Veronika led me into the dining-room. They were still at table. I began
to apologize. Tikulski stopped me.
“You have come just at the proper moment,” he cried. “You shall
now have occasion to confess that my niece is as good a cook as she is a
player.”
“But I have dined,” I protested.
“But you can make room for one morsel more—for a mere taste of
pudding.”
Veronika, with infinite grace, was moving about the room, getting a
plate and napkin. Then with her own hands she helped me to the pudding.
“Doesn’t that flavor do her credit?” cried Tikulski. “It is a
melody materialized, is it not?”
We all laughed; and I ate my pudding at perfect ease.
“I hope Mr. Neuman has brought his violin,” said Veronika, “for
then we can have a first and second.”
“Yes, I took that liberty,” I answered.
And afterward, adjourning to the parlor, I played second to the old
man’s first for an hour or more—reading at sight from his own
manuscript music, which was not the lightest of tasks. Then Veronika
sang to us. And then, as it was extremely hot, Mr. Tikulski proposed
that we betake ourselves to a concert garden in the neighborhood and
spend the rest of the evening in the open air. We sat at a round
table under an ailanthus tree, and watched the people come and go, and
listened to light tunes discoursed by a tolerable band, and by and by
had a delicious little supper; and while Mr. Tikulski puffed a huge
cigar, Veronika and I enjoyed a long, delightful confidential talk in
which our minds got wonderfully close together, and during which one
scrap of information dropped from her lips that afforded me infinite
relief. Speaking of her nocturnal pilgrimages to Hoboken, she said, “I
go over by myself in the summer because it is still light; but coming
home, the organist takes me to the ferry, where uncle meets me.”
“So,” I concluded, “there is no one ahead of me; for if there
were, of course he would be her escort.” And I lost no time about
putting in a word for myself. “I am very anxious to hear you sing in
church,” I said. “Your voice can not attain its full effect between
the narrow walls of a parlor.”
And it was agreed that I should call upon them Sunday afternoon and
that we should all three take a walk in Central Park, Veronika and
I afterward going to Hoboken together. Music had, indeed, proved a
freemasonry, so far as we were concerned. This was only our second
interview; and already we treated each other like old and intimate
friends.
A thunder shower broke above our heads on the way back to Fifty-first
street, and in default of an umbrella, I lent Veronika my handkerchief
to protect her hat. She returned it to me at the door of her house, and
lo! it was freighted with a faint, sweet perfume that it had caught from
contact with her. I stowed the handkerchief religiously in my pocket,
and for a week afterward it still retained a trace of the same dainty
odor. It was a touchstone, by means of which I could call her up bodily
before me whenever I desired.
As I sat alone in my bed-chamber that night, I acknowledged that I was
more deeply in love than ever. The reader would not wonder at this if
he could form a true conception of Veronika’s presence. I wish I could
describe her—that is, render in words the impression wrought upon me
by her face, and her voice, and her manner, and the things she said.
I am not accustomed to expressing such matters in words, but with
my violin I should have no sort of difficulty. If I wanted to give
utterance to my idea of Veronika, all I should have to do would be to
take my violin and play this heavenly melody from Chopin’s Impromptu
in C-sharp minor:—Sotto voce.
0030
It seems almost as though Chopin must have had Veronika in mind when
he composed it. Its color, its passion, its vague dreamy sadness, and
withal its transparent simplicity, make it for me a perfect musical
portrait. Those were the traits which most constantly and conspicuously
abode in my thought of her. Her simplicity, her child-like simplicity,
and her naturalness, and the serene purity of her soul, made her as
different from other women that I had seen—though, to be sure, I had
seen but few women except as I passed them in the street or rode with
them in the horse-car—made her as different from those I had seen, at
any rate, as a lily plucked on the hillside is different from a hothouse
flower, as daylight is different from gaslight, as Schubert’s music is
different from Liszt’s. In every thing and from every point of view,
she was simple and natural and serene. Her great pale face, and the dark
eyes, and the smile that came and went like a melody across her lips,
and the way she wore her hair, and the way she dressed, and the way
she played, sang, spoke, and her gestures, and the low, sad, musical
laughter that I heard only once or twice from the beginning to the
end—all were simple, and natural, and serene. And yet there was a
mystery attaching to each of them, a something beyond my comprehension,
a something that tinged my love for her with awe. A mystery that would
neither be defined nor penetrated nor ignored, brooded over her, as the
perfume broods over a rose. I doubt whether an American woman can be
like this unless she is older and has had certain experiences of her
own. Veronika had not had sufficient experience of her own to account
for what I have described: but she was a Jewess, and all the experience
of the Jewish race, all the martyrdom of the scattered hosts, were hers
by inheritance.
No matter how I was occupied, whether teaching, or practicing, or
reading, or writing, or walking, or talking to other people, I was
always conscious of the love of Veronika astir in my heart. Just as
through all the vicissitudes of a fugue the subject melody will survive
in one form or another and be at no minute altogether silenced, so
through all the changes of my busy day the thought of Veronika lingered
in my mind. I can not tell how completely the whole aspect of the
world had been altered since the night I first saw her standing in
the moonlight. It was as if my life up to that moment had been passed
beneath gray skies, and suddenly the clouds had dispersed and the
sunshine flooded the earth. A myriad things became plain and clear
that had been invisible until now, and old things acquired a
new significance. My heart welled with tenderness for all living
creatures—the overflow of the tenderness it had for her. All my
senses, all my capacities for pain and pleasure, were more acute than
before. Suddenly music, which had been my art, became my religion: she
had glorified it by her devotion. I looked forward to my next visit with
her as a benighted traveler looks forward to the glowing window that
promises rest and shelter: only in my case the light illuminated my
whole pathway and made the progress toward its source a constant delight
instead of a perfunctory labor. But this is the common story of a man
in love, and stands without telling. Suffice it that before our
acquaintance was a month old I had got upon the most intimate terms with
Mr. Tikulski and Veronika, spending not only every Wednesday evening
at their house but also each Sunday afternoon, and accompanying her to
Hoboken as regularly as she had to go. Never was there a prouder man
than I at those junctures when, with her hand pressed tightly under my
arm, I felt that she was trusting herself entirely to my charge and that
I was answerable for her safety and well-being. The Hoboken ferry-boats
became to my thinking vastly more interesting than the most romantic of
Venetian gondolas; and to this day I can not sniff the peculiar stuffy
odor that always pervades a ferry-boat cabin without being transported
back across the years to that happy, happy time. I actually blessed the
necessity that forced her to journey so far for her livelihood; and it
was with an emphatic pang that I listened to the plans which she
and Tikulski were prone to discuss whereby she was shortly to get
an engagement nearer home: though the sight of her pale, tired cheek
reproached me the moment after. On her side she made no concealment of
a most cordial regard for me. Her face always lighted up at my arrival;
she was always eager to share her ideas with me and to call forth my
opinion of her work, appearing pleased by my praise and impressed by my
criticism. She set me an admirable example of frankness. She would say
precisely what she thought of my renditions, sparing not their blemishes
and indicating how an effective point might be improved.
But as yet I had not dared to hope that she loved, or was even in train
to love me. So as yet I had not intended to speak of love at all.
But one day—one Sunday late in June—she proposed to sing me a song
she had just been learning.
“What is it?” I asked.
“From Le Désert of Felicien David,” she said, handing me the
music.
It was the “O, belle nuit, O, sois plus lente,” originally written
for tenor.
“I should hardly think it would suit your voice,” I said, running
over the music.
“Neither did I, at first; but listen, anyway.” And she began.
Her voice had never been in better order, had never been more resonant,
never more electric. Contrary to my misgivings, the song suited it
perfectly, afforded its ‘cello quality full scope. She sang with an
enthusiasm, a precision, a delicacy of shading, that carried me away.
As the last tender note melted on her lips, she swung around on the
piano-stool and looked a question with her great, dark, serious eyes.
I know not what possessed me. A blindness fell upon my sight. My heart
gave a mighty bound. In another instant I was at her side and had caught
her—my darling—in my arms. In another instant she was sobbing her
life out upon my shoulder.
By and by, after the first stress of our emotion had subsided, I
mustered voice to say, “Then, Veronika, you love me?”
Her hand nestled in mine by way of answer.