Heart (de Amicis)/The Wounds of Labor
THE WOUNDS OF LABOR
Monday, 15th.
Nobis can be paired off with Franti: neither of them was affected this morning by the terrible sight which passed before our eyes.
On coming out of school, I was standing with my father and looking at some big boys of the second grade, who had thrown themselves on their knees and were wiping off the ice with their cloaks and caps, in order to make slides more quickly, when we saw a crowd of people appear at the end of the street, walking hurriedly, all serious and seemingly terrified, and talking in low tones. In the midst of them were three policemen, and behind the policemen two men carrying a litter. Boys hastened up from all quarters. The crowd advanced toward us. On the litter was stretched a man, pale as a corpse, with his head resting on one shoulder, and his hair tumbled and stained with blood, for he had been losing blood through the mouth and ears; and beside the litter walked a woman with a baby in her arms, who seemed crazy, and who shrieked from time to time,
“He is dead! He is dead! He is dead!”
Behind the woman came a boy who had a satchel under his arm and who was sobbing.
“What has happened?” asked my father. A neighbor replied, that the man was a mason who had fallen from the fourth story while at work. The bearers of the litter halted for a moment. Many turned away their faces in horror. I saw the schoolmistress of the red feather supporting my mistress of the upper first, who was almost in a swoon. At the same moment I felt a touch on the elbow; it was the “little mason”, who was ghastly white and trembling from head to foot. He was certainly thinking of his father. I was thinking of him, too. I, at least, am at peace in my mind while I am in school: I know that my father is at home, seated at his table, far removed from all danger; but how many of my companions think that their fathers are at work on a very high bridge or close to the wheels of a machine, and that a movement, a single false step, may cost them their lives! They are like so many sons of soldiers who have fathers in the battle. “Muratorino” gazed and gazed, and trembled more and more, and my father noticed it and said:—
“Go home, my boy; go at once to your father, and you will find him safe and sound; go!”
The “little mason” went off, turning round at every step. And in the meanwhile the crowd had begun to move again, and the woman to shriek in a way that rent the heart:
“He is dead! He is dead! He is dead!|He is dead! He is dead! He is dead!”
“No, no; he is not dead,” people on all sides said to her. But she paid no heed to them, and tore her hair.
Then I heard an indignant voice say, “You are laughing!” and at the same moment I saw a bearded man staring in Franti's smiling face. Then the man knocked Franti's cap to the ground with his stick, saying:—
“Uncover your head, you wicked boy, when a man wounded by labor is passing by!”
The crowd had already passed, and a long streak of blood was to be seen in the middle of the street.