sun, going down in
the west, seemed to embrace the whole sky and earth with its rays, and
smiled among the shadows and on the peaks of the snowy Apennines, which
gradually faded away into the distance on the last clear rim of the
horizon. But the village, all but the great ruined tower on the little
piazza, the upper part of which was still in light, began to grow dark;
and it was already dusk in the ancient, narrow streets, black as if
after a conflagration, filled with crowds of country folk, among which
the red shawls of the jolly peasant women made bright points here and
there, and noisy with cymbals and other instruments, laughter, and
shouting.
This, then, was not a propitious moment. In fact, Rosalinda was not long
in returning, with her pitcher and her hands both empty. The people,
nearly all poor, were tired of her continual requests, and by this time
the pitcher trick was becoming stale.
“Eh!” said her husband, rubbing his hands as usual. “I suppose they
would not open their doors to you, because it is winter, and they are
afraid of the cold coming in?”
“Be quiet!” screamed Rosalinda to the child. “Be quiet, or I’ll make an
end of you!”
“Be quiet, Vittorino,” repeated Phœbus. “This evening we shall have
twenty loaves and some roast meat! Wife! you be quiet too, and give me
those things that ought to be in the box!”
The things were a heap of rags, on the top of which lay a worn-out tall
hat, very old, but seeming still to remember its former owner; for to
those who had never seen him in any other hat for years and years it was
impossible not to be instantly reminded of that wrinkled, benevolent,
patient face, whose serious sadness was rather added to than diminished
by the somewhat long chin and Dantesque nose. The other things—a
waistcoat, knee-breeches, and a very long black overcoat—had very
evidently belonged to an extremely poor and unfortunate priest.
But Vittorino began to laugh and dance when he saw his father put on not
only this Court suit, as it seemed to him, which his wife handed him,
grumbling and crying at the same time, but a pair of huge horse-hair
whiskers and an enormous paper collar, the points of which reached
nearly to the tip of his nose.
Not only this, but a wave of merriment ran through the whole village,
like the ripple which a puff of wind makes in the surface of the lagoon,
when Phœbus issued from his door thus dressed, with a huge book
containing the whole series of ancient medical prescriptions under his
arm. Some people insisted on recognising in his icy smile, in those
remedies so learnedly prescribed in his slow, pompous manner, in that
awkward, straddling walk, Doctor Ambrogio, the village physician for
forty years, who was also surgeon, veterinary surgeon, and dentist. As
dentist his renown had attracted people from the remotest villages; and
for the expense and trouble he had undergone to acquire it he expected
compensation even from the poor, though in justice it must be said (and
this shows Doctor Ambrogio’s fair-mindedness), much less than from the
rich.
Other masks made a cheerful variation in the crowd—_stenterelli_,[19]
with painted faces and pigtails curled up like a point of interrogation,
harlequins, Turks, madmen, wizards, and big, bearded creatures got up as
nurses, and carrying turkeys swathed up in baby-clothes; which birds,
pushing their red-wattled heads out from among the bandages, never
imagined—though they seemed astonished and confused enough already—the
slaughter which was to befall them later on. The women, with bright eyes
and laughing lips, hung over each other’s shoulders, in the windows and
on the balconies, to get a sight of Phœbus. Only when he began to give
utterance to certain jokes at which no girl—and not even a married
woman—can very well laugh in public, then they knitted their brows,
while the men, looking at them, laughed fit to kill themselves. Then his
popularity grew; then it seemed as though Plenty thought fit to empty
her cornucopia over Phœbus; then the public liberality knew no limits,
and down were showered steaks, and bread, and sausages, and
_polpette_,[20] and _maritozzi_,[21] and _ballotte_,[22] and
_strozza-prete_,[23] and apples, and _schiacciatunta_,[24] and rosemary
cake, and millet puddings—all poured on the devoted head of Phœbus, who,
without putting the smallest morsel into his mouth, stuffed the whole
into the front of his waistcoat, into his hat, and into all the pockets
of his overcoat and trousers.
Yet none the less did he continue to look like Famine, or Lent
personified, come to play the fool in the midst of all that courteous
and kindly merriment. The clumsy black spectacles—with the glasses
broken and mended with black sealing-wax—with which he covered the
horrible sight presented by his burnt eyes, seemed of themselves to
darken him, and take away every touch of life and mobility from his worn
face, white as old wax, which might have been taken for that of an old
man or one far gone in consumption, if it had not been for the intensely
black hair, and the figure, which, though below the middle height, was
broad in the chest, and all muscles and sinews. If his hair had been
white he would not have moved people’s compassion so much as he did when
they saw him still fresh and robust; for thus his lot appeared
peculiarly unjust and cruel, paralysing his strong arms, and robbing him
of so many years of ease gained by hard labour, and reducing him instead
to the necessity of asking alms, which were so limited, and not always
kindly given. Nevertheless, on account of that habit he had of smiling
and rubbing his hands when speaking, many people thought him a merry and
light-hearted man who was fond of his joke.
The shouting crowd hustled him out on the little square, where rises the
gloomy tower—at that moment lit up by the last rays of the sun, with the
hawks wheeling, in the blue sky, round the top.
Doctor Ambrogio, standing at the door of the chemist’s shop, looked like
Æsculapius himself, with his ruddy, well-nourished face, full of severe
learning, and his long white beard, under which appeared, wound several
times round his neck, a heavy scarlet woollen scarf. If this physician,
who was great at blood-letting and cupping, had remained a little behind
the times, the chemist had by no means done so; and in this instance the
old and the new generation joined hands. For the chemist, emulous of his
city colleagues, had sold to a Florentine dealer in antiquities the
phials and vases of glazed terra-cotta and the dried Nile crocodile,
which, hanging with widely-opened jaws from the middle of the ceiling,
had formerly given an uncanny idea of medical science and the
apothecary’s art, as though they had been devouring monsters. Moreover,
he had decorated his shop with all the latest improvements—gilt boxes
and ornamental stoppers, chalybeate water, and purgative syrups enclosed
in cut-glass bottles; and he never sold an ounce of cream of tartar or
bitter salts without doing it up in a little bag of glazed paper. All
this elegance certainly raised the price of his commodities; but only
consider how much it added to the efficiency of the drugs!
Here, right in front of this luxurious establishment, Phœbus stood
still, in the midst of the crowd, opened his book, turned over the
pages, and after discoursing for some time, concluded by prescribing Dr.
Ambrogio, who was still standing in the doorway, and who suffered from
sciatica, _a decoction of asinine cucumber_.
Dr. Ambrogio turned his back, closed the glass door, and said to Sor
Vincenzino, who was seated on the sofa reading the paper: “This blind
man is a public nuisance, and I cannot think why you don’t get him out
of the way. If I were syndic....”
“If you were syndic you would know what red-tape and difficulties and
formalities are! Last year I tried to send him to the hospital for the
blind at ..., and they sent him back because he was not a native of the
place.”
“Yes, I remember. I gave him as full a certificate as I could to get him
away from here. Good heavens! If this town is not a nest of
wretchedness, I don’t know what is.”
The chaplain, who was also in the shop waiting for the chemist, seemed
touched to the quick, and said—
“It is the fault of the rich. If the rich were to think more about
giving work——”
But the doctor interrupted him.
“Here we are with the rich again! Can’t you understand, sir, that the
rich have too many taxes?” The syndic nodded approvingly. “It’s the
Government that’s in fault,” said the doctor. “Here’s the dilemma, and
there’s no getting out of it:—Either they ought to take off the
income-tax, or they, and not we, should see to the feeding of these
starving wretches.”
“Very true! Just the thing I have so often thought,” answered the
syndic. “Because if they were to take off the income-tax, that sum would
remain in the treasury; but it cannot remain there, because the funds
have to be turned to account; and for doing this labour is needed, and
labour being needed it has to be paid for, and being paid for, why,
there you are. Then people have something to eat! Why, that’s quite
clear, gentlemen! No difficulty in understanding that!”
“There was no need for your explanation,” returned the chaplain,
shrugging his shoulders with a slightly vexed look as he rose from the
sofa, stretching out his legs, which appeared, long and thin as those of
a blackbird, under the skirts of his wretched coat. “Even the poor
countess paid income-tax; yet at the end of the year she had spent a
pretty large sum in good works. But her heirs have inherited her money
and not her merciful heart.”
“That is just the sort of speech you might be expected to make,
belonging as you do to the _Misericordia_,” said the doctor, with a
quietly contemptuous smile.
“And a ruined man into the bargain!” whispered Sor Vincenzino into the
doctor’s ear. “Later on, some time, I’ll tell you a little story about
his niece.”
“Throwing away one’s own money in that fashion,” the doctor went on,
with a solemn air of wisdom, “is not charity; it is merely carrying out
the whims of hysteria; and the countess was hysterical from the tip of
her great toe to the ends of her hair. It’s a question of organisation.
You’re far behind the times, chaplain!”
“You had better take care. I may be in advance of you!”
“Everything _may_ be; but that there ought to be methods and limits even
in charity, for otherwise even great fortunes would fall into ruin, this
indisputable and precious axiom of economic science, I am afraid—excuse
me—you are not acquainted with. And with interest, you know, there is no
joking.”
Sor Vincenzino concluded his approving nods by one of final and
comprehensive assent; and wishing to convey clearly to the chaplain
that, in short, he thought nothing of him, he turned his back on him,
and set himself, with a diplomatic countenance, to meditate over his
newspaper. The chaplain understood that, and with his simple face full
of grave sadness, and his white hair curling over his temples, remained
standing, waiting patiently for the medicine for his poor, pretty niece,
who was ill. The doctor kept looking out of the window, and saying to
himself, “I should like to know what has become of the police! They
ought to make an example and dismiss them both! If I saw one of them I’d
tell him to make that rascal hold his tongue!”
“To-day I cure every one for nothing!” Doctor Phœbus was shouting in the
midst of the crowd. “To-morrow it will be too late! Yes, it will be too
late, unhappy people! If you have not enough to live upon—if you do not
pay me a proper fee for every visit—if you don’t want to pay a high
price for medicines, and buy them here of my good friend the chemist,
who is the only man who sells good ones—why then, unhappy wretches, you
can be no patients of mine! Then you will have to go to the hospital—our
hospital!—where he who goes in never comes out any more! What with
fasting, and poultices, and gruel without salt, mallow-water and
cuppings, in a week you will either be cured or gone where you want no
more curing.”
At this point the last glimmer of the fiery sunset, the sound of the
great church bell, and the rattle of a drum which was going round
announcing the “Last Wonderful Comedy of the Burattini,” distracted the
audience. A man slipped out of the Caffé del Giappone, in the dusk, with
baking-pan full of pastry, just out of the oven, and hastened to carry
it to the Casino for the evening’s festivity. It was duly evident from
all the going and coming that there were great things in the air. Not
only at the Casino, but there was to be dancing at Sora Carmelinda’s and
at Sor Gregorio’s; there was to be dancing at the taverns, in the space
between the wine-casks, and in the hay-lofts at the farms; for all which
occasions there had been secretly stored up in every house masks and
half-masks and _papier-mâché_ noses, in which one could be perfectly
certain of not being recognised. Time was pressing; the drum had ceased
to beat and the bell to ring, and instead one could hear stray
barrel-organs, to whose sound little companies of peasants came trooping
in along the dark lanes; and here and there, scattered through the
streets of the merry little town, the shouting and laughter which had
previously been all concentrated in the square. Then Phœbus found that
he had been left alone, in a deeper darkness than before. He stretched
out his numbed hands in order to give them a joyful rub; but the long
tight overcoat, now stuffed out with the bounty showered on him, got in
his way; he tried to stoop and to raise his arms, but this too was a
failure. He was impatient to get home quickly, and instead of being able
to do so he was forced to grope his way slowly along those noisy
streets, where he could scarcely find room to set his stick down.
“Wife! Vittorino! help! I can get no farther! Wife! Come and help me
unload the casks full of presents my patients have given me!” he began
to shout when he was a few paces from the house.
His wife and Vittorino hurried to meet him, and relieved him of his load
in a twinkling; and having entered the house, all three ate like wolves,
finding, moreover, here and there among the spoils, a piece of cod’s
head or a rotten apple, flung for a joke, which were thankfully received
by the cat and the hen, now awakened; so provident is Nature.
Then, unluckily, Phœbus said to his wife, “This evening, at least, dear,
you are not going to complain!” Alas! it was like putting the match to
the powder-magazine. She had been quiet; but the words seemed to set her
going afresh, and she began again—shrieks, tears, and lamentations; how
much reason she had for complaining, and how much for thinking of the
next day, and how much better it would have been if she had always
remained single.
Then Phœbus began, in good earnest, to blaspheme like a heretic, in the
brutal Tuscan way. Yet, being quick-witted and kind-hearted beyond the
average, he understood that such a burst of temper, after all anxiety
had been removed by so abundant a supper, could only have been caused by
the state of her health; and he resisted the temptation of bringing her
to her senses by a good beating. Instead of that, he shuddered, pitied
her, and sat down comfortably in the chimney-corner without saying
another word.
But poor little Vittorino, cheered by the unaccustomed supper, began to
sing and jump about in that gloomy den, just like a bird which has seen
the sun rise. Only the poor woman felt as if her nerves were being torn
to pieces by the noise; and she thought the child, young as he was,
ought to have understood that there was cause rather for crying than
laughing. Then he began to cry; but that, also, would not do; he was to
be quiet and not let himself be heard in any way. The child obeyed with
a sigh, and the mother then took him in her arms, soothing, petting, and
kissing him. But these caresses of his mother’s, who was sobbing after
having beaten him (the blind man was singing to himself the whole time),
could not draw a smile from him; tired out and very serious, he fell
asleep in her arms, and she laid him down on the ghastly mattress and
stretched herself beside him. And after that there was nothing more to
be seen or heard in the room....
They were all asleep, even Phœbus, who loved sleep because it gave him
back his liberty. By day, when he was awake, there was always a cloud
surrounding him, and he fancied that he had to bore his way through it,
as a mole bores through the ground, to find the sun he had lost. But
that dark path went on and on, and never came to an end; it was only in
the darkness of night that he could even see the sun again, when he
slept and dreamed that he was no longer blind, but could move about
freely as before, with his eyes open and seeing. Then he saw them all
again—not his little Vittorino, for the child had been born since his
misfortune, and the father had never looked on his bright eyes and
pretty features; but his wife, and his parents, and his mates, and
sometimes lovely distant landscapes that he had never seen before.... He
had never had such beautiful dreams before he became blind....
But that night he did not sleep sound, for a hand shook him roughly as
he sat in the dark corner of the hearth, and recalled him to the reality
of things—namely, to the belfry tower to ring the bells, according to
orders received from the archdeacon, from eleven o’clock to midnight, in
order to announce the beginning of Lent, and warn people against
breaking in on the fast and vigil.
At the command, then, of Phœbus, still masquerading as the doctor, two
beggars, acting as his subordinates, who had already entered the tower
and seized the bell-ropes, began bending their backs and rising again to
the swing of the bells—a “double” so loud and eloquent in the gloomy
silence as to reach even the most distant cabins, where some ancient
oaks marked the boundary of the parish. But for a great many the bells
tolled in vain. Nay, some masks even went and stood under the
archdeacon’s windows, making unseemly noises, howling and whistling with
the intention of annoying him. And in some hay-lofts the young men,
laughing at the remonstrances of the old and the continued tolling of
the bells, kept up the dancing till daybreak, amid the smoke of the
pipes and the sawing of the violins. The girls, it is true, were
somewhat recalcitrant; but with a few scruples of conscience and a
little remorse, they let themselves be whirled away, after a while,
willingly enough.
After ringing for an hour, Phœbus, hearing the archdeacon’s maid-servant
call him from a window, entered, with his companion, the corridor of
that dignitary’s house, and having cautiously knocked at a door, was
told to come in. They entered a large room lit by an old-fashioned brass
lamp. Facing the door, at a little round table, smoking and sipping
punch, after having finished their game at chess, sat the good
archdeacon, a jolly man of portly presence, verging upon seventy;
Cavalier Vincenzino, the syndic, with bye-laws and civic enactments
clearly written on the folds of his brow and the curves of his mouth;
and the preaching friar, an elderly and hypocritical Franciscan, with
red hair and a round face, who had arrived that very day to preach the
Lenten sermons. When Phœbus and his companions entered, the friar hid
his modest little pipe in his wide sleeve, and produced instead a
snuff-box,[25] from which he immediately offered a pinch to the syndic
and the archdeacon, who readily accepted. The archdeacon, seeing Phœbus
appear before him in that burlesque costume, and with that crushed and
battered chimney-pot hat, threw back the tassel of his black skull-cap,
which was dangling close to his left ear, and nearly choked himself with
laughter. Modesta, the maid, who made a glorious entry, carrying a large
dish of steaming meat-dumplings, hastened to set them down on the other
table, which was ready laid in the middle of the room, so that she might
scratch her head and laugh, like her master—or even louder and longer.
This pleased neither the preaching friar nor the syndic, and they
whispered together, looking deeply scandalised.
“_Persicomele!_”[26] exclaimed the archdeacon, “are you going about
masked after the stroke of twelve? And what sort of a costume might this
be?”
“It is the costume of a doctor of medicine!”
“Dear archdeacon, my dear sir!” said the Franciscan, pointing at Phœbus,
“this suit of clothes has belonged to a priest; do you not see the black
stockings, the knee-breeches, the waistcoat? Archdeacon, it is not the
proper thing to let the clothes of the clergy be seen in a masquerade.”
“_Persicomele!_” exclaimed the archdeacon, looking more closely, as he
passed his hand over his knees, as if dusting his breeches. “Who gave
you these clothes?”
“The chaplain!”
“Good! very good!” exclaimed the syndic, chuckling with delight, but he
immediately resumed the calm, severe, and munificent aspect of the
person who has to sign municipal edicts.
“It seems impossible that, at the present day, certain priests should
have so little respect for their cloth!” said the Franciscan
indignantly. “Fatal effects, my dear sir!...” And he took an enormous
pinch of snuff, with both hands.
“You must not believe, reverend father,” replied the syndic, with some
heat, “that the chaplain gives the law to our commune; he is a——”
“Sir!” exclaimed the archdeacon.
“But you don’t know——”
“I don’t want to know. The chaplain is a priest, and that’s enough! Find
me another who for 260 francs will take the services of the
_Misericordia_ the whole year round, who will go ten or twelve miles on
foot, in the depth of winter, or in the dog-days, to attend a funeral,
and that with seventy years on his back! And then he has all his
brother’s family to keep—seven persons! But you were only joking,
Cavalier!—so never mind, let it pass.... And as for you, you blind
rascal, I must speak to you again about this. You had no business to go
masquerading in these clothes, which were given you in charity.
To-morrow, I shall tell the chaplain to take them away from you again!”
“What a pity!” thought Doctor Phœbus to himself; “I was going to make
the overcoat into a nice jacket to wear only on feast-days!”
“But, to make a short story of it,” resumed the archdeacon after some
moments of anxious silence, “what did you come here for—eh?”
“We came to see whether it is time for the _polpette_.”
“The _polpette_ are on the table; sit down, therefore, and eat.”
“Fair and softly,” exclaimed one of the guests a little later, giving
Phœbus a tremendous nudge with his elbow.
“Blind man, you’re going too fast!” cried the archdeacon, looking at
him.
“May I lose my sight if I have eaten more than two!”
“Two!—you’ve eaten a dozen!”