Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  “An hour has colored eternity before now,” I murmured, knowing that I was unreasonable and unwise. “It is not what you have done; it is what you may do. She has no mother. She is quite alone.”

  “She has Maryx,” said Hilarion, with a smile I did not like.

  “You mistake, — if that be what you think. He is her master; nothing more. I am stupid, I dare say, and may seem rude. But I am afraid you are capricious and inconstant.”

  “Is that my fault?” he said, with a sigh.

  ‘Hätte Gott mich anders gewollt,

  Er hätte mich anders gebaut.’

  “I do not see what any god can ever answer to that charge of Goethe’s. It is unanswerable. So you would have me leave your Ariadne to Maryx?”

  “No, I would have you leave her to her art and to herself. I do not think Maryx has any thoughts of her, — of that kind. He cares only for her genius. He is a generous man, and good.”

  “None better. Do not try to make him out a bloodless pedant.”

  “A pedant!”

  “Yes; to talk of his only seeing a muse in her! Maryx is a great man, and greater in nothing than in the manner of his life. But he is human, I suppose. When he modeled his Nausicaa, I doubt if he were half as much a sculptor as a lover. It is not ideal at all. It is simply the girl herself. Maryx for once in his career only copied. He must know that.”

  “Could he have done better?”

  “I do not say he could. I say when we are content only to reproduce a living thing we are not artists any longer; we are lovers. If the contentment remains with us, art is exiled.”

  “Is it in the interest of art, then, that you are always faithless?”

  “Am I so much worse than others?” he said, with a little amusement.

  “You are more cruel,” I said, simply.

  He was silent. He knew that I was right.

  “At least, you are cruel when you are tired; and you tire quickly,” I said to him.

  Hilarion laughed.

  “Dear Crispin, you are bitter. I lay no claim to art. I am sure none of the scattered poets of the Anthology did; and if I be anything at all, I am as one of them. Only they lived in a happier time than I. So she called me Agathon? I do not think I ever had so pretty a flattery as that.”

  I could have bitten my tongue off, that I had told him: Agathon of the “Flower” and of the “Symposium!” Agathon of Athens, who was called pre-eminently “the beautiful!” Of course he was not likely to think the less of her, hearing that.

  Palès, could she have spoken, would have had more sense than I.

  “Her head is full of those people of the past,” I said to him. “She lived all alone with the old books and her father’s talk of them. She is like Julian, — always expecting to see the gods give signs. All the old time is to her as yesterday to others. It is a good in one way, and an evil in another. I do not think she sees the time she lives in, one whit more than, reading Virgil as she goes, she sees the throngs that bawl and pass her. Of course she may be run over, and be killed so, any day. Virgil will not save her.”

  “A curious danger! Women do not often suffer much from love of the impersonal. Tell her that all that past she thinks so great was only very like the Serapis which men worshiped so many ages in Theophilis, and who, when the soldiers struck her down at last, proved itself only a hollow colossus, with a colony of rats in its head, that scampered right and left. My friend, you drink nothing. Taste that tokay: it comes off my own vines by the Danube, and it is as soft as mother’s milk. You have lost your mirth, Crispin. You should not have gone to sleep in the Cæsar’s gallery: it has dazed you. You used to be as cheerful as any cricket in the corn.”

  “Would you promise me?” I said, and hesitated, for it seemed absurd to be so anxious about a danger that was yet unmenaced, and a thing that might be farthest from his thoughts.

  Hilarion laughed, and rose.

  “Oh, no! I never promise anything; I have not many scruples, but I do scruple about breaking my word, and so I never give it. Why should you be afraid of me? Maryx can hold his own; and I am not Agathon, as she would soon find out, if she saw me ever so little. I am not even young now!”

  I was impatient and pained. He saw it, and touched my shoulder with a kindly caressing gesture.

  “Come and see some pictures I brought from France. They are landscapes. Maryx is right, that landscape-painting is the only original form of painting that modern times can boast. It has not exhausted itself yet: it is capable of infinite development. Ruysdael, Rembrandt, and the rest did great scenes, it is true, but it has been left to our painters to put soul into the sunshine of a cornfield, and suggest a whole life of labor in a dull evening sky hanging over a brown plowed upland, with the horses going tired homeward, and one gray figure trudging after them to the hut on the edge of the moor. Of course the modern fancy of making nature answer to all human moods, like an Eolian harp, is morbid and exaggerated, but it has a beauty in it,. and a certain truth. Our tenderer souls take refuge in the country now, as they used to do in the cloister. Come and see my two Millets; and there are some slighter things by lesser men of his school, that are touching in their way: whom could your dear Claude ever touch?”

  “These pictures touch you: do your own peasants ever?”

  “No,” said Hilarion: “I never think about them.”

  And he never did. He had been brought up in the purest egotism. No one had even spoken to him of such things as the duties of fortune. He had been given the most careful culture of the mind and the body, and the graces of both: there his education had ended. That he ever did sweet and gracious things was due to the changeful impulses of his nature, and a certain disdain in him of all meanness, which at times became almost nobility. But that was all. And yet one loved him.

  Love does not go by attributes, as is said in some comedy. It may be said out of a comedy, and in all sad seriousness. The best-loved men and women have seldom been the best men or the best women.

  He was summoned away by the arrival of same new treasures that he had bought on his way home; and I went out and looked for the little flute-player, whom he called Amphion, and whom we had left sitting where the sunflowers were.

  He was as lovely a youth as I have ever seen; with a pale oval face, and great eyes, that had the pathos and the meditation of the ox’s in them; you laugh: well, look straight into our oxen’s eyes when next they meet you coming under the yoke across the fields, and say if all the unutterable sadness and wonder of existence are not in their lustrous gaze. “Why are we here to suffer?” say those eyes; the eternal question that all creation asks, and asks in vain, for aught that we can see.

  Poor little lad! — he was eighteen years old, perhaps, and had lived on one of those little islands of the Ægean, where the population is like one family, lives by the tillage of the earth, sleeps out of doors under the stars, — men, women, and children, — and is hardly altered at all since the ages of the “Works and Days.”

  He had run barefoot, leapt in the sea, mown the hay, slumbered on his bit of carpet under the broad shining skies, and been quite happy, till a passer-by, touching at the little isle, had heard him play to his goats and for the maidens, and had spread gold before his dazzled parents, and filled his head with dreams by a word or two, and carried him off to the great world of cities, there to be listened to a while and then forgotten.

  Hilarion was kind to him, since his fancy was fresh; had him richly dressed in the national costume, and bade his people see that he had all he wanted; but no one except Hilarion could speak modern Greek, and the boy was very lonely.

  He looked up at me with the timidity of a dog that had strayed. I myself could speak his tongue, though not with all the modern changes that Hilarion knew, and by little and little I gathered his short story from him.

  He was not very happy. He sighed for his barefooted liberty; his little coracle on the sea; his mother’s cool little dark hut with all the sun shut out, and no smell but
the scent of the cow’s breath and the dried grasses; but he did not dare to say so. He loved Hilarion, but he was very afraid of him.

  “How long have you been with him?” I asked him, where he sat under the sunflowers.

  “It was in the spring he came to the island.”

  “And you have seen wonderful places since then?”

  “Yes,” said the boy, wearily. “Many crowds, — crowds, — crowds. Once some great person, an emperor, came to see him. He had me to play. It did not matter to me. I did not see the great people; I saw the hay-fields, and the sea, and my white goats running to the honeysuckle. The emperor called me up and gave me a fine ring, and told me I should make my fortune. What is fortune? In the island he is rich who has six goats.”

  “I think you will be rich if you go back to your goats, caring for them.”

  He did not understand.

  “They would not know me, perhaps,” he said, sadly. “Praxides took them when I came away.”

  “Animals do not forget, my dear: that is a human privilege. And you would like to go back? You are not very happy?”

  He looked with a frightened glance right and left.

  “Yes, I would like to go back. But do not tell him. It is better here than it has been. One is in the air. But in that great place they call Paris, it was like being shut in a golden box. I could not play at first, in all that noise and glitter: he was angry, I could not help it. But one day I heard the goats bleat in the street; I thought my heart would break; I ran and got the flute, it was a friend. Then the old songs and dances came back to me.”

  Poor little misnamed Amphion!

  “You cannot read?” I asked him. He shook his head.

  “Not even music?”

  “Do people read music? I thought it was in the air.”

  “You must be lonely?”

  “Not when he remembers me. But he does not very often. And I should like to take these shoes off; I feel crippled — —”

  “We are all crippled. And we have crippled even our horses to keep us company. Two or three thousand years ago in your country the horse was a beautiful, free, joyous thing: now it is an automaton; most of us are so. We call it civilization. The tighter the bonds, the more advanced are the wearers deemed. But your gold-laden jacket cannot be as easy as the old white shirt with the red sash.”

  The boy was silent, crushing a peach with his small dazzling teeth.

  I was sorry for him.

  Great singers end in millionaires; small singers end as clerks, and this poor, pretty, ill-called Amphion, who played so sweetly that it called tears to your eyes to hear him, had no genius, I thought, but only a beautiful instinct of innocent melody, as a bird has. And you could not make even a clerk of a little Greek who sighed for the sea, and the green grass, and the dances under the stars. He could not read, and he was ignorant of everything in the most absolute manner. Yet he interested me.

  It is not what the human being knows, it is what he is, that is interesting.

  I think it is Musset that says that the utterances of most men are very monotonous and much alike: it is what is in their heads that is never spoken which is the epic, the idyl, the threnody, the love-sonnet.

  He goes on to say that every mortal carries about a world in himself, a world unknown, which lives and dies in silence; for what a solitude is every human soul!

  It is of that inner world that I try to get a glimpse, though reluctantly I am bound to say that I do believe that it does not exist at all in many, and that not a few are as completely empty inside of them by nature as any pumpkin of which a little beggar-boy has had the scooping.

  “Let him come home with me: he is dull here; there is not a creature that can talk to him,” I said to Hilarion, a little later.

  “Of course, so he be here at night to play for the duchess.”

  She, whom he spoke of, was a Roman, his reigning caprice of the hour.

  “He shall be here,” I said, and took Amphion with me in the quick rattling wagon of one of the wine-carriers, who was going to the city without his wine, and with only a load of flowers for the gardeners.

  Amphion scarcely spoke as we flew over the Campagna. Only once he looked at me with pleasure in his eyes.

  “It is like the sea!” he said: he had arrived by night, and had seen nothing of it before this.

  It was noon when I got to my fountain on the wall; and I had to be busy the rest of the day, and the lad would go back with the wine-cart at sunset. I took him up to Giojà’s room: she was sometimes at home at noon, and was so now.

  “Here is a Greek boy for you,” I said to her, and put Amphion into the chamber, with his sad, lovely face, that would have done for Icarus, and his pretty dress all loose and white and shining with gold thread.

  “Here is a little Greek for you,” I said. “He is all alone, and very unhappy. You know his tongue a little: will you try and make him a little happier?”

  “Are you a Greek, really?” said my Ariadne, coming to him with a grave courtesy, which never was familiarity, but always a little distant, like some girl-queen’s.

  “Yes, I am a Greek,” said Amphion, who stood looking at her in a kind of awe.

  Giojà’s face lighted and grew eager.

  “Then you have heard Homer sung? Tell me: do they recite it all at night as they used to do round the watch-fires when there is danger, and in the summer in time of peace, under the olive-trees: tell me.”

  “What is Homer?” said poor Amphion.

  Giojà glanced at him with contempt.

  “You are no Greek,” she said, and turned away.

  “Why did you bring him here?” she said to me. “He asks what Homer is!”

  “My dear,” I said to her, “he was a little peasant, on a little isle in the sea. I have been to those islands; the people only think of their flocks and their hay and their harvest. They tell tales indeed at night, as of old, but it is not of Achilles and Ithacus now; it is of the hill thieves on the main shore, or of the soldiers billeted on themselves, or of the next love that the priest is to bless, or of whatever else may be happening. Be kind to him. You can make him understand, though you only know the Greek of the poets. And he will play to you.”

  Amphion, who could not understand what I said, understood the contempt of those lustrous eyes resting on him, and felt that it was something shameful not to know what Homer was.

  He came with shy and timid grace, and knelt to her, and touched the hem of her skirt with his lips.

  “I cannot read, and Homer — is it a singer you mean? — but if you will let me play I will tell you so what I feel. You are like the sunrise on our sea: our girls there are fair, but not like you.” Giojà laughed, a thing she seldom did.

  “You come from the country of Helen, and call me good to look upon? — and what music can there ever be like the march of the hexameters telling of your heroes? But if you are not happy, then I am sorry. I suppose I speak ill; I know enough Greek to read it, but that is not your Greek. You can play to me while I finish my work if you like, and afterwards I will tell you about Homer.”

  He had his flute in pieces in his vest, where he always carried it, a silver flute that Hilarion had bought for him. He sat down on the floor, as he was used to sit on his bit of carpet under the great plane-tree at home in the starry evenings; and, with his eyes still fastened on her as on some creature of another world, he began to make his tender melodies, there at the foot of my Hermes.

  I left them so, and went my way down to the stall and Palès, who was grumbling sore at being left alone so long.

  They were a boy and girl: it was a fresher and more healthful interest for her than the poems of Hilarion.

  When I went up the stairs an hour afterwards to see if they were friends, I opened the heavy door so that I did not disturb them. Amphion was sitting on the floor, his flute lying across his knees, and Giojà, seated high above on the old oak-seat under the Hermes, was telling him the story of Patrocles’ burial, and of h
ow the absent Winds were feasting in the house of Zephyrus till the swift-footed Iris fetched them, and how they rose and scourged the clouds before them, across the Thracian sea, until the flames leaped up, and, making night terrible, devoured the body of his hero and the golden curls of his friend, and the honey and the horses, and the rich wood steeped with the wine that all night long Achilles poured from the golden bowl till daylight broke.

  Amphion’s pale face was glowing, and his eyes were full of wonder: nothing so wearies me as a twice-told tale, says Homer; but yet he told tales that echoing through thousands of years are ever fresh and ever welcome.

  Giojà, to whom every word that she recited was true as that the sun hung in heaven, saw nothing of him, but only saw the Thracian shore, the blowing flames, the surging sea, the peace that came with morn.

  I closed the door unheard, unwilling to disturb them or break in on those old sweet Greek cadences that her voice tinged with a Latin accent, not ungracious; and I was sorry when still another hour later I had to fetch the lad away to go back, as he was ordered to Daïla.

  “I was going now to tell him of Ulysses,” said Giojà, reluctantly. “Only think! He has a brother called Ulysses, and yet does not know — —”

  “It will be for another day,” I said. Amphion’s face bad a warm color in it, and looked happy.

  “I may come again?”

  “Yes. Do you still wish to go back to the goats?”

  “No,” he said, and smiled.

  “I do not care for the heroes,” he whispered to me as he went down the stairs. “And why did he burn his friend? I do not understand. But do not tell her. The sound of her voice is so lovely, — that is enough.”

  I began to doubt whether I should not have done better for him to have left him in his solitude and sorrowfulness, eating his peaches underneath the wall with his sunflowers. But I had been thinking more of her than of him. To interest her in something living and natural, instead of always old stories and old marble, seemed to me desirable. The boy was better than Apollo Soranus.