“Don’t drive across the city,” he said.
“How then, signore?”
“Go by the Girdle Road. I wish to have a drive.”
“As the signore desires,” said the other, clucking to his nag.
Soon they were moving in the wide thoroughfare that girts Milan without the ramparts. The night was far spent, but men and women kept it alive in the taverns that clustered about the Ticinese and other gates that they passed. Tarsis had no intention of visiting the wine-shop, and when the cabman had set him down there he tossed him his fare and walked away. Entering the city at once, he followed the Bastion drive as far as Via Cappuccini, and by this reached the rear gates of Palazzo Barbiondi. Before stopping to press the electric button concealed in the iron-work he took off the goggles, turned up the brim of his hat, and removed the muffler. Beppe answered the summons, rubbing his eyes. He was about to close the small opening he had made to admit his master when Tarsis commanded him to throw wide both the gates. The astonished retainer obeyed, and wondered what new sensation was brewing. Presently he saw two streams of light shoot from the garage, then the swiftest of the motor cars with the master at the lever.
“I will return in an hour,” he said, rolling into Via Cappuccini. Quickly he was beyond the walls on the highway that he had travelled often in his visits to the Brianza. The moon hung low, but the road was all his own, and he let his machine go. When he stopped it was before the post-office in Castel-Minore. The village was asleep and the post-office was dark; but Tarsis knew of the iron box set in the wall, with its slot for letters, and, assured that no eye beheld him, he drew from a pocket the forgery he had prepared with such patience and skill. A moment he held it in the light of the motor car’s lamps to make certain that it was no other than the missive addressed to Mario Forza; then he went to the box and dropped it in. The hour which he told Beppe he would consume had not elapsed when he was back in Via Cappuccini touching the secret button at the palace gate.
CHAPTER XVII
THE POT BOILS OVER
The following day at dawn La Ferita and forty thousand fellow mill and factory hands broke the time-honoured rule of their lives. Instead of going to the work that awaited them, they joined the battalions of the unemployed and set about the business of redressing their wrongs. They adopted the extraordinary course of throwing up barricades and taking possession of half of the town. To Ulrich the Austrian and masters of labour in general this boiling over of the social pot was a puzzle. And the municipal authorities were astonished that so many thousands of the people should follow the banner of anarchy; that men and women, hundreds of them, should stand their ground and die when cavalry charged the barricades. The military officers could not comprehend it at all, but agreed, over their cognac in the cafés, that such heroism was worthy of the conventional battle-field.
Mario Forza and his party in the Camera had striven to avert the disaster, but always the Government had been deaf to the warning. Why workers should cease work and wish to upset the established order was as much a riddle to the cabinet as to the shop-keeper and the manufacturer. The editor of the newspaper that printed the famous “punched nose” of Tarsis was asked what he thought of the situation. He defined it as a mixture of labour war and hunger begotten of incompetent, unenlightened government.
At one gate the troops—most of them country lads—had to fight thousands of peasants armed with pitchforks and scythes who tried to re-enforce the rebels within the walls. Cavalry rushes and volleys from the infantry were used against them, but their barricades did not fall until cannon was discharged into them. Many of the rioters had had more experience as soldiers than the uniformed farm hands against whom they fought; a condition difficult to avoid in a country where military service is the price of citizenship.