CHAPTER V
The case had come up expectedly two days after a public holiday. In one of the Italian provinces, on that festal day of patriotic celebration, some of the municipal board and the communal council had made most overt manifestations of advanced republican sentiments. The royalist councillors had immediately resigned their seats; telegrams had been despatched to deputies, newspapers, men of influence; the question had all in a moment assumed a serious aspect.
The summer season had arrived, and the sittings were dragging along in weary fashion; foreign politics had already sunk into their summer sleep; no important laws were being passed; the diversion came up unexpectedly, as a surprise, and was therefore welcome, and received general attention. The love-making between the Chamber and the Ministry had grown languid, like all passions meeting response and gratification; intimacy had brought disgust to those who had loved too warmly, and the commencement of the dispute, which grew more and more complicated, was the lash that stung the surfeited, apathetic lovers to activity. They had neither the inclination left, nor the strength, for fervent love. They now met to fight, to exchange insults, to wage a war of suspicion, political calumny, and private slander. The chief accused was the Minister of Home Affairs, who, obedient to his ideal worship of liberty, had not found it in his heart to cast off the aforesaid municipality.
A man of profound thought, large ideas, fine character, accustomed to take a broader view of political questions than was tolerable to the petty spirit of other politicians, ever rising to a lofty conception of things, he stated that the liberty of political conscience must be respected. In private amused at the unwonted importance attached to the affair, he said there was 'no likelihood that these little aldermen would burn down the temple of our institutions.' He declared publicly that the matter was trifling; and to the anxious, deeply-concerned people who came to appeal to him he showed the calm front of the superior individual, which seemed a pretence, but actually was the security of a quiet mind.
But all round him, surreptitiously and visibly, raged the desire for a crisis. All the malcontents, the ambitious, the mediocre, the envious incapables, the conceited fools, agitated, combined, held meetings, talked, harnessing mediocrity with envy, ambition with conceit, discontent with folly. They shouted in the cafés, made speeches at the eating-houses, arranged little sub-conspiracies in the parlours of the furnished houses where deputies had lodgings, behaved like arch-plotters at the tables set out in summer by Ronzi and Singer, the liquor-sellers, in the Piazza Colonna.
All day, at all the railway-stations, from all parts of Italy, deputies were arriving with small hand-bags—the emergency-week bag, into which a careful wife packs four shirts, six pocket-handkerchiefs, a pair of slippers, a clothes-brush, and so on, against the possibility of sudden departure. There were already three hundred and fifty deputies in Rome, an unusual number, never mustered in the most active winter sessions. And probably every one of the three hundred and fifty was expecting, believing, wishing, hoping to become, was certain of becoming, a Minister after the crisis.
The Minister—a strong, good, and wise man—either did not hear, or, if he did, ascribed no importance to the increasing clamour about the crisis.
'There will be no crisis,' he smilingly replied to those who asked him about it in friendly conversation. 'There will be no crisis,' he stated to those whom he assured of the fact with a preoccupied air of condescension.
At bottom he knew the political world and the men composing it. He was fully aware that the Prime Minister was on his side, that the seven other Ministers were with him, that this powerful body of nine would not allow itself to be ousted for no earthly reason but the refusal of a Mayor to sign an address to the King and his raising the cross of the tricoloured banner. He knew the furious lust for power of his eight colleagues, the tenacity of those oysters sticking to the rock; to attain it they had gone through all kinds of political sufferings and agony, and now they would sooner die than let go their hold. He smiled as he thought of what strength proceeds from weakness; he smiled, and felt safe.
But he passed on to a more moral flight of thought: his fine beliefs were still intact from scepticism, his faith in human conscience was yet unshaken. He felt that this supreme worship of liberty was rooted in every Italian heart and brain; he knew that mean interests might for a moment possess those hearts and brains; but that all would vanish in the presence of a great idea.
Malicious whispers, misrepresentations, false or fabricated news which reached him, were without effect; in vain would some true friend caution him and counsel a pessimistic view. The Home Minister maintained his ideality, which was touched ever so little with bitterness: he was not subject to defeat; he felt morally and materially secure, united with his brother Ministers in a generous cause that itself was strength. He ignored the approach of a political crisis, this Minister; besides, in the political caldron all kinds of characters were cooking, and the traits of every section of Italy were represented. The Sicilians were conspicuous for their warm feeling, mixed with irony and common-sense; the Neapolitans shouted and waved their arms; the Romans waited patiently and temporized, but knew the moment for action; the Tuscans laughed behind their spectacles, smiled mockingly under their moustaches, Mephistophelian and ambitious as they were, and laughed at each other and all the rest; the Lombards, with their aristocratic tendencies, flocked together in a solitary group; the Piedmontese and the Ligurians came and went, and made a bustle without speaking, their communications with each other being through the eye. But the most fiery, the most rebellious and wild, were the members from the smaller provinces—the Abruzzi, the Marches, the Romagnas, the Campania, the Calabrias, the countrymen, the representatives of the provinces that give life and wealth to the great cities, the deputies who had a genuine love for politics, who believed in them, who thought politics were the greatest force in human life, who became drunk with them as with strong wine.
But in the midst of all these latent elements of discord the men of the Basilicata never spoke, but coalesced, formed groups; frigid and impeccable, they asked no questions and gave no answers. The Minister, the stanch man and true, felt safe; he had never known fear at any juncture—and now he smiled.
When the Minister of Home Affairs entered the hall, on the day when the question was to be brought up, a prolonged murmur ran along the benches. He did not fail to observe it, but, a strong man in great things and small, he had the good sense not to look about, nor to look up at the galleries. It at once occurred to him, however, that the matter was more serious than he at first had considered it. Indeed, on the first day he had said to the Prime Minister, in a tone of unconcern:
'There is a lot of talk about this municipal affair.'
'Heat-blossoms,' the Prime Minister had replied, with a smile.
'Do you agree with me?'
'Of course I agree with you,' answered the other, without, however, specifying upon what points.
'Do you think Don Mario Tasca's speech will be important?'
'One of the usual speeches.'
And they talked of other things.
His other colleagues in the Cabinet had shielded themselves behind a strict reserve. Vargas only, the Minister of Fine Arts, a lean, dried-up old man, consumed by devouring ambitions, had offered some uncertain resistance, which the Minister of Home Affairs had combated in an uncertain tone. In the Chamber, however, there was undeniable evidence of a prospectively hot debate. Turning over some of his papers with eyes lowered, the Home Minister became conscious, from the loud, Parliamentary buzz, that at least 400 members must be present. He glanced up at the diplomatic gallery, where the Countess di Santaninfa, lovely and pensive, and dressed in black, was scanning the hall with melancholy eyes, and where the Countess di Malgra, a pale, seductive blonde, who was that day wearing a yellow straw hat, never for an instant ceased from intently considering the assembly. The civil service gallery was full; in the press gallery a triple row of heads anxiously bent forward.
'They smell powder,' thought the Minister. And he looked at his two or three brother Ministers, as if he had something to tell them, but they wore such an indifferent air that he said nothing. He therefore merely glanced at the House. It had quieted down, but had a hard, solid appearance; it was a substantial body of 400 silent, expectant men. And in a quarter of an hour, at three o'clock, the orator of the Right, Don Mario Tasca, began his address from the top bench of the last section but one, in a stillness like that of an empty church. The Prime Minister had come softly into the hall, and had sat down at the end of the Cabinet bench. Don Mario Tasca was a white-haired old man, with pink skin, and a white beard for a collar. His style was elegant; it had rounded periods accompanied and completed by circular manual gestures, resembling the rotation of a small wheel. The speech flowed on and on, softly and gently, with never a failure of the voice, never a check, just like the song of a bird. The orator did not look at the Minister; he looked into the air, like an inspired genius. He never bent his head to refer to his notes, but was as one who knows his part by memory. But, under all this external suavity, his discourse yet sounded of rebuke; the speaker mentioned neither individuals nor facts, but, confining himself to terms somewhat vague, stated that certain institutions and certain ideas were being assailed which hitherto no one had ever thought of impugning. It was a speech that did not rail, and was rather nebulous, perhaps; still, it accused. It withheld names, but it scorched consciences.
The Minister paid close attention, and from time to time glanced sideways at the Premier, who never once turned in his direction; the other Ministers also listened attentively to Don Mario Tasca, who continued in his beautiful, fluent prose. All the deputies were turned to the right and were lending ear; up above the whole public was leaning forward; the two Countesses—the dark and the fair—seemed to be drinking in Don Mario Tasca's words.
He spoke for one hour, with never a halt, and scarcely a blunder, and without the least change in the colour of his vocal tone. He challenged the Minister, in his last sentences, which became briefer and ever more contracted, to answer whether he intended to persist in this criminal do-as-you-like, go-as-you-please system. A very, very long murmur of applause rewarded Don Mario Tasca.
The Minister, before replying, tried to question his chief with his eyes, but the Prime Minister was writing, and this was therefore impossible. He then rose, and answered very placably, very judicially, reducing the question to its lowest terms, declaring it unimportant, planing and smoothing all the facts, having recourse to a number of highly-sensible arguments, foregoing expansion into fine language, which he believed inept. And as he spoke so calmly, he looked about, casting questioning glances at the deputies' faces, as if seeking their approval. But their faces did not light up, for they were displeased. The deputies were not mollified—no, not they; they had come here wrought up by a week of debate and anticipation, the matter was very serious, and the Minister had tried to deal them another hand by belittling the whole affair.
Fruitlessly did he lavish the best of his cleverness and ingenuity, as well as striking sallies both lucid and logical; he continued in the wrong key, not having caught the spirit of the occasion, blind to the circumstance that good oratory was the thing on a day when a crisis threatened. He took note of the general dissatisfaction but without understanding its cause—he still thought he could win this battle with the plain weapons of reason. But glacial silence prevailed in the hall at the close of his defence.
Niccolo Ferro, the Radical deputy, hereupon requested the floor. The Minister frowned; that moment foreboded peril. Niccolo Ferro, the best speaker of the Extreme Left, calm, lucid, imperturbable, strong in logic as in rhetoric, threw so clear a light on the situation that it was no longer subject to doubt. The action of that Mayor was held up in its real and great importance; it was a sign of the times; no one would venture to violate liberty of conscience so far as to prohibit or punish such manifestations. He treated of the historical traditions of the communes, of the long strife in Italy for the attainment of that state of freedom, which was yet in the bud, but which would soon blossom out. A Councillor is a man, he is a citizen, said the orator; he thinks according to his convictions, and acts as he thinks. Institutions are not destroyed by the hands of men, but fall because of their inherent corruption; not men strangle them, but new ideas are their ruin. They fatally rot through the germs of disease they contain; nothing can ever save them when decay has progressed so far.
Fundamentally Niccolo Ferro was both pleased and displeased with the Minister, and he declared it openly.
He was displeased because he, the champion of liberty, was attempting to throw ridicule on the courageous and bold conduct of this clear-sighted municipality; he was pleased because he knew that the old faith never changed in the hearts of upright men, despite the allurements of despotism to those in power; and he was convinced that never would a tyrannous act be done under instruction from that illustrious man.
The illustrious man had absorbed the whole speech, while nervously twisting his gray moustache. He looked at Niccolo Ferro, his friend, very gently, quite unreprovingly. He felt crushed; he felt the amazement of the Chamber at this fresh piece of audacity from the Radical party; he felt that they all, friend and foe, wanted to force him into an equivocal position, from which there was no escape. He could neither declare himself out and out of Niccolo Ferro's opinion, nor oppose him. In that hour he was conscious of having indulged in a too loyal policy, founded on truth alone, inspired solely by lofty principles, independent of men and events, poetical almost and unreal—a policy so unpractical that it lent itself to ready defeat by both the Right and the Left at the same time. The illustrious man recognised all this, but could say nothing. Possibly, in this peril the old Prime Minister, by addressing the house in his kindly, easy way, might save the situation; he might put Don Mario Tasca's mystical, lyrical apprehensions, and Niccolo Ferro's uncalled-for petulance, in their proper places. But the old Premier was reading a letter, as though he were in the peace of his study instead of in the tumult of the hall.
The floor was then given to the Honourable Sangiorgio, and immediately the assembly was hushed. The Prime Minister raised his hoary head, and looked at the Basilicatan deputy as piercingly as if he were trying to read his soul; the Home Minister breathed a sigh of relief, supposing that what himself and the Premier had omitted Sangiorgio would say. Sangiorgio was clever, and was friendly to the Ministry, so that he could not fail to set things right.
Instead, in one first cruel sentence, the Honourable Sangiorgio fell fiercely and with concentrated wrath upon the Government's home policy. Don Mario Tasca and Niccolo Ferro had said too little, whether for or against. Things really bore a far graver aspect. For a year back the worst disorder had reigned in the management of internal affairs; there was no longer a guiding hand, no longer a bridle; the public officials performed their duties at haphazard, or did nothing at all, having no orders. The policy of the Home Department was founded on equivocation and culpable carelessness; these elastic theories of liberty were causing havoc. And this bitter, almost tragical vein of attack was readily guessed to correspond to the sentiment of the House, which murmured approval of each sentence. Sangiorgio cited facts. He enumerated the Republican associations, which in the course of a year had increased beyond measure; he declared that Republican committees were multiplying everywhere, and likewise rebellious acts, which were done not by that single Mayor, nor in that single place, but by other public officials elsewhere. He spoke of a Prefect who had consented to take part in a banquet where toasts to the King were prohibited, and said that the Minister of Home Affairs, although he knew of it, and in spite of the articles in the Royalist newspapers, had not reprimanded such Prefects, Commissioners, and delegates, all of whom were allowed the free scope of their own opinions and own will, committing deeds inexcusably arbitrary or weak. But the dominant note was their indolence, their shameful neglect. No energetic circular of instructions was ever sent from Rome. The reports of the most zealous functionaries always remained unanswered, or were replied to ambiguously; at Rome, a number of philosophical and sociological deductions were indulged in, but never was an energetic step taken.
The Chamber applauded Sangiorgio so vociferously that the Speaker was obliged to call for order twice. Sangiorgio spoke with a peculiar hardness of voice, with such sharp accent and brevity of phrase, and with such bare simplicity, that the smallest points told. His facts were like so many blows from an unerring weapon, each striking the mark remorselessly. It was a document of impeachment, a summary compiled with the cold cruelty of a judge in vindication of law and ethics. Sangiorgio's face was set and severe, his features were rigid; he did not smile, did not gesticulate, nor had recourse to any of the common artifices of oratory; he seemed to be so sure of his cause, and so wrapt up in it, that he considered a cold, precise exposition sufficient. He supplied no comments, or very few, but enumerated facts, proceeding from one to another, with the occasional remark: 'But that is not all; there is more.' This sentence, repeated at intervals of three or four minutes with the regularity of a tragic refrain, made a deep impression; nervous tremors seem to run down the spinal column of that great body in the Chamber.
The atmosphere of Parliament was laden with electricity. No one was writing, no one was reading—all were turned towards the speaker; groups of listeners had gathered near his section; some had even climbed the stairs, as if to drink in Sangiorgio's words, in their exaggerated attentiveness. Up above, in the diplomatic gallery, had appeared the ever-beautiful Countess Lalla d' Ariccia, who was the surest barometer of a crisis, for she never came excepting in electrical weather. Donna Luisa Catalani was leaning over, her little head tied about with a white veil, and beside her Donna Angelica Vargas looked down, her lovely face unveiled, quite pink at the temples, under the excitement of curiosity.
The speaker recapitulated all he had said, using his synthesis upon the audience with the force of a hammer. And without adding any deductions, without challenging reply, without so much as expecting one, and in disdain of whatever argument from whatever opponent, he read out the following motion:
'That the Chamber, disapproving of the Ministry's home policy, now proceed with the business of the day. Francesco Sangiorgio.'
Then there arose such a huge, irrepressible clamour that for five minutes the Speaker rang his bell in vain. Discussion rang all over the hall, on the steps, in the hemicycle, on the benches, in the galleries—everywhere. The ladies in the diplomatic gallery stared and stared, themselves, perhaps, also seized with nervous agitation.
And the strong, honest man who was Minister of Home Affairs had, without budging, received the strokes of the Honourable Sangiorgio in his breast, half admiring his adversary's might.
Only, towards the end, when the ultimate solution was becoming plain, a growing doubt assailed him. After that extremely vigorous attack, coming from the Centre, from a Ministerialist, from a man who had shown democratic leanings, the situation was so perilous that only the Prime Minister could relieve it. Defence now devolved upon the senior, the chief, the old Parliamentarian. A new and bitter suspicion sprang from the Minister's heart to his head, and in those five minutes of Parliamentary uproar, like certain poisonous plants indigenous to the tropics so this suspicion spread apace in his soul. He looked at the old Prime Minister as penetratingly as if he wanted to tear the truth from out of him, yet, fearing lest some emotion might cloak his voice, he said not a word to him, nor asked him a single question, but merely looked at him, expecting him to come out of his silence, to come to life, for that morning he might as well have been dead. The Prime Minister, however, remained speechless, and went on writing, stroking his beard with his other hand. And the Minister of Home Affairs suddenly composed himself inwardly, showing nothing outwardly but a slight pallor.
Certainty was at hand, and it was irrefragable. He felt himself abandoned, felt himself betrayed. His colleagues and the Prime Minister had left him to fall alone. They had already separated from him, as though shunning a corpse because of its nauseous odour. Assuredly the betrayal was complete; they wanted to be rid of him, as of a diseased arm or a cancerous leg. The Chamber would have none of him henceforth—that he felt. When the Speaker gave him permission to answer in his own justification, in frank, calm tones the illustrious man was heard to say:
'I have no remarks to make; I accept the Sangiorgio motion.'
At the division, a majority of thirty votes went against him. The Minister of Home Affairs had fallen.
A week after the official Ministerial organ, all the other newspapers following suit, published this:
'It is now ascertained that, in the reconstruction of the Cabinet, Don Silvio Vargas will exchange from the Fine Arts to the Home Department. The Honourable Sangiorgio, in vain requested to join in the new combination, has persistently refused, and has left for the Basilicata.'