The Waters of Edera

"The worst, in a work, is that a foreign company, already established for several years in this country, has obtained a faculty to turn this water out if its course and use it as the motive power of an electric railway and of an acetylene manufactory, and of other enterprises."

"And this cannot be undone?"

"I fear not; they are rich and powerful. What are we? Let me get home. There you shall hear all, and judge."

Adone asked and said no more. He turned and went backward. His steps were slow and unsteady, his head was hung down. The dry, hot air was like fire around them; the sun, though still low, darted fierce rays upon them, like spears thrown with a sure aim. He had not known how much and how strongly he had hoped until now that he heard that there was no hope left.

Don Silverio, though he did not speak of himself, was faint with fatigue; the return journey had tried him more cruelly than the first, since on his way to Rome he had been sustained by the hope to find the project abandoned, or at the least uncertain. He had spent all his scanty earnings, so hardly and tediously collected through a score of years, and he had brought back to his poor people, and to the youth he loved, nothing except the confirmation of their worst fears. It was with difficulty that he could drag his aching feet over the burn grass back to his parish.

When they reached the bridge they were on the village side of the stream. Adone, with an effort, raised himself from the trance into which he had fallen.

"Forgive me, sir; you are overtired, you must rest. I will come to you later."

"No, no," said Don Silverio quickly, for he thought the youth in no state to be alone. "I will wash and take a cup of coffee, then I will tell you all. Wait in my book-room."

They went together to his house. There was no one in the street or on the walls except some children gathering dandelion leaves in the ditch. They reached the priest's house unobserved; only the little dog, who was making his diurnal search there, rushed out of the entrance in a frenzy of rapture.

"Poor little man! Dear Signorino!" murmured Don Silverio, and he took the little creature in his arms. Then he opened the door of his study. "Wait there," he said to Adone. "I will soon come downstairs. I will only wash off the dust of this journey."

Adone obeyed.

The room was dusky, cool, silent; he sat down in it and waited; he could hear the loud, uneven beating of his own heart in the stillness.

As he felt now, so, he thought, must feel men who have heard their own death-sentence, and are thrust alone into a cell.

If Don Silverio could do nothing, to whom could he turn?

Could he induce the people to rise? It would be their ruin as well as his, this rape of the river. Would they bear it as they bore taxation, neglect, conscription, hunger?

It was not half an hour, although it seemed to him half a day, which passed before Don Silverio came down the stone stair, his little dog running and leaping about him. He seated himself before Adone, by the shuttered window, through which, by chinks and holes in the wood, there came rays of light and tendrils of vine.

Then detail by detail, with lucidity and brevity, he narrated all he had heard and done in Rome, and which it was exceeding hard to bring home to the comprehension of a mind wholly ignorant of such things.

"When I reached Rome," he explained, "I was for some days in despair. The deputy of San Beda was not at the Chamber. He was in Sicily. Another deputy, a friend of the Prior at San Beda, to whom I had a letter, was very ill with typhoid fever. I knew not where to turn. I could not knock at the doors of strangers without credentials. Then I remembered that one with whom I had been friends, great friends, when we were both seminarists, had become a great man at the Vaticano. It was scarcely possible that he, in his great elevation, would recollect one unseen for a quarter of a century. But I took courage and sent in my name. Imagine my surprise and emotion when I was admitted at once to his presence, and was received by him with the uttermost kindness. He assisted me in every way. He could not of course move ostensibly in a matter of the government, himself, but he gave me letters to those who could obtain me the information and the interviews which I desired. He was goodness itself, and through him I was even received by his Holiness. But from all those political and financial people whom I saw I learned but the same thing. The matter is far advanced, is beyond any alteration. The company is formed. The concurrence of parliament is not to be, but has long been, given. The ministry favours the project. They all repeated to me the same formula: public works are to the public interest. They babbled commonplaces. They spoke of great advantages to the province. I pleaded as forcibly as I could in the interests of this valley, and I opposed fact to formula. But my facts were not those which they wanted; and they told me, politely but unmistakably, that a churchman should not seek to interfere with civil matters. The promoters are masters of the position. They are all of accord: the foreign bankers, the Italian bankers; the foreign engineers, the Italian engineers; the Technical office, the President of Council, the dicastero of Hygiene, of Agriculture, of Public Works, all of them. Our poor little valley seems to them a desirable prey; they have seized it, they will keep it. They were all courteous enough. They are polite, and even unwilling to cause what they call unnecessary friction. But they will not give an inch. Their talons are in our flesh as an eagle's in a lamb's. One thinks fondly that what a man possesses is his own, be it land, house, stream—what not! But we mistake. There is a thing stronger, higher, more powerful than any poor title of property acquired by heritage, by purchase, or by labour. It is what they call expropriation. You think the Edera cannot be touched: it can be expropriated. You think the Terra Vergine cannot be touched: it can be expropriated. Against expropriation no rights can stand. It is the concentration and crystallisation of Theft legitamised by Government; that is by Force. A vagrant may not take a sheaf of your wheat, a fowl from your hen-house: if he do so, the law protects you and punishes him. A syndicate of rich men, of powerful men, may take the whole of your land, and the State will compel you to accept any arbitrary price which it may choose to put upon your loss. According as you are rich or poor yourself, so great or so small will be the amount awarded to you. All the sub-prefects, all the syndics, all the officials in this province, will be richly rewarded; the people defrauded of the soil and the river will get what may be given them by an enforced valuation. I have conversed with all kinds and conditions of men; and I have heard only one statement in the mouths of all: the matter is beyond all alteration. There is money in it; the men whose trade is money will not let it go. My son, my dearest son, be calm, be prudent. Violence can only injure yourself, and it can save nothing."

He had for the moment spoken as he had been speaking for the last two weeks to men of education and of the world.

He was recalled to the fact that his present auditor did not reason, did not comprehend, only felt, and was drunk with his own force of feeling. The look on Adone's face appalled him.

The youth seemed almost to have no intelligence left, almost as if all which had been said to him had reached neither his ear nor his brain.

Don Silverio had been in the world of men, and unconsciously he had adopted their phraseology and their manner. To Adone, who had expected some miracle, some rescue almost archangelic, some promise of immediate and divine interposition, these calm and rational statements conveyed scarcely any sense, so terrible was the destruction of his hopes. All the trust and candour and sweetness of his nature turned to gall.

He listened, a sullen, savage darkness stealing over his countenance.

"And our rights? Theirs? – mine?" he said as Don Silverio paused.

"For all rights taken away they will give legal compensation."

"You dare repeat that, sir?"

Don Silverio controlled his indignation with difficulty.

"I dare do whatever I deem right to do. You should know that by this time."

"You think this right?"

"I think it right to repeat exactly what has been said to me. I do not of necessity approve because I repeat."

"You know no compensation is possible!"

"Morally, none. I speak of but what the law allows."

"The law of pirates, of cut-throats!"

"The law of the State, alas!"

Adone laughed. His hearer had heard such laughter as that in madhouses.

"The State kills a soldier, and gives his family a hundred francs! That is the compensation of the State. If they emptied their treasuries, could they give the soldier back his life? If they emptied their treasuries, could they give us back what they will take from us?"

"My dear son, do not doubt my sympathy. All my heart is with you. But what can be done? Can a poor village, a poor commune, struggle with any chance of success against a rich company and a government? Can a stalk of wheat resist the sickle? Can an ear of wheat resist the threshing-flail? I have told you the story of Don Quixote della Mancha. Would you fight the empty air like him?"

Adone did not reply.

His beautiful face grew moody, dark, fierce; in his eyes flamed passions which had no voice upon his lips; his white teeth ground against one another.

"Believe me, Adone," said his friend, "we are in evil days, when men babble of liberty, and are so intent on the mere empty sound of their lips that they perceive not the fetters on their wrists and feet. There was never any time when there was so little freedom and so little justice as in ours. Two gigantic dominions now rule the human race; they are the armies and the moneymakers. Science serves them turn by turn, and receives from each its wage. The historian Mommsen has written that we are probably inferior both in intelligence and in humanity, in prosperity and in civilisation, at the close of this century to what the human race was under Severus Antonius; and it is true."

Adone did not seem to hear. What were these abstract reasonings to him? All he cared for were his river and his fields.

"I sought for an old friend of mine in Rome," said Don Silverio, endeavouring to gain his attention and divert his thought, "one Pamfilio Scoria. He was a learned scholar; he had possessed a small competence and a house of his own, small too, but of admirable architecture, a Quattrocentisto house. I could not find this house in Rome. After long search I learned that it had been pulled down to make a new street. Pamfilio Scoria had in vain tried to preserve his rights. The city had turned him out and taken his property, paying what it chose. His grief was so great to see it destroyed, and to be turned adrift with his books and manuscripts, that he fell ill and died not long afterwards. On the site of the house there is a drinking-place kept by Germans; a street railway runs before it. This kind of theft, of pillage, takes place every week. It is masked as public utility. We are not alone sufferers from such a crime."

Adone was still silent.

His thoughts were not such as he could utter aloud in the priest's presence; and he heard nothing that was said; he heard only little Nerina's voice saying: "Could we not kill these men?" That flutelike whisper seemed to him to sigh with the very voice of the river itself.

Don Silverio rose, his patience, great as it was, exhausted.

"My son, as you do not give ear to me it is useless for me to speak. I must go to my office. The friar from San Beda desires to return this evening. I have done all I can. I have told you the facts as they stand. Take courage, Be peaceable for your mother's sake and restrain yourself for your own. It is a frightful calamity which hangs over us all. But it is our duty to meet it like men."

"Like men!" muttered Adone as he rose to his feet; had not the child from the Abruzzo rocks a better sense of men's duty than this priest so calm and wise?

"Men resist," he said very low.

"Men resist," repeated Don Silverio. "They resist when their resistance serves any purpose, but when it can only serve to crush them uselessly under a mass of iron they are not men if they resist, but madmen."

"Farewell, sir," said Adone.

And with an obeisance he went out of the chamber.

"Poor boy! Poor, passionate, dear youth!" thought Don Silverio as the door closed. "He thinks me cold and without emotion; how little he knows! He cannot suffer as I suffer for him and for my poor wretched people. What will they do when they shall know? They will mourn like starved sheep bleating in a field of stones, and I, their shepherd, shall not have a blade of grass wherewith to comfort them!"

XI

Adone's sight was troubled as soon as he passed out of the dusky room into the blaze of noonday sunshine. His eyes seemed filled with blood. His brain was dizzy. That which had been his sheet-anchor in all doubts and contrition, his faith in and his reverence for Don Silverio, availed him nothing now. A blind sympathy with his most violent instincts was the only thing which could now content or console him.

He was in that state to which all counsels of moderation appear but so much treason and unkindness. As he went out of the priest's house in that dazzling light, a hand caught his sleeve and that young flutelike voice of which he had thought murmured to him —

"Adone! what tidings? What has he told you?"

Nerina, having run across the bridge and up the street after the little dog, had seen him and Don Silverio enter, and had waited for Adone to come out of the house.

Adone pushed her away.

"Let me be!" he said impatiently. "It is all bad – bad – bad. Bad as ill-blood. Bad as crime."

She clung to his arm nevertheless.

"Come into the church and tell me. No one cares as I do."

"Poor little soul!"

He let her draw him into the great porch of the church and thence into the church itself; it was dark, as it always was, cold as an autumn evening, damp even in the canicular heat.

"No one will hear; tell me!" said the child.

He told her.

"And what are you to do?" she asked, her eyes dilated with horror.

"According to him," said Adone bitterly, "I am to be meek and helpless as the heifer which goes to the slaughter. Men must not resist what the law permits."

Nerina was mute. To dispute what Don Silverio said was like blasphemy to her; she honoured him with all her soul, but she loved Adone.

She loved the Edera water too; that fair green rippling water, on whose bank she had sat naked under the dock leaves the day the two rams had fought. That which was threatened was an unholy, wicked, cruel robbery. Was it indeed necessary to yield to it in submission?

She remembered a saying of Baruffo's: "If a man stand up to me I leave him some coins in his pocket, some life in his body; but if he crouch and cringe I stick him in the throat. He is a craven."

The doctrine of Baruffo seemed to her the more sound. It warmed the blood of the little Abruzzo-born maiden to recall it. In the high mountains and forests the meeker virtues are not greatly honoured.

She stood by Adone's side, knitting her brows under her auburn curling locks, clenching her hands.

"Is there one who does this evil most of all?" she said at length. "One we could reach?"

"You are a brave child, Nerina!" said Adone, and his words made her proud. "I fear there is a crowd. Such men are like locusts; they come in swarms. But the first man who touches the water—"

"Shall sup of it and drown!"

The little girl added the words with a fierce joy in her great bright eyes.

"Hush!" said Adone, "and get you homeward, and tell my mother that Don Silverio has returned, and that I will come back to my work in a little while. Tell her he says there is no hope."

Nerina obeyed him instantly, her bare feet flying over the stones of the street. He was left alone in the sombre church, with the great winged angels of stone above his head.

He was grateful for its gloom. He shrank from the light of the morning. Every drop of blood in his body, and in his brain, and in his limbs, seemed to him to turn to fire – a fire which all the waters of the Edera would never quench.

How could they be accused of rebellion or wrong-doing because they wanted to keep the water running in the channel which it had made for itself in the very beginning of the world?

The Edera was ancient as its neighbours, the Fiumicino which heard the voice of Cæsar, or the Marecchia which was bridged by Augustus; ancient as the fountain of Arethusa, as the lake of Diana Nemorensis. What sacrilege could be more heinous than to chase it from its chosen course? No Lucumon of Etruria, or Esarch of Ravenna, or Pope or Rome, had ever dared to touch it. Revolutionists! they, who only sought to preserve it? The revolutionists were those who with alien hands and vampire's greed would seek to disturb its peace.

XII

All that day the people of Ruscino crowded round the Presbytery.

"What of the Edera water, sir?" they asked him a hundred times in the shrill cries of the women, in the rude bellow of the men, in the high-pitched, dissonant clamour of angry speakers. And all the day his patience and kindness were abused, and his nerves racked and strained, in the effort to persuade them that the river which ran beneath their walls was no more theirs than the stars which shone above it.

It was hopeless to bring home to their intelligence either the invalidity of their claim, or the peril which would lie in their opposition.

"'Twas there in the beginning of time," they said. "There it must be for our children's children."

He talked nonsense, they thought; who should be able to stop a river which was for ever running? The Edera water was carried in the womb of the Leonessa: Leonessa gave it fresh birth every day.

Yes! thought Don Silverio, as he walked by the river after sunset, and watched its bright, impetuous current dash over the stones and shingle whilst two kingfishers flashed along its surface. Yes, truly Nature would pour it forth every day from her unfailing breast so long as man did not do it outrage. But how long would that be? A year, two years, three years, at most; then its place would know it no more, and its song would be silent. The water-pipet would make its nest no more in its sedges, and the blue porphyrion would woo his mate no more on its bosom. As one of the rich men in Rome had said to him with a cynical smile, "The river will be there always, only it will be dry!"

In the gloaming he went and spoke to Adone's mother. She was at her spinning-wheel, but her hands moved mechanically; her face was dark and her eyelids swollen.

"My friend," he said, as he sat down on the bench beneath the rose-tree, "I have brought you ill-tidings."

"It is true then, sir?"

"Alas!"

"I do not believe it. God will not let it be."

"Would that I could think so."

"'Tis you, sir, who should think so, and not I."

"My good Clelia," he said, with some impatience, "it is no use to dream dreams. Try and persuade your son to accept the inevitable. My words seem harsh. They are not so. But I dare not let you cherish your illusions like this; blind yourself to fact, you expect some supernatural intercession. They will take your river; they will take your lands. Your house will be yours no more. If you do not go peaceably they will have you turned out, as if you were a debtor. This may take some time, for it will be done with all due legal forms, but it will be done. They will pay you and your son some value by appraisement, but they will take your land and your house and all that is yours and his; I have seen the plans in Rome. Can you think that I should invent this to torture you? There will be a process, a sentence, an award; the money the law allots to you will be strictly paid to you; but you will be driven away from the Terra Vergine. Realise this. Try and keep your reason and save your son from madness. Surely, where there is great love between two people, and bonds of memory and mutual duty, and strong faith, there a home may be made anywhere, even over seas?"

Clelia Alba snapped with violence the thread she span. "They have talked you over, sir," she said curtly. "When you went away you were with us."

"With you!" he echoed. "In heart, in pity, in sympathy, yes; never could I be otherwise. But were I to see you struck with lightning, should I save you by telling you that lightning did not kill? I did not know that the enterprise was as mature as I found it to be when I saw the promoters of it in Rome. But I know now that it has been long in incubation; you must remember that every bend and ordnance maps; every stream, however small, is known to the technical office, and the engineers civil and military. I abhor the project. It is to me a desecration, an infamy, a robbery; it will ruin the Valdedera from every point of view; but we can do nothing; this is what I implore you to realise. We are as helpless as one of your fowls when you cut its throat. Violence can only hurry your son into the grip of the law. His rights are morally as plain as yonder snow on those mountains; but because they will buy his rights at what will be publicly estimated as a fair price, the law will not allow him to consider himself injured. My dear friend, you are a woman of sense and foresight; try to see this thing as it is."

"I will hear what Adone says, sir," replied Clelia Alba doggedly. "If he bids me burn the house, I shall burn it."

Don Silverio was heart-sick and impatient. What use was it to argue with such minds as these? As well might he waste his words on the trunks of the olives, on the oxen in their stalls.

They were wronged.

That the wrong done them was masked under specious pretences, and was protected by all the plate armour of law and government, made the outrage little the worse to them. The brigand from the hills who used to harry their cattle and pillage their strong-box looked to them a hero, a saint, a Christ, compared to these modern thieves who were environed with all the defences and impunity which the law and the State could give. When an earth-shock makes the soil under your feet quiver, and gape, and mutter, you feel that unnatural forces are being hurled against you, you feel that you are the mere sport and jest of an unjust deity. This was what they felt now.

"Nay," said Clelia Alba, "if the earth opened, and took us, it would be kinder; it would bury us at least under our own rooftree."

What use was it to speak to such people as these of the right of expropriation granted by parliament, of the authority of a dicastero, and of a prefecture, of the sophistries and arguments of lawyers, of the adjudication of values, of the appraisement of claims? They were wronged: and they came of a race and of a soil in which the only fitting redresser of wrong was revenge.

"Mother," cried Adone, "my father would not have given up his land as meekly as a sheep yields up her life."

"No," said Clelia Alba; "whether he came from those war-lords of old I know not, but he would have fought as they fought."

XIII

The autumn and winter passed without more being heard in the Valdedera of the new invasion. The peasantry generally believed that such silence was favourable to their wishes; but Don Silverio knew that it was otherwise. The promoters of the work did not concern themselves with the local population, they dealt with greater folks; with those who administered the various communes, and who controlled the valuation of the land through which the course of the Edera ran; chiefly those well-born persons who constituted the provincial council. A great deal of money would change hands, but it was intended, by all through whose fingers those heavy sums would pass, that as little of the money as possible should find its way to the owners of the soil. A public work is like a fat hog; between the slaughterers, the salesmen, the middlemen, and the consumers, little falls to the original holder of the hog. The peasants of the Valdedera were astonished that no one came to treat with them; but they did not understand that they dwelt under a paternal government, and the first care of a paternal government is to do everything for its children which is likely to promise any profit to itself.