“It was the military that shot him down,” he declared. “And would you know why, my comrades? I will tell you: Because he is the friend of the man or woman who toils. That’s why they wanted to kill him—because he is the friend of labour. They don’t want labour to have any friends except dead friends.”
“True, true!” came from the crowd.
“They are trying to tell us that one of the people shot Mario Forza,” the orator went on. “Ha, ha! The capitalistic press wants to ram that down our throats. But they can’t do it. I brand that assertion a lie. The press and the Government are the slaves of capital, and they’ll do anything, say anything to serve their masters. Bah! What right have they to come to us who do the work and say, ‘You may keep one tenth of what you produce; the rest you must hand over to us’? What right, I ask, have they to tax the bread out of our children’s mouths and the coats off our backs? And what do they do with the money that they plunder us of? I will tell you: They use it to pay things like those over there—those things with the carbines—they hire them to shoot us down if we say that our souls are our own. That’s what they spend our earnings for!”
There was a deluge of hisses for the carbineers. They made no reply, by word, look or gesture, although some of the women shook their fists at them and snarled in their faces like tigresses.
“On to Milan, comrades!” the ploughman cried, pointing dramatically toward the city. “On to Milan and help our brothers pull down the capitalistic Bastile!”
“Bravo! On to Milan! Down with the capitalistic Bastile!”
Repeating the cry, they scattered, men and women alike, to their homes, to get rakes, hoes, scythes, shovels, axes, or any other implement with which to arm themselves.
Hera had lingered to catch the words about Mario, and then, impelled by the thought that she might arrive at the hospital only to find him lifeless, she pressed forward, urging her horse to greater speed. Behind her, more than a league, she had left the river, her course lying now through a country green with maize, over a road that slanted to the south-west from the town of San Michele; keeping to this she would enter upon the Monza Road not far from Milan’s Venetian Gate.
She was one of the many now that fared toward the city. The road swarmed with the peasantry, as on festal days, only it was plain that this was no holiday throng. In groups the people moved onward, most of them afoot, a few women on sorry nags, and others with their children in rumbling farm carts. Beneath their sullen demeanour seethed a spirit of contempt for established things. They called to one another in the shrill mezzo canto of their dialect, scoffing at authority and boasting of what they would do to pull it down.
Once or twice Hera came upon a band of farm hands marching with a semblance of line that bespoke service in the army. For weapons they carried scythes and pitchforks. Here and there a woodman, shouldering a glistening axe, swaggered along with fine assurance of success in his mission to fell the oak of capitalism. “Long live the industrial army!” was the cry that greeted the marching ones oftenest as they trudged on, their faces set with determination.