by Ouida
“No; she had no soul. She is like a dead rat. That is just the horror of it. It is so with us all, of course; oh, yes. But still it sickens one, in spite of reason.”
He threw himself into a chair, and a dark shadow came upon his face, that took all its youth away, and made it weary. He covered his eyes with his hand some minutes; then he looked up, and rose, and pushed more wine to me, saying, “Drink.” I saw on his fair cheeks two great slow coursing tears. I drank his wine.
From that night Hilarion and I had often been together. We had been friends so far as two men could be, sundered by different age and different tempers and most utter difference in all outward circumstances of life. I had learned to love him, he being one of those who compel your liking against your judgment; and Hilarion, with his strange liking in turn for me, his fancies, his riches, his grace, his charming talk, his wanton wanderings through all the realms of all the arts and the philosophies, gave me many a bright hour in my life, for which I was his debtor in many a year that brought him to that great white villa under the shadow of Soracte, which it had been his whim to buy that he might as nearly as possible lead the life of Catullus and of Horace in this age of prose.
When Hilarion was not in Rome, or near it, I myself lost much; yet now I was glad that he was going, — going far away for any indefinite space of time that his caprice might dictate.
“It is best so. Be quiet,” I said to Palès; but Palès was howling after him, because she adored him, as did all female things. Yet he would strike her, — when he was in the mood, or she was in the way.
He killed a dog with a blow once, — a careless blow of mere impatience. He gave the dog a marble tomb amidst the flowers, and wrote a poem on it that made the whole wide world weep. But that could not make the dog alive again, — poor brute!
Palès howled after him: she had seen the tomb, and doubt less heard the story from other dogs, but that wrought no difference in her, she being a female thing.
For me, I was glad, as I say, for Hilarion would at times climb up into my room upon the bridge, to gaze at the Hermes, and send his many dreamy fancies out over the bean-flowers, and down the reaches of the river with the pale rings of the smoke; and he was not one whom it was easy to baffle about anything, or send on any false scent at any time.
When he told me his name that night, it was one that the world had heard of, very young though he was.
He was only a boy, indeed, but within the year then past he had leaped into that kind of sudden and lurid fame which is the most perilous stuff that can test the strong sense of a man or a woman. It is a tarantula-bite to most; few can have been bitten with it without craving forever the music of applause, or losing their brain giddily and dying in dizzy gyrations.
Hilarion had as much strong sense as lies in a strong scorn, and this preserves the head cool, since nothing in all the world is so cold as is contempt; but he had no other strength: so his fame hurt him, because it increased his egotism and rendered effort needless. With different fortunes, and tossed on a sea of endeavor in a dark night of adversity, he would have been a great man. As it was, he was only a clever idler, despite his fame.
That night when the poor wretch of a Lilas died he had been only a brilliant boy; but as the years had rolled on he had done mightier things, and became more celebrated. But to be celebrated is still far off from being great.
He had the temper of Heine and the muse of Musset. Talent like that, when given with it many other gifts that command fortune, easily passes with the world for genius. And, in a sense, genius it was: only it was genius without immortality in it; it was a rose that had a stinging insect at its core; instead of the morning dew.
Life had been always smooth for Hilarion, and though the sadness in him was real and not assumed, it was that more selfish sadness which takes its rise from fatigue at the insufficiency of any pleasure or passion to long enchant or reign.
He came of two opposing races: his father had been a German noble, his mother a Greek princess; his whole education had been in Paris; he had considerable wealth, and large estates that he scarcely ever visited; he had been his own master from very early years; and in mind and person Nature had been most prodigal to him. Yet, despite all this, none could have said that he was satisfied with life: one ought to say, perhaps, because of all this.
Half his sadness was discontent, and the other satiety; but this kind of sadness is widely different from the noble and passionate grief which protests against the illimitable torture of all creation and the terrible silence of the Creator.
It is a melancholy that is morbid rather than majestic, — the morbidness that has eaten into the whole tenor of modern life. Men have forgotten the virile Pyrrhic dance, and have become incapable of the grace of the Ionian: their only dance is a Danse Macabre, and they are always hand in hand with a skeleton.
This age of yours is, in sooth, perhaps the saddest-tempered that the races of men have ever known; but this is the cause of its sadness, — that it has lost the faculty to enjoy.
Hilarion, and such men as Hilarion, are its chosen prophets; and their curse is forever on the barrenness of the land.
The old poets knew the fruitfulness of life, and sang of it. But Hilarion and his brethren only see that Demeter has passed over the earth, and that all is sicklied and sear. And their passionate protest of pain would be grand in its very hopelessness, only that it is spoiled by being too often rather querulousness than despair.
From the night Lilas died to the day he drove past me now with his Roman singing woman, the life of Hilarion had been eventful, but quite shadowless, except for that faint, gray, unchanging shadow of satiety, — a shadow like death, which stretched across all his written pages, — the shadow of that universal incredulity which is the note of this generation.
Horace believed as little as Hilarion; but Horace, in whose time the world yet was young, said, “Let us eat and drink and enjoy, for to-morrow we die,” and found pleasure in the carpe diem. But the school of Hilarion says, rather, “Of what use to eat, and how shall we enjoy? All beauty is unlovely, once possessed, and so soon we sleep the dreamless death-sleep with the worms.”
Between Horace and Hilarion there is a bottomless gulf, filled with the dull deep waters of satiety; and in that gulf so much of manhood lies drowned.
An age is like a climate: the hardier may escape its influence in much, but the hardiest will not escape its influence entirely.
Now, the poetic temperament is never robust, — no more than the mimosa is, or the nightingale. The soul of the poet is like a mirror of an astrologer: it bears the reflection of the past and of the future, and can show the secrets of men and gods, but all the same it is dimmed by the breath of those who stand by and gaze into it.
When Hilarion came past me in this early morning he was many years older than when he had seen Lilas die; he was very celebrated; he had a genius that was facile and never failed him more than a good lute does a good player; women loved, men sought, and enemies feared him; he did as he chose, and wandered where he liked, and failed in nothing that he wished. And yet I would not have changed places with him, — I, Crispino, shaping leather for my bread, with a cabbage-leaf on my skull, between me and the hot Roman sunshine.
For the world is beautiful to me, and its past scenes full of wonder; and the joys and pangs of the people thrill me like music. And when I go up and down the streets I see faces lighten at sight of me, and I care for that: that is, you see, because I am an ignorant man, and soon content. Content is ignorance.
Hilarion, who has everything and knows everything, and sees ten thousand people turn to look at him if he goes through a strange city, — Hilarion is restless and dissatisfied. The parable of Paradise is a very just one. The tree of knowledge may have its roots in wisdom and its branches in action, perhaps; but its fruit is forever unrest.
Well, he was gone, and gone far away. I sighed a little for my own sake, and stitched on in the lovely light warmth of the forenoo
n.
My blacksmith was a drunken, dissolute fellow, and, being often idle, — for blacksmiths are at a discount on our Seven Hills, — as often as not used his hammers to split open a neighbor’s brain-pan. But we do not think much of these trifles, and he paid well, and I did honor to his boots, — brave boots for feast-days, that were alike his misery and glory. When they were done I left them at his place, and went on in search of the girl’s things.
After much difficulty and delay, — as there happen always in such matters, — I found them, and had them given over to me, and trundled them home upon a friendly bagarino’s barrow, and sent them up to her, — poor small sad burdens, smelling, of the sea, and of the rosemary of the shores whence they had come.
When evening fell and coolness came, I went up as I had promised her, to my own room, where Hermes was, and the carnations, and the bean-flowers.
Ersilia had shoved the little low bedstead decorously within a recess, and made no opposition to my entrance. The girl was in the old wooden balcony, which at that time of the year, and indeed at almost every other, was brimming over with flowers. There were some small busts, new to me, standing about, — two in marble, a few in clay, a few more carved in wood.
She did not hear me enter.
She was leaning over the wooden rail, with her forehead against the bean-flowers, and her feet amidst the tufts of sweet-smelling thyme; and indeed, when the stars are coming out, but the sunset warmth is still upon the skies, and the river of Midas is stealing silently by to lose itself among the dense grass and tangled lilies of the marshes, there are many less lovely things to do in this world than to stand thus before a window and look down through the heads of the flowers over the million roofs of Rome.
Before disturbing her, I glanced at the busts upon the table: they were graceful things, but sadly weak. There was elegance of fancy and of outline in them, but no strength and no originality. One could well believe them the work of a man who had been a recluse and a dreamer and had refused to do any battle with the world. There was a bust of Faunus, that was pretty, — dear god Faunus, the most despised of all the gods in this day. But, then, sculpture should have so much more than prettiness. Canova’s prettiness cursed him; it is almost barrenness.
“They are my father’s,” she said, coming in from the balcony.
She did not say, “Are they not beautiful?” Perhaps some truer, stronger artistic sense in her made her conscious where they were deficient. But she looked on then with tender eyes of lingering affection; and I could see that to part with them was hurting her.
“He was a classic scholar, I see by them,” I said, evasively; and indeed the choice of themes was far out of the common.
“A great scholar,” she said, with the warmth of love upon her face. “He taught me all I know. He lived in his Greek and Latin books. The books and these are all he had to leave me.”
“You know Latin and Greek?”
“Oh, yes,” she answered in a sort of surprise, as at so simple a question, as though I had asked her had she learned to read.
“He would wish me to sell them,” she said, with that look of strongly-repressed pain which gave her young face so much force. “If they ought all to go, take them all. I must owe Ersilia so much. And should I have enough to get a little chamber for myself near this, and buy some clay to work in —— ?”
“You cannot owe much,” said I, lying, as the best of us do lie on occasion. “And one of these busts, or two at most, should bring enough to pay it all and keep you for weeks afterwards, if that be what you are thinking. You wish to stay in Rome?”
“I know no one anywhere. I have no friend,” she said, with a simplicity of desolation that wounded one more than all the eloquence of woe.
“You have me, my dear,” I said, huskily; for I felt like a fool, and was cross with myself for being no better and no mightier than I was, to be of use to her. “I am an old man, as you see, and of no account, and work for my daily bread; but you may count on me; I will be true to you. I can do little; but what I can do — —”
“You are good, and I was ungrateful and forgot,” she answered, and laid her hand in mine.
I let it lie there, and bent my head over it. I felt as any old cordwainer of Venice might have felt to Catherine of Cyprus: her youth compelled my age to loyalty.
Then I put on a sheepish look.
“Now you want a room, you say. Why not keep mine, paying me something? It would suit me very well,” I said; “because, you see, my dear, I am a poor man, and even the little you would pay I should be glad of. And so we should do one another mutual service, as poor people should; and I have another place to sleep in, because, you know, I keep late, unseemly hours; and Ersilia is angry if one knocks her up, and sees so quickly if one be the worse for wine; not that a Roman ever is, you know, except sometimes in October, out of remembrance of Anne Parenna, who was not Dido’s sister, you know, though the scholars tried to make her so when this Hellenism became the rage, and the Julii would have it they were Trojans. We Trasteveres all say we are to this day; and indeed the story of Ennius is so pretty, one would be loath to lose it, and the thirty little white pigs, and the old white-haired shepherd-king of Arcadia. Will you please me, and keep the room?”
She looked at me with her clear, pathetic eyes.
“Will it really suit you? Are you sure you do not speak against yourself from kindness?”
And — may the gods forgive me! — I swore by all of them that not only would it suit, but be the making of me; and I persuaded her I spoke the truth. My marble Hermes seemed to me to smile: I suppose he was thinking how many millions of lies men have been telling for woman’s sake since first he made her out of sport that day.
But there was no other way that I could so well have served her, for there was no room empty in Ersilia’s house, nor had there been one could I have been sure that I could always be able to pay for it; but I knew that I could always lend my own and sleep with Palès, or anywhere about, on bench or under porch, as poor men do. I might get madness from the moon, or death from the bad air; but who is sure that he is wholly sane? And better company has gone before us to the tomb than any that lives now!
“We understand one another, then,” I said, after a pause, for I do not like the sadder side of life, and would always turn away from it were it possible. “I am only Cristie the cobbler, a queer fellow, as you will hear, and an old man, and poor, but very well contented; and how much that is to say! I am so glad you will keep this room. It is no use to me; my business lies in the street from night to morning, and Hermes here must be so glad to see your face instead of mine.”
I asked her if there was nothing that she had moulded herself which she could show me. She said that they were very little things, not worth the looking at, but fetched them. I found them fully worth, — graceful, yet strong; little naked figures of fish-children, full of spirit; and some heads and figures of classic themes, treated with far more strength than was in any of her father’s. One wingless Love of the early Greek poets seemed to me wonderful from such a child. I told her so.
“How can you look at them after my father’s?” she said, almost in reproof. “And indeed, you know, the working was insomuch his: the idea was mine, and he helped me to put it into shape.”
“The idea is the art,” I said, angry with her that she should so depreciate herself for that dead and useless man, whom I myself could have kicked almost in his coffin.
However, I did not say that, but took two busts, — the one of Heliodora and the other of the boy Zagreus looking in the fatal mirror; and I prayed her to accept hospitality of me for a day longer at the least, and left her looking out through the red flowers at the deep-blue skies of the night, with the stars shining on the moss-grown roof of the little temple of Vesta, and in the sleepy, brown waters of Tiber.
“You are not unhappy now?” I said to her in farewell.
She looked at me with a smile.
“You have given me ho
pe; and I am in Rome, and I am young.”
She was right. Rome may be only a ruin, and Hope but another name for deception and disappointment; but youth is supreme happiness in itself, because all possibilities lie in it, and nothing in it is as yet irrevocable.
Ersilia hurried in at that moment, angry because the casement was open, the wind cool, the river dangerous, and all the trouble she had taken in the fever imperiled by so much imprudence. Ersilia was a grand old Roman woman, majestic and imposing; but she was furious of tongue and violent about small things, and much given to driving other people hither and thither with her will and fiery word. Of men she had always the most miserable opinion. Pippo was the only good one of all his worthless set, — Pippo, who had been her lover once and her lodger always, and who, having sung his passion to her on a lute fifty years before, now showed it in a less poetic but as palatable a manner, by frying her many a purple artichoke and golden little fish, and cooking for everybody in her hive-like house.
The busts I did sell at a shop I knew in the Spanish square. I got a small sum for each; I quadrupled it with that money in the jar in the wall, and took it to her.
“I had double this, but I have paid all you owe Ersilia,” I said to her. I thought and wished it so. “Also I have taken a month’s rent for my room, as you desired. Ersilia will see to you. It will cost little; and she is a good woman, honest and true: you will not mind her tongue. Let it run on as we let the wind blow. Yes; those busts sold well. When you have done this money we can sell two others. You think the money too much? Ough! Dealers know their own business. It is not for us to teach it to them.”
Now, of course, all this was pure lying. But then it soothed her and set her heart at rest. She never would have taken money from me; she would have gone out and wandered in the streets till she fell senseless with homelessness and hunger, and then they would have taken her to some public hospital, and so the end would have come. Therefore I lied.
I was thankful then I had had that little store put by in case of my own sickness or of some street-accident. It was but very little; but it served its turn.