by Ouida
Then the mouth of the pit seemed to swallow her, the darkness seemed to engulf her, and the red glow of the dying poppies in her hand was lost to me.
The two hags, who had been all eyes and ears, chuckled, and nodded at me.
“A fair morsel that! Does she go to Ben Eddin? She has a look of Zourah. Oh, yes, she has a look of Zourah. It is only the other day, — some sixteen years or so, — the handsomest maid in all the Ghetto, and with a voice! — like a rain of diamonds the notes were when she sang. She used to sing on high there, where the gold stuff hangs, and all the courts were still as death to listen. Ben Sulim had just sold her to a man of Milan for the public stage, when one morn the bird was missing, and he searched all Rome in vain: some said she had gone with a student, a Trasteverino, who worked in marble, who had been banished for some irreverence to his own church, the church of the Christians. But no one ever rightly knew. Is this her daughter? — a comely maiden. But she will get no welcome there. Well, there are princes and cardinals! — —”
And with a leer again, and laughter in their thick quaking voices, they turned to their old rags. I sought to get from them what manner of man this Syrian Jew was who dwelt there; but they were cautious, or else tongue-tied by the comradeship of a common faith with him. They would tell me nothing more, except that he was poor, and had come to Rome many long years before from Smyrna.
I left them with a shudder and took my homeward way.
There were the butcher’s boots waiting, and Padre Trillo’s shoes to go to him, and that fragment from the Aldine press to pore over, and many things to interest me, such as, the gods be praised! I always found in life; such as any one may find indeed if they will seek for them.
If our beloved Leopardi, instead of bemoaning his fate in his despair and sickening of his narrow home, had tried to see how many fair strange things there lay at his house-door, had tried to care for the troubles of the men that hung the nets on the trees, and the innocent woes of the girl that carried the grass to the cow, and the obscure martyrdom of maternity and widowhood that the old woman had gone through who sat spinning on the top of the stairs, he would have found that his little borgo that he hated so for its dullness had all the comedies and tragedies of life lying under the sound of its tolling bells. He would not have been less sorrowful, for the greater the soul the sadder is it for the unutterable waste, the unending pain, of life. But he would never have been dull: he would never have despised, and despising missed, the stories and the poems that were round him in the millet-fields and the olive-orchards. There is only one lamp which we can carry in our hand, and which will burn through the darkest night and make the light of a home for us in a desert place: it is sympathy with everything that breathes.
My heart was heavy as I left the Place of Weeping and passed into the crooked spot where the schools gather and the Hebrew children learn the lex talionis as a virtue: just there, there hangs, as all the world knows, a dusky, vast, irregular mass of stone and rubble that frowns on the streets beneath like a leaden storm-hued cloud.
So black it looked and hateful, frowning against the blue sky of the sweet afternoon, that for a moment I forgot what it was, — one moment only: then I knew the shapeless mound was once the theatre of Balbus; the mass built on to it and out of it was the palace of the Cenci.
On high are the grated casements whence the eyes of Beatrice once looked to see if there were any light on earth or hope in heaven, since she had been born in hell and in hell must perish.
Behind, fathoms deep, as in sea-depths, lie the shameful and secret caverns where imperial crimes were done, and death-cries stifled, and dead bodies dragged out by the hook to the river, and nameless infamies wrought on hapless innocence that never vengeance reached nor any judgment followed.
Those two hang together over the Ghetto, the sin of the Empire, the horror of the Cenci: in their shadow I left her.
CHAPTER IV.
As I drew near my stall I heard the people talking, coming out a little from their doors as the noon heat passed.
“Crispin has been gone all the morning,” said Tistic, the barber, who will shave a human head so well that no one shall know it from a pumpkin.
“And my boots not touched,” growled Massimo, the butcher. “That’s what comes of being so very clever. A fool sticks to his last.”
“He is always poring over a book.”
“Or mooning with the monks.”
“Or fooling with the painters.”
“Or standing moon-struck, staring at old stones.”
“But when he does work, it is the best work in Rome, and lasts! Why, a mended shoe of Crispin’s has triple the wear of a brand-new one from any other stall. And he is honest.” So said Lillo, the melon-seller, who is a good soul, and partial to me.
“Yes, he is honest,” most of them sighed, as though sadly owning a defect.
“Yes,” said old Meluccio, who sells old books a few yards off. “The other day he bought a book of me, an old rotten thing, but something that delighted him. I never know the titles: I buy them by the weight. And back he comes at nightfall to bring me a paper note he had found between the pages, a note good for twenty florins! What do you say to that?”
“I always thought his pate was cracked, for my part,” said Bimbo, the tinker, whose own head I had cracked some years before with a hardy bit of wood, for ill treating a poor pony.
“He is as good as gold. I often think he is the precious St. Crispin himself come back on earth. Look what he is when any one of us has the fever, or cannot pay up to time with rent!” said poor hard-working Serafina, the washerwoman, giving kisses to her big brown boy, whose two-year-old feet were dancing on the top of a wine-barrel.
I, of whom my good neighbours talked so kindly, am a Roman born. I was son of old Beredino Quintilio, the king of the beggars, who reigned on the Spanish Steps, in good old times, when the whole city agreed with you that you would be a fool to bend your back and stick a spade in the ground, when you could get plenty by merely stretching your hand out where you lay at your ease in the sunshine.
Of course the world is of the same opinion still, in point of fact; but it only allows the practice of this philosophy to beggars in good broadcloth and purple phylacteries. The beggar in rags goes to prison now, in Rome, as elsewhere.
We lived very snugly in Trastevere; that is, we always had good wine, and fries of all fashions, and in Carnival time never missed money to prank forth with the gayest of them; for Beredino had a noble head, fit for Abraham or Agamemnon, and a really withered leg, that, rightly managed, was a fortune in itself.
We came of the gens Quintilii, according to our traditions, — and, indeed, why not? — and of course my father, being so noble and of such ancient lineage, never could work. “Beg too, little wretch,” said he to me, when I was big enough to trot across the river to the Spanish Square; and I begged accordingly; till I was seven. I never made very much: I was ugly; and I could never bring myself to whine.
When I got to be seven years old, I asked a little girl, not much older, for a coin. She was a very pretty little foreign thing, just coming down the steps of the Trinità de’ Monti. She looked like a little angel, for she had a cloud of light hair, and some roses in her hands. She gave me the roses.
“You can sell them,” she said to me. “But why do you beg? — only thieves and cowards do that.”
And then she ran away to her people.
That night Beredino beat me with a stout ash stick, because I brought home nothing. My body was sore for three days; but I did not care. I kept the roses. When the stripes were healed, I went to an old fellow I knew, who cobbled boots and shoes in Trastevere.
“Will you teach me to do that?” I asked him. “I am tired of the Spanish Steps, and I will not beg any more.”
The old fellow shoved his spectacles on to the crown of his head in amazement.
“Little Rufo, you are mad! What are you thinking of? I do not make so much in a week as you do in a
n hour.”
I hung my head.
“But I am ugly; and I get nothing by begging,” I said to him; for I was ashamed, as young things are, of being ashamed of wrong-doing.
“That is another affair, then,” said the cobbler. “If you cannot make fraud succeed, it is just as well to be honest. If you cannot get this world, you may as well have a try for the next. Here and there are a few people who cannot get a lie out of their mouths, — just as there are folks color-blind, who cannot see the red in an apple. When one is deficient like that, one must tell the truth, and cobble leather or break stones, for one will never make a figure among men. It is a misfortune, — like being born dumb or a cripple; but there is no help for it. I was one of them. Your father drinks wine every night, and has his stomachful of broad beans and good goat’s meat. I taste flesh once a year, on Fat Thursday, and never know what a kid tastes like. If you want to work for your living, I will teach you; but I warn you what it will cost.”
“Teach me,” said I; and I squatted behind his board, and pierced and bored and sewed the old leather day after day, at the old street-corner, where one could see the angel on Hadrian’s tomb, and the people coming and going over the St. Angelo bridge, and the Tiber tumbling away, bilious-looking and sullen, as though angry always because the days of Sallust were done, and the gardens and the villas and the pleasure-places of Horace’s hymning had passed away into dullness and darkness and only left to its desolate banks the sough of the wind in the sedges and the rustle of the fox in the thickets.
I hunted often for the fair-haired rose-child; but I never saw her any more.
Only I used to say to myself, “Cowards beg,” when sometimes in the drouth of the dusty day I was tempted to drop tool and leather and sit stitching there no more, but run out into the broad bright sunshine and get bed and bread by just stretching out a dirty hand and whining for alms.
“Cowards beg,” I said to myself, and stayed by the cobbler’s stall, seeing day come and go behind the angel with the sword, there upon Hadrian’s tomb. Little words strike deep sometimes, — acorns, which grow to timbers, and bear safe to shore, or wreck for instant death, a thousand souls.
Whenever my father met me in the streets he struck at me with his crutch and cursed me for letting down the family greatness and shaming the gens Quintilii. Italo — who was beautiful as a cherub, and knew how to look starved and woebegone after eating half a kid stuffed with prunes, — Italo was, a son after his own heart, and made a dozen crowns a day by weeping, in the sweetest fashion, in the sunshine.
Italo would run to me of a night, having put off his rags and dirt and sorrowful wounds and dressed himself in gay shirt and silken sash to go and dance the tarantella all night with girls at a wine-shop. Italo, who loved me all the same though I disgraced them so, would plead with all his might, and beg me to go back to the Spanish Steps and the old ways of living, and jest at me with all a Roman’s wit for sitting stitching there at gaping boots, and gnawing leather with my teeth, and earning scarcely, all the while, enough to keep body and soul together. But neither Italo’s kisses nor Beredino’s blows got me back to begging. I learned the cobbler’s trade and stuck to it, only running off from the stall every saint’s day and holyday, to caper, and dance, and sing, and eat melons, outside the walls, as every Roman will, be he six or sixty.
So Crispin the cobbler I am, — nothing more whatever.
I am a fool, too, of course. Rome always says so. But I was never a dullard. A good old monk taught me reading, and the like. He was a mendicant friar, but knew more than most of them, and was, in a humble, rambling fashion, a scholar, mooning his days away with a Latin book on the green hillocks that tumble, like waves, about the leagues of ruins beyond the Lateran Gate.
From him I got the little that I know, and a liking for queer reading, and a passion for our Rome. Of course I was an ignorant youth always; my scraps of learning were jumbled piecemeal in my brain, like the scraps of cloth in a tailor’s bag, which will only, at best, make a suit of motley; but they served to beguile me as I sat and tinkered a boot, and I learned to pick my way in my city by the lights of Dion Cassius and Livy.
So I grew up in Rome; a cobbler, when I wanted to pay for bed and board; a jumble of merrymaker and masker and student and improvisatore and antiquary and fool when I could make holyday about the place, — which, thanks to the Church calendar, was a hundred and fifty days out of the year always.
And all the time, by dint of dreaming over dead Rome and getting my head full of republics and their glories, I used to talk in high-flown strains, sometimes, atop of a barrel in the wine-shops and fair-booths, and by the time I was twenty years old the Papal Guard had their eyes on me as perilous matter: indeed, I should have fared worse, had it not been that I haunted the churches often from a real love of them, and had good friends in two or three jovial monks, who loved me, and for whom I did willing work without payment, any day that the hot stones of Rome scorched their sandals into holes.
But one year, when I was still a youth, there came a breath of fire upon Rome. Revolution thundered at the gates like Attila. The old cobbler was dead, and my father too. I threw my leather apron to the winds, kicked my stall into the gutter, shouldered a musket, and rushed into the fray. As all the world knows, it came to nothing. There were dead men in the streets, — that was all. The Pope reigned still, and free Rome was a dream.
I had to run for my life, by night, under the thickets, along the course of the Anio, and over the old Nomentana bridge. I had a bullet in my shoulder; my feet were blistered. I had two copper pieces in my pocket, — that was all. I looked up at the Mons Sacer, and tried to tell myself that it was great and glorious to suffer thus; but I fell into a ditch, and a herd of. buffaloes trampled me where I lay, and patriotism. seemed a dreary thing, even in Mons Sacer’s shadow. A peasant of the Campagna, whose hut stood where Hannibal had encamped, dragged me in-doors, and tended me through months of sickness and exhaustion. He was a poor creature himself, a mass of disease and weakness, and he only scraped a bare subsistence by tending cattle; but he was very good to me, a poor lad, wounded, and friendless, who would have been shot down for a rebel without his succor and shelter.
The world is bad, you know; human nature is a vile thing, — half ape, half fox most often; but here and there one finds these golden gleams; and they look the brighter for the darkness round, as lamps do in the catacombs.
Well, when I rose upon my feet again, I knew the gates of Rome were closed against me. To go back there, then, was to be shot or thrown into the casemates of St. Angelo. So there was nothing for it but to set the Anio between myself and Rome, and creep across the plains to the seashore, and there hide away on a fishing-sloop and cross to other lands. For the rest, I was not unhandy at other things as well as leather, and, being strong and well again, and young, had not much fear, — only a great unending sorrow, because the hills hid Rome.
For, wander where one will, you know, one’s heart is sick for Rome, — for the fall of the fountains, for the width of the plains, for the vast silent courts, for the grass-grown palaces, for the moonlight falling on the ruined altars, for the nightingales singing in the empty temples.
I got out of my country by the way that Dante did, looking back, ever and ever, through blind eyes of pain, as he did, and so traveled on foot, as poor men do, across into the Tyrolean and the German lands.
At first I settled down in Nuremberg, where I fell sick, and found friends, and was not ill content. I was a very young man even then, and, as I sewed leather at my little leafy window, on the street that was Albrecht Dürer’s birthplace, I got friends with the students and philosophers, and read many a deep old volume that they lent to me, and so picked up such scraps of knowledge as best I could, as a magpie picks up shreds and straws and silver spoons and shoves them all away together.
Some said I might have been a learned man, had I taken more pains. But I think it was only their kindness. I have that twist in my brain wh
ich is the curse of my countrymen, — a sort of devilish quickness at doing well, that prevents us ever doing best; just the same sort of thing that makes our goatherds rhyme perfect sonnets and keeps them dunces before the alphabet.
All that beautiful Teutonic world could not console me for the loss of Italy. It is beautiful, that wide, green, cool, silent country, with its endless realms of forest and its perpetual melody of river-waters.
The vast seas of tossing foliage; the broad plains, with their great streams winding through them in the sun; the intense silence of the aisles of pine; the blue-black woods that stretched, seemingly limitless, away on every side; the hill-sides, dusky with the thickness of the leaves, and thrilled with the whisper of a thousand legends; the little burghs, vine-hidden, clustered round their chapel-belfries, and nestled at the foot of towering oak-clad mountains, or rent red rocks all fragrant with the larch and fir and bay tree; the old gray bridges, with the yellow current flowing underneath; the round watch-towers, set in the middle of the swirling streams; the black and white houses, gabled and peaked and carved till they were like so many poems of the Minnesingers; the quaint, peaceful, antique homes, where the people dwelt from birth to death, spinning their flax and shaping their ivory and wooden toys, in green nests under gray hills, that the world knew not, and that knew not the world: they were all beautiful, these quiet, noble, shadowy things that made up the old Teutonic kingdoms; and I knew them well to be so. But amidst them I was in exile always.
Who can once have laughed in the light of the sun of Italy and not feel the world dark elsewhere ever afterwards? And it is only in Italy that the eyes of the people always, though they know it not, speak to men of God.
But ere very long the spirit of unrest possessed me, and I went hither and thither, trying all manner of trades, and even some arts, daubing on pottery, — not ill, they told me; only I could not stand the confined life of any factory-room, — and playing, some seasons, with travelling actors, — with no bad success, since I could always make the people laugh or cry, according as my own mood was: indeed, I might have remained in that career, perhaps, only I never could constrain myself from altering the part with my own imagination and improvisation, which put out the others, so they said; and then, again, though I am a very peaceable man, I stuck a knife into my chief, about a woman, and had some trouble that way, though it was all honest jealousy and fair fight, and the mere rights of man, let them say whatever they will to the contrary.