The Hound of Florence
If so be thou art poor on this earth, thou must be a dog for one half of thy life; then mayest thou spend the other half as a man among men.
—The Hermit of Amiata
LUCAS GRASSI STOLE OUT OF THE gloomy old house in the Tuchlauben without a word of farewell. Within the cramped walls of a building into which the sun but rarely shone, he was leaving his belongings and the last years of his boyhood. In the kitchen, the bedroom and the parlour, even in the windings of the steep familiar stairs, which he was now descending never to climb again, in the dark narrow passage along which he strode for the last time, he was leaving all he knew and loved on earth. In every nook and cranny of the place there were traces of his father which had kept the memory of the old man green and fresh; for he had never left these rooms altogether; his presence haunted them and stood beside his son with a semblance of life that was only slowly and hardly perceptibly fading away.
Whenever Lucas called to mind how his father’s hands had rested on the table, or raised the window-bolt above it and then carefully stretched the parchment across the drawing-board, or how every morning he had seen him sit up in his bed in the recess, his pale calm face visible in the twilight of the room, his gentle voice uttering his first greeting and asking the first question before starting on a new day, he always felt that at any moment his father might come into the room through the low, rusty-black door.
But Lucas Grassi knew that all this was now at an end. He saw only too well that it was impossible for him to remain in the old place any longer, for he had not even the wherewithal to appease his hunger, much less to pay his arrears of rent. It seemed to him almost a stroke of luck that he had been able to find, near the Kärtner wall, a wretched attic which he had found no difficulty in renting for a mere song. But at that moment, as he stepped out into the street from the old house, he was conscious of a momentary feeling of pained astonishment to think that he was leaving his home, precisely as he had done so often—oh, how often!—before, but that now it was forever, without a word of farewell!
He was still very young, and did not know how frequently a man stands all unknowing on the threshold of a new life, his back to a past forever closed. He did not know that, at such important moments, the uninterrupted forward march of Fate leaves but little time for farewell, or that possibly it was all for the best that this should be so; nor was he aware that his momentary feeling of pained astonishment was in itself a leave-taking.
He wandered slowly and uncertainly along the Tuchlauben, caught up and borne along by the busy bustle of the day, ambling on, as every man does who has no goal, no hope, and is bowed down by care. The feeling of bitterness, which had oppressed him ever since his father’s death, seemed to gnaw more sharply than ever at his heart. His ears were deaf to the sing-song of the street hawkers, or the warning shouts of the runners, who, clad in gorgeous liveries, spread commotion right and left as they dashed forward in front of the various coaches. He did not even notice the coaches as they rocked and rattled past.
On that day when Lucas Grassi set out to meet his destiny, there were doubtless many others in Vienna as poor as himself. But only a few felt their poverty as acutely as he did, as intolerable torture. At such moments, when his soul rose up in impotent revolt, he hated even the city itself, which, with its bastions and moats seemed, as it were, to hold him imprisoned in a dismal dungeon, and, flaunting its riches in his face, to torment and make mock of him. He hated the narrow pavements in the streets. Hemmed in on either side by houses gray with age, dark and tortuous, they seemed always to lead back to the same spot.
He longed to be off to the beautiful land of sunshine, which he fancied he remembered having seen in early childhood. Ever since he had been left alone in Vienna, his mind had been full of it, and the faint stirrings of a new feeling of home-sickness seemed to have invaded his heart. But what his imagination pictured was not a memory of something he had really seen so much as the visions his fancy fashioned from all his father had told him. His early childhood days had been reflected in his father’s stories, as a bright landscape is mirrored in a glass globe. He saw gardens full of roses and lilies, rich green trees laden with golden fruit, and houses with hospitable wide-open doors beckoning the guest, their white walls gleaming like a bright smile amid the foliage. There were many other children, too, playing about in the meadows. The air was full of the plaintive songs of birds, borne on the soft summer breeze, and the warm rays of the kindly sun spread courage and good cheer all around. He could never remember how it all came about, but suddenly all these scenes vanished, his mother’s form faded away, the gardens were swallowed up, and he was wandering over hill and dale by his father’s side. True, it all seemed very long ago. He remembered that on their way they had sometimes been accompanied by strangers, and women he had never seen before took care of him; but they were mere shadows in his memory, and seemed to have no faces.
Towns, cornfields, valleys and wooded heights flashed past; he had no notion what or where they were. Sometimes the road ran along the banks of strange rivers. Although that journey was now nothing but a motley chain of pictures which for the most part had grown quite pale and faint, occasionally one of them would stand out distinctly, until the chain ended in the landscape that now surrounded him and over which leaden clouds so often lowered for days at a time.
As he looked back on his short life, he could not help thinking that from the very beginning it had been nothing more than a path leading from bright sunshine to impenetrable gloom, until at last this city had reared its walls about him, to crush him beneath their weight.
As he walked along the gloomy alley of the Kohlmarkt it occurred to him again that he might look up one of his father’s old colleagues, and beg for food and work. But the thought, as ever, was distasteful to him. He knew but little of his father’s fellow-craftsmen; they had come to the city to build and decorate the Palace of some great noble. One or two of them were sculptors like his father, others were painters. Lucas had already heard what most of them had to say to him.
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