Earthwork Out Of Tuscany

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This lasted a few minutes only: even Simonetta, with all her maiden
tremors still feverishly acute, hardly noticed the flight of time; she was
so hot with the feeling of her wrongs, the slight upon her victorious
fairness. Did she not _know_ how fair she was? She was getting very
angry; she had been made a fool of. All Florence would come and gape at
the picture and mock her in the streets with bad names and coarse gestures
as she rode by. She looked at Sandro. Santa Maria! how hot he was! His
hair was drooping over his eyes! He tossed it back every second! And his
mouth was open, one could see his tongue working! Why had she not noticed
that great mouth before? 'Twas the biggest in all Florence. O! why had he
come? She was frightened, remorseful, a child again, with a trembling
pathetic mouth and shrinking limbs. And then her heart began to beat under
her slim fingers. She pressed them down into her flesh to stay those great
masterful throbs. A tear gathered in her eye; larger and larger it grew,
and then fell. A shining drop rested on the round of her cheek and rolled
slowly down her chin to her protecting hand, and lay there half hidden,
shining like a rain-drop between two curving petals of a rose.

It was just at that moment the painter looked up from his work and shook
his bush of hair back. Something in his sketch had displeased him; he
looked up frowning, with a brush between his teeth. When he saw the tear-
stained, distressful, beautiful face it had a strange effect upon him. He
dropped nerveless, like a wounded man, to his knees, and covered his eyes
with his hands. "Ah Madonna! for the pity of heaven forgive me! forgive
me! I have sinned, I have done thee fearful wrong; I, who still dare to
love thee." He uncovered his face and looked up radiant: his own words had
inspired him, "Yes," he went on, with a steadfast smile, "I, Sandro, the
painter, the poor devil of a painter, have seen thee and I dare to love!"
His triumph was short-lived. Simonetta had grown deadly white, her eyes
burned, she had forgotten herself. She was tall and slender as a lily, and
she rose, shaking, to her height.

"Thou presumest strangely," she said, in a slow still voice, "Go! Go in
peace!"

She was conqueror. In her calm scorn she was like a young immortal, some
cold victorious Cynthia whose chastity had been flouted. Sandro was pale
too: he said nothing and did not look at her again. She stood quivering
with excitement, watching him with the same intent alertness as he rolled
up his paper and crammed his brushes and pencils into the breast of his
jacket. She watched him still as he backed out of the room and disappeared
through the curtains of the archway. She listened to his footsteps along
the corridor, down the stair. She was alone in the silence of the sunny
room. Her first thought was for her cloak; she snatched it up and veiled
herself shivering as she looked fearfully round the walls. And then she
flung herself on the piled cushions before the window and sobbed
piteously, like an abandoned child.

The sun slanted in between the golden leaves and tendrils and played in
the tangle of her hair....

III

At ten o'clock on the morning of April the twenty-sixth, a great bell
began to toll: two beats heavy and slow, and then silence, while the air
echoed the reverberation, moaning. Sandro, in shirt and breeches, with
bare feet spread broad, was at work in his garret on the old bridge. He
stayed his hand as the strong tone struck, bent his head and said a
prayer: "Miserere ei, Domine; requiem eternam dona, Domine"; the words
came out of due order as if he was very conscious of their import. Then he
went on. And the great bell went on; two beats together, and then silence.
It seemed to gather solemnity and a heavier message as he painted. Through
the open window a keen draught of air blew in with dust and a scrap of
shaving from the Lung' Arno down below; it circled round his workshop,
fluttering the sketches and rags pinned to the walls. He looked out on a
bleak landscape--San Miniato in heavy shade, and the white houses by the
river staring like dead faces. A strong breeze was abroad; it whipped the
brown water and raised little curling billows, ragged and white at the
edges, and tossed about snaps of surf. It was cold. Sandro shivered as he
shut to his casement; and the stiffening gale rattled at it fitfully. Once
again it thrust it open, bringing wild work among the litter in the room.
He made fast with the rain driving In his face. And above the howling of
the squall he heard the sound of the great bell, steady and unmoved as if
too full of its message to be put aside. Yet it was coming to him athwart
the wind.

Sandro stood at his casement and looked at the weather-beating rain and
yeasty water. He counted, rather nervously, the pulses between each pair
of the bell's deep tones. He was impressionable to circumstances, and the
coincidence of storm and passing-bell awed him.... "Either the God of
Nature suffers or the fabric of the world is breaking";--he remembered a
scrap of talk wafted towards him (as he stood in attendance) from some
humanist at Lorenzo's table only yesterday, above the light laughter and
snatches of song. That breakfast party at the Camaldoli yesterday! What a
contrast--the even spring weather with the sun in a cloudless sky, and now
this icy dead morning with its battle of wind and bell, fighting, he
thought,--over the failing breath of some strong man. Man! God, more like.
"The God of Nature suffers," he murmured as he turned to his work....

Simonetta had not been there yesterday. He had not seen her, indeed, since
that nameless day when she had first transported him with the radiance of
her bare beauty and then struck him down with a level gaze from steel-cold
eyes. And he had deserved it, he had--she had said--"presumed strangely."
Three more words only had she uttered and he had slunk out from her
presence like a dog. What a Goddess! Venus Urania! So she, too, might have
ravished a worshipper as he prayed, and, after, slain him for a careless
word. Cruel? No, but a Goddess. Beauty had no laws; she was above them,
Agnolo himself had said it, from Plato.... Holy Michael! What a blast!
Black and desperate weather.... "Either the God of Nature suffers."... God
shield all Christian souls on such a day!....

One came and told him Simonetta Vespucci was dead. Some fever had torn at
her and raced through all her limbs, licking up her life as it passed. No
one had known of it--it was so swift! But there had just been time to
fetch a priest; Fra Matteo, they said, from the Carmine, had shrived her
(it was a bootless task, God knew, for the child had babbled so, her wits
wandered, look you), and then he had performed the last office. One had
fled to tell the Medici. Giuliano was wild with grief; 'twas as if
_he_ had killed her instead of the Spring-ague--but then, people said
he loved her well! And our Lorenzo had bid them swing the great bell of
the Duomo--Sandro had heard it perhaps?--and there was to be a public
procession, and a Requiem sung at Santa Croce before they took her back to
Genoa to lie with her fathers. Eh! Bacchus! She was fair and Giuliano had
loved her well. It was natural enough then. So the gossip ran out to tell
his news to more attentive ears, and Sandro stood in his place, intoning
softly "Te Deum Laudamus."

He understood it all. There had been a dark and awful strife--earth
shuddering as the black shadow of death swept by. Through tears now the
sun beamed broad over the gentle city where she lay lapped in her mossy
hills. "Lux eterna lucet ei," he said with a steady smile; "atque
lucebit," he added after a pause. He had been painting that day an
agonising Christ, red and languid, crowned with thorns. Some of his own
torment seems to have entered it, for, looking at it now, we see, first of
all, wild eyeballs staring with the mad earnestness, the purposeless
intensity of one seized or "possessed." He put the panel away and looked
about for something else, the sketch he had made of Simonetta on that last
day. When he had found it, he rolled it straight and set it on his easel.
It was not the first charcoal study he had made from life, but a brush
drawing on dark paper, done in sepia-wash and the lights in white lead. He
stood looking into it with his hands clasped. About half a braccia high,
faint and shadowy in the pale tint he had used, he saw her there victim
rather than Goddess. Standing timidly and wistfully, shrinking rather,
veiling herself, maiden-like, with her hands and hair, with lips trembling
and dewy eyes, she seemed to him now an immortal who must needs suffer for
some great end; live and suffer and die; live again, and suffer and die.
It was a doom perpetual like Demeter's, to bear, to nurture, to lose and
to find her Persephone. She had stood there immaculate and apprehensive, a
wistful victim. Three days before he had seen her thus; and now she was
dead. He would see her no more.

Ah, yes! Once more he would see her....

* * * * *

They carried dead Simonetta through the streets of Florence with her pale
face uncovered and a crown of myrtle in her hair. People thronging there
held their breath, or wept to see such still loveliness; and her poor
parted lips wore a patient little smile, and her eyelids were pale violet
and lay heavy to her cheek. White, like a bride, with a nosegay of orange-
blossom and syringa at her throat, she lay there on her bed with lightly
folded hands and the strange aloofness and preoccupation all the dead
have. Only her hair burned about her like a molten copper; and the wreath
of myrtle leaves ran forward to her brows and leapt beyond them into a
tongue.

The great procession swept forward; black brothers of Misericordia,
shrouded and awful, bore the bed or stalked before it with torches that
guttered and flared sootily in the dancing light of day. They held the
pick of Florence, those scowling shrouds--Giuliano and Lorenzo, Pazzi,
Tornabuoni, Soderini or Pulci; and behind, old Cattaneo, battered with
storms, walked heavily, swinging his long arms and looking into the day's
face as if he would try another fall with Death yet. Priests and acolytes,
tapers, banners, vestments and a great silver Crucifix, they drifted by,
chanting the dirge for Simonetta; and she, as if for a sacrifice, lifted
up on her silken bed, lay couched like a white flower edged colour of
flame....

... Santa Croce, the great church, stretched forward beyond her into the
distances of grey mist and cold spaces of light. Its bare vastness was
damp like a vault. And she lay in the midst listless, heavy-lidded, apart,
with the half-smile, as it seemed, of some secret mirth. Round her the
great candles smoked and flickered, and mass was sung at the High Altar
for her soul's repose. Sandro stood alone facing the shining altar but
looking fixedly at Simonetta on her couch. He was white and dry--parched
lips and eyes that ached and smarted. Was this the end? Was it possible,
my God! that the transparent, unearthly thing lying there so prone and
pale was dead? Had such loveliness aught to do with life or death? Ah!
sweet lady, dear heart, how tired she was, how deadly tired! From where he
stood he could see with intolerable anguish the sombre rings round her
eyes and the violet shadows on the lids, her folded hands and the
straight, meek line to her feet. And her poor wan face with its wistful,
pitiful little smile was turned half aside on the delicate throat, as if
in a last appeal:--"Leave me now, O Florentines, to my rest, I have given
you all I had: ask no more. I was a young girl, a child; too young for
your eager strivings. You have killed me with your play; let me be now,
let me sleep!" Poor child! Poor child! Sandro was on his knees with his
face pressed against the pulpit and tears running through his fingers as
he prayed....

As he had seen her, so he painted. As at the beginning of life in a cold
world, passively meeting the long trouble of it, he painted her a rapt
Presence floating evenly to our earth. A grey, translucent sea laps
silently upon a little creek, and in the hush of a still dawn the myrtles
and sedges on the water's brim are quiet. It is a dream in half tones that
he gives us, grey and green and steely blue; and just that, and some
homely magic of his own, hint the commerce of another world with man's
discarded domain. Men and women are asleep, and as in an early walk you
may startle the hares at their play, or see the creatures of the darkness--
owls and night hawks and heavy moths--flit with fantastic purpose over
the familiar scene, so here it comes upon you suddenly that you have
surprised Nature's self at her mysteries; you are let into the secret; you
have caught the spirit of the April woodland as she glides over the
pasture to the copse. And that, indeed, was Sandro's fortune. He caught
her in just such a propitious hour. He saw the sweet wild thing, pure and
undefiled by touch of earth; caught her in that pregnant pause of time ere
she had lighted. Another moment and a buxom nymph of the grove would fold
her in a rosy mantle, coloured as the earliest wood-anemones are. She
would vanish, we know, into the daffodils or a bank of violets. And you
might tell her presence there, or in the rustle of the myrtles, or coo of
doves mating in the pines; you might feel her genius in the scent of the
earth or the kiss of the West wind; but you could only see her in mid-
April, and you should look for her over the sea. She always comes with the
first warmth of the year.

But daily, before he painted, Sandro knelt in a dark chapel in Santa
Croce, while a blue-chinned priest said mass for the repose of Simonetta's
soul.

VIII

THE BURDEN OF NEW TYRE

For a short time in her motley history, an old-clothesman, one Domenico--
he and his "Compagnia del Bruco," his _Company of the Worm_[1]--
reigned over Siena and gave to her people a taste for blood. It was
bloodshed on easy terms they had; for surely no small nation (except that
tiger-cat Perugia) has achieved so much massacre with so little fighting.
Massacre considered as one of the Fine Arts? No indeed; but massacre as a
_viaticum_, as "title clear to mansions in the skies"; for, with more
complacency than discrimination, these sated citizens chose to dedicate
their most fantastic blood-orgies by a _Missa de Spiritu Sancto_ in
the Cathedral Church. The old-clothesman, who by some strange oversight
died in his bed, was floated up on the incense of this devout service to
show his hands, and--marvel!--Saint Catherine, the "amorosa sposa" of
Heaven, reigned in his stead. Certainly, for unction spiced with ferocity,
for a madness which alternately kissed the Crucifix and trampled on it,
for mandragora and _fleurs de lys_, saints and succubi, churches and
lupanars--commend me to Siena the red.

[Footnote 1: This was one of the _Contrade_ into which the City was
divided, and of which each had its totem-sign.]

You are not to suppose that she has not paid for all this, the red Siena.
None of it is absolved; it is there floating vaguely in the atmosphere. It
chokes the gully-trap streets in August when the air is like a hot bath;
it wails round the corners on stormy nights and you hear it battling among
the towers overhead, buffeting the stained walls of criminal old palaces
and churches grown hoary in iniquity--so many half-embodied centuries of
deadly sin gnawing their spleens or shrieking their infamous carouse over
again. So at least I found it. Without baring myself to the charge of any
sneaking kindness for bloodshedding, I may own to the fascination of the
precipitous fortress-town huddled red and grey on its three red crags, and
of its suggestion of all the old crimes of Italy from Ezzelino's to
Borgia's, of all unhappy deaths from Pia de' Tolomei's to Vittoria's, the
White Devil of Italy. Its air seemed "blood-boltered" (like the shade of
the hunted Banquho), its stones, curiously slippery for such dry weather,
cried "Haro!" or "Out! Havoc!" And above it all shone a marble church,
white as a bride; while now and again on a favourable waft of wind came
the fragrant memory of Saint Catherine. It is the peak of earth most
charged with wayward emotions--pity and terror blent together into a
poignant beauty, a sorcery. Imagine yourself one of those old Popes--Linus
or Anaclete or Damasius--whose heads spike the clerestory of the Duomo,
you would look down upon a sea of pictures (by the best pavement-artists
in the world)--the _Massacre of the Innocents_ like a patch of dry
blood by the altar-steps, a winking Madonna in the Capella del Voto
thronged with worshippers, Hermes Trismegistus, a freaksome wizard, by the
West door, and a gilded array of the great world smiling and debonnair in
the sacristy. Not far off is Sodoma's lovely Catherine fainting under the
sweet dolour of her spousals. Are you for the White or the Black Mass?
Cybele or the Holy Ghost? Catherine or Hermes Trismegistus? Siena will
give you any and yet more cunning confections. It is very strange.

The approach to her three hills, if you are not flattened by the
intolerable pilgrimage from Florence, is fine. Hints of what is to come
greet you in the frittered shale of the grey country-side broken abruptly
by little threatening hill-towns. The scar juts out of the earth's crust,
rising sheer, and there on a fretted peak hovers a fortress-village, steep
red roofs, an ancient bell-tower or two with a lean barrel of a church
beyond; all the lines cut sharp to the clean sky; a bullock-cart creaking
up homewards; the shiver and dust of olives round the walls. You could
swear you caught the glint of a long gun over the machicolations; but it
is only a casement fired by the westering sun. Such are San Miniato,
Castel Fiorentino, Poggibonsi (where stayed Lorenzo's Nencia--his Nancy,
we should call her), San Gimignano and its Fina, a little girl-saint of
fifteen springs; such, too, is Siena when you get there, but redder, her
grey stones blushing for her sins. And the country blushes for her as you
draw near, for all the vineyards are dotted with burning willows in the
autumn--osier-bushes flaming at the heart. Let it be night when you
arrive--the dead vast and middle of a still night. Then suffer yourself to
be whirled through the inky streets, over the flags, from one hill to
another. It is deathly quiet: no soul stirs. The palaces rise on either
hand like the ghosts of old reproaches; a flickering lamp reveals a gully
as black as a grave, and shines on the edge of a lane which falls you know
not whither. You turn corners which should complicate a maze, you scrape
and clatter down steeps, you groan up mountain-sides. All in the dark,
mind. And the great white houses slide down upon you to the very flags you
are beating; you could near touch either wall with a hand. So you swerve
round a column, under a votive lamp, and have left the stars and their
violet bed. You are in a _cortile_: men say there is an inn here with
reasonable entertainment. If it is the _Aquila Nera_, it will serve.
There is no sound beyond the labouring of our horses' wind and of some
outland dog in the far distance baying for a moon. This is Siena at her
black magic.

I maintain that the impression you thus receive holds you. Next morning
there is a blare of sun. It will blind you at first, blister you. Rayed
out from plaster-walls which have been soaking in it for five centuries,
driven up in palpable waves of heat from the flags, lying like a lake of
white metal in the Piazza, however recklessly this truly royal sun may
beam, in Siena you will feel furtive and astare for sudden death.

There is nothing frank and open about Siena; none of your robust, red-
lunged, open-air Paganism. Theophile Gautier, Baudelaire, Poe--such
supersensitive plants should have known it, instead of the ingenuous M.
Bourget and the deliberate Mr. Henry James. M. Bourget looked at the
Sodomas and Mr. James admired the view: what a romance we should have had
from Gautier of illicit joys and their requital by a knife, what a strophe
from Baudelaire half-obscene, half-mournful, wholly melodious. But
Theophile Gautier tarried in Venice, and, as for M. Charles, the man of
pronounced tastes and keen nose, stuck in the main to Paris. Failing them
as guides, go you first to the Piazza del Campo where horses race in
August--all roads lead thither. Contraries again! A square? It is a cup. A
field? It is a Gabbatha: a place of burning pavements. Were red brick and
Gothic ever so superbly compounded before, to be so strong and yet so
lithe? That is the Palazzo Publico, the shrine of Aristotle's
_Politics_ and the _Miracles of the Virgin_. What is that long
spear which seems to shake as it glances skywards? It isn't a spear; it's
the Torre del Mangia--the loveliest tower in Tuscany, the _filia
pulchrior_ of a beautiful mother, the Torre della Vacca of Florence.
That tower rises from the bottom of the cup and shoots straight upwards,
nor stays till it has out-topped the proudest belfry on the hills about
it. But what a square this is! The backs of the houses (whose front doors
are high above on the hill-top) stand like bald cliffs on every side. You
cannot see any outlets: most of them are winding stairways cut between the
houses. The lounging, shabby men and girls seem handsomer and lazier than
you found them in Florence. They seem to have room to stretch their fine
limbs against these naked walls. Their maturity is almost tropical. The
girls wear flopping straw hats: wide, sorrowful eyes stare at you from the
shady recesses, and the rounding of their chins and beautiful proud necks
are marked by glossy lights. "Morbida e bianca," sang Lorenzo. I suppose
they think of little more than the market price of spring onions: but
then, why do their eyes speak like that? And what do they speak of? _Dio
mio_, I am an honest man! So was not Lorenzo; listen to him:--

"Two eyes hath she so roguish and demure
That, lit they on a rock, they'd make it feel;
How shall poor melting man meet such a lure?"

How indeed? Ah, Nenciozza mia!

"My little Nancy shows nor fleck nor pimple;
Pliant and firm, is she, a reed for grace:
In her smooth chin there's just one pretty dimple;
That rounds the perfect measure of her face:"

That dimple has been the destruction of many a heart:--

"So wise, withal, above us other simple
Plain folk--sure, Nature set her in this place
To bloom her tender whiteness all about us,
And break our hearts--and then bloom on without us."

Yes indeed, my Lorenzo. But enough! Let us take shelter in the Duomo.

Barred like a tiger, glistening snow and rose and gold, topped by a
flaunting angel, her door flanked by the lean Roman wolf; paved with
pictures, hemmed with the Popes from Peter to Pius, encrusted with marbles
and gemmy frescoes, it is a casket of delights this church, and the
quintessence of Siena--_molles Senae_ as Beccadelli, himself of this
Tyre, dubbed his native town. Voluptuous as she was, tigerish Siena was
more consistent than you would think. True, Saints Catherine and
Bernardine consort oddly with the old-clothesman saying mass with wet
hands, and Beccadelli the soft singer of abominations, just as the
"Madones aux longs regards" of the Primitives--pious creatures of slim
idle fingers and desirous eyes, pining in brocade and jewels--seem in a
different sphere (as indeed they are) from Pinturricchio's well-found
Popes and Princesses, and Sodoma's languishing boys or half-ripe
Catherines dying of love. Have I not said this was once a city of
pleasure? And whether the pleasure was a blood-feast or an _Agape_,
or a Platonic banquet where the flute-players and wine-cups and crowns
crushed out the high disquisition and philosophic undercurrent--it was all
one to soft Siena drowsing the days out on her hills. Her pleasures were
fierce, and beautiful as fierce. But the burden of Tyre is always the
same. And so the memories of a thousand ancient wrongs unpurged howl over
the red city, as once howled the ships of Tarshish.

IX

ILARIA, MARIOTA, BETTINA

(_Studies in Translation from Stone_)

Greatest of great ladies is Ilaria, _potens Luccae_, sleeping easily,
with chin firmly rounded to the vault, where she has slept for five
hundred years, and still a power in Lucca of the silver planes. It was a
white-hot September day I went to pay my devotions to her shrine. Lucca
drowsed in a haze, her bleached arcades of trees lifeless in the glare of
high noon; all the valley was winking, the very bells had no strength to
chime: and then I saw Ilaria lie in the deep shade waiting for the
judgment. Ilaria was a tall Tuscan--the girls of Lucca are out of the
common tall, and straight as larches--of fine birth and a life of
minstrels and gardens. Pompous processions, trapped horses, emblazonings,
were hers, and all refinements of High Masses and Cardinals. So she lived
once a life as stately-ordered as old dance-music, in the airy corridors
of a great marble palace, swept hourly by the thin, clear air of the
Lucchesan plain; and her lord, went out to war with Pisa or Pescia, or
even further afield, following Emperor or Pope to that Monteaperti which
made Arbia run colour of wine, or shrill Benevento, or Altopasdo which
cost the Florentines so dear.[1] But Ilaria stayed at home to trifle with
lap-dogs and jongleurs under the orange trees: heard boys make stammering
love, and laughed lightly at their Decameron travesty, being too proud to
be ashamed or angered; and sometimes (for she was not too proud but that
love should be of the party), she pulled a ring from one lithe finger, and
looked down while the lad kissed it for a holy relic and put it in his
bosom reverently,--pretending not to see. But, Ilaria, you knew well what
gave colour to the faint and worn old words about _Fior di spin giallo,
or O Dea fatale_, or

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