Part 6

Don Silla, a man of peaceful proclivities, was for the moment perturbed by the laundress’s strident tones, and cast a glance at the two faithful custodians of his official dignity. Then, taking a pinch of tobacco from his horn snuff-box, he said to her: “My daughter, be seated.”

But Candia remained standing. Her beak-like nose was inflated with anger, and her wrinkled cheeks quivered curiously. “Tell me, Don Silla.”

“You went yesterday to take back the wash to Donna Cristina Lamonica?”

“Well, and what of it? What of it? Was there anything missing? All of it counted, piece by piece--and not a thing missing. What’s the matter with it now?”

“Wait a moment, my daughter! In the same room there was the table silver--”

Candia, comprehending, turned like an angry hawk, about to swoop upon its prey. Her thin lips twitched convulsively.

“The silver was in the room, and Donna Cristina found that a spoon was missing. Do you understand, my daughter? Could you have taken it--by mistake?”

Candia jumped like a grasshopper before the injustice of this accusation. As a matter of fact she had stolen nothing.

“Oh, it was I, was it? I? Who says so? Who saw me? I am astonished at you, Don Silla! I am astonished at you! I, a thief? I? I?”

And there was no end to her indignation. She was all the more keenly stung by the unjust charge, because she knew herself to be capable of the action they attributed to her.

“Then it was you who took it?” interrupted Don Silla, prudently sinking back into the depths of his spacious judicial chair.

“I am astonished at you!” snarled the woman once more, waving her long arms around as though they had been two sticks.

“Very well, you may go. We will see about it.”

Candia went out without a salutation, blindly bumping into the doorpost. She had turned fairly green; she was beside herself. As she set foot in the street and saw the crowd which had gathered, she realized that already public opinion was against her; that no one was going to believe in her innocence. Nevertheless, she began to utter a vociferous denial. The crowd continued to laugh as it dispersed. Full of fury, she returned home, and hopelessly began to weep upon her doorstep.

Don Donato Brandimarte, who lived next door, said mockingly: “Cry louder, cry louder! There are people passing by!”

Since there were heaps of clothing still waiting for the suds, she finally calmed herself, bared her arms, and resumed her task. As she worked, she thought out her denials, elaborated a whole system of defense, sought out in her shrewd woman’s brain an ingenious method of establishing her innocence; racking her brain for specious subtleties, she had recourse to every trick of rustic dialectic to construct a line of reasoning that would convince the most incredulous.

Then, when her day’s work was ended, she went out, deciding to go first to see Donna Cristina.

Donna Cristina was not to be seen. It was Maria Bisaccia who listened to Candia’s flood of words, shaking her head but answering nothing, and withdrawing in dignified silence.

Next, Candia made the circuit of all her clients. To each in turn she related the occurrence, to each she unfolded her defense, continually adding some new argument, amplifying her words, growing constantly more excited, more desperate, in the face of incredulity and distrust. And all in vain; she felt that from now on there was no further defense possible. A sort of blind hopelessness took possession of her--what more was there to do? What more was there to say?

III

Meanwhile Donna Cristina Lamonica gave orders to send for Cinigia, a woman of the people, who practised magic and empirical medicine with considerable success. Cinigia had several times before discovered stolen goods; and it was said that she was secretly in league with the thieves.

“Find that spoon for me,” Donna Cristina told her, “and you shall have a big reward.”

“Very well,” Cinigia replied; “twenty-four hours are all I need.”

And twenty-four hours later she brought back her answer; the spoon was to be found in a hole in the courtyard, near the well.

Donna Cristina and Maria descended to the courtyard, made search, and, to their great amazement, found the spoon.

Swiftly the news spread throughout Pescara.

Then triumphantly Candia Marcanda went the rounds of all the streets. She seemed to have grown taller; she held her head erect; she smiled, looking every one straight in the eye, as if to say, “I told you so! I told you so!”

[Illustration: =Gabriele D’Annunzio=]

The people in the shops, seeing her pass by, would murmur something and then break forth into a significantly sneering laugh. Filippo La Selvi, who sat drinking a glass of liqueur brandy in the Café d’Ange, called Candia in.

“Another glass for Candia, the same as mine!”

The woman, who was fond of strong spirits, pursed up her lips covetously.

“You certainly deserve it, there’s no denying that!” added Filippo La Selvi.

An idle crowd had gathered in front of the café. They all had the spirit of mischief in their faces. While the woman drank, Filippo La Selvi turned and addressed his audience:

“Say, she knew how to work it, didn’t she? Isn’t she the foxy one?” and he slapped the laundress familiarly upon her bony shoulder.

The crowd laughed. A little dwarf, called Magnafave, or “Big Beans,” weak-minded and stuttering, joined the forefinger of his right hand to that of his left, and striking a grotesque attitude and dwelling upon each syllable, said:

“Ca--ca--ca--Candia--Ci--ci--Cinigia!” and he continued to make gestures, and to stammer forth vulgar witticisms, all implying that Candia and Cinigia were in league together. His spectators indulged in contortions of merriment.

For a moment Candia sat there bewildered, with the glass still in her hand. Then in a flash she understood--they did not believe in her innocence. They accused her of having brought back the silver spoon secretly, by agreement with the sorceress, to save herself further trouble.

An access of blind anger came upon her. Speechless with passion, she flung herself upon the weakest of them, upon the little hunchback, in a hurricane of blows and scratches. And the crowd, at the sight of this struggle, formed a circle and jeered at them in cruel glee, as at a fight between two animals, and egged on the two combatants with voice and gesture.

Big Beans, badly scared by her unexpected violence, tried to escape, hopping about like a little ape; and held fast by the laundress’s terrible arms, whirled round and round with increasing velocity, like a stone in a sling, until at last he fell violently upon his face.

Some of the men hastened to pick him up. Candia withdrew in the midst of hisses, shut herself within her house, and flung herself across her bed, sobbing and gnawing her fingers, in the keenness of her suffering. The new accusation cut her deeper than the first, and all the more that she knew herself capable of such a subterfuge. How was she to clear herself now? How was she to establish the truth? She grew hopeless as she realized that she could not allege in defense any material difficulties that might have interfered with carrying out the deception. Access to the courtyard was perfectly simple; a door, that was never fastened, opened from the ground floor of the main stairway; people came and went freely through that door, to remove the garbage, or for other causes. So it was impossible for her to close the lips of her accusers by saying, “How could I have got in?” The means of successfully carrying out such a plan were many and easy.

Candia proceeded to conjure up new arguments to convince them; she sharpened up her wits; she invented three, four, five different cases to prove that the spoon never could have been found in that hole in the courtyard; she spilt hairs with marvelous ingenuity. Next she took to making the rounds of the shops and the houses, seeking in every possible way to overcome the people’s incredulity. They listened to her, greatly entertained by her captious reasoning; and they would end by saying, “Oh, it’s all right!”

But there was a certain tone in their voice that left Candia annihilated. So, then, all her trouble was for nothing! No one would believe her! Yet with marvelous persistence she would return to the attack, spending whole nights in thinking out new arguments. And little by little, under this continued strain, her mind gave way; she could no longer follow any sustained thought but that of the silver spoon.

Neglecting her work, she had sunk to a state of actual want. When she went down to the river bank, under the iron bridge, where the other wash-women congregated, she would sometimes let slip from between her fingers the garments that the current swept away forever. And she would talk continually, unweariedly, of the one single subject. In order not to hear her, the young laundresses would begin to sing, and would mock her with the improvised rimes of their songs. And she meanwhile would shout and gesticulate like a crazy woman.

No one could give her work any longer. Out of pity, some of her former employers would send her food. Little by little she fell into the habit of begging, and wandered through the streets, bowed over, unkempt, and all in rags. The street urchins would tag behind her, shouting: “Tell us the story of the spoon, ’cause we never heard it, Auntie Candia!”

She would stop strangers sometimes as they passed by, to tell them the story and to argue out her defense. Young fellows would sometimes send for her, and pay her a copper to tell it all over, two, three, or four times; they would raise up difficulties against her arguments; they would hear her all the way through, and then at last stab her with a final word. She would shake her head, and go on her way; she found companionship among other beggars and would reason with them endlessly, indefatigably, invincibly. Her chosen friend was a deaf woman, whose skin was a mass of angry blotches, and who limped on one leg.

In the winter of 1874 she was at last stricken with serious illness. The woman with the blotches cared for her. Donna Cristina Lamonica sent her a cordial and a scuttle of coals.

The sick woman, lying on her pallet, still raved of the silver spoon. She would raise herself on her elbow and struggle to wave her arm, to give emphasis to her fevered arguments.

And at the last, when her staring eyes already seemed overspread with a veil of troubled waters that rose from within, Candia gasped forth:

“It wasn’t I, madam--because you see--the spoon--”

SIGNORA SPERANZA BY LUIGI PIRANDELLO

[Illustration]

_Luigi Pirandello, master of style, the humorist of a group of young Italian writers who are said to be inaugurating a renaissance in Italian literature, was born at Girgenti, Sicily, in 1867. He appeared first as a poet, pure in style, severe in inspiration, but later “found himself” in the writing of humorous tales. His humor, though at bottom sad and almost pessimistic, is not of the quiet sort. To him man appears as a creature more miserable than grotesque, eternally made sport of by the irony of fate. Such is the philosophy in his lugubriously fanciful “Mathias Pascal,” skeptical in spirit, in “Il Turno,” with its cruel pictures of Sicilian peasant life, and in “Signora Speranza,” one of the latest and most characteristic of his novelettes. For the purpose of this work the discursive passages have been here and there condensed and made more direct._

[Illustration]

SIGNORA SPERANZA BY LUIGI PIRANDELLO

Translated by Elise Lathrop. Copyright, 1907, by P. F. Collier & Son.

I

The family boarding-house of Signora Carolina Pentoni (Big Carolini, or Carolinona, as she was called, because of the excessive flesh which distressed her) was patronized by certain scatterbrains, droll fellows, who were the delight of the well-behaved who frequented the table, not so much because of the good cooking perhaps, but that they might be present at the gratuitous gaiety offered them during the meals.

One of these excellent, well-mannered people, without the least suspicion that he might be included among the so-called amusing types of the pension, had been for some time the butt of the scatterbrains, Biagio Speranza and Dario Scossi, who played all sorts of tricks on him; but he remained calm; so calm and obstinate that they were finally forced to let him alone. “Laughter is healthy. You gentlemen make me laugh, so I shall remain.”

And he did remain, cordially disliked by all. His name was Cedebonis; he was a physician, professor of philosophy in the _liceo_, and of pedagogy in a normal school for girls; he was a Calabrian, short, thick-set, dark, bald, with an oval-shaped head, with no neck to speak of; mulish, with a leather-colored face, enormous bushy eyebrows, and mustache the color of ebony. As the resigned victim of his many scientific doctrines, both philosophical and pedagogical, he had come to live almost automatically, with a brain like a warehouse, in which his thoughts, precise, well-weighed, and classified, were arranged in perfect order according to their various categories. Possibly his robust and vigorous body would gladly have lent itself to violent exercises, but Cedebonis made himself a storehouse for archives, or so said Scossi, and did not permit himself any expansiveness that was not according to the dictates of science, philosophy, and pedagogy. “To live is not enough; live to do good,” he used to say placidly, in his big, oily voice. And he would ask: “Reason, reason, gentlemen, for what was it given us?”

“That we might be worse than beasts,” once replied scornfully the music teacher Trunfo, who could not endure him.

Separated with much scandal from his wife, always scowling, gloomy, grumbling, and at times explosive, Trunfo passed almost the whole day in the house of Carolinona, in the dining-room there, intent, like a dog who licks the bruises he has received, on correcting and rewriting the most hissed parts of his opera, for the production of which he had half beggared himself. He smoked continually. Biagio Speranza called him “Vesuvius.”

Sometimes Cedebonis would go quietly up behind him, and sit beside him in order to inhale the odor of the tobacco, which he delighted in. Trunfo, grumbling, would squint at him a couple of times, then fuming, fidgeting with annoyance, would draw a cigar from his pocket, and offer it to him rudely: “Pray take it. Smoke, for Heaven’s sake!”

“No, thank you,” Cedebonis would reply, without the least discomfiture. “You must know that nicotine is very injurious. I only like to inhale the smoke, to smell its fragrance.”

“At my expense,” Trunfo would then burst out furiously. “How about the damage to _my_ health? Get out of here, I say! Shame on you! If you want your pleasure you can pay for it!”

“Cedebonis,” said Scossi--who every time he began to speak would shove out the tip of his terrible tongue like an arrow-head--“Cedebonis, with that face of his, like a happy monk, would be quite capable of presenting himself calmly in the house of our dear Martinelli, and, with the pretext that woman, like nicotine, is injurious, ask him to lend him, yes, I say, for a moment--”

“His wife?” asked Biagio Speranza.

“Oh, shocking! Her powder puff.”

“But what has my wife to do with the matter?” exclaims harmless Martino Martinelli, hit when least expecting it, his eyelashes quivering rapidly over his round, owl-like eyes, very close together, separated by an extremely long, thin nose, and which seemed to draw up and leave his upper lip suspended in the air.

“Calm yourself,” replied Scossi; “I merely mentioned her because I know that your excellent wife is in Sicily, Signor Martinelli.” And good Martinelli became calm, sighed, and shook his head bitterly. Ah, he thought continually of his poor wife, banished to a normal school in Sicily, and he spoke of her always in his own peculiar manner, groping along in his discourse, half helping himself, half covering every pause with a “Yes, I say,” an interjection which they all imitated, without his perceiving it. The poor fellow could not resign himself to the bureaucratic cruelty which, at a blow and without cause, had separated him at sixty-four from his wife, thus destroying his home and family, forcing him to live alone, in a furnished lodging, and to dine there at the boarding-house of Carolinona, whom he alone called Signora Carolina.

King of Romancers was Momo Cariolin, a little dwarf, who seemed like a living joke. To look at him, it seemed impossible that such a tiny frame could conceive such enormous lies, uttered imperturbably, with the air of a diplomat.

“But tell me,” Biagio Speranza once asked him seriously, “have you ever looked in a mirror?” because Momo Cariolin boasted with particular pride of the favor which women showed him. They had been women of his own rank at the very least, or ladies of the nobility; or they were of royal blood or imperial archduchesses (notably Austrian), these victims of Cariolin. And such adventures had befallen him during the various congresses of Orientalists in the capitals of Europe! For Cariolin professed himself, although a dilettante, a profound student of Oriental languages.

“But for Heaven’s sake, look at Martino’s nose!” Biagio Speranza would suddenly cry out, interrupting the marvelous narrations of Cariolin. And good Martinelli, abruptly roused amid the laughter of the others, would begin to smile.

Biagio Speranza’s jokes, Dario Scossi’s sarcasms, Trunfo’s outbursts and sneers did not disturb Martino Martinelli. But another of the boarders frightened him, and this was none other than the poet Giannantonio Cocco Bertolli, who undoubtedly was the most ridiculous type of the house. But the poet had been absent for nearly a month, owing to a serious misfortune which had befallen him. A single one? No. All the misfortunes in the world had befallen the poor poet Cocco Bertolli, who for this reason was given to railings against injustice, both human and divine. What worse misfortune could befall him than this? To defend himself from celestial and terrestrial perfidies he had had only his powerful voice, his tongue of fire, and now he could not even whisper. Everybody knew it; those who had declared they were his friends had even done it purposely; they had teased him, tormented him, that they might utterly ruin him, might actually kill him; he roared, roared, until it seemed as though his enormous bovine eyes would burst out of his congested face. His bile accumulated. “My muse is bile! It was with bile that Shakespeare created Othello, King Lear!”

And he prepared a poem, “Erostratus,” a tremendous poem. Ah, the magnificent temple of Imposture, the temple of so-called Civilization, where infamous Hypocrisy was enthroned and adored, he would kindle it with his verses. But as soon as people knew that he was at work on this poem he was attacked on all sides. Though deprived of his professorship at the _ginnasio_ because of these tragic bestialities, thrown out on the streets, until a short time before, Giannantonio Cocco Bertolli had not been cast down. Sleep? Why, for two cents he could sleep at a resort of beggars and of sublime, ragged, louse-covered fellows. Eat? Good Carolinona had given him credit for more than a year already. “And I, Carolina, I will make you immortal,” he would repeat to her. “You only love me, you who beneath a rough exterior conceal a heart of gold, a most noble soul, Carolina!”

“Yes, sir, do not worry,” Carolina would hasten to reply, for she, like good Martinelli, was afraid of those great eyes which opened so widely whenever he began to speak, while his mouth wore so complacent a sneer that one never knew, even when he paid a compliment, but that he was satirizing in his own way.

Signora Pentoni also feared that her other patrons, those who paid, would stay away because of him, would be annoyed or disgusted by his presence at table; and although, whether from good-heartedness or from fear, she could not show him the door, she lovingly advised him to be calm, prudent, sought with all politeness to tame him, and also took care of him and the garments in which he draped himself, mended them, brushed them, and finally even made him cravats out of the ribbons from her discarded hats.

Not understanding why all this care was taken of him, Giannantonio Cocco Bertolli finally--and why not?--fell in love with Signora Pentoni. He took to composing odes, sonnets, anacreonic songs, and read them while she sewed buttons on his coat or vest, or brushed them. Carolinona did not comprehend that these verses were addressed to her, and why he read them; but since she thought him mad, she did not ask for a reason, and allowed him to read on.

Giannantonio Cocco Bertolli, violent and bestial in everything else, was most timid in love. Not knowing how to confess directly to Pentoni the passion she had inspired, he poured it out in poetry, hoping to arrive by means of the monstrous flowery paths of his limping metaphors. But seeing that Carolinona remained impassive, he became frenzied, violent.

“And what is the matter with you now?” the poor woman asked him in amazement.

“What?” cried Cocco Bertolli in a trembling voice, folding the paper on which he had scrawled the poetry, and opening his eyes very wide, as usual, and stamping his feet. “You ask me? Nothing! But I know! This is to be my lot! Thus my accursed fate has decreed! I am to be understood by no one! Not even by you!”

“I? Why?”

“She does not even say that she seems to understand!”

“Understand what? The poetry? But good gracious! I understand nothing. You know that. Be good, come now! Why do you act thus?”

“Because--because--” In vain! He could not pour out his heart in a declaration.

For this was needed the impelling force of an odious suspicion that came upon him suddenly, during one of these scenes, while poor Pentoni was urging him to be quiet, at least to speak softly, since nearby was the musician correcting his music.

“Ah, so it is for him?” Cocco Bertolli had thundered forth. “You love him? He is your lover? Confess! Viper, viper, viper--and why, then, have you flattered me until now?”

“I? Leave me!” Pentoni had cried, trembling with fear. “You are mad!”

“Cry; yes, cry out so that he will hear! I wish to see your knight; he too is a viper!”

“But be quiet, hush!” Carolinona had implored him. “Are you speaking seriously, Signor Bertolli? What do you want of me? Let me alone!”

“I can not! I love you. Do you love another? We shall see.”

“But I love no one. Are you trying to make fun of me? At my age? This is the last straw! And pray who would fall in love with me, Signor Bertolli?”

“I! And I have told you so!”

“Pardon me, but this is madness. And not even laughable. Let me be--I am a poor woman.”