Cuore (Heart) Part 16

THE SICK MASTER.

Sat.u.r.day, 25th.

Yesterday afternoon, on coming out of school, I went to pay a visit to my sick master. He made himself ill by overworking. Five hours of teaching a day, then an hour of gymnastics, then two hours more of evening school, which is equivalent to saying but little sleep, getting his food by s.n.a.t.c.hes, and working breathlessly from morning till night.

He has ruined his health. That is what my mother says. My mother was waiting for me at the big door; I came out alone, and on the stairs I met the teacher with the black beard--Coatti,--the one who frightens every one and punishes no one. He stared at me with wide-open eyes, and made his voice like that of a lion, in jest, but without laughing. I was still laughing when I pulled the bell on the fourth floor; but I ceased very suddenly when the servant let me into a wretched, half-lighted room, where my teacher was in bed. He was lying in a little iron bed. His beard was long. He put one hand to his brow in order to see better, and exclaimed in his affectionate voice:--

"Oh, Enrico!"

I approached the bed; he laid one hand on my shoulder and said:--

"Good, my boy. You have done well to come and see your poor teacher. I am reduced to a sad state, as you see, my dear Enrico. And how fares the school? How are your comrades getting along? All well, eh? Even without me? You do very well without your old master, do you not?"

I was on the point of saying "no"; he interrupted me.

"Come, come, I know that you do not hate me!" and he heaved a sigh.

I glanced at some photographs fastened to the wall.

"Do you see?" he said to me. "All of them are of boys who gave me their photographs more than twenty years ago. They were good boys. These are my souvenirs. When I die, my last glance will be at them; at those roguish urchins among whom my life has been pa.s.sed. You will give me your portrait, also, will you not, when you have finished the elementary course?" Then he took an orange from his nightstand, and put it in my hand.

"I have nothing else to give you," he said; "it is the gift of a sick man."

I looked at it, and my heart was sad; I know not why.

"Attend to me," he began again. "I hope to get over this; but if I should not recover, see that you strengthen yourself in arithmetic, which is your weak point; make an effort. It is merely a question of a first effort: because sometimes there is no lack of apt.i.tude; there is merely an absence of a fixed purpose--of stability, as it is called."

But in the meantime he was breathing hard; and it was evident that he was suffering.

"I am feverish," he sighed; "I am half gone; I beseech you, therefore, apply yourself to arithmetic, to problems. If you don't succeed at first, rest a little and begin afresh. And press forward, but quietly without f.a.gging yourself, without straining your mind. Go! My respects to your mamma. And do not mount these stairs again. We shall see each other again in school. And if we do not, you must now and then call to mind your master of the third grade, who was fond of you."

I felt inclined to cry at these words.

"Bend down your head," he said to me.

I bent my head to his pillow; he kissed my hair. Then he said to me, "Go!" and turned his face towards the wall. And I flew down the stairs; for I longed to embrace my mother.

THE STREET.

Sat.u.r.day, 25th.

I was watching you from the window this afternoon, when you were on your way home from the master's; you came in collision with a woman. Take more heed to your manner of walking in the street.

There are duties to be fulfilled even there. If you keep your steps and gestures within bounds in a private house, why should you not do the same in the street, which is everybody's house. Remember this, Enrico. Every time that you meet a feeble old man, a poor person, a woman with a child in her arms, a cripple with his crutches, a man bending beneath a burden, a family dressed in mourning, make way for them respectfully. We must respect age, misery, maternal love, infirmity, labor, death. Whenever you see a person on the point of being run down by a vehicle, drag him away, if it is a child; warn him, if he is a man; always ask what ails the child who is crying all alone; pick up the aged man's cane, when he lets it fall. If two boys are fighting, separate them; if it is two men, go away: do not look on a scene of brutal violence, which offends and hardens the heart. And when a man pa.s.ses, bound, and walking between a couple of policemen, do not add your curiosity to the cruel curiosity of the crowd; he may be innocent.

Cease to talk with your companion, and to smile, when you meet a hospital litter, which is, perhaps, bearing a dying person, or a funeral procession; for one may issue from your own home on the morrow. Look with reverence upon all boys from the asylums, who walk two and two,--the blind, the dumb, those afflicted with the rickets, orphans, abandoned children; reflect that it is misfortune and human charity which is pa.s.sing by. Always pretend not to notice any one who has a repulsive or laughter-provoking deformity. Always extinguish every match that you find in your path; for it may cost some one his life. Always answer a pa.s.ser-by who asks you the way, with politeness. Do not look at any one and laugh; do not run without necessity; do not shout. Respect the street. The education of a people is judged first of all by their behavior on the street.

Where you find offences in the streets, there you will find offences in the houses. And study the streets; study the city in which you live. If you were to be hurled far away from it to-morrow, you would be glad to have it clearly present in your memory, to be able to traverse it all again in memory. Your own city, and your little country--that which has been for so many years your world; where you took your first steps at your mother's side; where you experienced your first emotions, opened your mind to its first ideas; found your first friends. It has been a mother to you: it has taught you, loved you, protected you. Study it in its streets and in its people, and love it; and when you hear it insulted, defend it.

THY FATHER.

MARCH

THE EVENING SCHOOLS.

Thursday, 2d.

LAST night my father took me to see the evening schools in our Baretti schoolhouse, which were all lighted up already, and where the workingmen were already beginning to enter. On our arrival we found the head-master and the other masters in a great rage, because a little while before the gla.s.s in one window had been broken by a stone. The beadle had darted forth and seized a boy by the hair, who was pa.s.sing; but thereupon, Stardi, who lives in the house opposite, had presented himself, and said:--

"This is not the right one; I saw it with my own eyes; it was Franti who threw it; and he said to me, 'Woe to you if you tell of me!' but I am not afraid."

Then the head-master declared that Franti should be expelled for good.

In the meantime I was watching the workingmen enter by twos and threes; and more than two hundred had already entered. I have never seen anything so fine as the evening school. There were boys of twelve and upwards; bearded men who were on their way from their work, carrying their books and copy-books; there were carpenters, engineers with black faces, masons with hands white with plaster, bakers' boys with their hair full of flour; and there was perceptible the odor of varnish, hides, fish, oil,--odors of all the various trades. There also entered a squad of artillery workmen, dressed like soldiers and headed by a corporal. They all filed briskly to their benches, removed the board underneath, on which we put our feet, and immediately bent their heads over their work.

Some stepped up to the teachers to ask explanations, with their open copy-books in their hands. I caught sight of that young and well-dressed master "the little lawyer," who had three or four workingmen cl.u.s.tered round his table, and was making corrections with his pen; and also the lame one, who was laughing with a dyer who had brought him a copy-book all adorned with red and blue dyes. My master, who had recovered, and who will return to school to-morrow, was there also. The doors of the schoolroom were open. I was amazed, when the lessons began, to see how attentive they all were, and how they kept their eyes fixed on their work. Yet the greater part of them, so the head-master said, for fear of being late, had not even been home to eat a mouthful of supper, and they were hungry.

But the younger ones, after half an hour of school, were falling off the benches with sleep; one even went fast asleep with his head on the bench, and the master waked him up by poking his ear with a pen. But the grown-up men did nothing of the sort; they kept awake, and listened, with their mouths wide open, to the lesson, without even winking; and it made a deep impression on me to see all those bearded men on our benches. We also ascended to the story floor above, and I ran to the door of my schoolroom and saw in my seat a man with a big mustache and a bandaged hand, who might have injured himself while at work about some machine; but he was trying to write, though very, very slowly.

But what pleased me most was to behold in the seat of the little mason, on the very same bench and in the very same corner, his father, the mason, as huge as a giant, who sat there all coiled up into a narrow s.p.a.ce, with his chin on his fists and his eyes on his book, so absorbed that he hardly breathed. And there was no chance about it, for it was he himself who said to the head-master the first evening he came to the school:--

"Signor Director, do me the favor to place me in the seat of 'my hare's face.'" For he always calls his son so.

My father kept me there until the end, and in the street we saw many women with children in their arms, waiting for their husbands; and at the entrance a change was effected: the husbands took the children in their arms, and the women made them surrender their books and copy-books; and in this wise they proceeded to their homes. For several minutes the street was filled with people and with noise. Then all grew silent, and all we could see was the tall and weary form of the head-master disappearing in the distance.

THE FIGHT.

Sunday, 5th.

It was what might have been expected. Franti, on being expelled by the head-master, wanted to revenge himself on Stardi, and he waited for Stardi at a corner, when he came out of school, and when the latter was pa.s.sing with his sister, whom he escorts every day from an inst.i.tution in the Via Dora Grossa. My sister Silvia, on emerging from her schoolhouse, witnessed the whole affair, and came home thoroughly terrified. This is what took place. Franti, with his cap of waxed cloth canted over one ear, ran up on tiptoe behind Stardi, and in order to provoke him, gave a tug at his sister's braid of hair,--a tug so violent that it almost threw the girl flat on her back on the ground. The little girl uttered a cry; her brother whirled round; Franti, who is much taller and stronger than Stardi, thought:--

"He'll not utter a word, or I'll break his skin for him!"

But Stardi never paused to reflect, and small and ill-made as he is, he flung himself with one bound on that big fellow, and began to belabor him with his fists. He could not hold his own, however, and he got more than he gave. There was no one in the street but girls, so there was no one who could separate them. Franti flung him on the ground; but the other instantly got up, and then down he went on his back again, and Franti pounded away as though upon a door: in an instant he had torn away half an ear, and bruised one eye, and drawn blood from the other's nose. But Stardi was tenacious; he roared:--

"You may kill me, but I'll make you pay for it!" And down went Franti, kicking and cuffing, and Stardi under him, b.u.t.ting and lungeing out with his heels. A woman shrieked from a window, "Good for the little one!"

Others said, "It is a boy defending his sister; courage! give it to him well!" And they screamed at Franti, "You overbearing brute! you coward!"

But Franti had grown ferocious; he held out his leg; Stardi tripped and fell, and Franti on top of him.

"Surrender!"--"No!"--"Surrender!"--"No!" and in a flash Stardi recovered his feet, clasped Franti by the body, and, with one furious effort, hurled him on the pavement, and fell upon him with one knee on his breast.

"Ah, the infamous fellow! he has a knife!" shouted a man, rushing up to disarm Franti.

But Stardi, beside himself with rage, had already grasped Franti's arm with both hands, and bestowed on the fist such a bite that the knife fell from it, and the hand began to bleed. More people had run up in the meantime, who separated them and set them on their feet. Franti took to his heels in a sorry plight, and Stardi stood still, with his face all scratched, and a black eye,--but triumphant,--beside his weeping sister, while some of the girls collected the books and copy-books which were strewn over the street.

"Bravo, little fellow!" said the bystanders; "he defended his sister!"