The sword of wealth

by Henry Wilton Thomas

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.”