Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  But I have never been a wise man, — or I had not now been stitching boots and shoes for the tired feet of the Roman plebs.

  One day as I was working, — it was very early morning, and Palès and I and the Faun in the water were all alone, — two slender hands were laid upon my stall, and, looking up, I saw her, just as I had seen her that day when I dreamed of my Ariadne of Borghese, — clad just the same, and looking just the same, only she had no flowers in her hands, and had the pallor of illness on her face.

  Her eyes were wet with tears.

  “I have come to thank you,” she said, very low. “Only I cannot thank you — ever. You have been so good. I do not know what to say. And I have nothing—”

  “There is no need to say,” I answered, almost roughly. “And Ersilia was to tell you nothing. I mean — an empty room there doing no good to any one — and you are well now. Should you be out like this? you cannot be very strong!”

  “I awoke at daybreak, and I could not rest longer without coming to you; Ersilia would not let me leave the room before; you have been all so good — so good — and I—”

  “There has been but little goodness: had there been less we had been brutes. Are you sure that you are strong enough to stand? Sit here!”

  I drew my bench out for her, and she sank down on it. For me, I was stupefied by the loveliness of her, and her likeness to that Borghese bronze.

  “You should be with them there in that cool green place, — you and Psyche; only Bacchus should never come near to you, nor Theseus either,” I murmured to myself. She lifted her head in surprise, thinking me mad, no doubt, or else not understanding, probably; for indeed how should she have understood?

  She had a little tumbled paper in her hand, which she put out to me.

  “This is the receipt I had given me: they were to send such few things as I had. Could you ask for me? There is not much, save some busts of my father’s: they might sell, and pay what is owing all this time. How long is it that I have been ill? Ersilia would not say.”

  “Oh, a few weeks. This is midsummer, and you will suffer from the heat,” I answered her. “Yes, I will go and ask after your things; but as for payment, — the room was empty, and Ersilia, I am sure, would never wish — My dear, she lost a daughter of your age.”

  A certain proud shadow stole over her face.

  “And I am grateful. Do not think I want to acquit so great a debt as that. I only hope to pay the money it has cost. That can make no difference in one’s heart. I say it very badly; but you know what it is I mean.”

  “Oh, Yes, I know. Palès, be silent.”

  “The room is your room; that Ersilia told me,” she said, with the color rising up over her brow. “I cannot bear to be so much trouble: I wish to go away. I will try and keep myself. I can make little things in clay. I might help sculptors—”

  “My dear, go back to my room, since you will have it that it is mine, and do not pain us all by taking flight like this,” I said to her, feeling like a fool, not knowing what to say, and deafened with the jealous noise of Palès. “I will go and get your things when I have done this pair of boots; and do you rest, and then in the evening I will bring them to you, and we will talk. But have no fear: the gods love youth: and we are all your friends.”

  She thanked me once more with the loveliest smile, like sunrise illumining the sadness of her face, then went, with an obedience I could not have looked for, away to the corner of the bridge and into the darkness of Ersilia’s doorway.

  I had been anxious to have her well away before all the young peasants trooped in from the Janiculan with their market-fruits and greenery, and before two or three students who dwelt upon the bridge should come out on their morning stroll to the academies. There was no harm in any of these lads; but they were lads; and she was the living image of that Ariadne away in the gallery of the Borghese in the shadow of the old green ilex woods.

  I stitched on manfully at the boots; they belonged to the blacksmith round the corner.

  Why is a blacksmith always a half-heroic and even almost poetic person, and a cobbler always more or less absurd?

  Is it viler to shoe men than horses? Or is it that the grim divinity of Hephæstus and Mulciber has given a sort of grandeur forever to the anvil and the forge? Or is it because great Lysippus was a blacksmith? and because it was a cobbler that set the murderers on Cicero? You may make a shoeing-smith a very Odysseus or Hector in your poem, and no one will laugh at you or your picture; but your human shoemaker is always beneath contempt: it is very unjust.

  There was a crashing and jingling confusion of sounds, and a clatter of restless horses’ hoofs upon uneven stones.

  “I turned out of my way to say farewell to you, Crispin,” said the sweet melodious voice of Hilarion on my ear. “No, there is nothing the matter, and it is never too warm for me; but the fancy came to us an hour or so ago. I shall be back — ah, who knows when? When they unearth any fresh nymph from my fields. Go up to the villa when you will, and how you will; go and stay there all summer through, as though I were there. But you must be at your corner when I come, or Rome will not be Rome. It could better lose the Faun from the Capitol than the Faun of your fountain.”

  He leaned downwards and shook my hands. The horses sprang forward, angry at the noise of the water; in a moment he had both come and gone. The black-browed singer, who was his latest fancy, was beside him: they swept on and left me there.

  Only a. few days before, he had spoken of passing all the summer in his beautiful home under Soracte; had planned a thousand excursions and excavations; it had been ascertained that his villa of Daïla was on the site of what had once been a country-seat of Petronius Arbiter; he had undertaken excavations on a large scale in its vineyards; a few days before they had found a broken but very lovely marble of the nymph Canens, and he was eager to lay bare the earth for more treasures; he had insisted with his charming imperious way that I should spend all the summer and vintage months with him; he had meant to banish women, to be alone, to translate the songs of the Greek of Gadarene, to write a poem upon the necklace of Eriphytê; and now he was gone.

  For myself, I was sorrowful: Hilarion to me was both a solace and delight. Looking up at the bean-flowers above the bridge, I was glad. For she, up yonder, was fairer than that nymph Canens whom he had unearthed from his fields beneath Soracte; and he ——

  It was many years since I had first met Hilarion. When I had seen him first he had been only a most lovely boy, — beautiful as any whom Mennirmus and Theognis delighted to sing of in their odes.

  It was in an earlier time, just before I had ceased wandering about, and, being smitten with that homesickness at sight of the Madonnina of old Mino, had come to set up my stall to Crispin-Crispianus.

  It happened thus.

  There was a plague in the city of Paris; the cholera killed its thousands and tens of thousands. The gay spring and midsummer months were made ghastly by it, and in the open-air theatre, where the comedians I then belonged to were acting and singing merrily enough for the meagerest pittance, night after night some workman or student or sewing-girl would be seized with the pangs of the dire disease as they sat and laughed there, chewing a peach, or smelling a knot of jasmine, and would be carried out of the place, neither to laugh nor to weep any more.

  There were burning drought and hideous sickness and people talked wildly of poisoned wells, and suspected foul faith everywhere, as they will in the fear of contagion and in the contagion of fear. I did what I could: it was not much: the silence of death made itself felt everywhere; one used to look in a sort of infuriated despair down the Seine — that had shrunk from its yellow banks — and think of Tiber and our Sacred Island, and wonder where the old fair days had gone, when in this kind of misery the cities could pray to Zeus, and believe that they beheld him bring health and mercy as the golden serpent crept from sea to shore.

  One night in the height of the plague going along as the moon had risen, where the street wa
s solitary, I met a man carrying a woman in his arms.

  He cried aloud to me, and I went to him.

  “It seized her a little while ago,” he said to me. “We were in the opera-house; my horses and servants had not come; no one would touch her. Help me to get her home, — if you have no fear.”

  I had no fear. I helped him to carry her. She was perhaps twenty years of age; not more. She was already livid and unconscious, though she writhed and moaned. She was a very pretty pink and white thing, and the jewels on her sparkled and seemed to laugh horribly in the moonlight.

  He was a youth, not more than twenty himself, if so much; tall, and fair, and beautiful, with something imperious and tired on his face already.

  The streets were empty, though a few folks like him were of the Decamerone temper, and went to song and feast in the midst of the universal death; yet these were few, and carriages were rarely met, because so many had fled out of the doomed city.

  We bore her between us as best we might to where she lived, — it was not very far, — a great place, in which she had several rooms, luxurious, and full of scattered, useless riches, such as young men lavish on such women as she was. The chambers were decorated in the taste of Paris, light and white, silver and golden.

  We laid her down upon her delicate bed. I remember it was all curtained with white satin embroidered with pale roses, and above it hung a little Love — laughing. There were lamps burning, and a heavy sweet smell upon the air from jars of lilies and of hothouse flowers.

  I left him with her, and ran for aid. When I found a doctor, and took him up the stairs, with one glance he saw death written there. He tried his remedies, but without any hope in their power. He, like all men in that season, had grown used to seeing human bodies drop like swarms of stifled bees. In less than an hour the girl lay dead, gray and dusky and swollen under her blossoming roses and her laughing Love. She died horribly, in short but mortal agony, and rather like a poisoned rat than like a human creature.

  All the while her young lover watched her with little emotion: he seemed rather curious than pained. He was a beautiful boy, — hardly more than eighteen; but no cynic of eighty years could have been colder before that death-bed than he was.

  There was no farewell even between them in her intervals of consciousness. She had only muttered curses on her pain, and he had only said, “Poor Lilas!” as carelessly almost as a heartless man might say a word passing a dying horse by the wayside.

  When she was quite dead, he rose and offered me his hand.

  “You have been so good! How can I thank you? To bear such a scene, and for a stranger. In your place, I think, I should have refused. She is dead, you see. Poor Lilas! — an hour ago laughing at the theatre, and counting on having a big emerald she had screamed for in the morning. It is droll, you know: no religion of any kind could explain that. If ever one doubted that death is an end of all things, one would know it seeing such women as these die. Think of heaven or hell for Lilas! it is making a midge a giant. She was munching sweetmeats an hour ago, and teasing me for emeralds, — and there she is now, ‘an immortal soul’ in their jargon. Look, Love laughs; well he may. Her eternity must be about as good a jest as his.”

  He spoke rather with indifference than levity. A diamond flower-spray had fallen off her bosom on the bed. He took it up and tossed it in his hand.

  “That was the price of the soul. Let it be buried with her, as the Etruscans buried toys with their children. Come away. The surgeon will send the women, and she has no beauty to show us now — —”

  “You will leave her here alone!” I said, in disgust at this boy, so beautiful and so brutal.

  “Why not?” he said, dreamily. “It is only a dead butterfly. There was no harm in her, and no good. She was a pretty animal, with a sleek skin and an insatiable appetite. Nature made her, — which was a pity, perhaps; and Nature has unmade her, — which is no pity whatever, though you seem to think so. What is she to me? I only saw her first three months since, here in Paris. Her own Love laughs: why should any one weep? Come away: there are the women, and she is ugly to look on, — all in an hour, you see!”

  He took me with him through various rooms into one which looked down on a garden: we saw the stars through the lace-hung windows; there was a rich supper on the table, and lights were burning.

  He poured out wine and pushed it to me, and sat down and drank himself.

  I refused it. I thought he gave it me because I seemed a low fellow to him, and the kind of man to be paid for service.

  “Why do you not drink?” he said, impatiently. “It is good wine, — my wine,-if you are doubting that.”

  “Death and wine do not go together, though the Etruscans thought they did,” I answered him, bluntly. “And I will take my leave of you. I cannot see a woman die, and laugh, — if you can.”

  “Have I laughed? I think not. As for a woman, — Lilas was not a woman. She was a pretty cat, a little sleek beast of prey, a ball of soft wool with a needle hidden in it, — anything you like; but not a woman. I suppose there are women somewhere, — creatures that love men, and bear their young, and are faithful. I suppose they did not all die with Andromache and the rest. But these things we play with are not women. They have as many blood-suckers as the fish octopus, only they are pretty to look at, and suck you softly as a cooing dove. Can you read Shakspeare? You think Dante greater. Of course you do, being an Italian. But you are wrong. Dante never got out of his own narrow world. He filled the great blank of Hereafter with his own spites and despites. He marred his finest verse with false imagery to rail at a foe or flaunt a polemic. His Eternity was only a mill-pond in which he should be able to drown the dogs he hated. A great man! — oh, yes! — but never by a league near Shakspeare. Sympathy is the hall-mark of the poet. Genius should be wide as the heavens and deep as the sea in infinite comprehension. To understand intuitively, — that is the breath of its life. Whose understanding was ever as boundless as Shakspeare’s? From the woes of the mind diseased, to the coy joys of the yielding virgin; from the ambitions of the king and the conqueror, to the clumsy glee of the clown and the milkmaid; from the highest heights of human life, to the lowest follies of it, — he comprehended all. That is the wonder of Shakspeare. No other writer was ever so miraculously impersonal. And if one thinks of his manner of life it is the more utterly surprising. With everything in his birth, in his career, in his temper, to make him cynic and revolutionist, he has never a taint of either pessimism or revolt. For Shakspeare to have to bow as a mere mime in Leicester’s house, — it would have given any other man the gall of a thousand Marats. With that divinity in him, to sit content under the mulberry-trees and see the Squires Lucy ride by in state, — one would say it would have poisoned the very soul of Saint John himself. Yet never a drop of spleen or envy came in him: he had only a witty smile at false dignities, and a matchless universality of compassion that pitied the tyrant as well as the serf, and the loneliness of royalty as well as the loneliness of poverty. That is where Shakspeare is unapproachable. He is as absolutely impartial as a Greek chorus. And, thinking of the manner of his life, it is marvelous that it should have bent him to no bias, warped him to no prejudice. If it were the impartiality of coldness, it would be easy to imitate; but it is the impartiality of sympathy boundless and generous as the sun which ‘shines upon the meanest thing that lives as liberally as on the summer rose.’ That is where Shakspeare is as far higher from your Dante as one of Dante’s angels from the earth.”

  He spoke with grace, and animation, and sincerity; he had a sweet voice, and a sort of eloquence which, when I came to know him well, I knew was a matter of natural impulse with him, and neither studied nor assumed. But at that moment for a minute I thought him mad, and for another he filled me with disgust. He drank more of his light wine when he had ceased to speak; for me, I threw the glass that he had filled me out of the window into the moonlight.

  “You talk very well, no doubt,” I said to him, bluntly, “an
d about your Shakspeare you may be right. The Germans always told me the same thing, only they say, some of them, that he was Lord Bacon, — which, if true, upsets your theories. But when your light o’ love lies dead ten seconds ago, and you heed her no more than if she were a poisoned rat, it is an odd time to take to preach in praise of sympathy, or say pretty things about a poet.”

  He smiled, in no wise provoked.

  “I am a poet, too, or think so; that is why. We break our hearts in verse.”

  “Break it in solitude, then,” said I, roughly. “You do not want me; you must have troops of friends; for you must be rich, or you never had been favored by that poor dead wretch. The less I hear you talk the less bitter my mouth will taste for the next month. Good-night to you.”

  I turned my back on him, surlily I dare say, for he was nothing to me except a base-souled, cynical-tongued youth, and that breed I hated, having known the true wants and woes and the real mirthful joys of life, as poor men do perhaps oftener than the rich, — that is, if they be not peevish with their poverty, which spoils everything, as sour cheese spoils the best macaroni. But when I had crossed the room half-way he crossed it too, and overtook-me.

  “No; stay with me,” he said, pleadingly, as a woman might. “I like your face, and you were kind to-night. My friends will not come for two hours and more. The supper was fixed ,for late, and I do not care to be alone, — with that thing dead so near.”

  I looked at him in surprise: there was emotion in his voice and in his face. I wondered which was real, — the levity or the feeling; now I think that each was, turn by turn.

  “What is that dead thing to you?” I said, echoing his own words. “She is so ugly to look at, — just in an hour, — and she had no soul, you know.”

  He looked at me with a look of curious bewildered pain, and contempt, and passion, all together.