Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  We stayed long, and watched it high above on the wooden roof of the tower; watched it until the sun had set, and the glow had died, and the stillness of evening had fallen over the hills and plain, and past our faces flew a little grey downy owl.

  “Your fathers saw Galileo?” said Pascarèl to the bird as it went, “and thought what a fool he was, no doubt, to sit mooning there with his face turned to the stars instead of hunting moths in the night air and slaughtering mice under the olive stems as they did. To be sure: — the owls and the world, no doubt, were quite of one mind concerning him. When there is a nice, plump, black mouse to be killed down on the clay, what greater folly can there be than to stay on high staring at stars? Who would not be an owl ten times sooner than a Galileo?”

  “Are you serious?” I asked him, when we leaned against the wooden rail. I had not then learned to disentangle his thoughts from his language.

  “Altro!” he cried, sending a pebble down into the olive foliage beneath. “Who would not be an owl? To escape all the toil and moil of the day, asleep in a cosy ivy hole; to doze all the hours away, and only awake to kill and eat; to be able to swear there is no such thing as a sun, because we are too blind to see it — what can be finer than that? It is such a popular type, too; ten thousand times more popular than a Galileo !”

  I looked at him where he leaned with his arms on the parapet of the roof, and his profile, clear and dark, against the delicate silvery greys that had followed the rose glow in the heavens.

  He had more interest for me than Galileo or the owls; in no way could I reconcile the grace of him, the wit of him, and the look of his face with the mode of his life, which was scarcely above the grade of vagrants and of mountebanks.

  It seemed to me so strange that any man of such various learning and such ironical perception should thus willingly pass away his years in the homely and grotesque career of a strolling player.

  * * * *

  “What could ever first make you take this life you lead?” I asked him, incredulously, when we stood together on the top of the star tower.

  “I fell in love,” said Pascarèl, promptly, leaning over the roof-wall to watch the shadows steal over the long cypress stradone, and come slowly upward and upward to the heights whereon we stood, “not for the first nor the fifth time, of course, but truly enough for that matter. A set of French comedians came to stir the stately silence of old Pisa. They were merry, poor, happy-go-lucky people who played their way all along the Riviera. Clever people, too — French players always are.

  “Amongst them there was a girl whom we called the Zinzara, because of her pungent tongue. I am not sure that she was handsome, but she had a diable au corps, you know — no, you don’t know — no matter!”

  “To see the Zinzara play Phædre in the first, and dance the cancan in the afterpiece, was a revelation. I had always maintained that women could not possess genius, but I gave in before her. Her renderings of Racine were miracles, and so were her soups and salads.

  “She would scare your very soul out of you with her whirlwinds of passion, and her whisper was like the hiss of a snake, and her eyes seemed a blaze of fire and passion, and then half-an-hour after you would see her in her one poor little room, with her cuffs turned back from her long white hands, and she would mix you oil, and lettuces, and beet-root, or toss you a herb omelette over her stove with a skill that half the cooks of Paris could not have equalled. She was a true Frenchwoman, the Zinzara. I have never seen her like since.

  “It was she who made me an actor. I had always had a taste for it, but when I saw this Paris mosquito the die was cast I had finished all my course in Pisa. For that matter I had swept all before me, and won all there was to win. Indeed, they actually offered me a professorship of mathematics. Never say that I have not rejected greatness.

  “I was two-and-twenty; I was an Italian; I was Pascarèl; and they imagined that I should settle down to lead all my life in old Pisa like an owl in a belfry, till I grew as old, and as grey, and as silent, and as forgotten of God and man as Pisa is herself! But they meant well; only they knew nothing of the fitness of things. Academies never do.

  “If I had meant to stay, the Zinzara would have swept my intentions to the winds. I had a room I was very fond of, high up in a tower, with the river washing against the walls far away down below. There were scores of cobwebs, and legends, and ghosts attached to it, but I slept too soundly in those days to take heed of any one of them. I had hundreds of books there, and my tubes, and prisms, and telescopes, and I had passed seven years there after the fashion of Faust, only that I had all my life before me, and being young broke up my learning and science with nights of nonsense and days of pleasure that needed no devil’s cordial.

  “I loved my room, and was loth to quit it, and almost it tempted me to stay in Pisa; but one fine morning, as I read my Plato for the thousandth time, I heard a merry noise and laughter in the street at the foot of the tower; and looking out I saw a little set of people all ready for long travel, and going gaily on their way. It was the Zinzara and her brethren going back towards their France.

  “They had the sun all about them; they had great clusters of cherries in their hands; they were eating, and laughing, and singing; they were dusty already, but what of that? they were going to the green country, to the blue sea, to the charm of change, to the tumult and merriment and variety of life.

  “The spell of the Wanderjahre was cast on me, to say nothing that I was really in love with that poor Zinzara.

  “An hour after I had made over my room and my books and my instruments to my best friend, Ezio Luccone, and I had caught up the mosquito and her friends on the high road for Livorno, just as the sun reached to noon. From that day I was a player.

  “I stayed about two years with that troop, all that time on the Riviera or among the little mountain towns of Savoy.

  “The Zinzara taught me all she knew. For the matter of that I had found my vocation, which assuredly did not lie in a professorial tribune.

  “I used to write comedies and ‘revues’ for them, No! I have not a scrap of what I wrote left. What does that matter! If one have any orò sodò about one at all, either mental or moral, one never counts what shreds of the good metal one drops along the roads. If others pick it up, let them. To be of ever so little use is all one can hope for in this world.

  “At the end of two years the troop broke up; it is a miracle amongst actors when any set of them holds together half as long, and I went by myself to Paris, where, too, I played.

  “But I never cared much for Paris. One cannot open one’s mouth when one talks that language; and amongst those shining zinc roofs, and that blaze of white paint and of gilding, I grew thirsty for my own great dark palaces, and still historic garden-ways, and moonlit plains song-haunted, and measureless distances only swept by clouds and wind. Do you not know! Oh, yes; anyone who has once breathed in Italy knows. And to anyone who had not, there would be no use in talking.”

  “What of the Zinzara!

  “Oh, the usual thing of the Zinzara. She loved me very dearly for a time, and then she picked up a Marquis out of Monaco — only a Marchese di Truffaldino I am afraid, poor thing — and flung the salad-bowl at my head.

  “Women always fling something at you when they are angry with themselves for having been in love with you; a great genius flings a stinging ‘Elle et Lui;’ a poor actress can only fling a kitchen missile that comes handy. Perhaps the latter is the better. It is not so disagreeable to be forcibly reminded of the radishes and endive of the past, as it is to see all one’s old follies and passions served up with pepper and mustard.

  “The poor Zinzara! I have not a notion what became of her. She had genius of a sort indisputably, both for tragedy and cookery. But she never fastened her mark on the world, though she had the making both of a Rachel and a Vatel in her.

  “Peace be with her wherever she be; she enlivened two bright summers for me; she taught me the tricks of the stage; and she
only broke her wooden supper-bowl, and not either my head or my heart.”

  I was silent as he ceased speaking; I had only the most vaguely innocent notions of what this his passion for the Zinzara might mean; but I had a vague and restless impatience at hearing him speak of any love for any creature at all. His gaze went westward as he spoke.

  Close at hand, on its own quiet hill-side, stood the little convent-church of Sta. Margherità, the highest point of all, bowered close amongst olive and fruit-tree foliage, with the village slanting away from it in a dusky line of roofs downward to where the Pazzi tyrannicide was planned amongst the villa gardens.

  Pascarèl looked across to it. It is not changed since its beautiful novice left its saintly peace and stole down through the amorous olive shadows to the lawless love of Fra Lippi.

  “Do you not see Fra Filippo,” said he, “gathering his monk’s frock about him, and speeding up there to steal a glance at Lucrezia through the convent grating, if chance favoured! What grace was there in that scamp of the Carmelites, that Rabelais of painting, that Falstaff of the fine arts, that a woman, young and rich and beautiful, should leave all for him, and cleave to him so faithfully? Some heart and soul there must have been. The city saw in him a wild, frolicsome, mad monk, fitter to worship Silenus than Christ But there must have been some soul in him — some soul tender, pitiful, spiritual, profound, — or he had never painted his S. Stefano of Prato till it made the fierce men of his own day weep, and he would never have loved those green, wide, laughing countries which made him greater than Masaccio, and the first of the Florence painters of landscape. Perhaps that soul in him the young nun saw. Are we ever truly read, save by the one that loves us best? Love is blind, the phrase runs; nay, I would rather say Love sees as God sees, and with infinite wisdom has infinite pardon.”

  His voice grew very sweet and still, and the dreamy look came into his eyes as he leaned there gazing across at the little red roof of Sta. Margherità, whose solitary bell was tolling the Ave Maria over its silent woods.

  His thoughts were far beyond me; I was but a heedless child, and of where his mind had wandered I knew nothing; and of the greatness of such a love as he was wishful for, doubtless, in his heart even then, I had no more conception or measurement than I had of that baser passion such as he had been lured with by the Zinzara.

  * * * * *

  He spoke no more; the night had fallen quickly and completely, as it does in Valdarno when once the sun’s disc has dropped behind Carrara.’

  We went slowly together down the stairs and across the court and through the olive downward to the City, and we passed within the gates again as the stars began to burn, and the sheets of moonlight to lie white and wide on river and piazza. The world, so tired though it be with fruitless pain, so dull in drowsy apathy, so weary of for ever giving birth to what for ever perishes when touching on its prime, the world is once more young again when the moon shines on Italy.

  “To my fancy,” said he, softly, as we paused a moment on the bridge of the Graces to see the silver width of the stream shine away on either side into the sweet tremulous darkness of the hills, “to my fancy, when the gods of the golden age were driven from earth and walked no more amongst men, they looked back once, and said, ‘that we may be remembered a little in this land — we, the old banished gods of the old, fair, dead faiths, — let Paradise return to earth when the moon wakes above Italy.’ Her nights are gifts of the gods that she has, this Italy of ours; it is so trite to say so — ay, because it is so true.”

  Florence was very still that night as we went through her streets from the old Star Tower.

  It was the Holy week.

  Here and there, from some low open door, a Miserere was pealing. Here and there the shadow of a monk fell across the broad white stones. Here and there a lamp burned before some street shrine hung with those scentless flowers that are the joyless Christian symbol of immortality.

  But Florence never can be very sad. Her tears and smiles lie close together. If she draw the saintly cowl about her, her fair eyes laugh from beneath the folds, so that you half shall swear the robe of penance is a masker’s domino.

  She tells her beads with one hand, but she touches her lute with the other.

  Even this night as we went, though it was the season of the saintly Quaresima, there was a mandoline trilling from some high casement in a palace tower; in an old dusky doorway there was the glisten of a girl’s white dress and a cuirassier’s flashing breastplate; from a fretted balcony of stone fashioned with lilies and fawns’ heads a beautiful dark woman, gathering about her a mantle of black and gold, dropped a single rosebud to a lover who waited below for the pretty symbol; far, far away, across the great white luminous piazza, there came the sound of voices, in chorus, laughing to light scorn the lenten lamentations; some men and maidens had been in the meadows and were bringing home sheaves of the lilies, they danced as they came in the moonlight, and a young boy played a viol before them.

  Pascarèl looked and listened, then went onward with a smile.

  “Is not my Florence perfect?” he murmured. “Some say I talk of her as though she were a city of fairie. Well, a fairy city she is to every poet and every lover. Was she not builded in a night by Hercules as a pleasure toy for Venus and Flora, made with the stones from the golden Amo water, and set up in a meadow of lilies? Hercules gave her his strength as a birthright, and Flora being content, touched the soil and said, ‘All the year long flowers shall blossom here, and their smile shall not cease in any season;’ and Venus, being well pleased likewise, called her son to her, and said, ‘When you dart your arrows hither wreathe them with roses, and wing them from the eagle and the dove.’”

  CHAPTER VIII.

  The Lily-queen.

  HE did indeed love Florence with a tender passion.

  Paris is the Aspasia of cities, but Florence is the Heloïse; upon the brilliancy of her genius and her beauty there lie always the shadow of the cloister, and always the divinity of a great sacrifice.

  Men, with any soul in them, love Florence reverently; for tuneful and thoughtless though her laughter be now, and although now the strangers of northern isles and western worlds coarsely intrigue in her pleasure-places, and basely cheapen her treasures in her streets, Florence cannot be changed or lowered, for in her day she suffered much and failed often, and aspired greatly, and set her seal with a pure hand on much of the noblest work of the world.

  To Pascarèl she was as a living thing.

  Not a stone of her but had a tongue for him. Not a dark nook in her quietest ways but for him was filled with some figure of the past standing out in the gold and colours of idealised tradition, like some form that a monk had drawn upon his missal vellum.

  Gay and idle, and buoyant and amorous indeed had been the tenour of all his days in Florence; laughed away to the tinkle of mandolines, the chink of wine-glasses, the riot of carnival mirth, the twittering love chirp of women quickly won and lightly lost But beneath this life of his there ran another vein, deeper and truer, and filled with the strong heroical blood of the past; and he would go through the Florence ways many and many a time, lost to all the daily stir around him, and seeing nothing but the wistful spiritual eyes of Angelico, or the white bare feet of Ginevra, or the flicker of the torch in the hand of the Black Giàn, or the dread of destiny on the face of Luisa Strozzi.

  He would laugh at himself for his joy in it, for he would say that he was a citizen of the world, and entered no narrower classification; but at heart the love of Florence was always warm with him, continual wanderer from her olive valleys though he was.

  He knew the story of her every stone and spandril; he would trace the steps of all her heroes and prophets inch by inch along the narrow ways; for him her paven courts were eloquent with a thousand tongues; and all the curling leaves and shining traceries of her sculptures had a million whispers of the great workshops where great men had wrought at them amidst the eager reverent eyes of pupils who, in their
turn, took up the glorious tale, and told it to the nations.

  And now and then, coming out of the Bargello into the broad silvery sunlight, or leaning on the old Rubaconte parapet, looking far, far away, to the snows of Vallombrosa, now and then he would bestir himself and speak of Florence, with that swift rush of that mellow Tuscan which has the war clang of the clarion and the love-note of the lute together in it.

  “Her richest” said he, in one of those moments, answering some thoughtless word of mine. “No. It was not the riches of Florence that made her power — it was her way of spending her riches; a totally different thing, cara mia.

  “Amidst all her commerce, her wars, her hard work, her money-making, Florence was always dominated and spiritualised, at her noisiest and worst, by a poetic and picturesque imagination.

  “Florentine life had always an ideal side to it; and an idealism, pure and lofty, runs through her darkest histories and busiest times like a thread of gold through a coat of armour and a vest of frieze.

  “The Florentine was a citizen, a banker, a workman, a carder of wool, a weaver of silk, indeed; but he was also always a lover, and always a soldier; that is, always half a poet. He had his Carocciò and his Ginevra as well as his tools and his sacks of florins. He had his sword as well as his shuttle. His scarlet giglio was the flower of love no less than the blazonry of battle on his standard, and the mint stamp of the commonwealth on his coinage.

  “Herein lay the secret of the influence of Florence: the secret which rendered the little city, stretched by her river’s side, amongst her quiet meadows white with arums, a sacred name to all generations of men for all she dared and all she did.

  “‘She amassed wealth,’ they say: no doubt she did — and why?

  “To pour it with both hands to melt in the foundries of Ghiberti — to bring it in floods to cement the mortar that joined the marbles of Brunelleschi! She always spent to great ends, and to mighty uses.