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? Cybel 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. Thophile 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 Thophile 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