Delphi collected works o.., p.1000
Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated), page 1000
René’s dark southern eyes lost a little of their new lustre of happiness, and grew troubled with a sort of cloud of perplexity. He did not seem to understand.
The old man took more snuff, and used phrases clearer still.
There were great collectors — dilettanti of houses imperial and royal and princely and noble, of all the grades of greatness — who would give any sum for bonbonnières and tabatières of eighteenth-century work by any one of the few famous masters of that time. A genuine, incontestable sweetmeat box from the ateliers of the Louis XIV. or Louis XV. period would fetch almost a fabulous sum. Then again he paused, doubtfully.
René bowed, and his wondering glance said without words, “I know this. But I have no eighteenth-century work to sell you: if I had, should we starve in an attic?”
His patron coughed a little, looked at Lili, then proceeded to explain yet further.
In René’s talent he had discerned the hues, the grace, the delicacy yet brilliancy, the voluptuousness and the désinvolteure of the best eighteenth-century work. René doubtless did other and higher things which pleased himself far more than these airy trifles. Well, let him pursue the greater line of art if he chose; but he, the old man who spoke, could assure him that nothing would be so lucrative to him as those bacchantes in wreaths of roses and young tambourine-players gorge au vent dancing in a bed of violets, and beautiful marquises, powdered and jewelled, looking over their fans, which he had painted for those poor little two-sous boxes of the populace, and the like of which, exquisitely finished on enamel or ivory, set in gold and tortoise-shell rimmed with pearls and turquoises or opals and diamonds, would deceive the finest connoisseur in Europe into receiving them as — whatever they might be signed and dated.
If René would do one or two of these at dictation in a year, not more, — more would be perilous, — paint and sign them and produce them with any touches that might be commanded; never ask what became of them when finished, nor recognize them if hereafter he might see them in any illustrious collection — if René would bind himself to do this, he, the old man who spoke, would buy his other paintings, place them well in his famous galleries, and, using all his influence, would make him in a twelvemonth’s time the most celebrated of all the young painters of Paris.
It was a bargain? Ah, how well it was, he said, to put the best of one’s powers into the most trifling things one did! If that poor little two-sous box had been less lavishly and gracefully decorated, it would never have arrested his eyes in the bonbon-booth at St. Cloud. The old man paused to take snuff and receive an answer.
René stood motionless.
Lili had sunk into a seat, and was gazing at the tempter with wide-open, puzzled, startled eyes. Both were silent.
“It is a bargain?” said the old man again. “Understand me, M. René Claude. You have no risk, absolutely none, and you have the certainty of fair fame and fine fortune in the space of a few years. You will be a great man before you have a gray hair: that comes to very few. I shall not trouble you for more than two dix-huitième siècle enamels in the year — perhaps for only one. You can spend ten months out of the twelve on your own canvases, making your own name and your own wealth as swiftly as your ambition and impatience can desire. Madame here,” said the acute dealer with a pleasant smile— “Madame here can have a garden sloping on the Seine and a glass house of choicest flowers — which I see are her graceful weakness — ere another rose-season has time to come round, if you choose.”
His voice lingered softly on the three last words.
The dew stood on René’s forehead, his hands clenched on the easel.
“You wish me — to — paint — forgeries of the Petitot enamels?”
The old man smiled unmoved: “Chut, chut! Will you paint me little bonbonnières on enamel instead of on cardboard? That is all the question. I have said where they go, how they are set: what they are called shall be my affair. You know nothing. The only works of yours which you will be concerned to acknowledge will be your own canvas pictures. What harm can it do any creature? You will gratify a connoisseur or two innocently, and you will meanwhile be at leisure to follow the bent of your own genius, which otherwise—”
He paused: I heard the loud throbs of René’s heart under that cruel temptation.
Lili gazed at his tempter with the same startled terror and bewilderment still dilating her candid eyes with a woful pain.
“Otherwise,” pursued the old man with merciless tranquillity, “you will never see me any more, my friends. If you try to repeat any story to my hindrance, no one will credit you. I am rich, you are poor. You have a great talent: I shall regret to see it lost, but I shall let it die — so.”
And he trod very gently on a little gnat that crawled near his foot, and killed it.
A terrible agony gathered in the artist’s face.
“O God!” he cried in his torture, and his eyes went to the canvases against the wall, and then to the face of his wife, with an unutterable, yearning desire.
For them, for them, this sin which tempted him looked virtue.
“Do you hesitate?” said the merciless old man. “Pshaw! whom do you hurt? You give me work as good as that which you imitate, and I call it only by a dead man’s name: who is injured? What harm can there be in humoring the fanaticism of fashion? Choose — I am in haste.”
René hid his face with his hands, so that he should not behold those dear creations of his genius which so cruelly, so innocently, assailed him with a temptation beyond his strength.
“Choose for me — you!” he muttered in his agony to Lili.
Lili, white as death, drew closer to him.
“My René, your heart has chosen,” she murmured through her dry, quivering lips. “You cannot buy honor by fraud.”
René lifted his head and looked straight in the eyes of the man who held the scales of his fate, and could weigh out for his whole life’s portion either fame and fortune, or obscurity and famine.
“Sir,” he said slowly, with a bitter, tranquil smile about his mouth, “my garret is empty, but it is clean. May I trouble you to leave it as you found it?”
So they were strong to the end, these two famished children of frivolous Paris.
But when the door had closed and shut their tempter out, the revulsion came: they wept those tears of blood which come from the hearts’ depths of those who have seen Hope mock them with a smile a moment, to leave them face to face with Death.
“Poor fools!” sighed the old vine from his corner in the gray, dull twilight of the late autumn day.
Was the vine right?
The air which he had breathed for fifty years through all his dust-choked leaves and tendrils had been the air off millions of human lungs, corrupted in its passage through millions of human lips; and the thoughts which he thought were those of human wisdom:
The sad day died; the night fell; the lattice was closed; the flute lay untouched. A great misery seemed to enfold us. True, we were no worse off than we had been when the same day dawned. But that is the especial cruelty of every tempter always: he touches the innocent, closed eyes of his victims with a collyrium which makes the happy blindness of content no longer possible. If strong to resist him, he has still his vengeance, for they are never again at peace as they were before that fatal hour in which he showed them all that they were not, all that they might be.
Our stove was not more chill, our garret not more empty; our darkness not more dark amidst the gay, glad, dazzling city; our dusky roof and looming crown that shut the sky out from us not more gloomy and impenetrable than they had been on all those other earlier nights when yet we had been happy. Yet how intensified million-fold seemed cold and loneliness and poverty and darkness, all! — for we had for the first time known what it was to think of riches, of fame, of homage, of light, as possible, and then to lose them all forever!
I had been resigned for love’s sake to dwell amongst the roofs, seeing not the faces of the stars, nor feeling ever the full glory of the sun; but now — I had dreamed of the fair freedom of garden-ways and the endless light of summer suns on palace terraces, and I drooped and shivered and sickened, and was twice captive and twice exiled, and knew that I was a little nameless, worthless, hapless thing, whose fairest chaplet of blossom no hand would ever gather for a crown.
As with my life, so was it likewise with theirs.
They had been so poor, but they had been so happy: the poverty remained, the joy had flown.
The winter was again very hard, very cold: they suffered greatly.
They could scarcely keep together body and soul, as your strange phrase runs; they went without food sometimes for days and days, and fuel they had scarcely ever.
The bird in his cage was sold; they would not keep the little golden singing thing to starve to silence like themselves.
As for me, I nearly perished of the cold; only the love I bore to Lili kept a little life in my leafless branches.
All that cruel winter-time they were strong still, those children of Paris.
For they sought no alms, and in their uttermost extremity neither of them ever whispered to the other: “Go seek the tempter; repent, be wise. Give not up our lives for a mere phantasy of honor.”
“When the snow is on the ground, and the canvases have to burn in the stove, then you will change your minds and come to me on your knees,” the old wicked, foul spirit had said mocking them, as he had opened the door of the attic and passed away creaking down the dark stairs.
And I suppose he had reckoned on this; but if he had done so, he had reckoned without his host, as your phrase runs: neither René nor Lili ever went to him, either on knees or in any other wise.
When the spring came we three were still all living — at least their hearts still beat and their lips still drew breath, as my boughs were still green and my roots still clung to the soil. But no more to them or to me did the coming of spring bring, as of old, the real living of life, which is joy. And my lover the wind wooed me no more, and the birds no more brought me the rose-whispers of my kindred in Provence. For even the little pigeon-hole in the roof had become too costly a home for us, and we dwelt in a den under the stones of the streets, where no light came and scarce a breath of air ever strayed to us.
There the uncompleted canvases, on which the painter whom Lili loved had tried to write his title to the immortality of fame, were at last finished — finished, for the rats ate them.
All this while we lived — the man whose genius and misery were hell on earth; the woman whose very purity and perfectness of love were her direst torture; and I, the little white flower born of the sun and the dew, of fragrance and freedom, to whom every moment of this blindness, this suffocation, this starvation, this stench of putrid odors, this horrible roar of the street above, was a moment worse than any pang of death.
Away there in Provence so many a fair rose-sister of mine bowed her glad, proud, innocent head with anguish and shuddering terrors to the sharp summons of the severing knife that cut in twain her life, whilst I — I, on and on — was forced to keep so much of life as lies in the capacity to suffer and to love in vain.
So much was left to them: no more.
“Let us compel Death to remember us, since even Death forgets us!” René murmured once in his despair to her.
But Lili had pressed her famished lips to his: “Nay, dear, wait; God will remember us even yet, I think.”
It was her faith. And of her faith she was justified at last.
There came a ghastlier season yet, a time of horror insupportable — of ceaseless sound beside which the roar of the mere traffic of the streets would have seemed silence — a stench beside which the sulphur smoke and the gas fumes of a previous time would have been as some sweet, fresh woodland air — a famine beside which the daily hunger of the poor was remembered as the abundance of a feast — a cold beside which the chillness of the scant fuel and empty braziers of other winters were recalled as the warmth of summer — a darkness only lit by the red flame of burning houses — a solitude only broken by the companionship of woe and sickness and despair — a suffocation only changed by a rush of air strong with the scent of blood, of putridity, of the million living plague-stricken, of the million dead lying unburied.
For there was war.
Of year or day or hour I knew nothing. It was always the same blackness as of night; the same horror of sound, of scent, of cold; the same misery; the same torture. I suppose that the sun was quenched, that the birds were dumb, that the winds were stilled forever — that all the world was dead; I do not know. They called it War. I suppose that they meant — Hell!
Yet Lili lived, and I; in that dead darkness we had lost René — we saw his face no more. Yet he could not be in his grave, I knew, for Lili, clasping my barren branches to her breast, would murmur: “Whilst he still lives I will live — yes, yes, yes!”
And she did live — so long, so long! — on a few draughts of water and a few husks of grain.
I knew that it was long, for full a hundred times she muttered aloud: “Another day? O God! — how long? how long?”
At last in the darkness a human hand was stretched to her, once, close beside me. A foul, fierce light, the light of flame, was somewhere on the air about us, and that moment glowed through the horrid gloom we dwelt in in the bowels of the earth. I saw the hand and what it held to her; it was a stranger’s, and it held the little colorless dead rose, my sweetest blossom, that had lain ever upon René’s heart.
She took it — she who had given it as her first love-gift. She was mute. In the glare of the flame that quivered through the darkness I saw her — standing quite erect and very still.
The voice of a stranger thrilled through the din from the world above.
“He fought as only patriots can,” it said softly and as through tears. “I was beside him. He fell with Regnault in the sortie yesterday. He could not speak; he had only strength to give me this for you. Be comforted; he has died for Paris.”
On Lili’s face there came once more the radiance of a perfect peace, a glory pure and endless as the glory of the sun. “Great in death!” she murmured. “My love, my love, I come!”
I lost her in the darkness.
I heard a voice above me say that life had left her lips as the dead rose touched them.
What more is there for me to tell?
I live, since to breathe, and to feel pain, and to desire vainly, and to suffer always, are surest proofs of life.
I live, since that stranger’s hand, which brought my little dead blossom as the message of farewell, had pity on me and brought me away from that living grave. But the pity was vain; I died the only death that had any power to hurt me when the human heart I loved grew still forever.
The light of the full day now shines on me; the shadows are cool, the dews are welcome; they speak around me of the coming of spring, and in the silence of the dawns I hear from the woods without the piping of the nesting birds; but for me the summer can never more return — for me the sun can never again be shining — for me the greenest garden world is barren as a desert.
For I am only a little rose, but I am in exile and France is desolate.
Street Dust (1901)
CONTENTS
Street Dust
Letta
A Little Thief
The Fig Tree
Gerry’s Garden
Street Dust
THEIR MOTHER WAS dead.
She had lived only thirty years, and a few months; but she had died before her time, as so many do, of over-toil and little food, some days no food at all, only grass seeds and leaves of wild sage. She was dead; a mere skeleton, brown and dry as a mummy, lying on her bed of dry ferns, from which swarms of lice and fleas were hurrying in their knowledge of and horror of a lifeless thing; only the torpid flies remained, gathering together in black dots upon her as the day advanced.
Her two children, who had seen her die, and had exhausted themselves in shrieks and sobs, went up to her again and kissed her and pressed their heads against her body. But there was no warmth, no response.
“She must be dead — dead — dead,” said the elder of them; and then they fell again to weeping, and they screamed loudly and long. But the echoes of their screams were the only answer that they had.
The day was now bright, and the great grass plains were hushed in their morning calm. A little greenfinch was hopping to and fro on a slab of broken marble, pecking at some seed or insect invisible to any eyes except his own: the small bird was the only living thing near.
The woman had come there three years earlier. She had been the wife or leman of a shepherd who had had some share, through his revelations, in the capture of a noted brigand whose head-quarters had been at Palombaro. For that share the shepherd had been quieted for ever, by a dagger stroke between the shoulders, one evening as he took his flocks to drink at the Anio water.
Life in Palombaro was no longer safe or possible for the family known to belong to him. She left the town stealthily and in terror, carrying with her a new-born male child, whilst her two elder children toiled after her as best they could, carrying a few cooking vessels and a bundle of clothes. She went on and on, on and on, down into the Campagna and across it to the south, resting as she could under thickets or amongst buried tombs, scarcely knowing what she did for the grief which was within her for her murdered love, and the torturing knowledge that he had deserved his end, having been a traitor, or at best a telltale: there is no other crime so dark in these parts as to speak of things which are hidden, and to aid the law against an outlaw.
For some time she dared not show herself by daylight, but at last she found a deserted hut built up out of rushes and brackens by the side of some blocks of tufa, once portions of a tomb; and here, finding herself left undisturbed, she ventured to remain with her two elder children; the little male had died of exposure and fevered milk in the earliest days of her flight. In this hut, under the Mons Sacer, she dwelt three years, getting a few coins by gathering the flowers of the plains and taking them to Rome, which was within sight at a few miles’ distance; this she did from the beginning of winter until the beginning of summer; in summer there were no buyers in the city, and there was no one on the plains except a very few, widely scattered, fever-stricken peasants as miserable as herself.
