by Ouida
There was a cabbage-leaf nice and wet upon my head, and above that a square of untanned leather, stretched upon four sticks, and wet, too, with sprinkled water, and on the board before me, among the tools and the old leather, were a handful of vine-leaves, and the half of a watermelon, and a flask of wine: who could be hot with all that?
There was nothing that needed haste, — only the butcher’s big old boots that he had brought over that morning from his shop by St. Crispian’s church; and I let them lie with the pair of little smart scarlet shoes that I had tacked up for handsome Dea at the seed-shop yonder, who dearly loved a students’ ball and had a father as sharp of eye and hard of heart as Shylock. I took a little wine, and stretched myself, as Palès was doing at her ease; and the Faun in the fountain was singing and piping his loudest of the days when men were wise and worshiped Sylvanus upon Aventine, and in the green gardens and the meadows and the forests invoked him as Sanctus Salutaris.
And with the music of their song and the bubbling of the water into the great stone basin in the wall, my unfinished sleep came over me again, and I dreamt that I was in the gallery of the Cæsars again, and that again I heard the gods, and the poets, and the wanton, dispute around Ariadne.
Ariadne stretched her hand and touched mine.
I awoke. Palès was barking; the drowsy sunshine was white about me, and between it and me a figure stood.
Was it Ariadne’s?
I stumbled to my feet.
“My dear, do not take the poppy,” I muttered, stupidly. “Love was cruel: that he always is.”
Then I got fuller awakened, and was only more bewildered. I could not stir; the sun blinded me, and the noise of Palès and of the fountain deafened me; I could only blink my eyes and stare as an old gray owl may do, startled out of sleep in the daytime, and seeing something fair and strange light on the branches of his hollow, ivy-mantled tree. The figure between me and the Via Giulia was so like the Ariadne of Borghese that I could only gaze at it idiotically and wish that I were in-doors with Pippo and his peppercorns. For there are old weird legends here and there in Rome of-statues that have come to life and given little peace to those that roused them.
The figure between me and the golden light and the dark walls had poppies in her hand, and a purple passion-flower; the stuffs she wore looked to me like the variegated alabaster; she had the small head, the clustered hair, the youthful eyes, the look as of one whom Aidoneus had sent up to seek for light and life and whom Love claimed.
“Do not take the poppies: they mean death!” I stammered, blinking like an owl; and then I saw that it was not the bronze of the Borghese made alive, but a mere naturally living creature, a girl, travel-stained and tired, and holding gathered flowers that were drooping in the heat.
She came a little nearer, and leaned her two hands upon my board, and Palès ceased to yell, and smelt at her almost tenderly.
“The poppies are no harm,” she said, with a little wonder. “Will you tell me where the Ghetto is? I want the Portico of Octavia.”
When I heard her voice speaking, then I knew that it was not my Ariadne, with her robes of gold and rose, and her crown of imperishable ivy, but only a mere human thing standing between me and the sunshine.
Her skirts were white, indeed, but of the roughest linen spun on village distaffs, and what I had taken for the hues of the alabaster was an old Roman scarf of many colors such as our Trasteverine women wear. Her small and slender feet were disfigured in coarse shoes covered over with gray powder from the highways and the streets. The poppies were common field-flowers such as grow everywhere by millions when the corn is high, and the passion-flower, no doubt, she had pulled down from any one of the garden-walls or the campagna hedges. But in her face, — though the skin was golden with sun-tan, and the eyes were heavy with fatigue, and the clustering hair was tumbled and dull from heat and dust, — in the face I saw my Ariadne.
I had not been wholly dreaming this time.
“I have come from the sea,” she said, with her hands leaning on the plank of my board. “I have lost my way. I do not know where to go. You look good: would you tell me where the Portico of Octavia is? That is what I want.”
She was a beautiful girl, a child almost. I stumbled to my feet on a sort of instinct of deference to her sex and youth. Though she was very poor, as one could see, there was a strange grace about her as she stood with all the hot sun beating down on her bronze-hued head, that should have had the crown of ivy on it. She looked tired, but not timid in any way; and there was a look of eager and joyous expectation on her face. Just so might Claudia Quinta have looked when with her own unaided hands she drew the stranded vessel of the Magna Mater off the banks of Tiber, in triumph and vindication of her innocence.
“The Portico of Octavia?” I echoed, stupidly. “Do you know what it is, now, my dear?”
“Yes; I have read of it in old Latin books.”
(In Latin books — good heavens!)
“And you want to go to the Ghetto?”
“Yes; that is the name.”
“Do you know what that is?”
“No.”
“Why do you go, then?”
“There lives an old man there that was my mother’s father: I was to go to him.”
An old man in the Ghetto and she my Ariadne! — the two went ill together. Not that I have any prejudices. Though a Roman born, I have lived in too many lands, and, in my own way, with too many dead men’s minds in books, to have any hostility against class or country. Only for this girl whom all the gods had counseled, and who had Love’s poppy-flowers in her hands, to go to that foul quarter that had once the gilded vileness of the Suburra and has now the dingy vileness of the Ghetto! She saw the astonishment and reluctance in me, and the foolish impulse of displeasure that I felt must have shown itself on my features, for she looked disappointed.
“I can ask some one else,” she said, a little sadly. “You have your stall to leave, and perhaps it is far away. I beg your pardon.”
But I did not like to let her go. It seemed churlish, and I might never see her again. Rome is large, and the Ghetto foul air for body and spirit.
“No, no,” I cried to her, for she was already turning away. “It is not that. It is not far off, and, if it were, the stall is safe with the dog; but in the heat, and to that pig-sty, — not but what I will go with you, my dear; oh, yes; only wait a little till the noon sun passes.”
“I would rather not wait,” she said, and paused, but looked at me doubtingly, as though my hesitation had suggested to her some misgiving of herself or me, and that I did not like.
I wondered what the Faun on the fountain thought of it; he and I often gossiped together; but I had no time to take counsel of him, for she was moving away towards the bridge and the nightingale-haunted slope of Janus’s hill.
“That is the wrong road,” I cried to her. “You have no need to cross the river. My dear, if I seemed to hesitate I must have seemed a brute. I had been asleep in this hot air, and got as empty-pated as a scooped-out melon that the boys have emptied in the sun. Just wait here till this great noon glare passes, — it is shady here, and not a soul will come; then I will go with you; for the streets are puzzling when one does not know them; not that there ever was a time that they were strange to me, the gods be praised.”
She looked at me quickly with confidence. “You love Rome?”
“Who loves not his mother? And our mother is the mother of the world.”
She looked glad and as if pleased with me, and took the stool I pushed to her, where the shadow of the leather could shelter her from the sun.
Palès licked her hand, — Palès, who hated strangers, especially those whose hands were empty.
She gave a short sigh, as of fatigue, once seated; but her eyes went to the water springing from the wall, and to the domes and temples that she could see afar off. As I happened to have a little rush basket full of the first figs under my vine-leaves (I had meant them for handsome Dea,
but Dea would have the scarlet shoes), I gave them to this girl, and she thanked me with a smile, and slaked her thirst with one of them, which comforted me, for it seemed to make her more thoroughly human. I was still a little afraid of her, as one is of the creatures of one’s dreams.
“You spoke of the sea; you come from the Maremma,” I asked her; for no one who sits all his life long at a street-corner can bear to sit in silence, as she was willing to do.
“Yes; from the coast.”
“But you seem to remember Rome?”
“My father was a Roman.”
She spoke with a flash of pride.
“Is he dead, my dear?”
“He died a year ago,” she answered; and her beautiful curved mouth grew pale and trembled. “He told me when the money would not last any more, I must try and find the old man by the Portico of Octavia; and the money was done: so I came.”
“What was your father?”
“A sculptor; and he carved wood, too.”
“And this old man?”
“I do not know. I believe he was cruel to my mother. But I am not sure. I never heard very much. Only, when he was dying he gave me some papers and told me to come to Rome. And I would have come to Rome if he had not told me, because there was no place on earth he loved so well, and only to see it and die, he said that was enough” —
“He lived very near, to die without seeing it.”
“He was very poor always, and in ill health,” she said, under her breath. The words rebuked my thoughtless and cynical remark.
“And this old man who is in the Ghetto, is he all you have to look to?”
“Yes. I think he will be glad to see me: do not you?”
“Surely, if he have eyes,” I said, and felt a little choking in my throat, there was something so solitary and astray in her, yet nothing afraid.
“And what is your name, my dear?”
“They called me Giojà.”
“Giojà. And why that?”
“I suppose because my mother thought me a joy to her when I came. I do not know. It was her fancy” —
“A pretty one, but still heathenish as a name, — as a baptismal name, you know: it is not in the Saints’ Calendar.”
“No. I have no saint. I do not know much about the saints. I have read St. Jerome’s writings, and the City of God, and Chrysostom; but I do not care for them; they were hard men and cruel, and they derided the beautiful gods, and broke their statues. It was Julian that was right, not they: only he killed so many beautiful birds. I would not have done that.”
I was of her way of thinking myself; but in Rome, with the monks and the priests everywhere at that time, as many as ants that swarm in midsummer dust across a roadway, one had to be guarded how one said such things, or one got no ecclesiastical sandals or sacerdotal shoon to stitch, and fell into bad odor.
“No, there is no saint for me,” she said, a little sadly again, and looked up at the blue sky, as though conscious that other girls had celestial guardians yonder in the golden shrines and upward in the azure heavens, but she was all alone.
“It does not matter,” I said, heathenishly, like the pagan that I was, as Father Trillo, who was a heavy man, and trod heavily, and wore out many a pair of shoes, would often tell me with a twinkle in his merry eyes.
“It is no matter. Let us hope the gods of joy are with you that the Christians killed. May-be they will serve as good a purpose as the saints. They are not really dead. You may see them everywhere here in Rome, if you have faith. Only wait till the night falls.”
She sat silently, not eating her figs, but watching the water gush out from the wall. She had dipped her poppies in it to refresh them; the passiflora was already dead. There was a perplexed expectant look in her dreamy eyes, as though indeed Persephone had really sent her up to earth.
“Have you come all the way from the sea to-day? and from what part of the coast?” I asked her, to keep her there in the shade a little.
“From below Orbetello,” she answered. “I have walked a part of the way; the other part boats brought me that were coasting. The fisher-people are always kind; and many know me.”
“Were you not sorry to leave the sea?”
“I should have been, only I came to Rome. Where we lived it was lovely; great rocks, and those rocks all thyme-covered, and the sheep and the goats grazing; farther in the marshes it is terrible, you know, — all reeds, and rushes, and swamps, and salt-water pools, and birds that cry strangely, and the black buffalo. But even there, there are all the dead cities, and the Etruscan kings’ tombs. I did not lose sight of the sea till the day before yesterday, when they told me I must turn inland, and indeed I knew it by the maps; but I could not find the birds and the thickets that Virgil writes of, nor the woods along the river: it is all sand now. There was a barge coming up the river with pines that had been felled, and I paid the men in it a little, and they let me come up the Tiber with them, for I was tired. We were all the two nights and yesterday on the water. I was not dull. I was looking always for Rome. But the river is dreary; it is not at all like what Virgil says.”
“Virgil wrote two thousand years ago. Did that never occur to you?”
“I thought it would be all the same,” she said, with a little sigh. “Why should it change? They have not bettered it. The forests and the roses must have been lovelier than the sand. Last night it rained, and there was thunder. I got very wet, and I grew a little afraid. The pines looked so helpless, great strong things that had used to stand so straight by the side of the waves, thrown down there and bound, and going to be built into walls for scaffolding and burnt up in ovens and furnaces, and never going to see the sea and the sea-gulls and the coral-fishing any more! But nothing really hurt me, you see, and when the rain passed off it was sunrise, and, though we were leagues away, I saw a gold cross shining where the clouds had broken, and one of the bargemen said to me, ‘There! that is St. Peter’s,’ and I thought my heart would have broken with happiness; and when at last we landed at the wharf where the lions’ heads are, I sprang on to the landing-place, and I knelt down and kissed the earth, and thanked God because at last I saw Rome.”
I listened, and felt my eyes wet, and my heart warmed to her, because Rome is to me — as to all who love her truly — as mother and as brethren, and as the world and the temple of the world.
“I thank thee who hast led me out of darkness into light,” I murmured as the Hebrew singer does. “That is what Maryx said when first his foot touched Rome. It is a pity Maryx should be gone across the bridge to his nightingales.”
“Who is Maryx?”
“A great man.”
“And you?”
“A small one, — as you see.”
“And why have you Apollo there?
She was looking at a little statue, a foot high, above my stall, that Maryx had made for me many years before, when he was a youth studying at the Villa Medicis.
“That is Apollo Sandaliarius. The shoemakers had their share of the sun-god in Rome; to be sure it was not till Rome became corrupt, which takes from the glory of it; but in his statues he is always sandaled, you know. And underneath there are Crispin and Crispianus, who have their church hard by; the brother saints who made shoes for the poor for nothing, and the angels brought them the leather: that picture of them is on stained glass; look at their palm-leaves and their awls: they are always represented like that.”
“You are a Roman?”
“Oh, yes. You may have heard of that cobbler whom Pliny tells us of, who had his stall in the midst of the Forum, and who had a crow that talked to the Romans from the rostrum and was beloved by them, and which crow he slew in a fit of rage because it tore up a new bit of leather, as if the poor bird could help destroying something, having consorted with lawgivers and statesmen! That man they slew, and the crow they buried with divine honors in the Appian Way. I am the ghost of that most unlucky man. I have always told the people so; and they will believe anything, if only you tell
it them often enough and loudly enough. Have they not believed in the virtues of kings, and are they not just beginning to believe in the virtues of republics? The sun is off one side of Via Giulia; now do you wish to be going? Will you not break a piece of bread with your figs first?”
She would not, and we took the way along the river towards the Ghetto.
As we walked, she told me a little more about herself, and it was easy to surmise the rest. Her father, when little more than a student, had been ordered out of the city in exile for some real or imagined insult to the Church, and, ruined in his art and fortunes, had gone, a broken-hearted man at five-and-twenty, to a dull village on the Ligurian Sea, taking with him the daughter of a Syrian Jew, Ben Sulim, whom he had wedded there, she changing her faith for his. What manner of man he might have been was not very clear, because she loved him, and where women love they lie so innocently and unwittingly of the object which they praise; but I gathered that be had had, probably, talent, and a classic fancy rather than genius, and had been weak and quickly beaten, finding it simpler to lie in the sun and sorrow for his fate than to rise and fight against it: there are many such.
She said he had used to carve busts and friezes and panels in the hard arbutus wood, and sometimes in the marble that lies strewn about that coast, and would model also in terra-cotta and clay, and send his things by hucksters to the towns for sale, and so get a little money for the simple life they led.
Life costs but little on these sunny, silent shores: four walls of loose stones, a roof of furze and brambles, a fare of fish and fruit and millet-bread, a fire of drift-wood easily gathered, — and all is told. For a feast, pluck the violet cactus; for a holiday, push the old red boat to sea, and set the brown sail square against the sun: nothing can be cheaper, perhaps few things can be better.
To feel the western breezes blow over that sapphire sea, laden with the fragrance of a score of blossoming isles. To lie under the hollow rocks, where centuries before the fisher-folk put up that painted tablet to the Stella Virginis, for all poor ship-wrecked souls. To climb the high hills through the tangle of myrtle and tamarisk, and the tufted rosemary, with the kids bleating above upon some unseen height. To watch the soft night close in, and the warning lights shine out over shoals and sunken rocks, and the moon hang low and golden in the blue dusk at the end there under the arch of the boughs. To spend long hours in the cool, fresh break of day drifting with the tide, and leaping with bare free limbs into the waves and lying outstretched upon them, glancing down to the depths below, where silvery fish are gliding, and coral branches are growing, and pink shells are floating like rose-leaves, five fathoms low and more. Oh, a good life, and none better, abroad in the winds and weather, as Nature meant that every living thing should be, only, alas! the devil put it into the mind of man to build cities! A good life for the soul and the body; and from it this sea-born Joy came to seek the Ghetto!