Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  I sat under the leafless branches and read the book by the light of the lamps above me. There were bands playing near, some wheeling, waltzing, dreamy measure; the verse seemed to go with the music; the crowd went by, the many wheels were a sound like the sea; beyond at the end was the white pile of Napoleon’s arch, and wintry masses of trees, and countless lights: — if I look at a line of the poem now, all the scene comes back to me.

  As I read, the scorching passion, like a sand-wind that burns and passes, — the hollow love, that even in its first fresh vows was not sincere, — the cruel analysis, the weary contempt of human nature, — the slow voluptuous and yet indifferent analysis of the woman’s loveliness and of the amorous charm that could no more last than lasts the hectic flash of the sky at evening-time, — they all seemed to cut into my very flesh like stripes.

  I seemed to hear her doom in them; the letters seemed stamped in fire.

  I read it as a man reads a death-warrant, seeing from beginning to end, as it were, in one flash of horrible comprehension. It told me no more than I knew, indeed; and yet it seemed to kill all hope in me, — because this book was freshly written, and it told me that the poet of it knew nothing of love save its brutality and its satiety; and how as a lover could he give any more than he knew?

  It frenzied me. It seemed to me as if I saw her dead, and he showing all her unveiled beauties to the gaze of men, as Nero showed in death Agrippina. I tore the paper cover off it, and the pages with their delicate printing, and bit them through and through with my teeth, and flung, them on the ground and to the winds.

  People passing by must have thought me mad: the boys of the streets ran and caught the flying pages from the gutter to make them into any of the ten thousand uses that the ingenuity of poverty can teach them. Then I rose and tried to remember where I was, and to find my way to a cheap house of call where I had used to live with the comedians twenty odd years before.

  That little hostelry had been pulled down to make way for the blank, glaring, dreary, plastered piles which your modern architects love, and which have no more story in them, or light and shade, or meaning of any kind, than has an age-worn coquette’s hard enameled face.

  The little wine-shop, once the abode of much harmless merriment and wise content, had been pulled down; but I found another, that suited me, and stayed on in Paris, going every night and day to stare up at Hilarion’s house, and ring at the closed gate, and receive the same answer, until the keeper of the gate grew angry, and threatened to hand me over to the keeping of the gendarmes.

  No doubt wiser folks and richer ones would have gone at once to the aid of the law to find her or hear of her, in many various ways; but I was afraid: we Trasteverini have no love of the law, or of its administrators, high and low, and I thought it best, rightly or wrongly, to keep close my own counsel.

  Once, passing a great public place, newly erected and very handsome in the soulless sort of splendor which is the highest that your modern architecture ever reaches, I saw through the ranges of the columns in its halls the Nero and the Actæa high-throned in a place of honor.

  The young artists were speaking of it.

  “How perfect it is!” said one. “He is a great man.”

  “Ay, truly,” said the other; “and what a beautiful life his has been! — beautiful as any Greek’s in Ægina. If there be one whom I envy — —”

  I hurried out of the hall, sick at heart.

  It had been a beautiful life indeed, and I had ruined it when I had bidden him take the face of his Actæa from my Ariadne.

  So ill does the world judge: seeing but the golden-green burnished smooth side of the laurel leaf, and not knowing the bitterness and the poison in it for him who chews it.

  Fame consoles, say the vulgar: oh, fools! that which has the strength to achieve fame has also the strength that intensifies the pang of every woe.

  Going through the streets, with Palès clinging to my heels, not noticing any of the sights and sounds about me, but seeing before my eyes, as though they were written everywhere, upon the stones and in the sky, those beautiful vile mocking verses and treasures of language, sent to show the hopeless vainness of all human loves, the music of a flute divinely played caught my dull ear and made me pause.

  There is so much music in Paris always that I cannot tell why this should have had power to enter my brain and make me stop, but so it was; and Palès pricked her sandy fox-like ears, as though in that multitude of strangers seeing some familiar face. I went where the flute was being played, before a coffee-house door, beneath the roadside trees, under the bright still skies and the desert of gas-lights.

  It was hard to see the player, for there were so many people crowding round and sitting at ease upon green iron chairs, sipping coffee and eating sweet things, for the night was serene and not cold. But I listened on the edge of the crowd, and though all flutes have but one voice among them, yet it seemed to me that this one spoke with the sweet sad sound that I had heard at Daïla when the peaches had been ripe, and, edging in a little nearer, I saw that the player was Amphion, whom I had never seen from the night that he had sent Maryx and myself to the seashore in time to behold the vanishing sail.

  When I had returned to Rome after that time I had utterly forgotten him, and when, remembering, I reproached myself and asked of him, I had been able to hear nothing: the fisherman by Quattro Capi could only say he had been an honest though not a useful lad whilst with him, and had gone away, — out of the city, for aught that he knew.

  And now I was sure that this was Amphion playing here, with the small olive face, and the big black eyes, and the nervous girlish hands, and making such soft, sweet, wailing music that even the Paris crowd was still and touched.

  When the music ceased, he took off the flat scarlet cap that he wore on his dark curls, and held it out to those who had listened; they were numerous, and all gave willingly. The flute he played on was a common one of ebony, — not the silver flute of Daïla. He divided it and slipped it in his breast, as his way always had been, then came out of the crowd.

  I stopped him. “Do you know me?” I said. “Where are you going? Why do you struggle like that?”

  For he was trying to escape me.

  He stood still, finding me resolute, but his face was downcast, and his voice faltered, as he stammered some ill-connected words of where he lived and how it fared with him: then, looking me suddenly in the face, the tears sprang into his eyes, and he drew me aside hurriedly down into a passageway.

  “You are old and poor. I can tell you,” he said, quickly. “I shall not be jealous of you. You care for her; but you cannot keep her. Come home with me, and I will tell you.”

  “She is in the city, then?” I said, with a great leap at my heart, and a dizziness before my sight.

  “Yes, yes,” he said, impatiently. “Come home with me.”

  I kept pace with his lithe and quick young steps to a house on the river.

  “You will make me lose money,” he said, restlessly looking backward at the crowded and illuminated streets we left.

  He had changed sorely from the pretty soft lad that he had been at Daïla; poverty and feverish passions, and the air and the ways of cities, had pinched and wasted his features, and given a false color to his worn cheeks, and a piteous eagerness to his glance. He drew me aside in a little passageway, where there was a bench under a pear-tree, and a sign of a silver deer swinging, as I well remember, in the artificial light.

  “Sit down,” he said, imperiously, and yet timidly. “You will say I have done wrong, no doubt. But if the time was to come over again I would not do otherwise. I could not.”

  I shook with impatience.

  “Who cares what you have done or left undone?” I cried, cruelly, “who cares? Tell me of her: has he left her?”

  Amphion laughed aloud.

  “Have you read Fauriel?”

  “I have had it read to me. I can understand the tongue now. Have you read it? Oh, it is beautiful, s
o the world says: it is beautiful, no doubt. Only reading it! why do you ask?”

  A great heart-sickness came over me: I held him with both my hands on his arm.

  “For the love of God, tell me in a few words. Since you know everything, it would seem, — is she near me now? Is she living? Has he forsaken her quite?”

  Amphion was silent, thinking.

  “Come with me,” he said, and turned towards the quarter where the gray Seine was gliding in the moonlight through Old Paris, the Paris of Philippe d’Orleans and of the Reine Isabeau.

  Something in the boy’s look and the sound of the voice froze my blood in my veins and nailed my tongue to my throat.

  I thought to see her lying dead, or perhaps to see some nameless wooden cross above the ditches where the friendless and forlorn lie buried.

  I could not ask him another word. Palès crept after us wearily, with her head hung down.

  I had forgotten that for ten hours I had never eaten nor drunk.

  He took me to a house standing quite on the water, with the towers and walls of the more ancient quarter close about it, and a few trees and the masts of boats rising above their boughs. He climbed a steep dark stairway, smelling of all foul odors, and paused up on high before a closed door.

  “Go in there,” he said, and opened the door. My heart stood still. I had no clear thought of anything that I should see, only one idea, — that she must be within the chamber lying dead.

  I set my foot upon the threshold with the ghastliest fear my life had ever known.

  The room was almost in darkness, for one small lamp would not light it: it was a garret, but clean and spacious, with one casement, through whose leaded panes the stars were shining, and the zinc roofs were glistening under the rays of the moon.

  There was the form of a woman there: her face I could not see. She was leaning her forehead against the window. She did not turn or move at the unclosing of the door. Palès ran forward whining: then I knew who it was. I went to her timidly, and yet in joy, seeing that she lived, even though she lived in misery.

  My dear, will you not speak to me?” I said, and tried to touch her hand. “Will you not even look? I am your friend always, though poor, and of so little use;” and then I stopped, and a greater horror than the fear of death consumed me, for as she turned her face towards me there was no light of any kind in it, no light of the reason or the soul: it had the mild, dumb, patient pain of a sick animal upon it, and in the great eyes, so lustrous and wide-opened, there was no comprehension, no answer, no recognition.

  The eyes looked at me; that was all: they did not see me.

  “Will he be long?” she said. Her voice sounded faint, and far away.

  “Do you not know me, oh, my dear ? Do you not even know me?” I cried, in my mortal agony. She did not seem even to hear: she sighed a little wearily, and turned to the casement and leaned her forehead there. I burst into tears.

  I shall always see that bare white room, and the plank floor, and the high garret window, with the stars shining through it, as long as I see anything on earth. Sometimes in the night I wake up shivering, and thinking I am there with her lustrous, hopeless eyes looking at me so, with no sight in them and no reason.

  “Oh, my dear! Oh, my dear! Where is God, that he lets such things be?” I cried, in my suffering, and raved and blasphemed, and knew not what I said, but seemed to feel my very heart-strings being rent asunder.

  But she heard nothing, or, at least, she took no notice: she was looking through the narrow panes, as if her lover were to come back to her from heaven.

  The boy, standing on the threshold, drew me back to him.

  “She is always like that,” he said, very low. “It is a pity he cannot see: it would serve him for fine verses.”

  “Hush, for the mercy of heaven! Can you jest?”

  “I? — Jest?”

  Then I felt ashamed that I had hurt him with such a word, for I saw in his face what he felt.

  “Forgive me, child,” I said, humbly, to him, as I felt I too was mad, I think. “Mad! Oh, who dares say any such word? — who dares? — the clearest, purest, loftiest mind that ever loved the sunlight of God’s truth! Oh, she will know me in a little while. Let me go back and speak to her again. She has not seen me well: the place is dark.”

  And again I touched her, and spoke, and again her eyes rested on me, not seeming even to see that I was a human thing. “Will he be long?” she muttered, once more, being disturbed.

  “She asks only that,” muttered Amphion: “nothing else is ever said by her. You only pain her; you only make her more restless. Come away: now you have seen her.”

  The boy spoke with the authority of an old gray-headed man, and his boyish face had the look of age. He drew me out across the threshold, and across the narrow passage-way, into another garret, much smaller, and quite as bare.

  “You want to hear,” he said, with a heavy sigh, pressing his hands to his forehead. “You will be angry: you will say I have done wrong. But I hated to let you know, or any one. I was all the friend she had, and, though she never knew, that was a kind of joy. Well, this is how it was.”

  He breathed quickly, then drew a long sigh, and so began to speak.

  “You stayed in Rome; that strong man, too, who makes the carven images. I could not stay. I had plenty of money, — his money, you remember. I came here. Here, I thought to myself, he would be sure to come: never is he long away, for he says that here only do men know how to live, if in Rome only can they learn to die. So I stayed here, and I watched his house.

  “I know how to watch: I was friends with the snakes at home. The windows of the house were always shut: it was like the face of a blind man; it told nothing. One day, that is a year ago now, they opened. I lived in a little room high up, very near, — so high, so near, I could see down into his garden: and I learned their tongue, only I let them believe I. did not know it: so I heard more. He lived his old life, — quite his old life: it was all pleasure, — what he calls pleasure, — and she stayed in her own chambers with her marbles: what did she know? She was shut up as you shut up a bird. Once or twice he had her with him at the opera: she was as white as the statues that she worships; she had a quantity of old Greek gold upon her. I knew that it was Greek, for I had seen him buy it in Athens. Some one near me said it was Helen, — risen. But she is not Helen, nothing in her like her: she read me of Helen in those old songs of war, in Rome. I think she suffered very much, because all those people looked so at her: as for him, he only smiled. This that I tell you of now belongs to last winter. Have patience: I must tell it my own way.

  “There came then to this city the wicked witch from Rome, she whom you call a duchess. She sent for him. He went, and when he had gone once, then he went often. She, in those rooms with her marbles, was more than ever alone. Her window opened on to the gardens and from my garret window I could see. Sometimes she would come out under the trees: they grow very thickly, and it is damp there, but she would sit still under them, hour after hour, — and he all the while about in the pleasure-places or with the Roman woman. I do not think he was cruel to her; no, I think not: he only left her: that is not cruelty, they say.

  “When the spring came, and all those lilies were in flower, and the air, even in this place, so sweet, she was all the day long in the garden: I could see her shadow always on the grass. The grass hardly ever had his shadow too. Sometimes I followed him, and I saw how he spent his nights. If I had been strong, like your sculptor, I would have killed him; but I am only a boy. Why did not the sculptor come? The Roman woman went away, and he went also: I learned from his people that he had left no word where he had gone.

  “She used to walk to and fro in the moonlight under the trees, till one was sick to see her. All day long she did nothing, nothing, only sit and listen, I suppose, for his steps, or the sound of some one bringing some word from him. She got a look on her face like that look that your dog’s eyes have when it loses you in a crowd. You know wha
t I mean. Men came and tried to see her, — men who were his friends; that is their friendship; but never would she see any one. She was so foolish, I heard the servants say; but I think they were sorry for her, and I know they loved her. All this time I kept myself by means of my flute, and watched the house all the time I was not playing. It was a hot summer: heat is so heavy here, where all these zinc roofs burn your eyes: it is not like the heat on our shores, where we lie in the air all night, and hear the cool sound of the waves; — oh, I have not forgotten!”

  The summer was horrible here: it was all clouds of dust by day and glare of gas by night, and the noise of the streets roaring like an angry beast. She never left the garden. She was never quiet; she was always moving up and down, and doing nothing, — she who used to do so much in every second of the day in Rome. I heard the people of the house say, ‘She thinks he is coming back;’ and the older ones sighed and seemed pitiful, but the man at the gate, who is wicked, laughed with his friends. They tried to enter and see her; great princes some of them were; but never would she see any one.

  “One day, when she was walking in the garden, I saw a messenger take her a great casket. She said not one word, but she threw it on the ground, and the lid of it burst open, and pearls and other jewels rolled out, and she trampled on them and trod them into the earth. I never had seen her like that. The man who had brought them was frightened. and gathered them up and hurried away. The man at the gate laughed, and told him she was a fool.

  “That is how the summer went by; and from my garret I could always see her, and all the long moonlight nights she would pace up and down there under those trees ; and the lilacs grew shriveled and black. Then all at once I missed her. Days went by. At last I asked. The man at the gate laughed again. ‘She is gone,’ said he: ‘she is a lovely creature, but not human, I think; he wrote to her, but she did not understand. She is gone away, somewhere or other. You see, she did not understand, — as if it were not always so.’ What is always so?”

  The Greek lad sighed, and drew his breath wearily, then again took up the thread of his bald narrative, which he told in simple, unlearned fashion.