Short Plays · The Glimpse of Reality (2/2) (2/2) (2/3)

| Giulia | He says that if you have ten crowns in your purse, and we kill you, we can give them to the Baron. It would be the same to him as if he got it from your illustrious father. | | Squarcio | Stupid: the Count is cleverer than you think. No matter how much money you give the Baron he can always get ten crowns more by breaking me on the wheel if the Count is killed. | | Giulia | That is true. Sandro did not think of that. | | Sandro | With cheerful politeness. Oh! what a head I have! I am not clever, Excellency. At the same time you must know that I did not mean my Giulietta to tell you. I know my duty to your Excellency better than that. | | Ferruccio | Come! You are dear people: charming people. Let us get to work at the supper. You shall be the mother of the family and give us our portions, Giulietta. They take their places. That’s right. Serve me last, Giulietta. Sandro is hungry. | | Squarcio | To the girl. Come come! do you not see that his Excellency will touch nothing until we have had some first. He eats. See, Excellency! I have tasted everything. To tell you the truth, poisoning is an art I do not understand. | | Ferruccio | Very few professional poisoners do, Squarcio. One of the best professionals in Rome poisoned my uncle and aunt. They are alive still. The poison cured my uncle’s gout, and only made my aunt thin, which was exactly what she desired, poor lady, as she was losing her figure terribly. | | Squarcio | There is nothing like the sword, Excellency. | | Sandro | Except the water, Father Squarcio. Trust a fisherman to know that. Nobody can tell that drowning was not an accident. | | Ferruccio | What does Giulietta say? | | Giulia | I should not kill a man if I hated him. You cannot torment a man when he is dead. Men kill because they think it is what they call a satisfaction. But that is only fancy. | | Ferruccio | And if you loved him? Would you kill him then? | | Giulia | Perhaps. If you love a man you are his slave: everything he says⁠—everything he does⁠—is a stab to your heart: every day is a long dread of losing him. Better kill him if there be no other escape. | | Ferruccio | How well you have brought up your family, Squarcio! Some more omelette, Sandro? | | Sandro | Very cheerfully. I thank your Excellency. He accepts and eats with an appetite. | | Ferruccio | I pledge you all. To the sword and the fisherman’s net: to love and hate! He drinks: they drink with him. | | Squarcio | To the sword! | | Sandro | To the net, Excellency, with thanks for the honor. | | Giulia | To love, Signor. | | Ferruccio | To hate: the noble’s portion! | | Squarcio | The meal has done you good, Excellency. How do you feel now? | | Ferruccio | I feel that there is nothing but a bait of ten crowns between me and death, Squarcio. | | Squarcio | It is enough, Excellency. And enough is always enough. | | Sandro | Do not think of that, Excellency. It is only that we are poor folk, and have to consider how to make both ends meet as one may say. Looking at the dish. Excellency⁠—? | | Ferruccio | Finish it, Sandro. I’ve done. | | Sandro | Father Squarcio? | | Squarcio | Finish it, finish it. | | Sandro | Giulietta? | | Giulia | Surprised. Me? Oh no. Finish it, Sandro: it will only go to the pig. | | Sandro | Then, with your Excellency’s permission⁠—He helps himself. | | Squarcio | Sing for his Excellency, my daughter. | | | Giulia turns to the door to fetch her mandoline. | | Ferruccio | I shall jump into the lake, Squarcio, if your cat begins to meowl. | | Sandro | Always cheerful and reassuring. No, no, Excellency: Giulietta sings very sweetly: have no fear. | | Ferruccio | I do not care for singing: at least not the singing of peasants. There is only one thing for which one woman will do as well as another, and that is lovemaking. Come, Father Squarcio: I will buy Giulietta from you: you can have her back for nothing when I am tired of her. How much? | | Squarcio | In ready money, or in promises? | | Ferruccio | Old fox. Ready money. | | Squarcio | Fifty crowns, Excellency. | | Ferruccio | Fifty crowns! Fifty crowns for that black-faced devil! I would not give fifty crowns for one of my mother’s ladies-in-waiting. Fifty pence, you must mean. | | Squarcio | Doubtless your Excellency, being a younger son, is poor. Shall we say five and twenty crowns? | | Ferruccio | I tell you she is not worth five. | | Squarcio | Oh, if you come to what she is worth, Excellency, what are any of us worth? I take it that you are a gentleman, not a merchant. | | Giulia | What are you worth, Signorino? | | Ferruccio | I am accustomed to be asked for favors, Giuliaccia, not to be asked impertinent questions. | | Giulia | What would you do if a strong man took you by the scruff of your neck, or his daughter thrust a knife in your throat, Signor? | | Ferruccio | It would be many a year, my gentle Giuliaccia, before any baseborn man or woman would dare threaten a nobleman again. The whole village would be flayed alive. | | Sandro | Oh no, Signor. These things often have a great air of being accidents. And the great families are well content that they should appear so. It is such a great trouble to flay a whole village alive. Here by the water, accidents are so common. | | Squarcio | We of the nobility, Signor, are not strict enough. I learnt that when I took to breeding horses. The horses you breed from thoroughbreds are not all worth the trouble: most of them are screws. Well, the horsebreeder gets rid of his screws for what they will fetch: they go to labor like any peasant’s beast. But our nobility does not study its business so carefully. If you are a screw, and the son of a baron, you are brought up to think yourself a little god, though you are nothing, and cannot rule yourself, much less a province. And you presume, and presume, and presume⁠— | | Giulia | And insult, and insult, and insult. | | Squarcio | Until one day you find yourself in a strange place with nothing to help you but your own hands and your own wits⁠— | | Giulia | And you perish⁠— | | Sandro | Accidentally⁠— | | Giulia | And your soul goes crying to your father for vengeance⁠— | | Squarcio | If indeed, my daughter, there be any soul left when the body is slain. | | Ferruccio | Crossing himself hastily. Dog of a bandit: do you dare doubt the existence of God and the soul? | | Squarcio | I think, Excellency, that the soul is so precious a gift that God will not give it to a man for nothing. He must earn it by being something and doing something. I should not like to kill a man with a good soul. I’ve had a dog that had, I’m persuaded, made itself something of a soul; and if anyone had murdered that dog, I would have slain him. But show me a man with no soul: one who has never done anything or been anything; and I will kill him for ten crowns with as little remorse as I would stick a pig. | | Sandro | Unless he be a nobleman, of course⁠— | | Squarcio | In which case the price is fifty crowns. | | Ferruccio | Soul or no soul? | | Squarcio | When it comes to a matter of fifty crowns, Excellency, business is business. The man who pays me must square the account with the devil. It is for my employer to consider whether the action be a good one or no: it is for me to earn his money honestly. When I said I should not like to kill a man with a good soul, I meant killing on my own account: not professionally. | | Ferruccio | Are you such a fool then as to spoil your own trade by sometimes killing people for nothing? | | Squarcio | One kills a snake for nothing, Excellency. One kills a dog for nothing sometimes. | | Sandro | Apologetically. Only a mad dog, Excellency, of course. | | Squarcio | A pet dog, too. One that eats and eats and is useless, and makes an honest man’s house dirty. He rises. Come Sandro, and help me to clean up. You, Giulia, stay and entertain his Excellency. | | | *He and Sandro make a hammock of the cloth, in which they carry the wooden platters and fragments of the meal indoors. Ferruccio is left alone with Giulia. The gloaming deepens. | | Ferruccio | Does your father do the house work with a great girl like you idling about? Squarcio is a fool, after all. | | Giulia | No, Signor: he has left me here to prevent you from escaping. | | Ferruccio | There is nothing to be gained by killing me, Giuliaccia. | | Giulia | Perhaps; but I do not know. I saw Sandro make a sign to my father: that is why they went in. Sandro has something in his head. | | Ferruccio | Brutally. Lice, no doubt. | | Giulia | Unmoved. That would only make him scratch his head, Signor, not make signs with it to my father. You did wrong to throw the Cardinal out of the window. | | Ferruccio | Indeed: and pray why? | | Giulia | He will pay thirty crowns for your dead body. Then Sandro could marry me. | | Ferruccio | And be broken on the wheel for it. | | Giulia | It would look like an accident, Signor. Sandro is very clever; and he is so humble and cheerful and good-tempered that people do not suspect him as they suspect my father. | | Ferruccio | Giulietta: if I reach Sacromonte in safety, I swear to send you thirty crowns by a sure messenger within ten days. Then you can marry your Sandro. How does that appeal to you? | | Giulia | Your oath is not worth twenty pence, Signor. | | Ferruccio | Do you think I will die here like a rat in a trap⁠—His breath fails him. | | Giulia | Rats have to wait in their traps for death, Signor. Why not you? | | Ferruccio | I’ll fight. | | Giulia | You are welcome, Signor. The blood flows freeest when it is hot. | | Ferruccio | She devil! Listen to me, Giulietta⁠— | | Giulia | It is useless, Signor. Giulietta or Giuliaccia: it makes no difference. If they two in there kill you it will be no more to me⁠—except for the money⁠—than if my father trod on a snail. | | Ferruccio | Oh, it is not possible that I, a nobleman, should die by such filthy hands. | | Giulia | You have lived by them, Signor. I see no sign of any work on your own hands. We can bring death as well as life, we poor people, Signor. | | Ferruccio | Mother of God, what shall I do? | | Giulia | Pray, Signor. | | Ferruccio | Pray! With the taste of death in my mouth? I can think of nothing. | | Giulia | It is only that you have forgotten your beads, Signor. She picks up the Friar’s rosary. You remember the old man’s bones rattling. Here they are. She rattles them before him. | | Ferruccio | That reminds me. I know of a painter in the north that can paint such beautiful saints that the heart goes out of one’s body to look at them. If I get out of this alive I’ll make him paint St. Barbara so that everyone can see that she is lovelier than St. Cecilia, who looks like my washerwoman’s mother in her Chapel in our cathedral. Can you give St. Cecilia a picture if she lets me be killed? | | Giulia | No; but I can give her many prayers. | | Ferruccio | Prayers cost nothing. She will prefer the picture unless she is a greater fool than I take her to be. | | Giulia | She will thank the painter for it, not you, Signor. And I’ll tell her in my prayers to appear to the painter in a vision, and order him to paint her just as he sees her if she really wishes to be painted. | | Ferruccio | You are devilishly ready with your answers. Tell me, Giulietta: is what your father told me true? Is your blood really noble? | | Giulia | It is red, Signor, like the blood of the Christ in the picture in Church. I do not know if yours is different. I shall see when my father kills you. | | Ferruccio | Do you know what I am thinking, Giulietta? | | Giulia | No, Signor. | | Ferruccio | I am thinking that if the good God would oblige me by taking my fool of an elder brother up to heaven, and his silly doll of a wife with him before she has time to give him a son, you would make a rare duchess for me. Come! Will you help me to outwit your father and Sandro if I marry you afterwards? | | Giulia | No, Signor: I’ll help them to kill you. | | Ferruccio | My back is to the wall, then? | | Giulia | To the precipice, I think, Signor. | | Ferruccio | No matter, so my face is to the danger. Did you notice, Giulia, a minute ago? I was frightened. | | Giulia | Yes, Signor. I saw it in your face. | | Ferruccio | The terror of terrors. | | Giulia | The terror of death. | | Ferruccio | No: death is nothing. I can face a stab just as I faced having my tooth pulled out at Faenza. | | Giulia | Shuddering with sincere sympathy. Poor Signorino! That must have hurt horribly. | | Ferruccio | What! You pity me for the tooth affair, and you did not pity me in that hideous agony of terror that is not the terror of death nor of anything else, but pure grim terror in itself. | | Giulia | It was the terror of the soul, Signor. And I do not pity your soul: you have a wicked soul. But you have pretty teeth. | | Ferruccio | The toothache lasted a week; but the agony of my soul was too dreadful to last five minutes: I should have died of it if it could have kept its grip of me. But you helped me out of it. | | Giulia | I, Signor! | | Ferruccio | Yes: you. If you had pitied me: if you had been less inexorable than death itself, I should have broken down and cried and begged for mercy. But now I have come up against something hard: something real: something that does not care for me. I see now the truth of my excellent uncle’s opinion that I was a spoilt cub. When I wanted anything I threatened men or ran crying to women; and they gave it to me. I dreamed and romanced: imagining things as I wanted them, not as they really are. There is nothing like a good look into the face of death: close up: right on you: for showing you how little you really believe and how little you really are. A priest said to me once, “In your last hour everything will fall away from you except your religion.” But I have lived through my last hour; and my religion was the first thing that fell away from me. When I was forced at last to believe in grim death I knew at last what belief was, and that I had never believed in anything before: I had only flattered myself with pretty stories, and sheltered myself behind Mumbo Jumbo, as a soldier will shelter himself from arrows behind a clump of thistles that only hide the shooters from him. When I believe in everything that is real as I believed for that moment in death, then I shall be a man at last. I have tasted the water of life from the cup of death; and it may be now that my real life began with this he holds up the rosary and will end with the triple crown or the heretic’s fire: I care not which. Springing to his feet. Come out, then, dog of a bandit, and fight a man who has found his soul. Squarcio appears at the door, sword in hand. Ferruccio leaps at him and strikes him full in the chest with his dagger. Squarcio puts back his left foot to brace himself against the shock. The dagger snaps as if it had struck a stone wall. | | Giulia | Quick, Sandro. | | | Sandro, who has come stealing round the corner of the inn with a fishing net, casts it over Ferruccio*, and draws it tight. | | Squarcio | Your Excellency will excuse my shirt of mail. A good home blow, nevertheless, Excellency. | | Sandro | Your Excellency will excuse my net: it is a little damp. | | Ferruccio | Well, what now? Accidental drowning, I suppose. | | Sandro | Eh, Excellency, it is such a pity to throw a good fish back into the water when once you have got him safe in your net. My Giulietta: hold the net for me. | | Giulia | Taking the net and twisting it in her hands to draw it tighter round him. I have you very fast now, Signorino, like a little bird in a cage. | | Ferruccio | You have my body, Giulia. My soul is free. | | Giulia | Is it, Signor? I think Saint Barbara has got that in her net too. She has turned your jest into earnest. |