Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  “Giojà, Giojà! they should have called her Ariadne,” I muttered, tossing the old bits of leather together on the board, and thinking of her likeness to that bronze, and of my dream. And Marietta, and all the rest of them coming out into the cooling air as the Ave Maria rang, grew very cross with me because I did not listen to them; and Padre Sylvio came again and grumbled for full ten minutes about his unmended sandals.

  He gone, there came a fisher fellow that I knew, with empty baskets on his head, and loitered by my stall a minute, a red carnation in his mouth, — as big black-browed and lusty a Roman as you could want to see, who led a pleasant life enough, knee-deep for the most part of it, in the tawny Tiber water, dredging for small fish, with half the spoils of Judea, and half the glories of Nero’s house, for anything he knew, under the sands that he waded on, unthinking.

  He tossed me a bright little pair of shining mullets on the board as a gift.

  “What were you doing in Fiumara this morning?” he asked me. “I saw you there, as I sold any fish. It was a girl you showed the way to? — yes, I spied her skirt flutter, and asked: she went to old Ben Sulim, eh? I could have told you what he would do, the meanest, sulkiest Jew dog in the Ghetto. It was not pretty of you, Crispin, — not pretty to leave her there. I would have brought her home myself, only my Candida has a jealous eye, and would welcome her with the big chopping-adze for certain.”

  “What happened? What did the man do?” I asked him, my conscience pricking sharply, for I had had no Candida with a chopping-adze to fear.

  “Cursed her, and drove her down the stairs. What else could she look for? — unless she went to buy, or took him a bargain. The rascal is so poor! I do not know her errand rightly. But so I heard. Pray, what was she?”

  “She said that she was the daughter of his daughter. And he has driven her away?”

  “So they said in Fiumara. I did not see, myself. But if she be of the old Syrian blood, she will do well enough: the hags there will show her fifty roads to fortune. All those singing-wenches whose throats get choked with gold and diamonds are of that accursed race; great eyes, and a thrush’s voice, and a shark’s maw, — that is your Jewess all the world over. Make your mind easy, Crispin. She will do.”

  And he went on his way with his empty baskets, singing lustily, to pour some crawfish into his fair Candida’s pot at home.

  Great eyes, and a thrush’s voice, and a shark’s maw. Well, say it were a Jewess the world over; say it were Woman — very often — everywhere; yet that did not make my conscience quieter for the fate of that sea-born Joy swallowed up in the Ghetto.

  Of course it was no business of mine; of course it mattered nothing to me: still, it harassed me, and made me ill at ease, — so ill at ease that I stripped off my apron once again, and put Palès again on guard, and left the stall, just as the pleasant, chattering, gossiping populace’s hour of sunset drew near at hand, and went my way much faster than at noonday, down towards the black shadows of the Conic pile.

  “I am an ass,” I said to myself: there was a nice little fry cooking on Pippo’s stove for my eating; there was a barrel of fine Veii wine that had been given me because I had found a Venus in the vineyards that had brought a million of scudi to the owner of the soil; there was a game at dominoes with my neighbours, which we played so regularly after dark whenever I was not roaming; there was a strange little black-letter copy of .in annotated Satyricon that I had picked up the day before and had barely had time to rejoice in; there were all these things and a dozen more to pass the time agreeably, for we always were merry in the quarter of the tanners, where the lutes twanged all night long; and yet I turned my back on them all, and went after what could be no concern of mine, down into the Ghetto.

  I envy the people who are occupied only with their own fortunes and never turn aside to follow the fates of others. Selfishness is the spinal marrow of comfort. As for me, I never could help troubling myself about the troubles of other folk. I suppose when one is always mending the holes that others have trodden their leather into along the highway stones and dust, one gets a habit of sympathy with the pilgrims that break down, — perhaps.

  “I am an ass,” I said to myself; and yet I went on and on towards the palace-prison of poor dead Beatrice.

  I made my way quickly into the Pescheria, and found the same two hags picking at the same old rags. They looked up and grinned.

  “Are you come for that pretty maiden of yours?” they said to me. “Well, we will have none of her; she came down the stairs as she went up them; she was barely a second above-head. We would have kept her, for she is one of those morsels that your great churchmen love; but she would not listen; she looked stupid. She went away yonder.”

  They pointed to the northwest. Perhaps, I thought, she had been coming to me. My first impulse was to go and see the Syrian miser in his den; my next, to leave him for awhile until I found her, for it was sunset, and night was near at hand.

  I searched about the surrounding streets, asking hither and thither; but it was not easy to describe her, for in the streets she had drawn her hood over her head, and there were other girls in linen dresses. But I lighted on one or two who had noticed such a figure pass, and by these mere threads of guidance I traced her to the Forum Romanum, and the Capitol, and the little dusky church that covers the depths of dread old Tullianum.

  You think of Peter and of Paul whenever you pass there; I think of Jugurtha and Vercingetorix; they perished without hope. It had been better for Cæsar to have saved that noblest foe, than to have gone on his knees up yonder stairs of Jupiter Feretrius.

  But for once I thought not of Cæsar, not even of Vercingetorix, this summer evening as the shadows deepened, and the bells for vespers tolled; for on those steps of Ara Cœli I saw her, sitting wearily, her whole frame drooped together with the listlessness of bodily fatigue and moral abandonment.

  There were the brick arches that artists love, and the mosaic of the Madonna above her head; there was a dim rose flush in the gloom from the set sun; within the church, choristers were chanting their lessons; the solemn strains and the distant voices sounded sad and mystical.

  She was not crying, as most girls would have been, but her head was drooped, and her arms fell wearily over her knees, in an attitude which had a despairing desolation in it, mute and very deep. She must have been very tired, too; and as I drew near to her I saw — for a cobbler looks first at the feet — that one of hers had bled a little, where a stone had pierced through the leather of her poor worn shoe.

  Somehow, — because it moved me professionally, I suppose, — that little stain of blood upon the stones touched me more than the most violent sorrow and weeping would have done.

  She was alone on the steps.

  The place was deserted. With the glad summer night at hand, Romans had other sport than to roam under the well-known pile of the Capitol: there were blind-cat, and many another game, to play in the wide squares, gossip to hear by the cool-sounding fountain-edge, figs and fish to be eaten in great piles at all street-corners, jaunts out to be made in rattling pony-carts along the blossoming Campagna to the wine-house, — a thousand, and ten thousand things to do, rather than to come to vespers in this sad old church, or go yonder to St. Joseph of the Carpenters.

  I went up to her, and touched her gently: she raised her head with a bewildered look.

  “Is it true?” I asked her. “Is it true that your mother’s father has driven you out so cruelly?”

  “He does not believe,” she said, simply.

  “Believe! But you have papers?”

  “He would not look at them.”

  “But he could be made, forced, obliged,” I said, hotly; not so sure of the law as of my own temper and of my fierce fury against this wretched Syrian in the Ghetto.

  “I would not wish it,” she said, with a sort of shudder of disgust. “I would rather think that he is right, — that I am nothing to him, — that there is some mistake. These are the steps where Gracchus
was struck down?”

  “Yes; and after him Rienzi,” I answered her, not wondering much at her thinking of such things at such a moment, because I always think of them myself in season and out of it. “But what did he do? what did he say? Was he indeed brutal to you? Tell me more.”

  “It does not matter,” she said, wearily. “Yes, he was unkind. But then he did not believe, you know: so it was natural.”

  “But why did you not come to me?”

  “I went to the Capitol, to see the Faun.”

  “The Faun! He could not help you.”

  “Yes. It is help — it gives courage — to see those things that one has dreamt of. How he smiles! he does not care that Praxiteles is dead!”

  There was a dreamy faintness in her voice, like the voice of one light-headed from fever or from want of food.

  She was so calm and so dry-eyed, she frightened me. She was all alone on earth, and sixteen years old, and without a roof to cover her in all the width of Rome, and yet could talk of Gracchus and of Praxiteles!

  “What will you do, my dear?” I said to her, trying to draw her back to the perils of her present place. “Shall I go see this Syrian and try to soften him? If he be your mother’s father, he must have some sort of feeling, and some right—”

  She shuddered, and looked at me with sad, strained eyes. “No. He called my mother evil names. I would not go to him, not if he begged me. And it was so vile there, so vile; and I was so happy — thinking I came to Rome!”

  Then at last she broke down into a passion of tears, her head bowed upon her knees. I think her grief was still much more for Rome than for herself. Men hate the tears of women: so do I; yet I felt more at ease to see them then.

  I touched, and tried to raise her.

  The singing of the choristers echoed from the church within; the warm glow died; the night fell quite; there were only a stray dog and the solitary figure of a monk, — here where the conquerors had used to come, with clash of arms, and loud rejoicings, whilst their captives passed downward into the eternal darkness of the Pelasgic prisons.

  “Come with me, my dear,” I said to her, for she was so helpless now, and so young that she seemed nothing more than a child, and I lost my awe for her as of the awakened Ariadne. “Come with me,” I said. “You are sorely tired, and must be wanting food too. I will do you no harm; and I have a little, clean place, though poor; and we can speak about your trouble better there than in the street here. I am Crispin the cobbler, — nothing else. But you may trust me. Come.”

  It was some time before she stilled herself and fully understood me, for she was stupefied with fatigue and pain. and followed me, when her passionate low weeping ceased, with the exhausted docility of a poor animal that has been over-driven.

  She was only sixteen years old; and she had thought to come to the Rome of Octavia!

  I led her almost in silence to my home.

  As you come from Janiculum, across the bridge of Pope Sixtus, you may see on your right hand, high up in the last house wall, a window, with pots of carnations on a wooden balcony, and bean-flowers running up their strings across it, and it hangs brightly right above the water, and any one sitting at it can look right away up and down the grand curves of Tiber upon either side, with the tumble-down houses and the ancient temples jumbled together upon the yellow edges of the shores.

  It was the window of my room. Of course I was most at home in the open air, but I had to sleep somewhere, and the old marbles and the old books that I had got together could not lie out in the rain of nights; so this was my home, and Pippo, who lived on the same landing, cooked for me; and Ersilia, who lived below, looked after it for me; and old blind Pipistrello, who lived above, and fiddled so sweetly that all the goldfinches and nightingales high above in the woods that were Galba’s gardens strained their throats for envy, used to come and fiddle there sometimes, with his blind eyes turned to the yellow water, and the temple of Vesta, and the Sacred Island, and the ruins of the Temple of Healing.

  To this one room of mine I took my Borghese Ariadne, who had gained human limbs and dragged them very wearily along. What else could I do? One could not leave a girl like that to go to her death, or to worse than death, in the streets of a city quite strange to her, where she had not a friend, and only sought gods that were dead.

  I talked on to her as we went, rambling nonsense no doubt, and I do not think she heard a word of it: at least, she never answered; she moved dully and silently, her head drooping, her feet seeming heavy as lead. As I turned to her on the threshold of the house upon the bridge, she grew paler and paler, stumbled a little, put out her hands with a feeble gesture, and would have fallen but for me. She had grown giddy, and lost consciousness from exhaustion and long fasting and being in the sun all through the hours of the day.

  Old Ersilia was spinning in the doorway; she cried out and came to help, — a good soul always, though of direful hot temper; between us we bore her within into Ersilia’s bed, and then I left her for a little to the woman’s care, and stood troubled in the street without.

  I lit my pipe. A pipe is a pocket philosopher, a truer one than Socrates, for it never asks questions. Socrates must have been very tiresome, when one thinks of it.

  With the help of the pipe I made up my mind, and went up-stairs into my chamber.

  It would have looked a poor, bad place enough to rich people, no doubt; but yet it looked fine to the people of my quarter, — much too fine for a vagabond cobbler, even when he sat quiet and respectable at his stall and might be almost called a shoemaker. For in twenty years’ living, with odd tastes, and many persons kind to me, and ideas of a dwelling-place different from my country folks, — from having traveled far and lived with men sometimes very far above me in position of life, — I had collected things in it that took off for me its desolateness and homeliness and made it unlike any other room in that Rione.

  There were some old German pipes, with mediæval potters’ painting on their bowls, relics of my old days in Dürer’s city; there were little bits of delicate French china, little cups and figures and milk-bowls, that women had given me in those good times of my youth and my wanderings; there were three massive old quattrocento chairs, with seats of gilded leather; there were a few old mezzotinto prints, and some of Stefano della Bella’s animals, that artists had given me; there was a grand old tarsia cassone, too, that Hilarion had sent there one day to be kept for him, and never had taken away again; and there were many pieces of agate and cameo, of bronze and of marble, that I had found myself in the teeming soil of the Agro Romano, as the wooden plow of some peasant turned them upward, or the browsing mouth of some ox cropped the herbage that had hidden them. And, above all, I had my armless Mercury, really and truly Greek, and almost as well preserved as the Mercury of the Vatican; a very thoughtful, doubting Hermes, mine, as though he had just made woman, and in his young, cold heart was sorry for her, as though foreseeing that the fair and dark brothers, Eros and Anteros, would one or other always conquer and bind her, so that the wiles and ways, the facile tongue and the unerring sight, with which he himself dowered her, would be powerless to keep her from slavery and from kissing the steel of her chains, and from most worshiping the one who locked them fastest and made their fetters surest with a blow.

  That was, I used to think, what my Greek Hermes thought of where he stood, a fair, maimed thing, in the Pentelic marble. Some said that Cephisodatus made him: for myself, I loved to go yet higher, and believed that Cephisodatus’s mighty father did so. Anyhow, it was too good for my little, shabby, dusky, stone chamber, where it had to be companioned with oil-flasks and wine-flasks, and melons and cabbages, and leather and old shirts, and the straw of Palès’s bedding. But when the sun came in red over the red bean-flowers on the balcony, and touched his delicate and noble head, I loved him very dearly, and he gave a tender grace, of an earlier and gladder age than ours, to the old bare room upon the river, and seemed to shed a light about it that did not come from the bro
ad blue sky of Rome.

  I had a few other little things: — carved arms, whose beauty made one see the whole woman that was lost; an old Etrurian bracelet, bronze, and green as the mould that grows over the tombs of peasants and of kings; a lamp with a mouse upon it, that might have shed light upon the brow of Sant’ Agnese herself, kneeling in the bowels of the earth, where never daylight or moonlight came; a colossal head of Greek sculpture, shattered from the throat on some day of siege when the marble temples fell like axe-hewn saplings, blackened and bruised, and cracked by fire, but with the crown of flowers and of fruit still fresh as though Glycera had just plucked them to be mimicked in the Parian by her lover’s chisel. These things I had, and they lent a grace to my attic; and now and then they offered me gold for them, and I ate my bit of black bread and refused. It was pleasant to feel that I, only Crispin the cobbler, had something the world would like to have and could not, unless I chose.

  Possession is the murderer of human love; but of artistic love it is the very crown and chaplet, unfading and life renewing.

  Still, though I would not sell my Hermes, I was a very poor man; for in all trades — from statecraft to shoemaking — it is he who makes holes, not he who mends them, that prospers.

  “See how well I fare,” said old Lippo Fede, who is a cobbler, too, in another Rione, and who one day got warmed with wine and spoke incautiously. “Look you, Crispin, whenever I sew up a hole I slit another, just a snick with a knife, — blacked over, and never seen when the shoes go home. Eh. praise the saints! the selfsame pair is back upon my stall within a fortnight, and I make my moan over the rottenness of leather. But you, my dear, you mend the hole, you see, and never pierce a new one. Well you may be poor! Besides, it is not fair to the craft; not fair in any way. What right have you to mend shoes so that people, seeing how yours wear, may get to think the rest of us a set of cheats and rascals? There is no good fellowship in that, nor common sense, nor brotherhood.”