Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  We went through the crooked streets whilst the shadow of the houses was still scarce wider than a knife’s edge, through the. dusty and sorrowful ways once threaded by the silken litters, with their closed curtains and fringes of gold and their amorous secrets and their running slaves, of the beautiful women who once gave fashion and fame to the quarter of the Velabrum. She looked as if such a litter should be bearing her to feast the sight of Cæsar and lean on cushions in that casement “whence the women could see the play of the fountains as they supped.”

  But that window is now only a line of shattered brick upon the Palatine, and this my Ariadne was going to the Ghetto!

  What a face she had! I thought if one could only have plaited an ivy wreath and set it on her curls, instead of the hood she had pulled over them, the Borghese bronze would have been her very likeness. She seemed to me Ariadne caressed by the sea and made sweet and strong by it, and with fair young limbs, and young breasts like sea-shells; but no lover, mortal or immortal, had touched her yet.

  She went through the streets with happy dreaming eyes, as of one who goes to a beloved friend long unseen.

  “You knew Rome before?” I asked her.

  “I never saw it with my eyes, nor walked in it,” she answered me. “But I know it well. My father had Pliny and Pausanias and Strabo and all the old books, and pictures, drawings, and models he had made, and would bring them out and talk of them half the day and night. When I was quite little I set off to walk to Rome. I was three years old, I think; and they found me asleep among the myrtles on the hills three miles from home. My father would sit on the shore and look over the hills eastward so often, with such a hunger in his eyes. ‘The moon is looking on her now,’ he would say: ‘if only I could see the bronze Augustus black against the sky before I die!’ But he never did. It must be so with any Roman. It would be so with you.”

  “It was so with me. Only I — returned.”

  “Ah, he had not the strength! But he loved Rome always. Better than my mother, or than me.”

  Then her mouth shut close, and she looked vexed to have seemed to pass any reproach on him.

  We went under the arch of Janus and past the bright spring of the Argentine water.

  “That is the spring of the Dioscuri, I think?” she said, and looked at me eagerly.

  Who could have had the heart to tell her it was an oft-disputed point?

  “Yes; they say so,” I said to her. “You see, my dear, we must be different men in Rome from any other men; the very cattle-drivers can water their bullocks from where the divine Tyndarides let their chargers drink.”

  “You believe in the Dioscuri?” she said, with serious eyes on mine, and I saw that unless I should say I did I should never win a step farther in her confidence.

  “Of course,” I answered; “who would lose them, the brethren of light by the lakeside?”

  And indeed I do believe all things and all traditions. History is like that old stag that Charles of France found out hunting in the woods once, with the bronze collar round its neck on which was written, “Cæsar mihi hoc donavit.” How one’s fancy loves to linger about that old stag, and what a crowd of mighty shades come thronging at the very thought of him! How wonderful it is to think of, — that quiet gray beast leading his lovely life under the shadows of the woods, with his hinds and their fawns about him, whilst Cæsar after Cæsar fell and generation on generation passed away and perished! But the sciolist taps you on the arm. “Deer average fifty years of life: it was some mere court trick, of course: how easy to have such a collar made!” Well, what have we gained? The stag was better than the sciolist.

  She smiled, and lingered there, with the look always on her face as of one who sees his native land at length after long absence.

  For the saints she cared little more than they did for her. I saw she seldom looked at the frescoed virgins, and the china martyrs behind their iron gratings at the turnings of the streets; but wherever an old fluted column was built into the dingy brick, or where a broad semi-circle sprang across a passage-way with green weeds in its crumbled carvings, there her gaze rested, and a certain shadow of disappointment and of wonder began to replace the eager expectation on her face.

  “I have seen Rome in my dreams every night,” she said, at last. “Only I thought that it was all of marble, — marble, and gold, and ivory, and the laurels and the palms growing everywhere, and the courts in the temples open to the sky; and it is all dust, — all dust and dirt.”

  “It is not dust in Rome, nor dirt,” said I. “It is dead men’s ashes. You forget, my dear, Virgil’s birds are all silent, and the roses of Ostia are all faded. Nothing blooms two thousand years, except now and then a woman’s face in the marble.”

  She sighed a little, heavily.

  “What do you expect the Ghetto to be like?” I asked her; for it seemed terrible to me that she should have been allowed to grow up in this sort of illusion.

  “Oh, I know what that is,” she answered, quickly. “At least my father has told me so often, when I asked him, because it was my mother’s birth-place, and must be beautiful, I thought, and I was so little when she died. He always showed me the drawings of the Portico of Octavia, and of that I could read much, and the books all said that there were few places lovelier in Rome, and that Praxiteles’s Cupid and other statues were there, and the Theatre of Marcellus and Juno’s temple were close by; and so I have always seen it in my fancy, white as snow, and with many fountains, and above-head, in the open domes, the swallows flying, and now and then an eagle going across like a great cloud. Tell me, — am I not right? Is it like that? Tell me.”

  I turned my head away, and felt sick at heart for her, fed on these fair cruel visions, and going to the filth of Pescheria and Fiumara!

  “My dear, you will always forget the roses by Ostia,” I said to her. “Rome is changed. You remember the sieges she has borne, and she has had masters more cruel to her arts and her antiquity than any enemies. That great black pile you saw yonder (old to us: it is the Farnese) was built out of the ruins of the Flavian amphitheatre. The Rome you think of is no longer ours. Octavia would know no place where her foot fell, could she come back and walk by daylight through the city: by moonlight one may cheat oneself. But it is the urbs still, the caput mundi, — the capital of the world. Yes, still there is no city upon earth like Rome. Why will you hasten? Stay here by the spring of your Dioscuri and eat your figs. The sun is warm.”

  “No, let me see it, — all, — quickly,” she said, with a restless sigh: a great troubled fear had come upon her.

  If I had been a prince or cardinal, now, — or even Maryx or my friend Hilarion! but I was only Crispin the cobbler, with no more than was needed for myself and Palès, and only one room in a house hanging over Tiber and shared with half a hundred other tenants. I could do nothing, — nothing, except plod after her in the heat through the empty ways of the quarter of my friends the tanners.

  Was I asleep again, and only dreaming, after all? I began to think so.

  She kept walking onward through the thick white dust, with a free swift motion, tired though she was, that might have trodden grass at day-dawn and scarce brushed the dew.

  In silence we approached the Doric pillars of the lower arcades of the Theatre of Marcellus; and where once the court of Augustus, shuddering, saw the evil omen of the broken curule chair, there were only now the mules munching their fodder or straining under the whip and knife, and their mountain drivers laughing and swearing, quarrelling and shrieking, and the peasant women suckling their rough, brown, clamorous babes, and the Jew peddlers slinking from stall to stall, hungry and lynx-eyed for safe bargain and barter. The great uncouth Orsini walls leaned over the pillars and jammed them down into the ground; lattices varicolored with multitudinous fluttering rags gaped between the higher Ionian columns; black yawning entrances showed piles of lumber and of rude merchandise, old copper, tattered clothes, pots and pans, cabbages and caldrons; rusty iron and smoking stews:
— the tu Marcellus eris seemed to sigh through the riot of screams and oaths and mirth and fury and shouted songs and vendors’ curses.

  She paused in the midst of the dirt, the squalor, the pushing people, and a vague terror came into her eyes that looked up into mine with a vague distrust.

  “Do you lead me right? Are you sure?”

  I would have given my right hand to have been able to answer her that I led her wrong.

  But what could I do? I could not build up for her out of my old leather the marble and golden city of her scholars’ fancies.

  I answered her almost roughly: men are often rough when they are themselves in pain.

  “Yes, this is right enough. Rome has seen two thousand years of sack and siege, and fire and sword, and robbery and ruin, since the days you dream of, child. I tell you Augustus would not know one stone of all the many that he laid. His own mighty tumulus is only a grass-grown ruin; and the people chuckle there on summer nights over little comedies; you may laugh at Harlequin where Livia sat, disheveled and distraught. Hadrian could slay Apollodorus for daring to disagree with him about the height of a temple, but he could not insure his own grave from desecration and destruction; it is a fortress yonder for the fisherman of Galilee; he has a little better fate than Augustus, but not much. Pass through the market: take care, those craw-fish bite. You see the Corinthian columns all cracked and scorched? The flames did that in Titus’s time. Yes, those built into that ugly church, I mean, and jammed up among those hovels. Well, that is all that you or I or any one will ever see of the Portico of Octavia, — the one good woman of imperial Rome.”

  I said it roughly and brutally; I knew that as I spoke, yet I said it. Men use rude words and harsh, sometimes, by reason of the very gentleness and pity that. are in their souls.

  We were in the middle of the Pescheria.

  It was Friday, and there was a large supply of fish still unexhausted; rosy mullets, white soles, huge cuttle-fish, big spigole, sweet ombrini, black lobsters, — all the fish of the Tyrrhene seas were swarming everywhere and filling all the place with salt strong pungent odors. Fish by the thousands and tens of thousands, living and dying, were crowded on the stone slabs and in the stone tanks, and on the iron hooks which jutted out between corbels and architraves and pillars and head-stones massive with the might of Cæsarian Rome, and which in their day had seen Titus roll by in his chariot behind his milk-white horses, with the trumpets of the Jubilee and the veil of the Temple borne before him by his Syrian captives.

  She stood in the midst of the narrow way, with the acrid smells and the writhing fish and the screaming people round her, and in the air the high arch restored by Septimius Severus, now daubed with bruised and peeling frescoes of the Christian Church; at her side was a filthy hole where a woman crimped a living quivering eel; above her head was a dusky unglazed window where an old Jew was turning over rusty locks and bars.

  She stood and looked, — she who came to see the Venus of Phidias and Praxiteles’s Love.

  Then a death-like paleness overspread her face, an unspeakable horror took the light out of her eyes; she dropped her head and shivered as with cold in the hot Roman sunshine.

  I waited silently. What could I say?

  With a visible and physical ill one can deal; one can thrust a knife into a man at need, one can give a woman money for bread or masses, one can run for medicine or a priest. But for a creature with a face like Ariadne’s, who had believed in the old gods and found them fables. who had sought for the old altars and found them ruins, who had dreamed of imperial Rome and found the Ghetto, — for such a sorrow as this what could one do?

  CHAPTER III.

  I WAITED for some passionate outbreak from her after the manner of women; but none came: one might have said she had been frozen there, so silently she stood.

  After a little while she turned her face to me.

  So one would fancy any creature would look that finds itself, adrift upon a wide and unknown sea, and has been dreaming of land and home, and wakes and finds only the salt water and the unfamiliar stars.

  I tried to comfort her, blunderingly; a man so often does his worst when he means the best.

  “Take courage, my dear,” I said, “ and do not look like that. They are all that are left, it is true, those columns in the wall; and that arch, and a few lintels and capitals and such like, here and there, like this egg-and-cup cornice just above our heads where that woman crimps her fish; and where the Venus and the Love are gone, who knows? The losses of the world are many; they may be under our very feet beneath the soil; that is quite possible. And the place is filthy and the people are cruel, and you may well be startled. But do not think that it is all as bad as this. Oh, no: Rome is still beautiful: so you will say when you know it well; and the past is all about you in it; only you must have patience. It is like an intaglio that has been lying, in the sand for a score of centuries. You must rub the dust away; then the fine and noble lines of the classic face show clearly still. You thought to see Augustan Rome? I know! And your heart aches because of the squalor and the decay and the endless loss everywhere that never will be made up to the world, let the ages come and go as they may, and cities rise and fall. But you must have patience. Rome will not give her secrets up at the first glance. Only wait a little while and see the moon shine on it all a night or two, and you will learn to love her better in her colossal ruin than even you have loved the marble and ivory city of your dreams. For there is nothing mean or narrow here: the vaults, the domes, the stairs, the courts, the waters, the hills, the plains, the sculpture, the very light itself, they are all wide and vast and noble, and man himself dilates in them, gains stature and soul as it were, one scarce knows how, and someway looks nearer God in Rome than ever he looks elsewhere. But I talk foolishly; and this is the Ghetto.”

  I had hardly known very well what I did say: I wanted to solace her, and knew ill how to do it. She stood with wide-opened despairing eyes, looking down the narrow lines of stinking Pescheria to the charred and crumbled columns built into the church-wall of Our Lady of the Fishes. She had not heard a single word that I had said.

  “This is Rome!” she murmured, after a moment, and was still again: her voice had changed strangely, and all the hope was dead in it, — the hope that a little while before had rung as sweet and clear as rings the linnet’s song at daybreak in the priory garden upon Aventine.

  “This is the Hebrew quarter of Rome, — yes,” I answered her. It seemed to me as if I said, “Yes, this is hell,” and led her there. She went forward without any other word, and entered the Place of Weeping.

  “Is there one Ben Sulim here, — an old man?” she asked of a youth beating a worn Persian carpet, red and white, upon the stones. The lad nodded, tossing his dusky curls out of his jewel-bright eyes to stare at her.

  “You want him?” he said. “Go to the left, there — on the fifth floor just underneath the roof; there, where that bit of gold brocade is hanging out to scare the moths away with the sun. Do you bring any good things to sell? or come to buy?”

  “Is he poor?” she asked, dreamily, watching the olive-skinned babies that were rolling in the dirt. The lad grinned from end to end of his mouth, like a tulip-flower.

  “We are all poor here,” he answered her, and fell again to the thrashing of his carpet, while the babies rolled in the dust with curious delight in its filth and their own nakedness. She moved on towards the place that he had pointed out, where the brocade that might one day have served Vittoria Colonna was catching on its tarnished gold such narrow glints of sunshine as could come between the close-packed roofs. She seemed to have forgotten me.

  I caught her skirts and tried to hold her back. “Stay, my dear, stay!” I said to her, not knowing very well what words I used. “Let me go first and ask: this is no place for you. Stay; see, I am poor too, and old, and of little account, but my home is better than this reeking desolation, and this stew of thieves and usurers and necromancers, and foul women who
blend vile philtres to the hurt of maidens’ souls. Come, you who belong to all the gods of Joy, you must not be buried there; you, my Ariadne, you will grow sick and blind with sorrow, and die like a caged nightingale of never seeing any glimpse of heaven, and how will Love, who loves you, ever find you there? Come back — —”

  She looked at me wonderingly, thinking me mad, no doubt, for what could she know of my dream before the Borghese bronze? But the pain in her was too deep for any lesser emotion to prevail much with her. She drew herself from my grasp, and moved onward towards the deep dark doorway like a pit’s mouth that was underneath the gold brocade.

  Two hags were sitting at the door-step, fat and yellow, picking over rags, rubies of glass and chains of gilt beads shaking in their ears and on their breasts. They leered upon her as she approached.

  She turned and stretched her hand to me.

  “You have been good, and I am thankful,” she said, faintly. “But let me go alone. The old man is poor, that is a reason the more; perhaps he wants me. Let me go. If I have need of anything I will cone to you by yon fountain. Let me go.”