Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  No one. The journals write beautiful threnodics over the grave of Ricasoli, and Rochefort shakes hands with Garibaldi, and who amidst the mouthing and the posturing of it cares one straw for the nation, for the people?

  The ranting demagogues of Milan care as little as the amnistié of the Cité Malesherbes or the satrap of the Palais Bourbon.

  The one shriek for Universal Suffrage and the others shriek for the Commune or for the March Decrees and the Scrutin de Liste; but when does the one speak of abolishing the lottery or the other of abolishing the conscription?

  When Madame Roland spoke her farewell words to liberty, she prophesied the whole hypocrisy of the century to come.

  I want people to get these facts that I have narrated well into their minds; to turn their eyes a moment from the Italian men‐of‐war joining the Naval Demonstration of the Powers, and the Italian troops deploying in the Val d’Aosta and the Mugello, and look into these million humble homes, darkened and naked, and see these children without food, these men without hope, who suffer that the pomp and parade of an empty boast may throw dust in the eyes of Europe.

  I cannot think to make you care for these people as I care for them; I, who know that they see their radiant sun for ever through a mist of tears, who know that their hard‐won bread is eaten with the gall of fear and of oppression tainting the sour crust, who know that their little children tremble in their town alleys and country lanes, and fly with their hunted dog from the armed myrmidon of a relentless and ignominious law; I cannot think to make you suffer for them as I do, but still I think you will not refuse to feel some pity for them and some pain.

  Italy is essentially a pastoral country. Those who would turn it into a manufacturing one would be as those who should turn a tabernacle

  of Giotto’s into a breeding hutch of swine. The people thrive on their pure ambient air, they pass their lives under their unsullied skies, they love laughter, song, dance; and still — with the pipe of Corydon and the smile of Adonis — welcome the harvest night and the vintage morn. Up in the hills and in the green places remote from cities, the old, simple, contented, pastoral life still prevails, and there the husbandman follows Christ and recites Tasso; maybe he cannot read the words of either, what of that? Raoul Rigault and Passantante, the murderer Prevost, and the murderess Virginie Dumaine, could all of them read. Were they the better for it?

  In its simplicity, in its freedom, in its purity of family affection, and in its Greek‐like habits of husbandry, I believe the unspoiled country life of Italy to be the best that remains to humanity on the face of the earth. When the childish pettifoggers of the new school scream with puerile ecstasy at the sight of a tramway, of a steam thresher, they know not all the beauty, content and pious peace that they destroy only to enrich some Scotch contractor or some Hebrew usurer. There are 40,000 Jews in Italy, and to them are going all the old estates, all the old palaces, and all the old heirlooms; the Italian noble, no more content to dwell as dwelt his forefathers, aspires to be beggared by the belles petites of Paris or the baccarat of some fashionable hell; the Italian people beholding all their old plenty and ancient rights slipping away from them, stand sullen and full of futile wrath to see all that for twice a thousand years has been their own, passing into the coffer of the foreign speculator or moneylender. This ruin is called Progress — and the whole land groans, and the whole people curse.

  Beyond all else, I repeat, is Italy a pastoral country. All its peace and its joy lie amidst its smiling fields. The conscription that takes all its country lads from plough and spade, from vineyard and chestnut wood because its leaders are bitten with the mania of meddling and marring in the councils of Europe, does the same evil to the land that do the foreign speculators who cover the country with unfinished rails and demolished buildings in that cruellest of all greeds, the greed of the hungry gambler of the stock‐exchange. The temptations to the peasant to leave his hillside for the cities, which those gamblers for their own ends put before him as improvement, is as merciless and fatal as any tempting of Satan to innocent souls of old. Most unhappily the rural life all the world over is spoken of now with scorn; yet it is certain that the rural life is the safest, the healthiest, the sweetest, and above all it is so here where the climate makes the mere living out‐of‐doors a poem and a picture.

  Compare the mechanic of Wakefield or Blackburn with the pall of black soot hung for ever between him and the sun, and his superficial repetitions of Darwin or Bradlaugh urged as evidence of an enlightened mind; compare his automatic hideous toil, his hard hatred of all classes save his own, his dwelling one amidst rows of a thousand similar, his wilderness of dark, foul‐scented streets, his stench of smoke, his talk of agnosticism and equality narrow as the routine of his life, his shallow sophisms, his club, his strikes, his tommy‐shop; compare him and these with the Italian labourer of the Luchese hills, or the Santa Fiora forests, or the Val d’Arno farms, rising to see the glorious sky glow like a summer rose, dwelling in his wide, stout, stone‐built house old as the trees around him, following in their course as the seasons change his manly and healthful labours, reaping and binding, sowing and mowing, guiding his oxen through the vines, having for ever around him the gladdest and most gracious nature; at noontide sitting down as the patriarch sat amidst his family and labourers to a homely plenty; at eventide resting to see the youths and maidens dance, and listen to the old pastoral love songs sung to the thrum of the guitar or the story of the Gerusalemme Liberata passed down by word of mouth from sire to son. Compare these two lives; they are no fancy pictures. You may see either of them any day you will; and tell me whether I am wrong when I dread, as the plague was dreaded of old, the false teachers, who, to fill their own purse try to persuade the southern peasant to covet the northern workmen; who try to say gas is fairer than the sun, and the oiled piston sweeter than the honey breath of the cattle, and the anathema of Fourier and Bakounine lovelier and wiser than the strophe of Ariosto and of Dante.

  Italy for the Italians! yes; with the municipal extortions made a thing of the past like the Inquisition, and the Jew usurer, and the English and American speculator, denied the soil they covet and pollute. This would well be the fitting war‐cry of the Italy of to‐day, who has darker foes made welcome in her midst than even the Austrian and the Bourbon that she banished.

  Let me give but one example of the delightful natural intelligence which the new schools are striving to replace with the scientific smattering of the factory and foundry mechanic, and I will weary you no more.

  In a letter published in 1859 to the celebrated Tommaseo, Professore Giulianni narrates the story of a woman called Beatrice in the Pistoiese Apennines — a woman he knew well — a poor, hard‐working, country‐bred creature, who knew not a single letter of the alphabet, but who improvised on the death of a beloved son, in a passion of grief and weeping, the most perfect poem in the always difficult ottave. This woman was but one amidst others, who all had, in a greater or a lesser degree, this grand poetical faculty, and harmony of ear, and who, when asked to teach their power to a stranger, would answer with a smile.

  Volete intender lo mio imparare? Andar per legna or starmene a zappare.

  What can the communal schools substitute for that one half so ennobling, so inspiriting, so sublime, as those natural bursts of song amidst the solitudes of the everlasting hills?

  ‘If you would learn to sing like me,’ she says, ‘come with me to gather the hillside wood, or stay beside me to hoe the earth; this rich and kindly earth which flowers for ever for you, making the almond bloom in the winter cold, and the cyclamen in the autumn mists, and all spring and summer shower on you blossoms with both hands.’

  How right she is, this wise old woman eloquent!

  What can the schools give us that will equal what Nature offers? Let us dwell, as she does, face to face with the blue sky, the mountain solitude, the forest freedom, and we shall see as she sees. This is what I would keep for this lovely land which has b
ecome mine, for these beloved people who are now my own, this fresh, natural intelligence, this healthful Greek‐like life. And this is what day by day is perishing, crushed out under the weight of the impost of the municipalities and the engine wheels of the greedy contractor. As an Italian writer has said aright: ‘As little by little our beautiful forests and green woodland growth fall before love of lucre and greedy desire, and give place to the smoke and the stench of the machine and the shaft, as our hillsides crumble and fall away, and our flowering meadows and our fair cultured fields vanish with them, so does equal craze for gain possess our people in the cities, and, bringing amidst them a strange and foreign element, corrupts our hearts as it corrupts our tongue.’

  She, who on the mountain side mourned for her son as Tasso might have mourned, is ordered to give place to the parrot‐phrase and automaton‐learning of the school‐crammed puppet; the old happy innocent nights in the valley and on the hills, when the youths came with violin and

  mandoline to bid the maidens dance trescone or galletta in the moonlight, or gathered about the wood fire in the winter time singing romanzetti and strombetti,and telling the old‐world tales of the Queen of Cyprus, and the Ginevra, and Piramo and Tisbe, are bidden to change and render up their place to wordy dispute of windy politics, and feverish suppers in crowded winehouses, where the pure juice of the grape is lost in alcohol and chemicals.

  The peasant‐improvisatrice is to become the hollow‐cheeked toiler of mill or machine; the happy husbandman is to become the sullen and savage mechanic with rotten lungs and watery blood; the songs, sweet and strong as wild birds’ notes, are to be drowned in the hoarse shouts of the proletariate; and the luxuriant, vigorous, natural intelligence is to be poisoned with the false logic of communism or stifled in the lifeless mechanical repetition of the schools.

  Forbid it, O Apollo Cytherœdus! here, where the echo of thy divine lute still may be heard at evenfall, when the shepherd pipes, and the maiden sings, in the green myrtle hollows and on the pine‐ crowned heights! Arise and protect these thine offspring!

  Let the false guides not take from thy children alike the bread that is life, and the pure air that is health, and the music that is laughter and is love!

  Wanda

  CONTENTS

  VOLUME I.

  PROEM.

  CHAPTER I.

  CHAPTER II.

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV.

  CHAPTER V.

  CHAPTER VI.

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII.

  CHAPTER IX.

  CHAPTER X.

  VOLUME II.

  CHAPTER XI.

  CHAPTER XII.

  CHAPTER XIII.

  CHAPTER XIV.

  CHAPTER XV.

  CHAPTER XVI.

  CHAPTER XVII.

  CHAPTER XVIII.

  CHAPTER XIX.

  CHAPTER XX.

  CHAPTER XXI.

  CHAPTER XXII.

  CHAPTER XXIII.

  CHAPTER XXIV.

  CHAPTER XXV.

  CHAPTER XXVI.

  CHAPTER XXVII.

  CHAPTER XXVIII.

  VOLUME III.

  CHAPTER XXIX.

  CHAPTER XXX.

  CHAPTER XXXI.

  CHAPTER XXXII.

  CHAPTER XXXIII.

  CHAPTER XXXIV.

  CHAPTER XXXV.

  CHAPTER XXXVI.

  CHAPTER XXXVII.

  CHAPTER XXXVIII.

  CHAPTER XXXIX.

  CHAPTER XL.

  CHAPTER XLI.

  CHAPTER XLII.

  CHAPTER XLIII.

  The first edition’s title page

  VOLUME I.

  PROEM.

  Doch — alles was dazu mich trieb,

  Gott! war so gut! ach, war so lieb! — GOETHE.

  Towards the close of a summer’s day in Russia a travelling carriage was compelled to pause before a little village whilst a smith rudely mended its broken wheel. The hamlet was composed of a few very poor dwellings grouped around a large low horse-shoe shaped building, which was the manorial mansion of the absent proprietor. It was gloomy, and dropping to decay; its many windows were barred and shuttered; the grass grew in its courts, and flowering weeds had time to seed and root themselves on its whitewashed walls.

  Around it the level ground was at this season covered with green wheat, spreading for leagues on leagues, and billowing and undulating under the wind that blew from the steppes, like the green sea which it resembled. Farther on were woods of larch and clumps of willow; and in the distance, across the great plain to the westward, rolled a vast shining river, here golden with choking sand, here dun-coloured with turbid waves, here broken with islets and swamps of reeds, where the singing swan and the pelican made their nests.

  It was in one of those far-off provinces through which the Volga rolls its sand-laden and yellow waves. The scene was bleak and mournful, though for many leagues the green corn spread and caught the timid sunshine and the shadow of the clouds. There were a few stunted willows near the house, and a few gashed pines; a dried-up lake was glittering with crystals of salt; the domes and minarets of a little city rose above the sky line far away to the south-east; and farther yet northward towered the peaks of the Ural Mountains; the wall of stone that divides Siberia from the living world. All was desolate, melancholy, isolated, even though the season was early summer; but the vastness of the view, the majesty of the river, the suggestion of the faint blue summits where the Urals rose against the sky, gave solemnity and a melancholy charm to a landscape that was otherwise monotonous and tedious.

  Prince Paul Ivanovitch Zabaroff was in Russia because he was on the point of marriage with a great heiress of the southern provinces, and was travelling across from Orenburg to the Krimea, where his betrothed bride awaited him in the summer palace of her fathers. Russia, with the exception of Petersburg, was an unknown and detested place to him; his errand was distasteful, his journey tedious, his temper irritated; and when a wheel of his telegue came off in this miserable village of the Northern Volga district, he was in no mood to brook with patience such an accident. He paced to and fro restlessly as he looked round on the few and miserable cabins of a district that had been continually harried and fired through many centuries by Kossack and Tartar.

  ‘Whose house is that?’ he said to his servant, pointing to the great white building.

  The servant humbly answered, ‘Little father, it is thine.’

  ‘Mine!’ echoed Paul Zabaroff. He was astonished; then he laughed, as he remembered that he had large properties around the city of Kazán.

  The whole soil was his own as far as his eyes could reach, till the great river formed its boundary. He did not even know his steward here; the villagers did not know him. He had been here once only, a single night, in the late autumn time, long, long before, He was a man in whose life incidents followed each other too rapidly for remembrance to have any abiding-place or regret any home in his mind. He had immense estates, north, south, east, west; his agents forwarded him the revenues of each, or as much of the revenues as they chose him to enjoy, when they themselves were satisfied with their gains.

  When he was not in Paris he was in Petersburg, and he was an impassioned and very daring gamester. These great silent houses, in the heart of fir woods, in the centre of grass plains, or on the banks of lonely rivers, were all absolutely unknown to and indifferent to him. He was too admired and popular at his Court ever to have had the sentence passed upon him to retire to his estates; but had he been forced to do so he would have been as utterly an exile in any one of the houses of his fathers as if he had been consigned to Tobolsk itself.

  He looked around him now, an absolute stranger in the place where he was as absolutely lord. All these square leagues he learned were his, all these miserable huts, all these poor lives; for it was in a day before the liberation of the serfs had been accomplished by that deliverer whom Russia rewarded with death. A vague remembrance came
over him as he gazed around: he had been here once before. The villagers, learning that it was their master who had arrived thus unexpectedly in their midst, came timidly around and made their humble prostrations: the steward who administered the lands was absent that day in the distant town. He was entreated to go within his own deserted dwelling, but he refused: the wheel was nearly mended, and he reflected that a house abandoned for so long was probably damp and in disorder, cold and comfortless. He was impatient to be gone, and urged the smith to his best and quickest by the promise of many roubles. The moujiks, excited and frightened, hastened to him with the customary offerings of bread and salt; he touched the gifts carelessly; spoke to them with good-humoured, indifferent carelessness; and asked if they had any grievances to complain of, without listening to the answer. They had many, but they did not dare to say so, knowing that their lord would be gone in five minutes, but that the heavy hand of his steward would lie for ever upon them.

  Soon the vehicle was repaired, and Paul Zabaroff ceased his restless walk to and fro the sandy road, and prepared to depart from this weary place of detention. But, from an isba that stood apart, beneath one of the banks of sand that broke the green level of the corn, the dark spare figure of an old woman came, waving bony hands upon the air, and crying with loud voice to the barine to wait.

  ‘It is only mad Maritza,’ said the people; yet they thought Maritza had some errand with their lord, for they fell back and permitted her to approach him as she cried aloud: ‘Let me come! Let me come! I would give him back the jewel he left here ten years ago!’

  She held a young boy by the hand, and dragged him with her as she spoke and moved. She was a dark woman, once very handsome, with white hair and an olive skin, and a certain rugged grandeur in her carriage; she was strong and of strong purpose; she made her way to Paul Zabaroff as he stood by the carriage, and she fell at his feet and touched the dust with her forehead, and forced the child beside her to make the same obeisance.