Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  So he talked, passing over the Campo di Fiore, talked discursively, as his habit was, of all things, relevant and irrelevant, as the fancy occurred to him.

  Then he left me and went into a dark doorway, to see some artist, as he said.

  It was quite evening when my errands were all done and I got home again to Palès and the fountain in the wall; for one cannot walk straightly in Rome: if you have brains and eyes, nohow will your feet carry you dully on your proper road; there will be always some old angle of acanthus cornice, some colossal porphyry fragment, some memory of monastic legend or of pagan feast, some fancy that here stood such a temple, or there lived such a poet, some marble seen ten thousand times and never seen enough, some church doors set wide open with the torches and the jewels and the white robes gleaming in the dusk, some palm-tree leaning over a high palace wall that may have come from Syria with the worship of the Magna Mater and of Attis, when Orontes overflowed into Tiber: — always something to turn aside for, and linger over, and set one wondering and sighing; for although Hilarion is right, that learning is the only pleasure of which there is no surfeit, and which lends a lovely light to all the darkest corners where we walk, yet all our choicest knowledge is at best but a mitigated ignorance.

  The wisest men I have ever known have always been the first to say so. Of course I cannot judge myself, having only picked up a little knowledge, as poor travelers see beautiful things by looking in through such doors and gates as stand open along the wayside.

  It was quite evening when I got back to the barking of Palès and the singing of my Faun. A good woman at a fruit-stall had given me some prickly pears and pomegranates, and I thought I would take them to Giojà: I had seldom much to give, and I knew she was always at home at this hour, for she went to bed with the birds and rose with them.

  When I climbed the steep stairs and opened her door, her lamp was burning, but the window was opened, and left in sight the sky, still tinged with the pale primrose light of the dead day, with here and there the stars already out. She had some great books before her on the table, and was leaning her arms upon them, and her cheeks upon her hands; her face was upturned, the light of the lamp fell on it; Hilarion was leaning against the casement, and was talking to her.

  I felt angry, — which was foolish, — and as though some wrong were done to me and Maryx, — which was more foolish still.

  “Dear Crispin, I have been expecting you an hour,” said he; and that I felt was a lie, for he had known where I had been going, and knew my dilatory and divergent ways of going anywhere. There were some great lilies, and rose-red cactus flowers, and other blossoms very rare at that time of the year; of course he had brought them there. Not that there was any harm in that.

  “She is perfect, your Ariadne,” he said, as we went down a while later into the street together. “At least she will be. At present she is not fairly awake. She has her soul shut in her marbles. Has Maryx no eyes?”

  “Maryx has honor.”

  Hilarion laughed a little.

  “Dear Lupercus, how grave you are! So you have given her your room, and your Hermes and all your treasures. You never told me that.”

  “How did you find her, then?”

  “Oh, that was easy enough. Can you live at a street-corner and hope to keep a secret? She has really genius. It is a pity.”

  “Why? since it is all she has?”

  “Is it all? Maryx and you are as cruel as the Pontifex Maximus when the fires were let out. Art for a woman is as sad as the temple of Vesta. To gather the sacred grain, and draw the sacred water, and guard the sacred flame, — that was not worth one little hour of joy. The Romans knew that. Their Venus Felix had always a child in her arms.”

  Then he took his horse which waited there, and went away through the dark to Daïla. I went back for a moment.

  “What do you think of him?” I asked her.

  She hesitated a moment, and it seemed to me that she colored a little. “He is beautiful,” she said, softly: sculptor-like, form was what she thought of first.

  “The most beautiful man the world ever saw was Heliogabalus,” I said to her. “And perhaps the next most beautiful was St. Just.”

  She looked at me in surprise, her hands among the lilies and cactus flowers.

  “I thought he was your friend?”

  I felt the rebuke, and was ashamed.

  “He is very great in the world, is he not?” she asked.

  “Yes, in a way. It is not Maryx’s way. Hilarion’s fame is like that cactus flower, glorious, brilliant lustre, born of a barren stem, and without fruit; the fame of words that burn but do not illumine.”

  She put the cactus blossoms together tenderly.

  “He says beautiful things, and I think he is not happy. Look, did you ever see such flowers in winter? Maryx says one must never attempt flowers in marble, — that it is as absurd as it would be to try and reproduce the dew or the waves. Otherwise, one might make a head of the Dea Syria, crowned with those cactus — —”

  “Yes. They would be appropriate symbols for the religion that embodied the corruption of Rome.”

  I was angry, unwisely so: the cacti were to me symbols of corruption.

  She had left the flowers, and was drawing. Maryx had taught her that design must underlie all great sculpture, as the skeleton underlies the beauty of human or animal form, and until she could satisfy him with the chalk he had always refused to trust her with the clay. Hence her designs were fine and firm and fearless. “Tell me all you know of him,” she said. “‘Hilarion’? What country is that name? Hilarion was a saint in the desert, you know.”

  I would not answer her at first, but she would not be denied; she had a stubborn resoluteness under her soft and serious ways. I told her reluctantly about him; it was not very much that I knew that was fit for her ears, but I had always had a love for him, and he had done me and others grateful and gracious things: of those I spoke, in justice to him, knowing I had been churlish and unfair. Then, at her entreaties, which I never could well understand, I went to an old credenza against the wall, where I kept some few books, black-letter and otherwise, and found a volume he had written, and read to her two or three of his poems, translating them as I went, though I felt that I spoiled sadly the languid and melodious dithyrambics of his genius.

  She listened in perfect silence, drawing with her charcoal and chalk all the while by the light of the lamp, under the statue of Hermes.

  At length I shut up the book, angry with myself for having given in to her.

  “It is getting late, at least late for you. Put up your work, my dear,” I said to her, and looked what she was doing.

  She had drawn the head of Hilarion in as perfect a likeness as it was possible to see, and had crowned it with the cactus flowers like a Syrian god.

  “It would do for an Antinoüs; and he was a slave and a suicide,” I said, venomously, for I would not admit the excellence of the work or its grace.

  “Oh, no,” she said, lifting; the lamp to light me to the door. “It would do for an Agathon: I should think he is like Agathon. It was so good of you to read me his songs. You will read me some more to-morrow?”

  What other girl or woman in the whole world would have thought of Agathon of Athens as a likeness for him, — of him of the “Flower,” and of the “Symposium,” whom all men united to call “the beautiful?”

  I had been a fool, I said to myself, stumbling down the dark stairs to see that my stall was safe. Palès woke out of her sleep in the straw, and told me that I had been a fool, and the Faun in the fountain was silent.

  Hilarion had asked me to breakfast with him. I went, walking across the Campagna in the tracks between the honeysuckle banks, where the ox-carts go. The earth is so beautiful at dawn, but so very few people see it, and the few that do are almost all of them laborers, whose eyes have no sight for that wonderful peace and coolness and unspeakable sense of rest and hope which lies like a blessing on the land. I think if people oftene
r saw the break of day they would vow oftener to keep that dawning day holy, and would not so often let its fair hours drift away with nothing done that were not best left undone.

  I had the mutilated volume from the Aldus press in my pocket for him, for he loved such things and had a fine knowledge of them; the thyme was sweet under my feet; the goats plucked at the long creepers in the broken arches of the aqueduct; big oxen with wide-branching horns passed, ringing the bells about their necks; the sun rose red; birds sang in the low clumps of bearberry and hawthorn; little field-mice scudded before my steps, where the wheels of Sulla’s triumphal chariot once had rolled; and Palès chased a rat where gens on gens of the great Roman world lay buried root and branch.

  But I could enjoy but little of it. I felt uneasy, and in a vague alarm.

  I found him in the great walled garden that lay behind his villa. He was lying at full length in a hammock of silk netting, that swung between magnolia stems; and his flute-boy was playing, seated in the grass. There was a delicious calm about the place; the autumnal roses were all in bloom, and thickets of the Chinese olive scented the air like the incense of some Indian god’s temple.

  There was a high wall near, covered with peach-trees, and topped, with wisteria and valerian and the handsome wild caper plant; and against the wall stood rows of tall golden sunflowers, late in their blooming; the sun they seldom could see for the wall, and it was pathetic always to me, as the day wore on, to watch the poor stately amber heads turn straining to greet their god, and only meeting the stones and the cobwebs and the peach-leaves of their inexorable barrier.

  They were so like us! — straining after the light, and only finding bricks and gossamer and wasps’-nests! But the sunflowers never made mistakes, as we do: they never took the broken edge of a glass bottle or the glimmer of a stable lantern for the glory of Helios, and comforted themselves with it, — as we can do.

  “If this wall were mine, I should throw it down for their sakes,” I said to Hilarion; “though, to be sure, by the time it came down, every poor helianthus would each be dead with frost.”

  “Would you sacrifice my peaches for those weeds? Crispin, you should have been born a poet. You are improvident enough for one. Taste those peaches. That one is the Madeleine Blanche, and that yonder is the Pucelle de Malines. Are you learned in fruit? I am when I am in France. But here you have no great gardening. Everything grows too easily. Your husbandry is like your brains! Will you hear the boy play?” said Hilarion, stretching himself at ease among the bronze foliage of the magnolia boughs.

  The boy played, and beautifully. Hilarion listened with closed eyes.

  “If anything could make one believe in immortality it would be music,” he said, when the lovely sounds had died away. “The best things I have ever written have been written when I heard music: thought should be like the stones of Thebes. How true in allegory all the old myths are!”

  “Where did you find this lad?”

  “In a little island off Greece; and I call him Amphion.”

  “And what will you do with him?”

  “Keep him while he pleases me.”

  “And after?”

  “I never think of ‘after.’ It is the freedom from any obligation to think of it that is the real luxury of tolerable riches — —”

  “Is the immediate moment sufficient?”

  “Perhaps not. But it is the best that one has. You do not choose your peaches well. Take that Téton de Vénus. Will Maryx be here to-day?”

  “I fancy not: he is occupied on some great idea that is only in the clay.” Hilarion smiled.

  “Or only in the flesh? I wish it may be in the clay. All he does is great. He belongs to another time than ours. One fancies he must have sat at Homer’s feet. And he is so unspoiled by fame and so indifferent to praise. Most of us who have any success in any art are no wiser than Glaukus, who ran after a mouse and tumbled into a reservoir of honey; and no god-endowed Polyeidus comes to shake us back into life and vigor.”

  “Why do you talk so? You like your tank of honey: it is as sweet as a death ‘by Malmsey wine.’”

  “Nevertheless, a death it is,” said Hilarion, with that contempt of himself and of his career which often moved him. “Perhaps we too began by running after a star instead of a mouse, but we stifle in the honey all the same; and the honey has always some stings of the makers left in it. The honey has been waiting for Maryx for twenty years, and he has never fallen into it. He is the strongest man I ever knew; praise has no power to intoxicate him, nor has censure any power to pain.”

  “You are equally indifferent, I think.”

  “Oh, no! “ I am weak enough to be glad that the foolish people come and pull the leaves of my myrtles, because they are my myrtles. Maryx cannot understand that. He is only glad when his own consciousness tells him his work is good. He does not care, I doubt whether he even knows, that a crowd in the streets looks after him. I think there is some charm in marble that keeps sculptors nobler than other men. The lives of most of them have been singularly pure; look at Michael Angelo’s, Flaxman’s, Canova’s, Thorwaldsen’s. By the way, I have had the Feronia put in the great hall: she looks well there. They have come on some broken Etruscan pottery now, and are digging deeper: very likely there are tombs underneath all. I will make an imaginary history of the spot, as the old Dominican, Fra Giovanni Nanni, did about Viterbo. Fancy walking all your life to and fro a cloister, with an old buried city for your Juliet! No doubt he ended by believing his own lies; all dreamers do. I can never understand the complete annihilation of Etruria: can you? It was so mighty a confederacy; but then, after all, it was not so much obliterated as transmuted; all that was Rome’s best was Etrurian. Oh, you do not agree to that, because you believe in the Quirites. Well, they were a strong people, but they had no art except war. Let me get you your peach. You do not choose well. There is no time to eat fruit like the early morning: the birds know that. Only we spoil our palates with wine.”

  He filled my bands with peaches, and then would have me in to his breakfast-table, and seat me at it, having no sort of pride in that way, though much in others; and he praised my Aldus, and decided that it was no Lyons imitation, and talked of the early printers, and of rare copies from their presses, and of anything and everything under the sun in that light yet dreamy fashion, scholarly and yet half flippant, which was natural to him, and which had a provoking charm of its own that seduced one into strange pleasure, yet irritated one, because the pleasure was after all so shifting and uncertain.

  All the while he never once mentioned Giojà, and that alarmed me, because of what he thought of most Hilarion was a man to speak the least; for his manner was candid and careless, but his mind was neither.

  At last, wisely or foolishly, I spoke of her.

  “Have you seen the Nausicaa?” I asked him.

  “No. A statue, or a picture? — new, or old?”

  “The last work of Maryx.”

  “Oh! the Nausicaa that was in Paris in spring? I forgot. Of course. A most lovely figure. But I do not know but what the original is fairer still.”

  “You recognized her, then?”

  “Beloved Lupercus, am I blind?”

  It made me angry to be given that name; it seemed as if we all looked foolish in his eyes; and he was smiling as he spoke. Then, as simple people do blunderingly, and to their own hindrance, and the hurt of those they fain would serve, I took my heart in my hand, and laid it before Hilarion.

  “You went to see her last night. I wish you would not. I read to her your poems; I was a fool. She said you were like Agathon of Athens. What other girl could think of that? Can you understand? I am nothing to her, — an old man that she asked her way of in the street the day she came to Rome, and old enough to be her grandsire and more, — but in a way, you know, I seem too to belong to her, because I never can forget my dream in the Borghese, and it makes me anxious, because Love laughed: he always laughs when he has done his worst. And now she is so u
tterly at peace; she wants for nothing; she is safe, and all is well. She has true genius, too; you may see that in the things that she has done; and she is not like a girl; she has such knowledge of the past, and so much of the strength of art; if she be let alone she will be happy; she will be even great, I think, as that Properzia was we spoke of yesterday. You said that she sleeps still; yes, it is true, she sleeps and sees the gods. It were a sin to wake her. It were a cruelty; and who could measure all that she would lose? You have so much; you have all the world. I wish — I wish that you would let her alone, pass by, think of her as a child asleep, and nothing more, and not go near her.”

  No doubt I spoke foolishly, but something in what I said touched him as he heard.

  We were sitting in one of the great painted chambers, with the angelic hosts of Giulio Romano above our heads; the room was all in shadow, strong beams of light alone finding out here and there the riches it contained, the gems, the marbles, the mosaics, the bronzes, the vases; and one of these rays of sun fell on the eyes of Hilarion: they were troubled and softened, and had a look of pity in them, — almost of shame.

  “I had no thought of it,” he said; and then I knew the error I had committed, and its folly.

  “Perhaps it would be a sin,” he added, wearily. “Sometimes I think all life is, for that matter; though whether a sin of ours against the gods or of the gods against us, I never am sure. But I had no thought of it. I have entanglements enough, — too many; and I do not know why you should be so anxious. What have I done? I took her a few flowers, and sat there for an hour; nothing more.”