Delphi collected works o.., p.230
Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated), page 230
And as I entered the town, the people got hold of me, and would fain feast and welcome me, and bore me in the midst of them all down the old Oltrarno. And then — up on high, behind a barred casement against the corner of the Lion’s Mouth — I saw her face, and then —
Well, then the sins and follies of my old life smote me from the lightning of the child’s eyes of scorn; and she spoke words I merited, no doubt, but still such words as one cannot hear even from a woman twice; and so I saw my duty plain before me, and did it, though late in the day, no doubt.
It was long and tedious labour to find her father, more especially because I had to earn my daily bread, whilst I sought for him, by any such handicraft or labour of the roads as came to my share in the bitter, joyless, strange countries where the people only saw in me a travel-stained vagrant with a brown skin and a foreign tongue.
But I did her will at last, and found her greatness and fair fortune, and so sent her the roses in farewell, and knew that she was lost to me for evermore, the pretty, careless, sunny, wayward thing who had strayed with me through the Poets’ Country whilst the blue lilies were in bloom. I am glad that I had strength to do it — yes, glad, surely, for her sake. For even had she been willing to link her life with mine, it would have been shame in me to lead her into my obscure and thorn-set paths of life whilst she was so young — so young, — and knew not what she did.
Yes, I am glad.
For, though one be but a strolling player, and never saw one’s crown engraven save on a travelling tinker’s old iron pot, still, when one bears a once-mighty name of Florence, one must needs try to be worthy of it by some poor shred of honour, at the least. Only for me, look you, all the world seemed dead.
God knows what I might have done in the weary days when I had sent her my farewell in flowers, and knew that every year of her life would only serve to make her higher and higher, farther and farther, away from me for evermore.
They were long burning days of drought and dust. The land was white with long thirst, and within the city the clouds of zanzari hooted all night long. For the first time in all my years of love for her the face of my Florence looked without beauty. Is not the beauty of all things so much within us, and derived so little from without?
God knows, I say, what evil or mad end to my life I might not have been tempted to put, in my heart-sickness and haste, had there not chanced to me a strange accident One blazing eveningtide, just as the sun was close on its setting, I was walking wearily down the Stocking-makers’ Street, thinking of nothing in particular, when I came upon a little group of people gathered before the door of a Cantina.
It is a quaint, odd, many-coloured, picturesque street, as all the world knows; and what with its pretty crowded gay wares, and its narrowness, and its popularity, it is a street that will always talk to one; it has done so much; the blood of Florence has coursed so often down it: and it has been a channel of the full Florence life ever since the Arts and Trades marched along it to set their flags round San Michaele that brave day when Duke Walter was hounded out through the gates.
Calzaioli will always talk if you will listen — here on the stones that are still called the Song of the Lily it has heard the soft footfall of Ginevra’s bare and trembling feet; here, where Guardamortà rose, it saw the Lion tremble before a mother’s love; here in its workshop the Bronzino dwelt, and here, in its church, his bones were laid to final rest; here Donatello and Michelozzo laboured for the love of arts and men hard by yonder against the little Bigallo; here flame and steel ravaged their worst after red Arbià; here the White Bands shivered and fled before their old hereditary foes; here, on Ascension Day, the Signoria went up with the gold and purple of ripe fruits, to lay them at the feet of that Madonna of Ugolino whose manifold miracles sustained the soul of Florence beneath the Devil’s Plague; here, on the Feast of Anna, it saw Walter of Athens driven out of the city, and all good men and true trooping thither to render her thanksgiving, and all the Arts raising in memory the statue of their patron saint and the shields of their blazonries — all these things, and a million more, has Calzaioli seen since its old towers and casements crowded hard on one another, and the destriers and palfreys champed below in the logge, and the painters and sculptors worked high above in the turretted roofs, worked amidst the challenge of silver clarions, and the clangour of brazen bells, the fret of horses’ hoofs, and the clash of crossing swords, the saucy laugh of the playing pages, and the sturdy tramp of the marching Trades.
Calzaioli will always talk to you, if you have ears to hear, and it was talking to me then, and I was heeding not at all the living throng around me, when my ear was caught by an air that was being played on a violin where the knot of people stood before the wineshop. I think I have heard most music that has ever rejoiced the earth; and at Pisa, amongst other things, I studied music as a science; but this air struck me at once as unlike anything else that I knew — quaint, delicate, fanciful, mournful, charming, and altogether new. I paused to listen with the rest.
A boy of about fourteen was playing, sitting on an old barrow that stood in the kennel of the street He was very small and slight, and pretty as a child; his clothes were ragged, and he was very pale. It grows dark in Calzaioli long before the light has died in the open contado; there was a lamp lit in the doorway above his head; the great silvery pile of San Michaele loomed beyond, with the saints and prophets white in the darkness. I stayed with the rest of them and listened.
The air had enchanted the people; they were humming it to themselves as it was played; and two country girls had caught it, and were singing to it a first and a second as they plaited on at their hanks of straw. It was just one of those melodies made to be repeated on every lip, and handed from town to town in every land: not because it was catching and common, but because that true divine spirit of music was in it which has an universal tongue and a life eternal.
All of a sudden, as I listened, the music of the violin ceased — snapped, as it were, and ceased; there was a little movement in the group; the musician had fallen backward in the gutter and the violin had dropped out of his hand.
I pushed the people aside and lifted his head on my knee. By his looks I thought he had fainted from hunger.
The people, looking frightened, began to edge away, still humming fragments of his melody.
“He does not belong to any of us,” they said, with little shrugs of their shoulders.
He did not belong to any one, poor lad; he had been seen in Florence for the first time for what anybody knew, playing along the Arno side for pence that day at noon. The beauty of his airs had drawn a little crowd after him. The people will wander after any harmony hour by hour anywhere over Italy.
Down in the gutter the lad lay, and if one lie there in Calzaioli, one is as sure to have a horse’s hoof in one’s face as May time is sure to bring cherries.
The wineshop people did not much like to let him in; but, nevertheless, as they knew me well, and in the old days of my fooling I had had many an idle night over their chiante, they gave way; and after a while, in their inner chamber, the lad came to himself, and opened great dark bewildered eyes on us. He was as handsome and small as a girl, with curls of Venetian gold lying soft and thick about his throat “I was playing — a moment ago?” he murmured, staring up into our faces. “It was in a street — what has happened?”
“You fainted, that is all,” I told him. “Was it the heat, or are you ill, or what is it?”
White as he was, and bloodless, he coloured painfully.
“It was hunger, I think,” he murmured. “I have eaten nothing for three days but a crust a dog left”. Knowing that, to do for him was easy.
He soon after sank into deep slumber, and seemed likely to sleep all the night; so I would not disturb him; but with the first of the daylight, as soon as the shutters were down, I, watching by him, saw his pretty eyes open; and then he was all for falling at my feet and blessing me, as though, poor little lad, I had been St Michael himself who had called him up into paradise. When he got a little calmer, he told me his story. His name was Raffaello Baptista.
“You see, dear signor,” said he, lifting his wistful, pitiful eyes to mine, “I belong to Verona. My mother, who was blind, was very very good, but she died more than a year ago, and I was very unhappy. Because my old master in music was dead too; and there was a lovely little lady who had always been my playmate who had disappeared in the strangest manner possible. She was much above me — oh yes, quite illustrious. Her people, I believe, were very great; only they never took any notice of her, so that it was not any good at all. When she was lost, all Verona said she was dead, because a girl’s body was found in Adige, and the face none could see, being gnawed by the rats. But I was always quite sure that the good God had not taken her without letting me see her once more. And little by little I came to think that I would try to find her. My mother was dead and buried, and my father drinks all day, and old Ambrogio, even, was gone; and so I thought to myself, no one wants me here, and I am kicked about like a useless little cur, and I am quite old now, thirteen come the Day of Ashes; and I will go and try and find out the donzella, and I am sure Mariuccia and the Mother will pray for me. And so off I came the very end of Quaresima, and I have been wandering, wandering, wandering ever since then, and never a sight of her face. Only once, in a hamlet, in the Romagna country, I heard of a girl who was singing, with hair all gold, like the wheat in summer, and the people spoke of her as L’Uccello; and then I took heart of grace to hear the old dear Veronese name, and I said, ‘There cannot be two like that,’ and I kept on and on till I came into Florence. Her brothers are all dead, and she is quite illustrious, you know, only so poor, so poor! And she and I were friends always, and always so happy together. And she has nobody at all but me; her old nurse died in the last wintertime, and of her people nobody knows. Have I money? Oh no. How should I? You see my legs are bare, and I have only this little pack — one shirt in it — and my little viol. But I have wanted for nothing. Nothing, nothing. Yes, I have come on foot all over the plains and the mountains. What of that? It has only been cold the last few months, and the people have always been good. I have played for them at feasts, at fairs, at bridals, at vintage dances, anywhere, always; and they have always given me a supper and a bed, and very often much more than that. Oh, I have not suffered at all — sometimes just a little, perhaps, from being tired, or out in the storms; and once some pifferali set on me, and beat me, and threw me into a ditch, because they thought I was in the way on their rounds; that is all the unkindness I have had. I have been only a fortnight in Florence, and the last three days I have made no money. I have been too weak to play, and I have slept in the grass in the Cascine meadows, and I think I have got a little fever perhaps. To-night I wandered out into the street, and did play a little. You know the rest I never shall find the donzella now. But — but — if I should die, will you let the poor little viol be buried with me? I should not like it to be burned as waste wood, though perhaps it is worth nothing more.”
So he spoke, the poor little Baptista, sitting on the mattress in the inner room in the Cantina, and looking at me with his great pathetic eyes under the auburn tangle of his locks — such a pretty, fragile, heavenly-looking little lad; one would have had him painted as that boy-martyr whose head being severed from his body sang on day and night the sweetest Aves ever afterwards. His whole face breathed music; we have many such faces amongst us. Very often they mean nothing; but his meant all that it uttered.
I seemed to know him so well. Had I not heard of Raffaellino scores of times from the mouth of his playmate, as she went with me along the Adda or Amo water? Had I not seen him with his little mandoline, and his bare feet, and his red sash, that first day of Carnival in Verona?
He did not know what the memory was that stirred in me; but it made him like my own son, as it were, to me, and as sacred. Besides, I loved the lad for staying neither for sense nor prudence, but setting forth to find his donzella in that innocent, foolish, childish faith and loyalty.
Now when I found Raffaellino in Calzaioli that night I was very little better off in the world than he; and the lad being very ill and altogether destitute, I had need to cast about me for some surer manner of maintenance, or let him drift away to the hospitals and the sepulchre. It seemed to me that the boy came in my way like a duty there was no means of escaping. My own faulty fashion of living had cost so much anguish to the child that had gone with me through all the fresh green Tuscan summer; and it seemed to me now that to do my best by her favourite playmate was the only sort of poor atonement that ever would lie within my reach.
So whilst Raffaello was stretched on the sacking in an attic amongst the roofs in the Street of the Stocking-weavers, I took thought as to a means of livelihood.
Now I had absolutely nothing.
The little I had saved had gone for that bit of land in the Valdigrève. I could always gain my day’s bread and lodging by a turn amongst the vines, or a few hours in the modelling shops, or by taking a fiddler’s place in the little opera houses, or by showing the trick of the clay to some young sculptor; for I have a sort of desultory universal talent, which is in a manner the most general curse of my countrymen — an over fertility of invention that is very apt to end in absolute sterility of achievement.
Little Toccò had gone as a pupil and ‘prentice to Orfio Orlanduccio, and was thought of good promise in the art, so that I had no soul in the world to work for; and where is the Italian who will work for mere work’s sake?
It is not possible to us. Give us an end and we will labour as well as other men; but without some impetus we will not serve that grim and ghostly Northern Thor whose hammer has struck down all the wild roses and tossing hawthorns and sweet skylarks of the world’s soft smiling, useless, leisurely, heaven-sent joys.
If we are happy, let us lie in the sun and dream of it; and if we are unhappy, what else better can we do. For Italians do not kill themselves; why, I cannot say; perhaps from fear of Dante’s Circles, or perhaps from sheer love of the mere plant-like sense of living: why, I will not say, but they do not.
The fifth night after I had found him, I went up the dreary Sdrucciolò by the Pitti to get a little fruit for him, and I had nearly resolved to go to Carrara as soon as he should prove able to be moved. The mountain air might do him good, and there was always work enough for any one who knew how to chip marble; and the life there, where all the sculptors’ dreams take shape, amidst the white desolation of the quarries, with the keen mountain solitudes all around, was most unlike (and therefore least painful to me of any) the life that I had led with my gay little Arte.
I was known there. It had even happened now and then that, finding some artist struggling with a fine fancy that he could not to his liking embody in the clay, I had had the luck, by a fitful night’s work, to call up the Andromeda or the Spartacus that escaped him, and the figure has gone forth — mine, if I had cared to claim it — and now and then, I have even heard, has made the other man’s fortune. What did it matter? it was only an accident, a knack, a turn of the hand, more or less happy, that chanced to put fire into a soulless model. What matter who claimed the statue in its city market-place? When we love Art for Art’s sake, we are pained by a line awry, a note discordant, a colour misplaced; but we are not pained by a name being lettered in gold instead of our own?
To Carrara, therefore, I thought I would go. But as fate would have it, as I thus resolved, I ran against, in Sdrucciolò, a little plump, oily Piedmontese, by name Luca Pestrò, who had rolled a good deal of gold together, as the men of Piedmont have a knack of doing, and was the director of the Goldoni Theatre in this city and of another larger one in Turin.
I knew Pestrò very well, he having been a gay, jovial soul before he had taken to money-making, and we had had some merry days together years and years before in France, where he was travelling with a choice company of marionettes, whose joints were as stiff and as dire a trouble to him as the tempers of any living troops of actors.
Pestrò flew across the narrow passage to me, and cast his arms about me, with tears in his eyes and his dress all disordered. I had not met with him for at least five years.
“Pascarèl! oh, Pascarèl! What ever good angel has dropped you heie?” he cried, in hot haste, still holding me by both arms, whilst the men and the mules pushed by us. “Do you know Ferraris is dying — struck speechless up at his villa only an hour ago — and he to play to-night to all the Princes, and I at such expense as never was; — and now all ruined unless indeed you would take the character yourself?”
I told him I had heard it as I came up the Sdrucciolò; people were heavy of heart for it; for Ferraris, though in the decline of his years, was the greatest player that the stage of Italy then numbered amongst its actors.
Well, in a word, he so besought me and wrought on me to take Ferraris’s place, that I, thinking of Raffaelino, at last assented.
The doors of the Goldoni opened at eight of the clock. But I needed little preparation; the costumes of Ferraris were about my measure, and for the part I knew it all well: in the old times, with the Zinzara and her people, we had played the “Don Marzio alla Bottega del Caffè” many and many a time in the little sea and mountain towns of the Riviera and the Basque country. A glance, and all the old eloquence came back to me. I heard, as though it had been yesterday, the sonorous roll of the Zinzara’s voice as she had first taught me the part by the light of a single candle, in her little attic, with her slender feet bare on the bare bricks, and a red japonica-flower thrust into her rough hair, and a great brown sausage hissing itself solemnly into readiness for supper over the charcoal stove, and through the broken lattice of the garret always the glimmer of the moonbeams and always the shimmer of the sea.
Poor woman! Was she deadì I wondered. It is strange how suddenly they flash into our lives, and how utterly they drift out of it, all these women!
