Earthwork Out Of Tuscany
M >>
Maurice Hewlett >> Earthwork Out Of Tuscany
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 | 9 |
10 |
11
Then came the August races.
Maso had brought his Isotta into the city to see the fun and she had
disappeared in the press just before the procession stayed by the Palazzo
and the trumpets sounded for the first race. Maso shrugged his shoulders
and cursed his luck, but didn't budge. The girl must look after herself.
He was on the upper rim of the great fountain craning his neck over the
pack of people: then he got a dig under the ribs enough to take the breath
of an ox. It was the spout of old Marco's green umbrella. "Hey! silly
fool," spluttered the old liar, "dost want that loose-legged slut of thine
in trouble? I tell thee she's playing in a corner with Carlo Formaggia.
Already he's pinched her cheek twice, and who knows what the end may be?
Mud-coloured ass, wilt thou let thy child slip to the devil while thou
standest gaping at a horse-race?" And this before all the neighbours! What
to say to such a man? Maso babbled with rage; but he had to go, for Carlo
Formaggia was well known. He had ruined more girls than enough; he was in
league with vile houses, gambling dens, thieves' hells; Captain of an
infamous secret society; the police were only waiting for a pretext to get
him shipped off to the hulks. He must go of course. No thanks to Marco
though: in fact he hated him worse than ever, partly because he had drawn
all eyes and a fair share of sniggering and tongues thrust in the cheek
upon his account; but most because he knew he had been trapped into losing
a good place. For, as he mounted the narrow stair cut between old houses
steep as rocks, he turned and saw Zoppa placidly smoking his pipe in the
very spot he had held, squatted on the fountain-rim with his green
umbrella between his knees. He was beaming through his spectacles, in a
fatherly, indulgent sort of way, upon the shouting people; following the
race too, like one who had paid for his box. Maso, when he heard the
shatter of hoofs and the wild roar from thousands of throats down below
him in the Campo, cursed old Zoppa with a grey face, and went muttering
round the blinding sides of the Duomo to find his daughter. And when he
did find her she was eating chestnuts at the open door of her aunt's shop
in the Via Ghibellina! Bacchus! she was sick of all those folk in their
_festa_ clothes, was all the explanation she would give him from
between fine white teeth all clogged with chestnut-meal. If he chose to
dress his daughter like a beggar's brat he had better not take her to the
races. Maso's feeling of relief at finding her alone and looking her usual
sulky impassive self, gave way very rapidly to a sort of righteous wrath
against his triumphant enemy. So, by foul slanders of honest God-fearing
people that old Jew had not scrupled to rob him of his place! His place
and his day's fun. By Heaven, he was tricked, duped by a scaly-eyed Jew
pedlar, a vile old dog tottering down to Hell with lies in his beard.
Well! he would put this morning's work down to his score; some day there
would be a choice little reckoning for Ser Marco.
Maso, green with impotent fury, poured out his flood of gutturals upon his
_insouciante_ child. General reproaches were always a failure in
cases of this sort. Some were sure to be wild guess-work and to drown the
real ones: you could never tell when you had hit the mark. Had she not--
she fourteen, too!--slid astride down the railing into the Campo and been
caught up in the arms of Carlo Formaggia waiting and laughing at the
bottom? Had she not lain a whole minute in his arms, panting? And then,
_Dio mio_, with the sweat still on her forehead, she had slipped off
to San Domenico and confessed to coughing at mass the Sunday before! Pest!
he would give her the strap over her shoulders when he got her home. The
long, brown girl leaned against the lintel kicking one heel idly against
the other. She was smiling at him, smiling with her lazy, languid eyes and
with her glistening teeth. Every now and then she inspected a chestnut
critically--like an amateur!--and slipped it between her jaws. They split
it like a banana. And then she squeezed the half skins and dropped the
flour down her throat. She had a long sinewy throat, glossy as velvet,
with its silvery lights and dusky brown shadows. Maso stood helpless
before her as she drank down her flour; he chattered like a little
passionate ape. At last he lifted up both hands in a sudden frenzy of
despair and went away.
Of course the races were over. The sober streets swarmed with people in
their holiday clothes. They all seemed laughing and smoking, and talking
fluently of something ridiculous. Maso, egoist, knew it must be about him--
or his daughter. Arms and heads went like mill-sails or tall trees in a
gale of wind. Then, with a rattle and the sudden sliding of four hoofs on
the flags, a cart would be in the thick of them, and the people scoured to
the curb, still laughing, or spitting between the spasms of the
interrupted jest. The boys tried to peep under the sagging hats of the
girls, and the girls turned pettish shoulders to them and, as they turned,
you caught the glint of fun in their great roes' eyes and saw the lips
part before the quick breath. The streets were mere gullies, clefts hewn
in zig-zag between grey houses that tottered up and up, and lay over them
like cliffs. An ancient church with bleached stone saints under flowery
canopies, a guttering candle before a tinsel shrine, and the hoarse babel
of the streets--whips that cracked and spluttered like squibs, a swarming
coloured stream of men and maids, once the twang of a chance mandoline.
Siena was feasting, and the waiters furtively swept their foreheads with
their coat-sleeves as they ran in and out of the _trattorie_.
In the _trattoria_ of the _Aquila Rossa_ old Marco Zoppa smoked
his pipe and talked, between the spurts of smoke, to his neighbours. Fate
brought him face to face with two enemies at once. Maso was battling his
way up the street, white and strained as a grave-cloth; and Carlo
Formaggia, the approved bravo--oiled and jaunty, with his brown felt
fantastically rolled and stuck over one ear, with a long cigar which he
alternately gnawed and sucked, Carlo the broad-chested, of the seared,
evil face, came down with the stream on the arms of two other gilded
youths. They met before the cafe, the man of intolerable wrongs and the
Pilia-Borsa of Siena. Maso scowled till his thick eyebrows cut his face
horizontally in two. He stood ostentatiously still, muttering with his
lips as the trio went lightly by. Then he made to go on. But old Marco
Zoppa stood up and made a speech. He had the wooden stem of his pipe
'twixt finger and thumb, and used it like a conductor's _baton_ to
emphasise his points. As his voice shrilled and quavered, Carlo Formaggia
caught his own name and turned back to listen, prick-eared. He stood out
of sight resting one foot on a doorstep, and leaned forward on to his leg.
He might have been dreaming of some night of love, but he held every word
as it dropped.
"Maso," Marco went on, "thou art but a thin fool. I know what I know; but
thou must needs stick dirt in thine ears and pass me by. Well, let be, let
be; the end will come soon enough--this night even. And I have warned
thee."
"Spawn of a pig, wilt never have done irking me? See, I scratch thee off
me!" Maso drove home his gibe with a dramatic performance. The
_trattoria_ was agape. Every table held its three craning necks and
six piercing, twinkling eyes atop.
"I grow old, my Maso, I grow very old, and thy monkey's tricks are nought.
'Tis thy slip of a girl and thy poor twisted Mariola I would save in spite
of thee. Listen then once more, and for the last time. Ser Carlo intends
to snare thy pigeon. He has limed his twigs; the bird flutters free for
this noon, but by to-night she will be caged. For me, I have done my
possible--but I am old. Life tingles fiercer in the blood of a young man.
Therefore beware. Wilt thou see that brawny assassin toying with thy girl;
leaning over her where she crouches, poisoning her with fat words? That's
how the snake licks the turtle before he gulps her--'tis to make her
sleek, look you! Well, go thy way, dolt and blunderhead. For me--old as I
am--I will shoot a last bolt for Mariola. This very night after supper I
go to the Sbirro: and thy thanks will be a rounder oath and some more
knave's tricks with my baskets."
"No thanks are owing, Marco Zoppa"; Maso was ashy with shame and rage at
the old man's placid benevolence. "Marco Zoppa, thou hast been my enemy
ever, and I have borne it"--the Cafe roared with laughter; a fat old
Capuchin nearly had a fit. Maso looked round with fright in his eyes. He
went on, "Now thou hast gone too far--insulting me grossly before these
citizens. Thou hast brought thine end upon thyself." He ran away fighting
through the delighted crowd. Everybody who could get at him slapped him on
the back. A big carter stove his hat in.
Old Marco shrugged his patient shoulders and sat down to read the
_Secolo_. He balanced his silver-rimmed spectacles on his nose and
held the journal at arm's length with hand a thought more shaky, perhaps,
than usual. Presently he looked up: "Mother of God! what a white-faced
rogue it is! Eh, Giuseppe?" "By Mars, if looks could stab, thou hadst been
riddled by the knife before this," said his friend. Marco shrugged and
went on reading--he was an old man.
But when Carlo Formaggia had heard the debate, he turned a shade shinier,
and his eyes harder and brighter. As he motioned his friends off with a
look, he swallowed something hard in his throat. Then he turned down the
first side street, doubled round to the right, turned to the left down a
kind of black sewer-trap and let himself into a wine-shop, where he sat
down, breathing short. He drank brandy--but he drank like a machine. The
muscles of his jaw were working spasmodically as he sat rigid on a tub,
leaning against the counter. And he fingered something at his belt. His
eyes were in a cold stare: he saw nothing and didn't move. But he went on
drinking brandy till late in the afternoon, till the _Hail Mary_
bells began to sound a tinkling chorus through the still air.
And Maso Cecci, he too, rushed away white and chattering. Rage had past
definition with him, he saw things red, and they choked him. The air felt
thick to him, full of flies. He brushed his hands before his face, struck
out vaguely, and swore as the dazzling black things settled round him
again in a swarm. Irritated, maddened as he was, he still heard the
derisive yells of the crowd at the _birreria_ and saw Marco's calm
wise old face smiling urbanely behind silver spectacles. _Cristo
amore!_ how he loathed that old man. Siena could never hold the pair of
them: there must be an end--there _should_ be an end. His heart gave
a jerk under his vest as he thought of it. An end!--an end of his eternal
fretting jealousy in the Campo, his continued sense of being worsted, of
galling inferiority to that methodical old villain. An end of his worries
about Isotta; an end--ah! but there would be something rarer than that? To
a man like Maso, a small man, of immoderate self-esteem, and that self-
esteem always on the smart, there is another satisfaction--that of seeing
the better man totter and slip forward to his knees. This insufferable old
Marco who was always so right, with his slow methods and accursed
accuracy--to see him stumble and drop! That was what made Maso's heart
flutter and thud against his skin. And then, as he thought of it, it
seemed inevitable. It could be done in a minute, _via!_ The old man
was alone--it would be dusk--he would peer forward through the gloom to
open the door and--_Madre di Dio!_--and then! Maso was sweating; the
back of his palate itched intolerably; something hot and sticky clogged
his mouth and glued his tongue against the roof of it. His knees shook so
that he could scarcely walk. Some little boys stood to stare at him as he
lurched by, and laughed stealthily to see the hated Maso tipsy. But Maso
was unconscious of all this: he staggered on homewards with scorching
eyes....
Old Marco lived down beyond the Railway Station--a room in a crazy block
of buildings that had been run up for the needs of the factory hands. It
was like a great smooth cliff, this block, and was washed over a raw pink,
but it glowed in the setting sun that evening, like the city herself and
all the hills, the colour of bright blood. As Maso neared its blind face,
stepping warily with outstretched neck like some obscene bird, and with
one hand under his coat--the sun was going down into a purple bank of
cloud. He gilded the edges as he sank and shot broad rays of crimson light
up into the green sky. Here and there a star twinkled faint; the city lay
over him like a cloudy, silent company of rocks; the tower of the Palazzo
ran up into the pallor of the sky, a shaking spear.
There was but one glimmer of light in the whole ghostly wall of tenements
and that, Maso knew, was Marco Zoppa's. Every soul else was crowded in the
Campo waiting for the fireworks. And, as he thought, he heard a dull thud
behind him, and turned; and there, far up, a single shaft of flame shot
aloft, and stayed, and burst into a fan of lights; and a puff told him it
was the first rocket. "_Ecco! Madre di Dio_, a sign! a sign! So will
_I_ go up; and so shall my enemy come down." And Maso crept up the
stairway breathing thick and short....
With a hand still under his cloak he rapped his knuckles on the door. No
answer. An echo, only, fluttered and grew faint down the stone steps. He
hoisted his cloak from the shoulder and swung his right arm free. Then he
knocked again. Nothing. No sign. Heavy silence; only a distant murmur of
voices, muffled and infinitely far, from the Campo on the hill.
"The game has flown! Or the old dog sleeps." Maso sighed, for he wanted to
see him drop gurgling to his knees. Still, it made his affair easier. He
gave one fierce hoist to his cloak, twitched his right arm once or twice,
and gently turned the handle. Then he stepped lightly and daintily into
the room.
A candle guttered on a little table in the corner, and the Crucified
showed white upon the black cross above. Marco Zoppa lay on his bed with
his throat cut from ear to ear. The cut was so resolute that his head
stuck out at an angle from his body--almost a right angle; and in some
struggle he had got his nostril sliced. That gave him an odd,
_mesquin_ expression, lying there with his mouth open and his yawning
nostril, as if he wanted to sneeze. The room smelt stale and sour; the
thick air gathered in a misty halo round the candle, and a fat shroud of
tallow drooped over the edges of the candlestick.
Maso dropped his long, clean knife; dropped on to his knees and wailed
like a chained dog. He could not take his eyes from the horrible black pit
between the dead man's chin and trunk. Out of that pit a thin scarlet
stream was still slipping lazily, and crawling down the white coverlet to
the floor. Maso's wailing attracted a dog near by. He too set off howling
from behind his door: and then another, and another. There was a chorus of
howls, long-drawn, pitiful, desolate; and Maso, the only man in that
woeful company, howled like any dog of the pack.
Gradually his moaning sank and then stopped with a dry sob. He crawled on
his knees a little nearer to the bed and eyed fearfully a patch of blood
on the counterpane. Just God! what was that patch? A faint circle smeared
with the finger, and through the midst of it a ragged dart. Carlo
Formaggia had been there! He knew that mark! And then the whole truth
blazed before him like a sheet of fire. He fell forward on his face. The
thin thread of scarlet from Marco Zoppa's gaping throat crawled drop by
drop on to his shoulder.
Carlo Formaggia had limed his bird.
XII
WITH THE BROWN BEAR
The secret of happy travelling is contrast. Suffer, that you may drowse
thereafter: grill, that you may have a heat on you worth assuagement.
Wherefore, to the Italian wanderer, it will be worth while to endure the
fierceness of the Lombard plain, even the gilded modernisms of Milan
(blistering though they may be under the stroke of the naked sun) and the
dusty, painful traverse of the Apennines, to drop down at last into the
broad green peace of the Val D'Arno. Take, however, the first halting-
place you can. You will find yourself in a hollow of the hills, helping
the brown bear of Pistoja keep the Northern gates of Tuscany. It is not
unlikely that the Apennine may "walk abroad with the storm," or hide his
moss-brown slopes in great sheets of mist. This, while it means a fine
sight, means also rain for Pistoja. A quiet rain will accordingly fall
upon the little city, gently but persistently. Only in the gleams may you
guess that you have the Tuscan sky over you and the smiling Tuscan Art
round about. But the ways of the Pistolesi will confirm the feeble knees;
such at least was my case.
For the Pistolesi were there beside foul weather, and splashed about under
green umbrellas with prodigious jokes to cut at each other's expense, of a
sort we reserve for Spring or early June. For them, with a vintage none
too good to be garnered, it might have been the finest weather in the
world: but I am bound to add my belief that they would have laughed were
it the worst. With no money, no weather, and taxes intolerable, Pistoja
laughed and looked handsome. Was not Boccaccio a Pistolese? I was reminded
of his book at every turn of the road: life is a wanton story there, or,
say, a Masque of Green Things, enacted by a splendid fairy rout. They were
still the well-favoured race Dino Compagni described them far back in the
fourteenth century--"formati di bella statura oltre a' Toscani," he says.
The words hold good of their grandsons--the men leaner and longer, hardier
and keener than you find them in Lucca or Siena; and the women carry their
heads high, and when they smile at you (as they will) you think the sun
must be shining. They are mountaineers, a strong race. At _pallone_
one day, I saw muscles "all a-ripple down the back," arms and shoulders,
which would have intoxicated the great old "amatore del persona" himself.
For their vivacity, it is racial; I think all Tuscans, more or less,
retain the buoyant spirits, the alertness as of birds, which crowned Italy
with Florence instead of Rome or Milan. Tuscan Art is a proof of that, and
Tuscan Art can be studied at its roots in Pistoja: you see there the naked
thing itself with none of the wealth of Florence to make the head swim. If
Florence had stopped short at the death of Giuliano de' Medici, you might
say Pistoja was Florence seen through the diminishing-glass. Is not that
ribbed dome, with its purple mass domineering over the huddled roofs,
Brunelleschi's? It is a faithful copy of Vasari's hatching; but no matter.
So with the Baptistery, the towers, the grim old corniced palaces, the
_sdruccioli_ and gloomy clefts which serve for streets. But you would
be wrong. Pisa is the real parent of Pistoja, as indeed she is of
Florence-Dante's Florence. Pisa's magnificent building repeats to itself
here: Gothic with a touch of Latin sanity, a touch of the genuine Paganism
which loves the daedal earth and cannot bring itself to be out of touch
with it. San Giovanni _fuoricivitas_, what a rock-hewn church it is!
A rigid oblong, dark as the twilight, running with the street without
belfry or window or facade. Three tiers of shallow arcades on spiral
columns, never a window to be seen, and the whole of solemn black marble
narrowly striped with white. Is there such a beast as a black tiger--a
tiger where the tawny and black change places? San Giovanni is modelled
after that fashion. It is very old--twelfth century at latest--very shabby
and weather-beaten, dusty and deserted. But it will outlive Pistoja; and
that is probably what Pistoja desired.
This black and white, which is so reminiscent of early Florence, is
carried out with more fidelity to the model in the Piazza. The octagonal
Baptistery is, no doubt, a copy of Dante's beloved church; but it is much
better placed, does not "shun to be admired" like its beautiful yellowed
sister. The Duomo is of Pisa again, and has a tower, half belfry, half
fortress, which once the Podesta seized and held while the plucky little
town endured a siege. The Brown Bear stood out long against the Lily. But
Lorenzo showed his teeth: and the Wolf prevailed at last. Sculpture apart,
the resemblance to Florence stops here. None of her Cinque-cento bravery
and little of her earlier and finer Renaissance came this way. But one
thing came; one clean breath from "that solemn fifteenth century" did blow
to this verge of Tuscan soil, a breath from Luca della Robbia and his men.
They may flower more exuberantly in Florence, those broad, blue-eyed
platters of theirs; nowhere is their purpose more explicit, their charm
more exquisitely appreciable than here. There is a chance of considering
the art on its own merits; better, you can see it more truly as it was at
home, since Florence has caught some little of Haussmannism and is not as
Luca left it. So here, perhaps best of all, you may try to plumb the
depths of the Della Robbia soul,--through its purity and limpid candour,
through its shining, sweetly wholesome homeliness, down to the crystal
sincerity burning recessed in the shrine. It is the fashion to say of
Angelico da Fiesole that his was a naivete which amounted to genius: a
thin phrase, which may nevertheless pass to qualify the inspired
miniaturist. The religiosity of the Della Robbia, while no less naive, is
really far other. It is not Gothic at all, nor ascetic, nor mystic. It
would be Latin, were it not blithe enough to be Greek. It speaks of what
is and must be, and is well content; not of what should, or might be, if
one could but tear off this crust. It seems probable that it speaks as
pure a Paganism--just that very Paganism which Pisan building represents--
as has been seen since the workmen of Tanagra fashioned their little clay
familiars for the tombs, slim Greek girls in their reedy habit as they
lived, or chattering matrons like those you read of in Theocritus. Much
fine phrasing has been spent upon the effort to analyse the aesthetics of
Delia Robbia ware. Its inexhaustible charm is unquestionable; but just
where does it catch one's breath? Not altogether in the clean colouring,
like nothing so much as that of a cool, glazed dairy at home,--"milky-
blue," "cream-white," "butter-yellow," "parsley-green," all the dairy
names come pat to pen--; not necessarily in the sheer, April loveliness of
form and expression, though that would count for much; nor, I believe, as
Mr. Pater would have us acknowledge, in the evanescent delicacy of each
motive and sentiment,--the arresting of a single sigh, a single wave of
desire, a single stave of the Magnificat. All this is true, and true only
of Luca, and yet the whole charm is not there. Rather, I think, you will
find it in the fusing of humble material--the age-old clay of the potter
(of the Master-Potter, for that matter)--and fine art, whereby the wayside
shrine is linked to the high altar, and _contadino_ and Vicar-
Apostolic can hail a common ideal. Every lane, every cottage, has its
Madonna-shrine here; lumped in clay or daubed in raw colour, nothing can
obliterate the sweet sentiment of these poor weeds of art, these tawdry
little appeals to the better part of us. Madonna cries with a bared red
heart; she supports a white Christ; suave she stoops to enfold a legion of
children in her mantle. She is as Tuscan as the brownest of them; but a
Tuscan of the rarest mould, they would have you to see, of a cleanliness
quite unapproachable, of a benignity wholly divine. One learns the secret
of devotional art best of all in such ephemeral sanctuaries. And since
Fine Art is the flower of these shabby roots, Italy only, where
Cincinnatus worked in his garden, can furnish so wonderful a harmony of
opposites. Surely it is the most democratic country in Europe. I saw a
Colonel the other day, in Bologna, carrying a newspaper parcel. He was in
full uniform. It was the secret of Saint Francis that he knew how to
bridge the gulf on either side of which we, prisoners in feudal holds,
have cried to each other in vain. It was the secret of the Delia Robbia
too. The god shall sink that we may rise to meet him in the way. Why not?
Here in Pistoja are some precious pieces--a _Visitation_ in San
Giovanni, a pearly _Madonna Incoronata_ on the big door of San
Giacopo, concerning which it would be difficult to account to one's self
for the added zest given by the mantle of fine dust which has settled down
on the pale folds of the drapery and outlined the square blue panels of
the background. After all, is it not one more touch of the hedgerow, a
symbol of the hedgerow-faith not quite dead in the byeways of Italy?
But I know I shall never convey the spontaneity with which Fra Paolino's
_Visitation_ strikes quick for the heart. The thing is so momentary,
a mere quiver of emotion passing from one woman to another. The pair of
them have looked in to the deeps. Then the older stumbles forward to her
knees, and the girl stoops down to raise her. One guesses the rest. They
will be sobbing together in a minute, the girl's face buried in the
other's shoulder. All you are to see is just the wistfulness,--"My dear!
my dear!" And then the Virgin, full of Grace, but a shy girl in her teens
for all that, hides her hot cheeks and cries her little wild heart to
quietness. Some of it is in Albertinelli's fine picture, but not all. All
of it--and here's the point--is to be seen in the street among these
clear-eyed Tuscan women, just as Fra Paolino (himself of Pistoja) saw it
before our time, and then fixed it for ever in blue and white.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 | 9 |
10 |
11