long, dark, and somber, accented by brows as “delicately arched as
those of the pictured Cenci;” a mouth whose warm red undercurve
contradicted the saddened eyes.
She was a frail and febrile copy of Da Vinci’s St. Marguerite, who,
despite her saintship, is a Spanish dancing-girl in a moment of repose.
There was something about her that stimulated the powers of life, that
created a passionate and imperious music which flooded the soul with
desire.
But it was the eyes that held my attention longest. They clung to mine
with an unwavering glance. In them lay a mute appeal. They looked at
me piteously, longingly. They implored help of me. They were like eyes
that look from the other side of the grave with the hope that by not
losing sight of mine they could draw themselves back and up again to
the light. They begged for life. At that moment I would have lain down
my own life to give momentary reality to hers.
Nor did she dance continuously like the puppet of my bow. She possessed
independent life. She paused and waved and beckoned with her little
hands. She tried to make me understand her dumb sign language, but
always in her eyes there was that look of piteous questioning.
She was so frail and bright! She was like a butterfly made of gauze. A
breath could crush her. Yet she danced bravely to please me, to win my
applause. Poor little lonely dancer! Who could be more unsuited to the
shadow world? Never had I so realized the cruelty of death. Never had I
so rebelled against it. What had her crisp muslins, her satins, and her
frivolous graces to do with death! I longed to clasp her in my arms, to
breathe my own life breath into her, to shield her from that awful fear.
Her eyes looked into mine. Her soul spoke to mine and was understood,
but her body I could not reach. It was, perhaps, ages away. It was not
space that separated us; it was something crueler far. It was time!
Suddenly a tremor passed over her. What was it! Ah! yes, my weary arm
had faltered in its playing. The little face quivered with fear. She
held out her arms in mute appeal. I was helpless. The exhausted muscles
refused to obey. My arm fell to my side. She floated away, away down
the dim, gray, mirror vista, her little hands fluttering a sad farewell.
When I put out the lights and leaned from the window for a moment for a
whiff of fresh air, I found that the night had gone and that the dawn
was streaking faintly the fields and hills.
That day I slept only until noon. Nervous tension prevented rest.
The remainder of the day I lounged in the library or idled on the
verandas, living over again in thought the incidents of the night. For
months this was my life. Not once did I leave the _castillo_, although
invitations from the neighboring gentry and my uncle’s friends poured
in upon me. Nor indeed, during this time, did I see any one but the
servants. I denied myself to visitors. I thought only of my Moorish
love. I dreamed only of her in the few day hours devoted to sleep.
Several times I saw the servants touch their foreheads significantly
when they passed me, and I heard them whisper, “The madness of the De
Quederos!”
My life now took on an excessive value. Did not another depend upon it?
Without me my Moorish love was dead. With me she enjoyed a semi-being.
At times I suffered the most torturing fear lest accident to me condemn
her forever to oblivion. The thought shook my soul.
Each night when my playing evoked her, she begged more piteously for
life, and I, who so gladly would have granted it, was powerless. Each
night her sign language was more comprehensible, more eloquent of
longing and of love. Each night my love for her grew greater. When the
hour for parting came, I felt grief such as they who bury those they
love. How could I know where she went, what horrors encompassed her!
How could I know what difficulties she had conquered to come to me! How
could I know that she would ever come again!
By day the burden of my mind was to know where, only to know where,
she was! Not even the feverish imaginings of my heart could frame an
answer.
At night, when lights began to twinkle in the little houses of the
village and the stars to show one by one, I looked out and cursed them,
because I knew that in not one of them all was she. In all the broad
firmament she was not. She alone, my Moorish love, had no share in
the sweetness of the spring. I grew to hate the world that had cast
her off. I became a solitary. How could I be expected to mingle with
people, to leave the _castillo_! Would it not be murder to do so even
for the space of a night? Not all crimes are amenable to law. Her life
depended upon me. Absence meant death. Could I condemn her I loved to
one unnecessary hour within the grave? Did I not always see, sleeping
or waking, the piteous eyes that begged for life? Did I not always see
the mouth that tried to smile, to coquette, despite the death-fear that
drooped it?
But how could I explain this to the Conde’s friends? Had I done so,
they would not have understood. I really believe they would have called
me mad. I persisted in silent refusals.
What a fate was mine! I loved a woman who was separated from me by
the centuries. I loved a phantom, a vision, a self-created mirage.
I, alone, knew that this vision possessed life. Night after night we
conversed by signs. Eyes looked into eyes, soul into soul, yet might
we never join hands or lips. We saw each other plainly, yet might our
voices never bridge the chasm of the ages. Within arm’s reach of me she
stood, and smiled and beckoned, yet I had not the power to touch her.
Her red lips voiced messages to me, but the wind of ages rushed between
and swept them away to bury within soundless silence. What torture was
this! What inexplainable suffering! In subtle punishment the curse of
Tantalus was not its kin.
Only to the violin could I confide my sorrow. I threw away my music. My
heart alone dictated. Thus I poured forth my longing, my unsatisfied
passion, and my grief. Thus I voiced my anger, my hatred of men, of
life, my rage against that silent and invisible God who mocked me with
his might, and reduced my endeavor to puny impotence.
Sometimes, when cruel notes shivered the air, and sharp discords all
but snapped the strings, I caught sight of the frightened faces of the
servants coming one by one, a-tiptoe, to peer at me. Or below I saw
teamsters turn sharply to avoid the _castillo_ and the Roman bridge
beneath my window. Too, there were fewer travelers on the road of late.
Less often sounded the friendly mule bell. The simple peasants were
terrified by the sounds of hate and rage. The servants, too, feared
me. They believed me to be “_possessed_.” The old steward, alone,
had a different opinion. He attributed my peculiarities to drink or
infatuation for a woman. The more so since of late no one had been
admitted to my rooms. One day the kind old fellow touched my arm in
a fatherly manner and whispered, “_Mi hijo, niños y vinos son mal a
guardar!_”
It was too late for the kindly offices of friends. I was hopelessly
given over to an infatuation. I had lost regard for appearances. I did
not care.
Swiftly the days slipped by. I paid as little heed as do they who live
under emotional strain. Spring deepened into summer; autumn came. In
time its color faded beneath the mists of November. Before I knew it,
_la nôche de los difuntos_ (the night when the dead come back) was at
hand.
It pleased me to think that then I could celebrate my wedding with
the dead. For the occasion I had the great drawing-room filled with
flowers. At the last moment the caprice seized me to don the state
costume of a courtier of Philip the Second. Then I drew a gilt couch
of old brocade in front of the mirror and with closed eyes began to
improvise upon the dance.
Suddenly a little hand touched my shoulder and a voice whispered: “Will
you not look at me, now that I have come?”
There she was beside me, and more lovely by half when freed from the
mirror’s grayness.
“But you--will you not tell me who you are?” I whispered back in an
ecstasy of love.
“Zarabanda.”
“_Zarabanda!_”
“Yes, why not?”
“The Moorish love of Philip the Second?”
Passion and its artistic embodiment, music, had made my love outlast
the empire that gave her birth. She had survived Spain and its splendor.
I was perched upon a dizzy height indeed. Below me the gray centuries
unfolded.
At the word “Philip” grief contracted her face.
“Oh, Philip! Philip! Will you not call him? Will you not let me see
him? I will never ask it of you again. You need not be afraid because
he is a great king. Give him this,” taking a bracelet of peculiar
workmanship from her arm and handing it toward me. “He will understand.
He will come anywhere for me.”
Grief filled my heart. It was not I she loved--I, who had recreated
her, who had brought her back from the grave. It was not I she thought
of, but that cruel and long-dead king.
“Believe me, my little love, I would do anything for you but
this--which is impossible.”
“Just once, please, just once! He was so handsome, Philip, and he loved
me so. Before he married Mary of England he took me to Granada, to the
town of the wall of a thousand towers. There he would have married me,
had it not been for Perez, the Great Minister!”
At mention of that name a shiver passed over her, the memory of an
ancient fear, setting crisply a-jingle the gems upon her cap and the
gold bells on her trousers.
“There I invented the Saraband. It was the dance he loved, and he named
it for me. All Spain danced it then.
“One day he was called away by a court messenger from Madrid. When he
left, he swore to marry me. On a certain day I was to meet him, having
sent word three days before. Then he was to marry me and make me queen!
“But as soon as he went, I was seized and imprisoned. I could not send
him word. I never saw him again. Oh, please let me tell him why. He
thinks I failed him. Let me tell him why!”
“I would do it if I could. I would do anything for you, but how can I?”
“Why? Philip is not--” Her dark face blanched, fear leaped into her
eyes. “Philip--is not--dead?”
I nodded. Not a word did she say, but tears came to her eyes and fell
slowly, one by one, upon her little hands. Never before had I realized
the word’s leaden weight. It was a plummet line that found the heart of
grief.
“Then there is nothing more to live for!”
The words pierced me like a dagger. I knew how complete was her
indifference to me.
“How long ago did he die?” she asked, with a sigh that shook her body
as a ground swell shakes the sea.
Could I tell her? That would mean another grief.
“Tell me when he died; how long ago.”
“In 1598.”
“And now what year is it?”
“1898. Three hundred years.”
“Three hundred years he has slept and dreamed me false! And now I can
never tell him!”
My heart forgot its suffering in sympathy for her.
“Now I can never tell him!”
Silence fell between us. She forgot my presence, so complete was her
absorption in the past.
The breath of the late autumn came through the ancient windows,
slanting for an instant the flames of chandeliers and sconces until
they looked like an army’s bloody spears upraised in flight. Opposite
the mute mirror oppressed me with its suggestion of nothingness and
of space. The flowers, too, became restless and shivered, as if some
foreign element had disturbed them.
As I thought thus gloomily, the little brown hand fell on mine, and
the voice whose sound was like the veiled tone-sweetness of a harp was
saying:
“Then, if it was so long ago, you did not know Tiziano, who painted me,
did you?”
How pitiful was this effort to be gay!
“Tiziano-was-a-noble-man-from-Venezia.”
The words were hyphenated with sighs.
“Oh, he was a very great painter! He said I was the loveliest woman
in Europe. The court ladies were wild with envy. But he would have
none of them. It was I he wanted--I--I! He painted me lying beside an
open window, a Cupid holding a crown above my head. At my feet sat
Philip--Philip, the king, at my feet! There is a little cap upon his
head, and he is playing the Saraband upon his lute. In the background I
made him paint the highland country of Madrid, which I should look out
upon when I was queen--”
“Yes!” I interrupted excitedly, unable to stand more. “Philip might
have given you a crown; I have given you life. Which is greater? Whom
do you owe the most? Have you no thought of me? My love has brought you
back from the grave, and now you think only of him!”
The little hand on mine fluttered sensitively. I grasped it. Its
delicate touch made me recall what I had read of the fine skin texture
of women of the dark races. I pressed my lips to it with delight. From
it came a peculiar odor, as from some unknown exotic, which took the
senses captive.
Until now I had never loved a woman. I had loved pictures, I had
loved marbles, but a living woman never. Acquaintance with the most
exquisite and exacting of arts had perhaps made my senses superfine.
The slightest physical imperfection was sufficient to spoil my
pleasure. Old age--that physical memory of many wearinesses--filled me
with disgust. Of love I did not ask a return, but the near presence of
something faultless, something which might never pall upon my senses,
something which I might love unrestrainedly.
During the years of concert giving I had been attracted by beautiful
faces, but acquaintance seldom failed to dispel the glamour. Their
possessors were self-seeking, vain, frivolous. Disgust took the place
of admiration. It was a disagreeable sensation which I did not like to
endure for the second time, to find a woman of delicate and sensitive
beauty possessed of the grasping nature of a miser, or caring only for
detail of practical things. Nothing in womankind had made me so dislike
the race as this union of external beauty and prosaic practicability.
Here, for the first time, was a woman whom I could love. She had none
of the traits of the modern woman. She could not prate of things that
disgusted and bored me. In her eyes there was no consciousness of
the life I detested. She was mine in a very real sense because I had
created her. I measured the greatness of my love by the knowledge
that I could love on while knowing that her heart was another’s. If
one loves, it is not necessary to be loved in return. Love is its own
reward. Already I felt its ennobling influence.
Ah! how she enchanted my soul leaning there against the high gilt
sofa’s end! Her black braids swept the floor. Her brown feet from which
the slippers had fallen were folded childishly, showing little pink
nails a-shine.
Every gem of color on her costume was like the dropping of a note of
liquid melody into my soul. She was an exquisite toy of flesh fashioned
for love. She was a fine-wrought gem of palest bronze, from which the
swinging lights struck cream and amber gleams.
“Zarabanda, my Moorish love! You shall learn to care for me and forget
him. I swear it! What a life we will lead together, you and I! He could
have brought Spain to your feet. I will bring the world. You shall see!
You shall see! I will bring the world. I will show this modern age
which loves ugliness--I will show it the noble type of antique beauty!”
Thus I raved in my infatuated dream.
My fervor moved her. She sat up erect. The jewels on her cap danced
brightly. She leaned toward me. I saw that my suit was not to be in
vain. The look of piteous fear within her eyes which had so haunted
me for months was gone. In its place there was a look which, had she
possessed no other charm, would have bound me to her forever. How shall
I describe it?
It was the essence of that which I missed in modern pictures which
represent antique life. It was just that which I missed in the women of
Tadema. It was just that which their eyes had not. It was a look made
up of the accumulated days of living a life totally dissimilar to our
own, a life made up of dissimilar thoughts, pleasures, needs. In short,
I saw within the eyes of Zarabanda the soul of a vanished age. My mind
was filled with a thousand fancies.
Looking at her, I sensed vividly the imperial love-hours of Moorish
beauties who had wantoned by the wall of a thousand towers. Their
purple and palpitant past engulfed me. The penetrating color-joy of
pagan pageants swept my senses, leaving a myriad burnished points of
thought. The voluptuous phantoms of past pleasures intoxicated me. The
life that pagan Spain had lived in ancient days, before Christianity
had come to make bitter upon its lips the wine of joy, was distilled
within my soul. Love, thought, creative fire, lifted life to divinest
height, intensifying all its powers.
Before my feverish and exalted fancy there rose a vision of the East,
the personified East, the seductive East, the glorious and sensuous
East, swathed in a robe of mist which palpitated like the voluptuous
veins of women when the tide of love is high. This vision inundated my
senses in a shimmering wave, which rolled its long, foaming coils of
pleasure over me.
Bending down, I folded her in my arms. I felt her little brown arm slip
round my neck, its softness rivaling the down beneath a sea-gull’s
wing. The penetrating Eastern perfumes struck my face, the blended
sweetness of aloes and ambergris. Her brown breasts became two moons
of gold beneath the shadowy twilight of her throat. The thick hair
with its trailing braids was an Eden of dim and amorous ways, where a
promise dwelled. As I drew her nearer, her eyes became black lakes.
Exquisitely pale her face was, like warm ivory. Nearer and nearer to
me the red mouth came; I knew that upon it dwelled all the sweetness
and all the savors of the South. My lips just brushed it, when, with
a reverberant crash, the great mirror fell and shivered in a thousand
pieces. My arms encircled the empty air. She was gone--gone, and
forever.
Thick dust of powdered chemicals, with which the glass was coated,
filled the air. I hastened to gain the window. Something fell at my
feet. It was her bracelet.
I reached the window just as the sun, its red rays throbbing like a
crown of blood, dipped above the horizon line. By its angry glare I
read upon the golden band, which was all that remained to me now of my
one night of joy, “Philip, To His Moorish Love.”
FOOTNOTES:
[8] From “Diego Velázquez y su Siglo,” by Carlos Justi.
LISZT’S CONCERTO PATHÉTIQUE
It was in the winter of 1906 that the following remarkable incidents
were communicated to me, and truly in a most remarkable manner. But
who may say what shall be the intermediary link, the invisible tie to
connect us with the facts of a vanished past? Who may say what vague
but mentally potent beings dwell on the border line separating the real
from the unreal, floating up perhaps from unthinkable depths of time
and space, there to await the propitious moment for tapping some nerve
of consciousness in us and establishing telegraphic communication with
the soul? Over these spirit wires of thought and feeling they flash
faint messages. They set the nerves a-tingle with the consciousness of
an infinity of unknown lives surrounding our own, of invisible electric
bodies that shock us into the recovery of forgotten memories, of the
realization of a limitless land that spreads beside us and upon the
verge of which we live precariously poised.
On an afternoon in the winter of 1906 I attended a concert given by
two well-known pianists. The _pièce de résistance_ of the concert--it
was for this that I had come--was a two-piano number, the _Concerto
Pathétique_ of Liszt, that sonorous tone tragedy with its wildly
dramatic incidents, interrupted from time to time by a melody of more
than mortal sweetness. As I listened, annoyed by the movements of seat
companions, the bobbing black heads in front, or the dry winter light
that filtered through a window to the right, striking sharply a corsage
ornament or a jewel, and projecting into my eyes daggered light as from
a crystal ball, suddenly my surroundings vanished, and I found myself
alone looking out across a land that I had never seen.
Before me lay a twilight desert, somber and lonely. Gray sand,
uninterrupted by tree or dwelling, as undulating and as barren as the
sea, stretched on and on. After a time I discovered that it was not
twilight that caused the dimness. Upon the horizon there was nothing
to indicate the vanishing of a sun or the future rising of a moon.
Within the sky there were no stars. A Cimmerian twilight lay over all.
I realized then that it was some place of purgatorial punishment,
where sweet light did not come nor green earth growths, nor rain,
nor the sound of leaves. It was a place of puzzling incompleteness
and fragmentary physical form. There were arms twisted and bony and
unattached to bodies, whose bent-fingered hands thirsted for cruelty
or itched for gold. There were legs wrinkled and withered with pain
and curved fantastically. There were backs bowed by the bearing of
burdens, and a multitude of winged and awful faces forming a discordant
chromatic scale of miseries, now flashing out leering and wanton
smiles, and anon fading away into monotonous grayness.
It was a land of disembodied pain, where the shadow forms of sorrow
dwelled. Regret, remorse, shame, misery, and anguish here got
themselves clothed in unearthly substances, and strained futilely
earthward where repentance lay. Here evil thoughts and desires were at
once translated into form, swiftly to fade back again by uncountable
disgusting gradations to the insubstantiality of dreams.
Across this desert a woman fled, breathless with haste and terror. She
was young, scarcely more than a child, as years count, and she would
have been beautiful had not her features been disfigured by grief. Out
behind, a long black robe floated like an emblem of evil, giving to her
appearance a certain cloistral touch. Closer inspection proved it to
be a nun’s cloak. It was unfastened and thrown hastily about her where
it was held together by one small nervous hand. Her hair, which was
pale gold, was short-cropped and curly, and bore the imprint of a close
covering. There was something pitiful in these little clustering curls
of faded gold, which were down-soft like the hair on a baby’s neck.
They told of helplessness and youth. Now in places they were darkened
by the perspiration of fear. Cloistral life and the nun’s hood had
bleached her face and given to it a marble pallor, until it seemed to
radiate light in the general dimness. Her eyes were a dark ethereal
blue. In their depths lay a light made of blended pain, passion, and
regret. As the hideous sand monsters drifted toward her, threatening
to block her way, then vanished to reshape themselves into still more
hideous forms, childishly she opened her mouth to call for help. But
no sound issued from her lips, although the little chin quivered
piteously. I knew that she was dumb and could not speak.
As she sped on, upborne by an unnatural energy, there rang out upon
the desert air a melody of more than mortal sweetness, the brief and
broken fragment of a phrase. As the music died away upon the moonless
space, there fell across the sand the pallid cold radiance of a cross,
but so far away, so etherealized by space and distance, that it was
scarcely more than a shadow’s shadow.
At first, I thought that the music was in some inexplicable way related
to the beauty of her face--that perhaps they were one. There was a
similarity between them. Both set to vibrating the same responsive
fibers of the heart. Both were penetratingly sweet, yet touched with
sorrow.
Further consideration proved this conjecture to be vain, and that the
music came from some alien yet nearby place. I could see by the woman’s
face that it caused her joy and sorrow, and I felt that it always sang
on in her heart, and that her trembling lips tried to frame its sounds.
Yet--in some way I could not understand--it kept her forever outside
the radiance of the cross.