Last Tales (4 page)

“Oh, Your Eminence,” said the lady, “do not speak ill of the new fascinating art of narration, to which I am myself a devotee. Those live and sympathetic persons of the modern novels at times have meant more to me than my acquaintances of flesh and blood. They have indeed seemed to embrace me, and when, reading by candlelight, I have wetted my pillow with the tears of Ellenore, this sister of mine—frail and faultful as myself—seems to have been shedding my own.”

“Mistake me not,” said the Cardinal, “the literature of which we are speaking—the literature of individuals, if we may call it so—is a noble art, a great, earnest and ambitious human product. But it is a human product. The divine art is the story. In the begining was the story. At the end we shall be privileged to view, and review, it—and that is what is named the day of judgment.

“But you will remember,” he remarked, as in a parenthesis and with a smile, “that the human characters in the book do come forth on the sixth day only—by that time they were bound to come, for where the story is, the characters will gather!

“A story,” he went on as before, “has a hero to it, and you will see him clearly, luminous, and as upon a higher plane. Whatever he is in himself, the immortal story immortalizes its hero. Ali Baba, who in himself is nothing more than an honest woodcutter, is the adequate hero of a very great story. But by the time when the new literature shall reign supreme and you will have no more stories, you will have no more heroes. The world will have to do without them, sadly, until the hour when divine powers shall see fit, once more, to make a story for a hero to appear in.

“A story, Madame, has a heroine—a young woman who by the sole virtue of being so becomes the prize of the hero, and
the reward for his every exploit and every vicissitude. But by the time when you have no more stories, your young women will be the prize and reward of nobody and nothing. Indeed I doubt whether by then you will have any young women at all. For you will not, then, see the wood for trees. Or,” he added, as if in his own thoughts, “it will be, at the best, a poor time, a sad time, for a proud maiden, who will have no one to hold the stirrup to her, but will have to come down from her milk-white steed to trudge on a dusty road. And—alas!—a poor and sad lover of hers who will stand by to see his lady disrobed of her story or her epos and, all naked, turned into an individual.

“The story,” he took up the thread, “according to its essence and plan, moves and places these two young people, hero and heroine—together with their confidants and competitors, friends, foes and fools—and goes on. They need not distress themselves about material for the burnt offering, for the story will provide. It will separate the two, in life, by the currents of the Hellespont and unite them, in death, in a Veronese tomb. It provides for the hero, and his young bride will exchange an old copper lamp for a new one, and the Chaldeans shall make out three bands and fall upon his camels and carry them away, and he himself with his own hand shall cook, for an evening meal with his mistress, the falcon which was to have saved the life of her small dying son. The story will provide for the heroine, and at the moment when she lifts up her lamp to behold the beauty of her sleeping lover it makes her spill one drop of burning oil on his shoulder. The story does not slacken its speed to occupy itself with the mien or bearing of its characters, but goes on. It makes the one faithful partisan of its old mad hero cry out in awe: ‘Is this the promised end?’—goes on, and in a while calmly informs us: ‘This is the promised end.’ ”

“O God,” said the lady. “What you call the divine art to me seems a hard and cruel game, which maltreats and mocks its human beings.”

“Hard and cruel it may seem,” said the Cardinal, “yet we, who hold our high office as keepers and watchmen to the story, may tell you, verily, that to its human characters there is salvation in nothing else in the universe. If you tell them—you compassionate and accommodating human readers—that they may bring their distress and anguish before any other authority, you will be cruelly deceiving and mocking them. For within our whole universe the story only has authority to answer that cry of heart of its characters, that one cry of heart of each of them: ‘
Who am I?’ ”

There was a long silence.

The lady in black stood still, sunk in thought. At last, absent-mindedly, she lifted her mantilla from the chair and draped it round her shoulders and torso in most fashionable style. She took a step toward the man, and stopped. At this moment of parting she was pale.

“My friend,” she said, “dear teacher, adviser and consoler. I see and understand, by now, that you serve, and that you are a loyal and incorruptible servant. I feel that the Master whom you serve is very great.”

She closed her eyes, then after a second looked up again.

“Yet,” she said, “before I go away—and perhaps we two shall never meet again—I beg you to answer one more question of mine. Will you grant me this last favor?”

“Yes,” said he.

“Are you sure,” she asked, “that it is God whom you serve?”

The Cardinal looked up, met her eyes and smiled very gently.

“That,” he said, “that, Madame, is a risk which the artists and the priests of the world have to run.”

THE CLOAK

W
hen the great old master, the sculptor Leonidas Allori, whom they called the Lion of the Mountains, was arrested for rebellion and high treason and condemned to death, his pupils wept and stormed. For to them he had been spiritual father, archangel and immortal. They assembled in Pierino’s hostelry outside the town, in a studio or in an attic, where they could sob, two or three, in each other’s arms, or—like a big tree in a gale with its bare branches reaching upward—crowded in a cluster could shake ten pairs of clenched fists to the sky, in a cry for rescue of their beloved, and for revenge on tyranny.

Only one out of all of them in those days continued to live as if he had neither heard nor understood the terrible news. And that one was the disciple whom the master had loved
above all others, whom he had called son, as the young man had called him father. Angelo Santasilia’s schoolfellows took his silence to be the expression of infinite sorrow; they respected his pain and left him alone. But the real reason for Angelo’s absence of mind was that his heart was filled with passion for the master’s young wife, Lucrezia. The love and understanding between her and him just at this time had gone so far that she had promised him her total surrender.

In vindication of the faithless wife it must be pleaded that for a long time, and in deep agitation and alarm, she had resisted the divine and merciless power which held her in its hands. With the most sacred names she had sealed—and had made her lover seal—an oath: that never again should word or glance at which the master himself could not have rejoiced pass between the two. As she felt that neither of them could keep the oath, she entreated Angelo to go to Paris to study. Everything was prepared for his journey. It was only when she realized that this resolve could not be carried out, either, that she gave herself up to her destiny.

The faithless disciple, too, might have pleaded extenuating circumstances, even if these might not have been accepted by every judge or juryman. Angelo in his young life had had many love affairs, and in every single case had surrendered himself utterly to his passion, but none of these adventures had ever for any length of time left a deep impression on his being. It was inevitable that, someday, one of them must become the most important of all. And it was reasonable, it was perhaps inevitable, that the chosen mistress should be the wife of his teacher. He had loved no human being as he had loved Leonidas Allori; no other human being had he at any time whole-heartedly admired. He felt that he had been created by the hands of his master, as Adam by the hands of the Lord; from these same hands he was to accept his mate. The Duke of Alba, in Spain, who was a handsome and brilliant man, married a plain and simple-minded lady of the court and remained faithful to her, and when his friends,
amazed at the fact, jestingly questioned him upon it, he answered them that the Duchess of Alba must needs, in her own right, and irrespective of personal qualities, be the most desirable woman in the world. So it was with the disloyal pupil. Once his strong amorous urge was joined with that great art which to him was the highest ideal of all—and was, moreover, coupled with a deep personal devotion—a fire was kindled, which later on he himself could not restrict.

Neither was Leonidas himself without blame in regard to the two young people. Day by day, in conversations with his favorite pupil, he had dwelt on Lucrezia’s beauty. While making the young woman pose for his lovely and immortal Psyche with the Lamp he called upon Angelo to try, at his side in the studio, his hand at the same task, and did indeed interrupt his own work in order to point out the beauties in the living, breathing and blushing body before them, enraptured and inspired as in front of a classic work of art. Of this strange understanding between the old and the young artist neither of them was really conscious, and if a third person had spoken to them of it, they would have rebuffed him with indifference, perhaps with impatience. The one who suspected it was the woman, Lucrezia. And through it she suspected—at the same time with a kind of dismay and giddiness—the hardness and coldness which may be found in the hearts of men and artists, even with regard to the ones whom these hearts do embrace with deepest tenderness. Her own heart lamented, in complete loneliness, much as a lamb laments when led by its shepherd to the shamble.

As now, through various unusual occurrences in his daily life, Leonidas realized that he was being watched and followed, and as from this fact he concluded that he was in great danger, he was seized so deeply by the idea of his own death, and of the approaching end to his artistic career, that his whole being closed round it. He spoke no word of his danger to the people surrounding him, because these people, in the course of a few weeks, to him had become infinitely distant
and thus, in accordance with the law of perspective, infinitely small. He might have wished to complete the work on which he was engaged, but soon his work, too, to him seemed an unreasonable and inconvenient distraction from the matter which really engrossed him. In the last days before his arrest, he stepped out of his isolation, unwontedly gentle and considerate toward all those around him. He now also sent Lucrezia away to the house of a friend, the owner of a vineyard, in the mountains a few miles from town. As, in order to give a reason for this arrangement—for he did not wish her to have any suspicion of the actual position—he explained to her that she looked pale and feverish, he himself believed that he was using a casual pretense to persuade her to leave him, and he smiled at the deep concern with which she received his command.

She at once sent word to Angelo and told him of her husband’s decision. The lovers, who in anguish had been seeking an opportunity to meet and fulfill their love, looked each other in the eyes in triumphant certainty that now, and from now on, all powers of life were uniting to serve them, and that their passion was the loadstone which according to its will attracted and ranged everything around them. Lucrezia before now had visited the farm; she instructed Angelo as to how, by a certain path in the mountains, he could approach the house unseen, and come to her window. The window faced west, the moon would be in her first quarter, she would be able to discern the figure of her lover between the vines. When he picked up a pebble from the ground and threw it against the windowpane, she would open the window. As, in the course of their deliberation, they came to this moment, the voices of both faltered. To regain his equilibrium Angelo told her that for the nocturnal journey he had bought himself a large and fine cloak of violet goat’s wool with brown embroidery, which a friend from the country,
who was hard up for the moment, had offered him. All this they discussed in Lucrezia’s room next to the studio where the master was working, and with the door to it open. The meeting, they decided, was to take place on the second Saturday evening.

They parted; and just as, all through the following week, the thought of death and eternity accompanied the master, the thought of Lucrezia’s body against his own accompanied the young disciple. This thought, without having at any time really left him, constantly seemed to return to him anew like a forgotten, surprising, joyful message—“Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night. Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee. I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.”

On Sunday morning Leonidas Allori was arrested and taken to prison. In the course of the week several interrogations of him followed, and possibly the old patriot might have justified himself in some of the accusations brought against him. But in the first place the government was resolved this time to make an end of such a dangerous enemy, and in the second place the accused himself was resolved not to upset, by any ups and downs, the sublime balance of mind he had attained. There was from the very beginning no real doubt as to the outcome of the case. Judgment was passed, and orders were given that next Sunday morning that most famous son of the people should be stood up against the prison wall, to fall against the cobbles with six bullets in his breast.

Toward the end of the week the old artist asked to be paroled for twelve hours in order to go to the place where his wife was staying, and to take leave of her.

His plea was refused. But such great strength had this man still in him, and with such an aura of radiance did his fame and his integrity of heart surround his person, that his words could not die quickly in the ears of those to whom they were
addressed. The last request of the condemned man was brought up again and weighed by his judges, even after he himself had give up hope.

It so happened that the topic was raised in a house where Cardinal Salviati was present.