It proved a simple one, after all—the more so as the animal, it appeared, was tenant in a very swarming warren, where concealment was easy. It was into a frowzy hole that, in the end, he saw him disappear—a tunnel, with a grating over it, like a sewer-trap.
And so, satisfied and not satisfied, he was turning away, when he was conscious in a moment of a face looking from the grating.
A minute later, threading his path along a by-alley, he emerged upon a sweeter province of the town, and stood to disburden himself of a mighty breath.
'So!' he muttered: 'He is there, is he! Well, the plot grows complicate.'
CHAPTER XVII
There was a quarter of Milan into which the new light penetrated with some odd uncalculated effects. It was called, picturesquely enough, 'The Vineyard,' and as such certainly produced a great quantity of full-blooded fruit. Vines that batten on carrion grow fat; and here was the mature product of a soil so enriched. There was no disputing its appetising quality. That derived from the procreant old days of paganism, before the germ of the first headache had flown out of Pandora's box into a bung-hole. 'The Vineyard's' body yet owed to tradition, if centuries of adulteration had demoralised its spirit. Still, altogether, it was faithfuller of the soil, self-consciously nearer to the old Nature, than was ever the extrinsic Guelph or Ghibelline that had usurped its kingdom. Wherefore, it seemed, it had elected to construe this new reactionism, this redintegratio amoris, this sudden much-acclaiming of Nature, into a special vindication of itself, its tastes, methods and appetites, as representing the fundamental truth of things; and, ex consequenti, to appropriate Messer Bembo for its own particular champion and apologist.
Alas, poor Parablist! There is always that awakening for an enlightened agitator in any democratic mission. Does he look for some comprehension by the Demos of the necessity of radical reform, his eyes will be painfully opened. The pruning, by its leave, shall never be among the suckers down by the root, but always among the lordly blossoms. Shall Spartacus once venture openly to stoop with his knife, he shall lose at a blow the popular suffrage. At a later date, Robespierre, who was not enlightened, had to subscribe to the misapplication of his own reforms, or be crushed by the demon he had raised. Here in Milan, 'The Vineyard' was the first to renounce its champion, when once it found itself to be intimately included in that champion's neo-Christianising scheme.
Alas, poor Parablist! Not Reason but Fanaticism is the convincing reformer! the bigot, not the saint, the effective drover of men.
In the meanwhile 'The Vineyard' swaggered and held itself a thought more brazenly than heretofore, on the strength of its visionary election. Always a clamorous rookery, one might have fancied at this time a certain increase in the boisterous obscenity of its note, as that might presage the fulfilment of some plan for its breaking out, and planting itself in new black colonies all over the city. But as certainly, if this were so, its illusionment was a very may-fly's dance.
Now as, on a noon of this late Autumn, we are brought to penetrate its intricacies, a certain symbolic fitness in its title may or may not occur to us. Supposing that it does, we will accept this Via Maladizione where we stand, this gorge of narrow high-flung tenements, looped between with festoons of glowing rags, for the supports and dead trailers of a gathered vintage. Below, the vats are full to brimming, and the merchants of life and death forgathered in the markets. Half-way down the street a little degraded church suddenly spouts a friar, who, punch-like, hammers out on the steps his rendering of the new nature, which is to remember its cash obligations to Christ, and so vanishes again in a clap of the door. A barber, shaving a customer in the open street, gapes and misses his stroke, thereby adding a trickle to the sum of the red harvest. Mendicants pause and grin; oaths rise and buzz on all sides, like dung-flies momentarily disturbed. And predominant throughout, the vintagers, the true natives of the soil, swarm and lounge and discuss, under a rent canopy, the chances of the season and its likely profits.