Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  But he was not mine any more.

  Sometimes I used to wonder, would she be sorry if she knew that I had lost him?

  But no doubt he was better there, and more fittingly in place with the Jupiter Axur in the palace of the Pope. I had never been great enough for him; I had only loved him; and what use was that?

  Time wore away, I say, and took the days and the weeks and the months, and Rome was swept with the by-winds of winter and scorched with the sand-blasts of the summer, and its travertine and its porphyry, and its old brick that has the hues of porphyry, were transfigured into matchless glory with every sun that set; and my Ariadne came thither no more.

  Where was she? I knew not. She was not forsaken, since Maryx stayed on in the city always, and I knew well that he would not forget that unuttered oath by the Cross.

  He was shut forever in his room at work, they said. To my sight, all the greatness had gone out of his work. But the world did not see it. Before a great fame the world is a myope.

  The cunning of his hand, and the force of it, and the grace, were all there as of old, of course; for the consummate artist, by long mastery of his art, does acquire at last what is almost a mechanical aptitude, and can scarcely do ill, so far as mere form goes, even working with blind eyes. But the soul of all art lies in the artist’s own delight in it; and that was now lacking forever in his. These things that he created had no joy for him.

  Men and women losing the thing they love lose much, but the artist loses far more: for him are slaughtered all the children of his dreams, and from him are driven all the fair companions of his solitude.

  Maryx labored by day and by night in his house upon the Golden Hill; but it was labor; it was no more creation, and the delight of creation. He worked from habit, from pride, to save himself perhaps from madness; for there is no friend or physician like work; but his old mother had said rightly, — he was like a dead man. He had never spoken any word to me of her since that night in the amphitheatre. Indeed, I saw him but seldom. I felt that my presence was pain to him, and I felt remorse. Why had I compelled Fortune and brought this evil upon him in the midst of his lofty, peaceful, and victorious life? We are sorry meddlers, and play with Fate too much.

  He had never reproached me; but for that very forbearance my own conscience but rebuked me the more.

  One day I met him in the park of the Pamfili Doria: they are very grand and lovely, these woods, with their slopes of grass that are like the moorlands of the North, and their old gnarled oaks, and their empurpled hoards of violets, that are so many you cannot tread in winter without crushing half a million little fragrant hooded heads.

  I had gone on an errand with a gardener’s hob-nailed shoes; he was walking against the wind, as men walk who would escape from ghosts that will keep pace with them, ghosts that the sunlight never scares away.

  He almost struck against me as he passed, and, pausing, recognized me.

  It was twilight in a wintry eve; the sea-breeze was sweeping keen and cold through the branches of the pines; the swans and the statues by the water’s edge looked chill and shadowy; the bold uplands of the shelving turf were crisp with glistening frost; the owls were hooting.

  He looked at me in the sad twilight which lasts but such a little moment here in Rome.

  “It is you!” he said, with a gentle voice. “My old friend, have I been neglectful of you, or unkind? I have not seen you for so long. But if there be anything you ever want of me — —”

  “Nay, there is nothing,” I said to him. “And we only hurt each other. We both are waiting — —”

  Then I stopped, afraid that I should wound him; for he was very proud in some things.

  “Come home with me now,” he said, abruptly, taking no notice of my last words. “Come home with me. You shall see my work. Rome holds no better critic.”

  Then he turned, and we went downwards through the park, under the broad branches of the ilexes, and the owls flapped in our faces, and the darkness fell, and the swans went off the water to their nests among the reeds; and we walked together through the gates and to his own house, which was not far distant, and where I had never been since the day that I had seen the Nausicaa shattered on the floor.

  The place was almost dark. We entered his studio, and he struck a light, and I began to see the glimmer of the marble’s and the plaster’s whiteness. We had walked quite in silence: what could we say to each other, he and I?

  He drew the shrouding cloths off a great group, and the lights from above fell on it.

  Its name matters nothing: it stands to-day before the senate-house of a great nation. It was a composition from the heroic age. It was majestic, pure, and solemn; there was not a false line in it, nor a weak one; it had the consummate ease and strength that only the trained hand of a perfect master can command; yet ——

  What was it lacking in it?

  It was hard to tell. But it was lifeless. It was work, composition, not art. It was like a dead body from which the soul has fled. I looked at it in silence.

  “Well?” he asked, and watched my face. Then, before I could measure my words to tell the truth yet veil it, he, scanning my face, read my mind, and cast the cloths back again, and laughed aloud, — a laugh that I can hear still when I sit and think and the night is quiet.

  “Ah, it does not deceive you any more than me! You see it aright. It is imposture. It will cheat the world. It cannot cheat you or me. It is a lie. Look at it: it is the first thing I ever sold to any man that has no shadow of myself put into it, no beauty in my sight, no preciousness or gladness for me, no thought or soul of mine blent with it to make it as strong and holy as a man’s labors can be. It is a lie. It is not art: it is cold, hard, joyless, measured, mechanical, — like any stone creature that the copyist sits and chips from some plaster model of the galleries, and calls a god! I always thought so, felt so. Who knows our work as we the makers do? And now I am certain, looking on your face. Hush! Do not speak. Tell me no lies. The thing is lie enough.”

  I was silent.

  It was of no use to seek to foist on him the empty phrases of an artificial compliment; he would have seen through them and despised me.

  The light from above fell on the half-shrouded group and on his face: his eyes had a terrible anguish in them, such as one could picture in a wounded lion’s that feels his mighty strength ebbing away and cannot rise again.

  The lamp that he held he dashed upon the floor; the flame was extinguished on the stone.

  “Look at that light!” he said. “A moment, less than a moment, and it is quenched, — just falling: that is the light in us who think ourselves the light of the world. One blow, and we are in darkness forever. We make Zeus in rage and Christ with pity; we should make them both only laughing: any god must laugh. Look! men have called me great, and stronger than most of them I may have been; and they will go on calling me great, and great everything that I do, sheerly from habit’s sake, and the force of memories, and the imitation of numbers. But for me, I know very well I shall never be great any more. The cunning may stay in my hand, but the soul is gone out of my body, and the art in me is dead. I am an artist no more. No more!”

  He was silent a little while, gazing out through the unshuttered windows into the starless night. The quenched lamp lay at his feet.

  “Look!” he said, suddenly, all the long-imprisoned suffering of so many months of silence breaking loose like a river long pent up and breaking its banks. “Look! From a little lad, all I cared for was art. Going behind my mule over the stony ground, I saw only the images I had seen in the churches, and the faces of the gods, and the saints. Starving and homeless in Paris, I was happy as a bird of the air, because the day showed me beautiful shapes, and by night in sleep I saw lovelier still. When fame came to me, and the praises of men, and their triumphs, I was glad because by such means I could give my years to the studies I loved and the visions of my brain in palpable form to the people. Never once was I proud with the pride of a fool; bu
t I was glad, — ah, God! I was glad. The stubborn stone obeyed me, submissive as a slave; I delighted in my strength; I knew my mastery; my labor was beautiful to me, and waking I thought of it and went to it as to the sweetest mistress that could smile on earth. When one loves an art, it is the love of the creator and of the offspring both in one; it is the joy of the lover and of the child; when it fails us, what can the whole world give? And now in me it is dead, — dead, — dead. I care for the marble no more than the workman that hews it for daily bread. It says nothing to me now. It is blank and cold, and I curse it. I shall never make it speak any more. I am palsied before I am old!”

  Then his head drooped upon his breast; he dropped down on the bench beside him, and covered his face with his hands.

  He had forgotten that I was there.

  I went away in silence, and left him, not to see a great man weep.

  What comfort could one give to him?

  Verily the sculptures of the Greeks were right. Love burns up the soul.

  CHAPTER XXVI.

  DAYS and weeks and months went by, for time devours so fast. It was again full summer, — the fierce, fair summer of the South, — and I was sitting vacantly one night by the stall, with the lamp swinging on its cord above my head, and the din of the laughter, and the swish of the oars in the water, and the light low chords of the twanging guitars, and the merry steps of the young men and maidens on the bridge, all sounding discordant and hateful on my ears, as they had always in the old time sounded welcome and musical; and this, I do think, as I have said before, is one of the unkindest things of sorrow, that it makes us almost loathe the gay and innocent mirth of others.

  I was sitting so, I say, with the moonlight all silvery about my feet, and the people around me dancing our beautiful native saltarella, that since the foreigners have come in such shoals our lads and lasses have grown almost ashamed of, learning to jig and jump instead, with no more grace than the stranger from over sea, for want of grace is progress too, it seems. And now, being summer, there were no foreigners to look on and make them blush for being graceful, so they danced that perfect dance in the space betwixt the fountain and the street, and I sat aloof and weary in the moonlight, with the sound of the tambourines thumping through my brain.

  Suddenly a hand fell on my shoulder. It was that of Maryx.

  “I am going away. Here I shall lose my brain before I lose my life. When one is strong, one does not die. You have seen, — I am like a paralytic. Perhaps travel may do something. You will not speak of me. Go and visit my mother. I shall be away till I feel some force to work, or until — —”

  He did not end his phrase, but I understood it as it stood. He meant, until he heard that she had been forsaken. I could say nothing to him. I knew that he was no longer himself.

  He looked at my Apollo Sandaliarius, the little white figure that he had sculptured in the days of his youth, when he had been a lustrous-eyed, eager-limbed lad, filled with a noble and buoyant fervor of life and that faith in his own strength which compels the destiny it craves.

  A great anguish came into his eyes.

  “Ah! to go back five-and-twenty years; — who would not give his very soul to do it? Well, I have all I wished for then; and what use is it?”

  Then, as if ashamed, he paused, and added, in a colder, calmer voice, —

  “I cannot tell where I may go, — the East, most likely. Comfort my mother. You are a good man. Farewell, my friend.”

  He pressed my hand, and left me.

  The sky seemed emptier, the world seemed grayer, than before. But he did wisely to go, — that I knew. Here, inaction and the desperate pain of failing force would gnaw at his very vitals, till he would curse himself and weep before the genius of his own works, as did your northern Swift. For there can be nothing so terrible as to see your soul dead whilst yet your body still lives.

  So I was left alone in the city, and the days and weeks and months crept slowly on; “ohne Hast, ohne Rast,” as the German says of the stars. Only, when one has neither the eager joy of haste nor the serene joy of rest, life is but a poor and wearisome thing, that crawls foot-sore, like a galled mule on a stony way. The mother of Maryx, left all alone on the Garden Hill, did not murmur: she understood few things, but she understood why he was gone.

  “I always said that it would be so. I always said it,” she muttered, with her feeble hands feeling the wooden cross at her neck, that she had worn ever since her first communion, when she had been a little bright brown-eyed girl, no doubt, clanking in her wooden shoes over the sunburnt fields. “You see, because he had mastered that wicked thing so long, and struck it and hewn it into any shape he chose, and made a slave of it, he thought it never could harm him; but I knew. His father used to laugh, and say, ‘How can it hurt me? It is I who hurt it, hewing it out of its caverns and breaking it up into atoms.’ But all the same one day it had its revenge, — and crushed him. He was only a common, rough hewer of stone. Oh, I know! And my son is great, and a kind of king in his way; but it is all the same: the marble does not forgive. It bides its time, then it strikes in its turn.”

  And she accepted what it had brought her, with the kind of numbness of mingled despair and patience which is the peasant’s form of resignation to the will of God. In her fancy, the marble never forgave its masters; in mine, I thought, “what art ever forgives its followers, when they open their eyes to behold any beauty outside its own?”

  Love art alone, forsaking all other loves, and she will make you happy, with a happiness that shall defy the seasons and the sorrows of time, the pains of the vulgar and the changes of fortune, and be with you day and night, a light that is never dim. But mingle with it any human love, and art will look forever at you with the eyes of Christ when he looked at the faithless follower as the cock crew.

  CHAPTER XXVII.

  So time went on, and the old woman spun her flax in the beautiful house on the hill, and grew feebler and a little blind; and I, down in my corner by the fountain, worked for my bread in torrid summers and in icy winters, and grew gloomy, they said, and pleased but few; and my neighbors said, “what did it matter to you? — to you nothing happened. It was not as if she had been your daughter.”

  And, indeed, nothing had happened to me, of course; only all the simple pleasures of life were dead and gone, and the wrinkled faces of the old manuscripts said nothing to me, and the spell of the arts for me was broken; and I should have cared nothing though my foot had laid bare all the jewels of the Faustinas, or the lost Cupid of Praxiteles.

  For a great sorrow is like that subtle poison which is carried by a carrier-fly in summer, and the paralysis of it runs through all the nerves, and the nearest and the most distant are alike stricken and numb.

  It is murder to take life; but perhaps to take away all the joy of life is a more cruel thing, in real truth.

  How was it with her? Was the false and faithless joy that had allured her gone from her? Was she left alone?

  I sat and wondered, till the sunlight on the stones seemed to scorch my eyes blind, and the sweet noise of the falling water sounded hideous.

  Rome is so beautiful when it lies under the splendor of its heavens of light; but it had ceased to be anything to me save a prison that held my body, while my sick soul was far away over strange lands, seeking — seeking ——

  I had little hope that he would be faithful to her, or merciful in any way; yet sometimes I fancied that that perfect love of hers, and her entire innocence of evil, and her many high and rare gifts, might so gain even on him, that it would not be quite with her as it had been with others. So I fancied, hoping against hope, and sitting stitching by my old place under the shadow of the old ecclesiastical walls.

  Hilarion came no more to Rome.

  It was not fear that kept him away: he was one of the boldest of men. It was, probably, that dislike to moral pain, and instinctive avoidance of it, which was very strong in his temperament. It was also, perhaps, some pang of conscience; for his
conscience was always fully awake to the evil he did, and the worst thing in him was that, knowing it, he deliberately selected it. But then, indeed, to him and to his school there is no clear right and no clear wrong in anything. All men were irresponsible in his sight, being born without any will of their own, and all adrift in a chaotic darkness that had no beginning or end.

  Hilarion came no more to Rome, and the beauty of Daïla was wasted on the empty air and on the peasants, who had no eyes to behold it, but only saw the locust on the wheat-stalk, the beetle in the vine-leaf, the fever-mist in the reedy places by the rivers, and all the other sore and various curses of their daily lives.

  If any asked for news of him there, they always said that they knew nothing. Perhaps it was true. Hilarion was one of those who have many houses in many lands, but have no home.

  They are common in your generation.

  Of little Amphion, also, I had seen no more since that fatal night.

  All about me the life was unchanged. My neighbors played their trisella and zecchinetto as of old; Ersilia scolded and labored, with a wrinkle the more betwixt her black brows; Pippo cooked, and Pipistrello played; and the youngsters skipped upon the stones to the twanging of lute and viol and the thump of tambourine; and the nightingales sang in the gardens; and the goats rang their bells with early daylight down the streets.

  But to me all the world seemed dead, — dead as Nero’s slaughtered millions were beneath the soil.

  A year had gone by since Maryx had left Rome, and it was summer again, — full summer, with all the people going out, in merry, honest fooling, to the country, and the lusty-lunged reapers coming through the streets all the night long, singing, with the tasseled corn in their hair, and the poppies behind their ears.

  Ah, the poppies! — Love’s gift.

  When I saw them I grew more heart-sick than before, and all the loud sonorous reaping-songs beat on my ears with a stupid hateful sound.

  One night they came by me over the bridge, louder and more mirthful than ever, and the girls of our streets were dancing the saltarella with some young fisher-fellows from the boats below, and all of a sudden the harmless, noisy joyousness of it all smote me so sharply that I could not bear it any longer, and I rose up and walked away.