Limbo and Other Essays Part 6

Now when the hunt had swept past, Messer Nastasio rubbed his eyes and wondered greatly. But even as he wondered, and stood in the middle of the clearing, behold, part of the hunt swept back, and the thing which they pursued ran in a circle on the greensward, shrieking piteously. And behold, it was a young damsel, naked, her hair loose and full of brambles, with only a tattered cloth round her middle. And as she came near to where Messer Nastasio was standing (but no one of the hunt seemed to heed him) the hounds were upon her, barking furiously, and a hunter on a black horse, black even as night. And a cold wind blew and caused Nastasio's hair to stand on end; and he tried to cry out, and to rush forward, but his voice died in his throat and his limbs were heavy, and covered with sweat, and refused to move.

Then the hounds fastening on the damsel threw her down, and he on the black horse turned swiftly, and transfixed her, shrieking dismally, with a boar-spear. And those of the hunt galloped up, and wound their horns; and he of the black horse, which was a stately youth habited in a coat of black and gold, and black boots and black feathers on his hat, threw his reins to a groom, and alighted and approached the damsel where she lay, while the huntsmen were holding back the hounds and winding their horns. Then he drew a knife, such as are used by huntsmen, and driving its blade into the damsel's side, cut out her heart, and threw it, all smoking, into the midst of the hounds. And a cold wind rustled through the bushes, and all had disappeared, horses, and huntsmen, and hounds.

And the gra.s.s was untrodden as if no man's foot or horse's hoof had pa.s.sed there for months.

And Messer Nastasio shuddered, and his limbs loosened, and he knew that the hunter on the black horse was Messer Guido Degli Anastagi, and the damsel Monna Filomena, daughter of the Lord of Gambellara. Messer Guido had loved the damsel greatly, and been flouted by her, and leaving his home in despair, had been killed on the way by robbers, and Madonna Filomena had died shortly after. The tale was still fresh in men's memory, for it had happened in the city of Ravenna barely five years before. And those whom Nastasio had seen, both the hunter and the lady, and the huntsmen and horses and hounds, were the spirits of the dead.

When he had recovered his courage, Messer Nastasio sighed and said unto himself: "How like is my fate to that of Messer Guido! Yet would I never, even when a spectre, without weight or substance, made of wind and delusion, and arisen from h.e.l.l, act with such cruelty towards her I love." And then he thought: "Would that the daughter of Messer Pavolo de Traversariis might hear of this! For surely it would cause her to relent!" But he knew that his words would be vain, and that none of the citizens of Ravenna, and least of all the damsel of the Traversari, would believe them, but rather esteem him a madman.

Now it came about that when Friday came round once more, Nastasio, by some chance, was again walking in the forest-clearing by the great pines, and he had forgotten; when the sea began to roar, and a cold wind blew; and there came through the forest the sound of horses and hounds, causing Messer Nastasio's hair to stand up and his limbs to grow weak as water. And he on the black horse again pursued the naked damsel, and struck here with his boar-spear, and cut out her heart and threw it to the hounds; the which hunter and damsel were the ghosts of Messer Guido, and of Madonna Filomena, daughter of the Lord of Gambellara, arisen out of h.e.l.l. And in this fas.h.i.+on did it happen for three Fridays following, the sea beginning to moan, the cold wind to blow and the spirits to hunt the deceased damsel at twilight in the clearing among the pine-trees.

Now when Messer Nastasio noticed this, he thanked Cupid, which is the Lord of all Lovers, and devised in his mind a cunning plan. And he mounted his horse and returned to Ravenna, and gave out to his friends that he had found a treasure in Rome; and that he was minded to forget the damsel of the Traversari and seek another wife. But in reality he went to certain money-lenders, and gave himself into bondage, even to be sold as a slave to the Dalmatian pirates if he could not repay his loan.

And he published that he desired to take to him a wife, and for that reason would feast all his friends and the chief citizens of Ravenna, and regale them with a pageant in the pine forest, where certain foreign slaves of his should show wonderful feats for their delight. And he sent forth invitations, and among them to Messer Pavolo de Traversariis and his wife and daughter. And he bid them for a Friday, which was also the eve of the Feast of the Dead.

Meanwhile he took to the pine forest carpenters and masons, and such as paint and gild cunningly, and waggons of timber, and cut stone for foundations, and furniture of all kinds; and the waggons were drawn by four and twenty yoke of oxen, grey oxen of the Romagnol breed. And he caused the artisans to work day and night, making great fires of dry myrtle and pine branches, which lit up the forest all around. And he caused them to make foundations, and build a pavilion of timber in the clearing which is the shape of a horse-course, surrounded by pines. The pavilion was oblong, raised by ten steps above the gra.s.s, open all round and reposing on arches and pillars; and there was a projecting _abacus_ under the arches over the capitals, after the Roman fas.h.i.+on; and the pillars were painted red, and the capitals red also picked out with gold and blue, and a s.h.i.+eld with the arms of the Honestis on each. The roof was raftered, each rafter painted with white lilies on a red ground, and heads of youths and damsels; and the roof outside was made of wooden tiles, shaped like sh.e.l.ls and gilded. And on the top of the roof was a weather-vane; and the vane was a figure of Cupid, G.o.d of love, cunningly carved of wood and painted like life, as he flies, poised in air, and shoots his darts on mortals. He was winged and blindfolded, to show that love is inconstant and no respecter of persons; and when the wind blew, he turned about, and the end of his scarf, which was beaten metal, swung in the wind. Now when the pavilion was ready, within six days of its beginning, carpets were spread on the floor, and seats placed, and garlands of bay and myrtle slung from pillar to pillar between the arches. And tables were set, and sideboards covered with gold and silver dishes and trenchers; and a raised place, covered with arras, was made for the players of fifes and drums and lutes; and tents were set behind for the servants, and fires prepared for cooking meat.

Whole oxen and sheep were brought from Ravenna in wains, and casks of wine, and fruit and white bread, and many cooks, and serving-men, and musicians, all habited gallantly in the colours of the Honestis, which are vermilion and white, parti-coloured, with black stripes; and they wore doublets laced with gold, and on their breast the arms of the house of Honestis, which are a dove holding a leaf.

Now on Friday the eve of the Feast of the Dead, all was ready, and the chief citizens of Ravenna set out for the forest of Cla.s.sis, with their wives and children and servants, some on horseback, and others in wains drawn by oxen, for the tracks in that forest are deep. And when they arrived, Messer Nastasio welcomed them and thanked them all, and conducted them to their places in the pavilion. Then all wondered greatly at its beauty and magnificence, and chiefly Messer Pavolo de Traversariis; and he sighed, and thought within himself, "Would that my daughter were less shrewish, that I might have so n.o.ble a son-in-law to prop up my old age!" They were seated at the tables, each according to their dignity, and they ate and drank and praised the excellence of the cheer; and flowers were scattered on the tables, and young maidens sang songs in praise of love, most sweetly. Now when they had eaten their fill, and the tables been removed, and the sun was setting between the pine-trees, Messer Nastasio caused them all to be seated facing the clearing, and a herald came forward, in the livery of the Honestis, sounding his trumpet and declaring in a loud voice that they should now witness a pageant, the which was called the Mystery of Love and Death.

Then the musicians struck up, and began a concert of fifes and lutes, exceeding sweet and mournful. And at that moment the sea began to moan, and a cold wind to blow: a sound of hors.e.m.e.n and hounds and horns and cras.h.i.+ng branches came through the wood; and the damsel, the daughter of the Lord of Gambellara, rushed naked, her hair streaming and her veil torn, across the gra.s.s, pursued by the hounds, and by the ghost of Messer Guido on the black horse, the nostrils of which were filled with fire. Now when the ghost of Messer Guido struck that damsel with the boar-spear, and cut out her heart, and threw it, while the others wound their horns, to the hounds, and all vanished, Messer Nastasio de Honestis, seizing the herald's trumpet, blew in it, and cried in a loud voice, "The Pageant of Death and Love! The Pageant of Death and Love!

Such is the fate of cruel damsels!" and the gilt Cupid on the roof swung round creaking dreadfully, and the daughter of Messer Pavolo uttered a great shriek and fell on the ground in a swoon.

Here the Romagnol ma.n.u.script comes to a sudden end, the outer sheet being torn through the middle. But we know from the Decameron that the damsel of the Traversari was so impressed by the spectre-hunt she had witnessed that she forthwith relented towards Nastagio degli Onesti, and married him, and that they lived happily ever after. But whether or not that part of the pine forest of Cla.s.sis still witnesses this ghostly hunt, we have no means of knowing.

On the whole, I incline to think that, when the great frost blasted the pines (if not earlier) the ghosts s.h.i.+fted quarters from the forest of Cla.s.sis to the church of the same name, on that forest's brink.

Certainly there seems nothing to prevent them. Standing in the midst of those uninhabited rice-fields and marshes, the church of Cla.s.sis is yet always open, from morning till night; the great portals gaping, no curtain interposed. Open and empty; ma.s.s not even on Sundays; empty of human beings, open to the things of without. The sunbeams enter through the open side windows, cutting a slice away from that pale, greenish twilight; making a wedge of light on the dark, damp bricks; bringing into brief prominence some of the great sarcophagi, their peac.o.c.ks and palm-trees picked out in vivid green lichen. Snakes also enter, the Sacristan tells me, and I believe it, for within the same minute, I saw a dead and a living one among the arum leaves at the gate. Is that little altar, a pagan-looking marble table, isolated in the midst of the church, the place where they meet, pagan creatures claiming those Grecian marbles? Or do they hunt one another round the aisles and into the crypt, slithering and hissing, the souls of Guido degli Anastagi, perhaps, and of his cruel lady love?

Such are Ravenna and Cla.s.sis, and the Ghosts that haunt them.

THE COOK-SHOP AND THE FOWLING-PLACE

In the street of the Almond and appropriately close to the covered-over ca.n.a.l (Rio Terra) of the a.s.sa.s.sins, there is a cook-shop which has attracted my attention these two last months in Venice. For in its window is a row of tiny corpses--birds, raw, red, with agonised plucked little throats, the throats through which the sweet notes came. And the sight brings home to me more than the suggestion of a dish at supper, savoury things of the size of a large plum, on a cus.h.i.+on of polenta....

I had often noticed the fowling-places which stand out against the sky like mural crowns on the low hills of Northern Italy; Bresciana is the name given to the thing, from the province, doubtless, of its origin.

Last summer, driving at the foot of the Alps of Friuli, such a place was pointed out to me on a green knoll; it marked the site of a village of Collalto, once the fief of the great family of that name, which had died, disappeared, church and all, after the Black Death of the fourteenth century.

The strangeness of the matter attracted me; and I set out, the next morning, to find the fowling-place. I thought I must have lost my way, and was delighting in the radiance of a perfectly fresh, clear, already autumnal morning, walking along through the flowery gra.s.s fields in sight of the great mountains, when, suddenly, there I was before the uncanny thing, the Bresciana. Uncanny in its odd shape of walled and moated city of clipped bushes, tight-closed on its hill-top, with its Guelph battlements of hornbeam against the pale blue sky. And uncannier for its mysterious delightfulness. Imagine it set in the loveliest mossy gra.s.s, full of delicate half-Alpine flowers; beautiful b.u.t.terflies everywhere about; and the sort of ditch surrounding it overgrown with blackberries, haws, sloes, ivy, all manner of berries; a sort of false garden of paradise for the poor birds.

But when I craned over the locked wicket and climbed on to the ladder alongside, what I saw was more uncanny yet. I looked down on to rows of clipped, regular, hornbeam hedges, with gra.s.s paths between them, maze-like. A kind of Versailles for the birds, you might think. Only, in the circular gra.s.s plot from which those green hedges and paths all radiated, something alarming: an empty cage hung to a tree. And going the round of the place I discovered that between the cut hornbeam battlements of the circular enclosure there was a wreath of thin wire nooses, almost invisible, in which the poor little birds hang themselves. It seems oddly appropriate that this sinister little place, with its vague resemblance to that clipped garden in which Mantegna's allegorical Vices are nesting, should be, in fact, a cemetery; that tiny City of Dis of the Birds, on its green hillock in front of the great blue Alps, being planted on those villagers dead of the Plague.

The fowling-place began to haunt me, and I was filled with a perhaps morbid desire to know more of its evil rites. After some inquiry, I introduced myself accordingly to the most famous fowler of the neighbourhood, the owner of a wineshop at Martignacco. He received me with civility, and expounded his trade with much satisfaction; an amiable, intelligent old man, with sufficient of Italian in that province of strange dialect.

In the pa.s.sage at the foot of his staircase and under sundry dark arches he showed me a quant.i.ty of tiny wooden cages and of larger cages divided into tiny compartments. There were numbers of goldfinches, a blackbird, some small thrushes, an ortolan, and two or three other kinds I could not identify; nay, even a brace of unhappy quail in a bottle-shaped basket. These are the decoys; the cages are hung in the circular walks of the fowling-place, and the wretched little prisoners, many of them blinded of one or both eyes, sing their hearts out and attract their companions into the nooses. Then he showed me the nets--like thin, thin fis.h.i.+ng nets--for quail; and the little wands which are covered with lime and which catch the wings of the creatures; but that seemed a merciful proceeding compared with the gruesome snares of the Bresciana.

When he had shown me these things he produced a little Jew's-harp, on which he fell to imitating the calls of various birds. But I noticed that none of the little blinded prisoners hanging aloft made any response. Only, quite spontaneously and all of a sudden, the poor goldfinches set up a loud and lovely song; and the solitary blackbird gave a whistle. Never have I heard anything more lugubrious than these hedgerow and woodland notes issuing from the cages in that damp, black corridor. And the old fowler, for all his venerable appearance and gentleness of voice and manner, struck me as a wicked warlock, and own sib of the witch who turned Jorinde and Jorinel into nightingales in her little house hung round with cages.

A few days after my visit to the fowler, and one of the last evenings I had in Friuli, I was walking once more beneath the Castle. After threading the narrow green lanes, blocked by great hay-carts, I came of a sudden on an open, high-lying field of mossy gra.s.s, freshly scythed, with the hayc.o.c.ks still upon it, and a thin plantation of larches on one side. And in front, at the end of that grey-green sweetness, the Alps of Cadore, portals and battlements of dark leaden blue, with the last flame-colour of sunset behind them, and the sunset's last rosy feathers rising into the pale sky. The mowers were coming slowly along, shouldering their scythes and talking in undertones, as folk do at that hour. I also walked home in the quickly gathering twilight; the delicate hemlock flowers of an unmowed field against the pearly luminous sky; the wonderful blue of the thistles singing out in the dusk of the gra.s.s.

There rose the scent of cut gra.s.s, of ripening maize, and every freshness of acacia and poplar leaf; and the crickets began to shrill.

As the light faded away I pa.s.sed within sight of the fowling-place, the little sinister formal garden of Versailles on the mound marking the village which had died of the Black Death.

This is what returned to my mind every time, lately in Venice, that I pa.s.sed that cook-shop near the closed-up Ca.n.a.l of the a.s.sa.s.sins, and saw the row of tiny corpses ready for roasting. The little throats which sang so sweetly had got caught, had writhed, twisted in the tiny wire nooses between the hornbeam battlements. What ruffling of feathers and starting of eyeb.a.l.l.s in agony there had been, while the poor blind decoy, finch or blackbird, sang, sang on in his cage on the central gra.s.s-plot!

And we scrunch them under our knife and tooth, and remark how excellent are little birds on a cus.h.i.+on of polenta, between a sage-leaf and a bit of bacon! But fowling-places have come down from the remotest and most venerable antiquity; and they exist of all kinds; and some of them, moreover, are allegories.

ACQUAINTANCE WITH BIRDS

One of the things I should have liked, I said to myself to-day, as I rode past one of the dreadful little fowling-places on the ridge of our hills, would have been to become acquainted with birds....

The wish is simple, but quite without hope for a dweller in Tuscany, where, what with poverty and lawlessness, peasants' nets and city 'prentices' guns, there are no birds whose acquaintance you can make.

You hear them singing and twittering, indeed, wherever a clump of garden ilexes or a cypress hedge offers them protection; but they never let themselves be seen, for they know that being seen is being shot: or at least being caged. They cage them for singing, nightingales, thrushes, and every kind of finch; and you can see them, poor isolated captives, in rows and rows of cages in the markets. That is the way that people like them: a certain devout lady of my neighbourhood, for instance, whose little seventeenth-century house was hung round with endless tiny cages, like the witches in the tale of Jorinde and Jorinel; a wicked witch herself, no doubt, despite her illuminations in honour of the Madonna, who should have taught her better. Another way of liking singing-birds is on toast between a sc.r.a.p of bacon and a leaf of sage, a dainty dish much prized by persons of weak stomach. Persons with bad digestions are apt, I fancy, to lose, and make others forego, much pleasant companions.h.i.+p of soul.

For animals, at least, when not turned into pets, are excellent companions for our souls. I say expressly "when not pets," because the essence of this spiritual (for it _is_ spiritual) relation between us and creatures is that they should not become our property, nor we theirs; that we should be able to refresh ourselves by the thought and contemplation of a life apart from our own, different from it; in some ways more really natural, and, at all events, capable of seeming more natural to our fancy. And birds, for many reasons, meet this requirement to perfection. I have read, indeed, in various works that they are not without vices, not a bit kinder than the other unkind members of creation; and that their treatment of the unfit among themselves is positively inhuman--or shall I say human? Perhaps this is calumny, or superficial judgment of their sterner morality; but, be this as it may, it is evident that they are in many respects very charming people. It is very nice of them to be so aesthetic, to be amused and kept quiet, like the hen birds, by music; and the tone of their conversation is quite exquisitely affable.

My own opportunities of watching their proceedings have, alas! been very limited; but, judging by the pigeons at Venice, they are wonderfully forbearing and courteous to each other. I have often watched these pigeons having their morning bath at the corner of St. Mark's, in a little shallow trough in the pavement. They collect round by scores, and wait for room to go in quite patiently; while the crowd inside ruffle, dip, throw up water into their wings and shake it off; a ma.s.s of moving grey and purple feathers, with never an angry push or a cry of ill-temper among them. So I can readily believe a certain friend of mine who pa.s.ses hours in English brakes and hedgerows, watching birds through special ten-guinea opera-gla.s.ses, that time and money could not be better spent.

One reason, moreover, why all animals (one feels that so much in Kipling's stories) are excellent company for our spirit is surely because they are animals, not men; because the thought of them relieves us therefore from that sense of overcrowding and jostling and general wordiness and fuss from which we all suffer; and birds, more than any other creatures, give us that sense of relief, of breathing-s.p.a.ce and margin, so very necessary to our spiritual welfare. For there is freedom, air, light, in the very element in which birds exist, and in their movements, the delightful sense of poising, of buoyancy, of being delivered from our own body and made independent of gravitation, which, as a friend of mine wisely remarks, Sir Isaac Newton most injudiciously put into Nature's head. Indeed, there is a very special quality in the mere thought of birds. St. Francis, had he preached to fishes, like his follower of Padua, might have had as attentive an audience, but we should not have cared to hear about it. _Aves mei fratres_--why, it is the soul's kins.h.i.+p with air, light, liberty, what the soul loves best.

And similarly I suspect that the serene and lovely quality of Dante's Francesca episode is due in great part to those similes of birds: the starlings in the winter weather, the cranes "singing their dirge," and those immortal doves swirling nestwards, _dal disio chiamate_, which lift the lid of that cavern of h.e.l.l and winnow its fumes into breathable quality.

Perhaps (I say to myself, being ever disposed to make the best of a bad bargain), perhaps the scantiness of my acquaintance with birds, the difficulty about seeing them (for there is none about hearing them in Tuscany, and I shall be kept awake by vociferous nightingales in a month's time), gives to my feeling about them a pleasant, half-painful eagerness. Certainly it raises the sight of birds, when I get out of this country, into something of the nature of a performance. Even in Rome, the larks, going up tiny brown rockets, into the pale blue sky above the pale green endless undulations of gra.s.s, and the rooks and magpies flocking round the ruins. And how much in Germany? Indeed, one of Germany's charms is the condition, or, rather, the position, the civic status, of birds and small creatures. One is constantly reminded of the Minnesinger Walther's legacy to the birds of Wurzburg, and of Luther's hiding the hare in the sleeve of his tunic. One of my first impressions after crossing the Alps last year was of just such a hare, only perfectly at his ease, running in front of my bicycle for ever so long during a great thunderstorm which overtook us in the cornfields between Donaustauff and Ratisbon. And as to birds! They are not merely left in liberty, but a.s.siduously courted by these kindly, and, in their prosaic way, poetical Teutons. Already in the village shop on the top of the Tyrolese pa.s.s there was a nest of swallows deep down in a pa.s.sage.

And in the Lorenz Kirche at Nuremberg, while the electric trams go clanking outside, the swallows whirr cheerfully along the aisles, among the coats-of-arms, the wonderfully crested helmets suspended on high.

There was a swallow's nest in the big entrance room (where the peasants sit and drink among the little dry birch-trees and fir garlands from the Whitsuntide festivities) of the inn at Rothenburg; a nest above the rows of pewter and stoneware, with baby swallows looking unconcernedly out at the guests. But the great joy at Rothenburg was the family of storks which still inhabit one of the high, pointed gatehouses. I used to go and see them every morning: the great cartwheel on the funnel-shaped roof, wisps of comfortable hay hanging over it; one of the parent storks standing sentinel on one leg, the little ones raising themselves occasionally into sight, the other stork hovering around on outspread wings like tattered banners. To think that there were once storks also in Italy, storks' homes, the old Lombard name _Cicognara_ meaning that; and cranes also, whom the people in Boccaccio, and even Lorenzo di Medici, went out to hunt! The last of them were certainly netted and eaten, as they used to eat porcupines in Rome in my childish days.

Speaking of cranes reminds me of the pleasure I have had also in watching herons, particularly among the ponds of my mother's old home.

"Would you like to see one near? I'll go and shoot it you at once," said my very kind cousin.

How odd it is, when one thinks of it, that mere contemplation seems so insufficient for us poor restless human beings! We cannot see a flower without an impulse to pick it, a character without an impulse to, let us say, a.n.a.lyse; a bird without an impulse to shoot. And in this way we certainly lose most of the good which any of these things could be to us: just to be looked at, thought about, enjoyed, and let alone.

ARIADNE IN MANTUA

TO

ETHEL SMYTH

THANKING, AND BEGGING, HER FOR MUSIC