by Ouida
From that night my fame spread, and spread, not only in this country but in all others, like circles on water from a well flung stone. In a few months’ space every hour of my -art could be counted by gold and diamonds. And for Raffaellino I accepted it and worked; the little angelic lad saved my reason certainly, my life perhaps.
For the winter, any or all of the cities hire me, and they bid much higher for me, one against another very often, than I am surely worth; but, when the vines are in blossom, I always come back under the Cross and the Lily, and play all the summer through to my own people in this dear city of mine, a Florentine once more and nothing else.
For the other cities I am the Pascarèllo of the kings, and the wits, and the great ladies, and the pleasure seekers, and I have as many gold boxes and honied words as Marzzoco in the old days had kisses from captives. But here I am the Pascarèl of the people who come trooping to me out of the scorching streets and burning squares, that are even hot when the moon is high, and in from the sunbaked contado, where the grapes burn black in the fierce scirocco.
Here I am myself once more, and I have my own populace about me: and the foreigners seek me with bribes in their hands and say, come with us to Baden, to Monaco, to Belgium, to Russia, to heaven knows where not, and I will not go; I stay here in the summer and play as I choose in the open air theatres with the wings of the swallows over my head, and the eager brown faces of my own people around me.
If half the year I did not hear that deep chested, sonorous vibration of Italian laughter that is like the metal tones of great melodious bells, I should lose heart and manhood. It has been about me all my life, I cannot do without it It is to me as the trumpet call to the trooper’s horse. And there is no laughter like it under the sun; just, so I often think, must the young gods have laughed when Pan piped to them.
And so I have played on from that time until now, for sake of the little tender lad who dreams his days away in music in a little home that I have made for him looking on an old green convent garden behind the Palace of the Torrigianni. Besides, one must do something, or go mad.
And going up under the pale walls where the field roses are nodding, in the sunny road towards Signa, I meet Brunótta on her mule, going to sell her birds in Florence. She is plump, and brown, and cheery: she thrashes her beast, and shrieks shrilly to the fowls in her panniers. And I once cared to caress that little foolish sulky face! Oh God, what fools men look to themselves when they see themselves in the mirrors of their old dead loves! I feel chilly and grown old.
The crickets sing in the canes by the shallow Grève water, and the little red roses are bright on the edge of the grey dusty wall; but for me — I feel old, I say.
What brought me this way to-day?
* * * *
THERE I stand with the laurel wreath in my hand. The laurel is not green, it is yellow from the passing of winter: laurels should always be painted so, for who gathers them in his spring time!
The daffodils blow to and fro by millions, in the fields; the vines are everywhere thrusting out their little tender buds; down there, beneath the shimmer of the olives, lies my City of the Lilies.
My friend paints on at his study of Panfilo, and tells me that I shall never be old; he will have it that artists never are. Perhaps there is some truth in it In a sense we are children to the end — children who are ready to laugh even in our tears, and whose gayest laughter has always a sob in it; children so, no doubt Children who after all know that the only real good that can come to them will be to be lulled into forgetful sleep in the arms of the great nursing mother, Death.
The painter rises and breaks off a bough of laurel fully budded, and brings it to me.
“Take this instead,” he says; “your laurels are not tarnished nor faded.”
For the matter of that I differ with him.
“I prefer those wrinkled ones flaked and crumpled with the winter’s frost. They are very much more true, I say.
“Yet I have nothing to do with laurels of any sort, unless I hold them as deputy for Madama Pampinea. Get me those dandelion heads, blow balls as the old poets call them, they are my prototypes, for they are light as feathers, and arrow headed, and all the four winds of heaven toy with them, and no one marks where they fall. If a player is painted with any emblem, he should be painted with those puff balls. Their place in creation is very much about what his own is.”
So I say. But he will not paint me with my puff balls; he paints his Panfilo holding a branch of amber tinted laurel. He tells me that I always look as if I had stepped out of the Decamerone; I tell him that every Florentine does the same. We have our father’s faces, if not our father’s force and our father’s florins.
It is absurd to paint me with even a dead laurel; I Pascarèl, a player. I have a sort of fame now, it is true, but what is the fame of a player? I said long ago, the mere breath of a breeze that drives the comets of man’s wonder a little before it for one hour, and with the wind sinks to utter silence, and cannot stir so much as a baby’s paper windmill were it ever so.
I used to be so happy in the old life of mine. I think few men, if any, lived so long as I and had so little care. Merriment, freedom, air, and pleasure; I had them all, the petals of the four-leaved shamrock, which here and there one in a million finds and gathers, having the wit to know where to look for it, not in kings’ gardens, but in little cool, green, darkling nooks of life, that bubble with the waters of content.
I had always been happy from the time that I first ran bare-legged and bare-headed in the Tuscan sun after my father’s barrow. I was really and truly the last of the Pascarèl princes; so he said, my poor father, if he were not crazed, and indeed I suppose it is true enough. But what was that to me? It was much more to me that I had the lithest limbs in the Salterrello of any one north of Abruzzi; much more to me that the girls leaning across the rails of the loggia in the summer nights had ripe red lips that always smiled on me. I was happy tinkering the old pots and pans, from the Aquilean marsh to the Sorrentine orange woods; I was happy studying all lore, virtuous and iniquitous, in the sad old ways of Pisa, and following even into occult paths, the steps of Paracelsus and Agrippa; I was happy when I went seaward with the Zinzara and her people, to make sport and laughter all along the bright sea road from Savoy to Basque; and happiest of all when, with no master but my own whim and fancy, I sauntered through the world and then came home this side the Alps, and set up, year after year, wheresoever I would, my little wooden theatre in some silent, shadowy grass-grown square of any old forgotten city, or amongst the hyacinths, and the poppies, and the asphodels of any sunny hillside field; the time when I lived with the country folk and the craftsmen, and when the very best that could be said of me was, “There goes that vagabond; some wit? Oh, yes; over his wine cups, so they say; but only a stroller, that goes a-foot from place to place and carries his baggage like a pack horse, nothing more.”
Life was a merry and gladsome frolic, if a sigh ran under it on occasion; so it seemed to me, I say, then, when the brown contadina grinned at my mirth, and the young coppersmith hid his tears at my woe. But now, when they call me a great genius, and despots laugh and their consorts weep at the things that I say and the things that I do on the stage of the world’s great theatre, now I feel myself no better and no wiser than any soap bubble that a child’s breath floats upwards on the air. The heart is gone out of the jest for me; and as for the pain — well, it lies too close to me now; so close, that when I make them laugh at it, I seem to make them mock my own. Can you understand?
Nay — who should understand an artist? We do not understand ourselves.
They call me great Well, so be it, if it please them. But for me, I know that I was nearer greatness under my old torn canvas roof. For the artist is only great when he lives in the ideal life of his imaginations, and when his own heart aches, how can he do that well! When the rack of the Real holds him tight in its iron jaws, how shall he sport and sleep and smile, in the arms of the Dr
eam Mother!
“Have you seen Pascarèl, the great Pascarèl!” they all say; and all the world runs to stare.
At times I play my own pieces, and then they say too, “What a genius he has!”
Nay, it has even so happened that a king has called me to his seat to give me a diamond box, and that a great princess has cast to me her own bouquet of orchids in a band of jewels. They run after me in the streets, and they sell my portrait betwixt the newest courtezan and the last murderer. Who can want more than that of Fortune!
Nay, nothing that I know of: only where is the light heart with which I used to toss down the poor mountain wine after I had acted to an audience of stonecutters and vinedressers away there on the grey Apennines! Ah, light hearts do not tarry with laurels. This artist friend of mine does rightly to paint the laurel with edges sear and torn. That laurel that Panfilo held, though gathered in the gardens of delight, it must surely have borne the taint of the plague somewhere about it Did the laughter on their lips never make those storytellers shudder! — I shudder sometimes, now, at mine.
I am a fool: oh, I know that well. What was a child with a sheen of yellow hair and a voice like a lute, that she should change the face of the world and the laughter of men to me!
Nothing in reason, I know, but then reason has so little to do with one’s life, and when one cannot so much as tell whether the thing one cares for be living or dead; — that is hard, you see.
Pascarèllo! Pascarèl. When a village ran at my heels with welcoming clamour sending my name over the budding vines and the crimson glow of the field tulips, how well it was with me; I asked nothing better of heaven or earth, than just to laugh on in my own fashion through the careless spaces of the happy years. But now, though all the cities cry it out, and men come to me with gold in their hands, where is the charm? I felt old to-day, I say, as I went by the grey Grève water, where the little red roses were all alive and glad in the living sunshine.
And yet it is April too; and I am here in my City of Lilies.
“You waste half your year,” said a Frenchman to me the other day. “You fling away on your Florentines in the summer all the fortune you make in the winter in Russia, and Paris, and Rome.”
Well, if I do: I love my Florentines better than Russia, or Paris, or Rome: and, what do I want with a fortune?
Besides, I like to be free in the glad summer weather, when the fireflies flash all along the ground and the magnolia trees are all white with flower.
Perhaps I am idle by nature, an Italian is sure to be.
One fierce summer noon I espied a letter-carrier going out for a day’s pleasuring at a fair in the contado, and stowing the post-bags of a whole district away in a cupboard behind his house door to await his return on the morrow. I asked him how he reconciled the dereliction to his conscience. He looked at me with wide open innocent eyes of surprise.
“Che diamine, signore! The fair will not wait; if I do not go to-day, I go never. But, as for the letters, they will wait very well. No one knows what is in them, so no one is expecting anything; and, no doubt, they are all bad news, letters always are, and the poor people will be all the better for having another day in peace.”
With which he turned the key on the post-bags, and jogged happily off on his donkey with red ribbons flying from its ears.
So on in like manner, I being idle and always at heart a vagabond, shut the gold bags out of sight and come to the fairs in the summer, only instead of surefooted Dapple I have a shying Pegasus; and there are no red ribbons at its ears, but only the frayed ends of tattered fancies; and when I get to the fair, the fun of it is flat and jarred to me now like a bell that has cracked in a fire.
It is odd too. In the old time, when I made a score of woolcarders weep like children, or a handful of stonecutters laugh in their dry dusty throats under that canvas roof of mine, that blew with the winds, and rocked with the rains, and shone yellow with the sunshine; in that time it always seemed to me that the Player after all was the greatest artist of them all, since turn by turn he was a breathing statue, a moving picture, a poet who spake aloud, and a musician whose syrinx was no less a thing than the million-chorded passions of mortals, strung on the echoing shell of human sympathy. So it always seemed to me in the old times.
It used to be pleasure enough just to be in the sun and hear the cicale’s zig-zig, and watch the big black fortuna buzz amongst the magnolia flowers, and beckon a brown-faced buxom girl up the path under the vines with her arm full of peaches and her lips ready for kisses. It used to be pleasure enough, all that; but now, there is wit enough in the cities, and there are women, handsome enough and ready enough with their laughter, and it is a gay, mad, zestful life, this life in the gas glare, and the masqueing, but still there is not much flavour in it. Perhaps it is because I have won all such graces and glories as there are to win — graces of a string of glass beads, glories of a truncheon of rushes.
Well, say I am great in my fashion, say I write what I please and I say what I please, and I am true to the duties of the Pantomimi and the Pasquin, whom every player worth his salt represents, in thrashing the tyrants with my scourge of asses’ tails, and in showing the great world its ridicule in my triangular fool’s mirror. Say I am great, so far, — pretty much as is the barber’s brass basin which reflects its audience with their faces so lengthened or widened, that they perceive for the first time all that is grotesque in their features. Well, the brass basin only holds soapsuds, and sometimes I think I myself hold nothing better. But whether I am great or little the flavour has gone out of my life.
That is thankless enough. Yes, I know. They call me a wit and a poet, they call me Martial and Plautus, they say I am a Boccaccio in motion, and an Ariosto in motley. Well, it is all very pretty, if it be not all very true; and they know that once down there in the cheerless Spring of Novara, it was not with a sword of lath that my blows were given; they know that in Pascarèl the Player there is also a little — just by that saving grace, a little — of Pascarèl the Patriot And that last title I like much better than the old one my forefathers owned of Pascarèl the Prince. But still the flavour is gone somehow.
Now and then, when the lads are around me and we go by moonlight through the streets, and some one strikes a chord from his mandoline and the shrill fresh voices rise, raising the echoes from palace and prison, the old spirit comes over me, and I drive them with words of fire, and I make them laugh, just such riotous, endless, rippling laughter as the torrent laughs in the sunshine, springing from stone to stone. Then I am the Pascarèl that the people knew, who was gay all day long like a grillo. But it will not last now, and when I am quite alone it seems to me that the world is weary as it seemed to me only to-day down there by the grey Grève water.
* * *
“IT is the idle hour,” says Varkò, the painter, going into his room, which is heavy with the scent from great sheaves of mughetti that fill a score of Montelupo bowls and Majolica dishes. “Lie here a little while and smoke, and Ninetta will bring fruit and wine; meanwhile do you look at my winter’s work, my Mona Lisa.”
“You are profane,” I tell him; but he is indifferent to the thunders of heaven that in justice should smite him for thus taking in vain the name of a god. He pushes me gently back into the shadow and then goes across the room and draws back the velvet curtain that is catching the full light on it. As the purple cloud sinks away, the light shines instead on a picture set in a dark frame of cinquecento carving, that is heightened here and there with a gleam of smalto in heralds’ devices, and is surmounted by a ducal crown. It is only a woman’s portrait Behind her there is a scarlet frame of oleander; she leans on a trecento balcony; her dress is of a curious dead gold, it is open at the throat and breast, and against the white skin a knot of vermilion-coloured carnations glow; there is a broken lute at her feet; she does not smile; one would say that she knows why the cords are snapped, why the music is still.
Red and gold! how the picture burns! And the woman�
�s face is beautiful in the midst of all the fire; and one would say that the last love-song she will ever care to hear has been sung on that shattered lute.
Somehow, though it is summer with her, and girlhood with her, and those oleanders are flowers of Florence; somehow you know well that there is a great silence round her, a silence as of things that are dead.
It is a strange picture.
I stand before it blinded and confused. What is it I see? I hardly know. In impatience, he asks me what I think; what I think!
Who knows so little as I?
Rudely I tell him that his oleander should not beam so radiant-red as that, Tiziano always painted his summer roses in dull semitones; Tiziano’s — beside his woman’s cheeks — are cool and pale, and have no flush on them. So I say to Varkò; and all the while my eyes gaze into that oleander glory; and the woman’s eyes look back at mine, and all manner of dead dreams raise their heads like little snakes around me.
Varkò is speaking to me, that I know; but the sense of what he is saying is vague and imperfect to me. Perhaps he is telling me the history of the portrait What need of that? — there is the broken lute.
“And her name?” I ask him suddenly.
My heart stands still as it were, and a rush of heat and life seems to throb through those Fates, that have been so heavy and so chill on it so long. I ask under my breath, as one speaks of the dead; I know that I am afraid of the answer. Afraid as I never was of that fiery sea of slaughter, down there by the field of Novara.
Varkò laughs aloud: a laugh that seems to me to echo jarringly through the stillness of the lily-scented air.
“Have you heard not a word of all I have been saying?” he cries to me. “It is scarcely a portrait: have you not heard me, indeed? And yet it is herself, just as I saw her in the last summer in Florence; I changed nothing. Nay, the oleanders burned as red as that behind her in the sunset. I know the Titian roses are all pale; but still, I have painted as I saw. It always seems best to me to do so, or try and do so at the least All that red, all that gold, they would kill any other woman’s face, but they do not kill hers. It is an old Florentine dress of cloth of gold, you see.