came to grief through her trust in a friend of her mother's. Then she
became a model besides, and was able to support her little brother, whom
she dearly loved.
At the time this story begins, this small waif and stray was "en
pension" with le père Martin, the rag-picker, and his wife, the dealer
in bric-à-brac and inexpensive old masters. They were very good people,
and had grown fond of the child, who was beautiful to look at, and full
of pretty tricks and pluck and cleverness--a popular favorite in the Rue
du Puits d'Amour and its humble neighborhood.
Trilby, for some freak, always chose to speak of him as her godson, and
as the grandchild of le père et la mère Martin, so that these good
people had almost grown to believe he really belonged to them.
And almost every one else believed that he was the child of Trilby (in
spite of her youth), and she was so fond of him that she didn't mind in
the least.
He might have had a worse home.
La mère Martin was pious, or pretended to be; le père Martin was the
reverse. But they were equally good for their kind, and, though coarse
and ignorant and unscrupulous in many ways (as was natural enough), they
were gifted in a very full measure with the saving graces of love and
charity, especially he. And if people are to be judged by their works,
this worthy pair are no doubt both equally well compensated by now for
the trials and struggles of their sordid earthly life.
So much for Trilby's parentage.
And as she sat and wept at Madame Doche's impersonation of la Dame aux
Camélias (with her hand in Durien's) she vaguely remembered, as in a
waking dream, now the noble presence of Taffy as he towered cool and
erect, foil in hand, gallantly waiting for his adversary to breathe,
now the beautiful sensitive face of Little Billee and his deferential
courtesy.
And during the _entr'actes_ her heart went out in friendship to the
jolly Scotch Laird of Cockpen, who came out now and then with such
terrible French oaths and abominable expletives (and in the presence of
ladies, too!), without the slightest notion of what they meant.
For the Laird had a quick ear, and a craving to be colloquial and
idiomatic before everything else, and made many awkward and embarrassing
mistakes.
It would be with him as though a polite Frenchman should say to a fair
daughter of Albion, "D---- my eyes, mees, your tea is getting ---- cold;
let me tell that good old ---- of a Jules to bring you another cup."
And so forth, till time and experience taught him better. It is perhaps
well for him that his first experiments in conversational French were
made in the unconventional circle of the Place St. Anatole des Arts.
[Illustration]
Part Second
"Dieu! qu'il fait bon la regarder,
La gracieuse, bonne et belle!
Pour les grands biens qui sont en elle
Chacun est prêt de la louer."
Nobody knew exactly how Svengali lived, and very few knew where (or
why). He occupied a roomy dilapidated garret, au sixième, in the Rue
Tire-Liard; with a truckle-bed and a piano-forte for furniture, and very
little else.
He was poor; for in spite of his talent he had not yet made his mark in
Paris. His manners may have been accountable for this. He would either
fawn or bully, and could be grossly impertinent. He had a kind of
cynical humor, which was more offensive than amusing, and always laughed
at the wrong thing, at the wrong time, in the wrong place. And his
laughter was always derisive and full of malice. And his egotism and
conceit were not to be borne; and then he was both tawdry and dirty in
his person; more greasily, mattedly unkempt than even a really
successful pianist has any right to be, even in the best society.
He was not a nice man, and there was no pathos in his poverty--a poverty
that was not honorable, and need not have existed at all; for he was
constantly receiving supplies from his own people in Austria--his old
father and mother, his sisters, his cousins, and his aunts,
hard-working, frugal folk of whom he was the pride and the darling.
He had but one virtue--his love of his art; or, rather, his love of
himself as a master of his art--_the_ master; for he despised, or
affected to despise, all other musicians, living or dead--even those
whose work he interpreted so divinely, and pitied them for not hearing
Svengali give utterance to their music, which of course they could not
utter themselves.
"Ils safent tous un peu toucher du biâno, mais pas grand'chose!"
He had been the best pianist of his time at the Conservatory in Leipsic;
and, indeed, there was perhaps some excuse for this overweening conceit,
since he was able to lend a quite peculiar individual charm of his own
to any music he played, except the highest and best of all, in which he
conspicuously failed.
He had to draw the line just above Chopin, where he reached his highest
level. It will not do to lend your own quite peculiar individual charm
to Handel and Bach and Beethoven; and Chopin is not bad as a
_pis-aller_.
He had ardently wished to sing, and had studied hard to that end in
Germany, in Italy, in France, with the forlorn hope of evolving from
some inner recess a voice to sing with. But nature had been singularly
harsh to him in this one respect--inexorable. He was absolutely without
voice, beyond the harsh, hoarse, weak raven's croak he used to speak
with, and no method availed to make one for him. But he grew to
understand the human voice as perhaps no one has understood it--before
or since.
So in his head he went forever singing, singing, singing, as probably no
human nightingale has ever yet been able to sing out loud for the glory
and delight of his fellow-mortals; making unheard heavenly melody of the
cheapest, trivialest tunes--tunes of the café concert, tunes of the
nursery, the shop-parlor, the guard-room, the school-room, the pothouse,
the slum. There was nothing so humble, so base even, but that his magic
could transform it into the rarest beauty without altering a note. This
seems impossible, I know. But if it didn't, where would the magic come
in?
Whatever of heart or conscience--pity, love, tenderness, manliness,
courage, reverence, charity--endowed him at his birth had been swallowed
up by this one faculty, and nothing of them was left for the common uses
of life. He poured them all into his little flexible flageolet.
Svengali playing Chopin on the piano-forte, even (or especially)
Svengali playing "Ben Bolt" on that penny whistle of his, was as one of
the heavenly host.
[Illustration: "AS BAD AS THEY MAKE 'EM"]
Svengali walking up and down the earth seeking whom he might cheat,
betray, exploit, borrow money from, make brutal fun of, bully if he
dared, cringe to if he must--man, woman, child, or dog--was about as bad
as they make 'em.
To earn a few pence when he couldn't borrow them he played
accompaniments at café concerts, and even then he gave offence; for in
his contempt for the singer he would play too loud, and embroider his
accompaniments with brilliant improvisations of his own, and lift his
hands on high and bring them down with a bang in the sentimental parts,
and shake his dirty mane and shrug his shoulders, and smile and leer at
the audience, and do all he could to attract their attention to himself.
He also gave a few music lessons (not at ladies' schools, let us hope),
for which he was not well paid, presumably, since he was always without
the sou, always borrowing money, that he never paid back, and exhausting
the pockets and the patience of one acquaintance after another.
He had but two friends. There was Gecko, who lived in a little garret
close by in the Impasse des Ramoneurs, and who was second violin in the
orchestra of the Gymnase, and shared his humble earnings with his
master, to whom, indeed, he owed his great talent, not yet revealed to
the world.
Svengali's other friend and pupil was (or rather had been) the
mysterious Honorine, of whose conquest he was much given to boast,
hinting that she was "une jeune femme du monde." This was not the case.
Mademoiselle Honorine Cahen (better known in the quartier latin as Mimi
la Salope) was a dirty, drabby little dolly-mop of a Jewess, a model for
the figure--a very humble person indeed, socially.
She was, however, of a very lively disposition, and had a charming
voice, and a natural gift of singing so sweetly that you forgot her
accent, which was that of the "tout ce qu'il y a de plus canaille."
She used to sit at Carrel's, and during the pose she would sing. When
Little Billee first heard her he was so fascinated that "it made him
sick to think she sat for the figure"--an effect, by-the-way, that was
always produced upon him by all specially attractive figure models of
the gentler sex, for he had a reverence for woman. And before everything
else, he had for the singing woman an absolute worship. He was
especially thrall to the contralto--the deep low voice that breaks and
changes in the middle and soars all at once into a magnified angelic boy
treble. It pierced through his ears to his heart, and stirred his very
vitals.
He had once heard Madame Alboni, and it had been an epoch in his life;
he would have been an easy prey to the sirens! Even beauty paled before
the lovely female voice singing in the middle of the note--the
nightingale killed the bird-of-paradise.
I need hardly say that poor Mimi la Salope had not the voice of Madame
Alboni, nor the art; but it was a beautiful voice of its little kind,
always in the very middle of the note, and her artless art had its quick
seduction.
She sang little songs of Béranger's--"Grand'mère, parlez-nous de lui!"
or "T'en souviens-tu? disait un capitaine--" or "Enfants, c'est moi qui
suis Lisette!" and such like pretty things, that almost brought the
tears to Little Billee's easily moistened eyes.
But soon she would sing little songs that were not by Béranger--little
songs with slang words Little Billee hadn't French enough to understand;
but from the kind of laughter with which the points were received by
the "rapins" in Carrel's studio he guessed these little songs were vile,
though the touching little voice was as that of the seraphim still; and
he knew the pang of disenchantment and vicarious shame.
Svengali had heard her sing at the Brasserie des Porcherons in the Rue
du Crapaud-volant, and had volunteered to teach her; and she went to see
him in his garret, and he played to her, and leered and ogled, and
flashed his bold, black, beady Jew's eyes into hers, and she straightway
mentally prostrated herself in reverence and adoration before this
dazzling specimen of her race.
So that her sordid, mercenary little gutter-draggled soul was filled
with the sight and the sound of him, as of a lordly, godlike,
shawm-playing, cymbal-banging hero and prophet of the Lord God of
Israel--David and Saul in one!
And then he set himself to teach her--kindly and patiently at first,
calling her sweet little pet names--his "Rose of Sharon," his "pearl of
Pabylon," his "cazelle-eyed liddle Cherusalem skylark"--and promised her
that she should be the queen of the nightingales.
But before he could teach her anything he had to unteach her all she
knew; her breathing, the production of her voice, its emission--everything
was wrong. She worked indefatigably to please him, and soon succeeded in
forgetting all the pretty little sympathetic tricks of voice and
phrasing Mother Nature had taught her.
[Illustration: "A VOICE HE DIDN'T UNDERSTAND"]
But though she had an exquisite ear, she had no real musical
intelligence--no intelligence of any kind except about sous and
centimes; she was as stupid as a little downy owl, and her voice was
just a light native warble, a throstle's pipe, all in the head and nose
and throat (a voice he _didn't_ understand, for once), a thing of mere
youth and health and bloom and high spirits--like her beauty, such as it
was--_beauté du diable, beauté damnée_.
She did her very best, and practised all she could in this new way, and
sang herself hoarse: she scarcely ate or slept for practising. He grew
harsh and impatient and coldly severe, and of coarse she loved him all
the more; and the more she loved him the more nervous she got and the
worse she sang. Her voice cracked; her ear became demoralized; her
attempts to vocalize grew almost as comical as Trilby's. So that he lost
his temper completely, and called her terrible names, and pinched and
punched her with his big bony hands till she wept worse than Niobe, and
borrowed money of her--five-franc pieces, even francs and
demifrancs--which he never paid her back; and browbeat and bullied and
ballyragged her till she went quite mad for love of him, and would have
jumped out of his sixth-floor window to give him a moment's pleasure!
He did not ask her to do this--it never occurred to him, and would have
given him no pleasure to speak of. But one fine Sabbath morning (a
Saturday, of course) he took her by the shoulders and chucked her, neck
and crop, out of his garret, with the threat that if she ever dared to
show her face there again he would denounce her to the police--an awful
threat to the likes of poor Mimi la Salope!
"For where did all those five-franc pieces come from--_hein?_--with
which she had tried to pay for all the singing-lessons that had been
thrown away upon her? Not from merely sitting to painters--_hein?_"
Thus the little gazelle-eyed Jerusalem skylark went back to her native
streets again--a mere mud-lark of the Paris slums--her wings clipped,
her spirit quenched and broken, and with no more singing left in her
than a common or garden sparrow--not so much!
And so, no more of "la betite Honorine!"
* * * * *
The morning after this adventure Svengali woke up in his garret with a
tremendous longing to spend a happy day; for it was a Sunday, and a very
fine one.
He made a long arm and reached his waistcoat and trousers off the floor,
and emptied the contents of their pockets on to his tattered blanket; no
silver, no gold, only a few sous and two-sou pieces, just enough to pay
for a meagre _premier déjeuner_!
He had cleared out Gecko the day before, and spent the proceeds (ten
francs, at least) in one night's riotous living--pleasures in which
Gecko had had no share; and he could think of no one to borrow money
from but Little Billee, Taffy, and the Laird, whom he had neglected and
left untapped for days.
So he slipped into his clothes, and looked at himself in what remained
of a little zinc mirror, and found that his forehead left little to be
desired, but that his eyes and temples were decidedly grimy. Wherefore,
he poured a little water out of a little jug into a little basin, and,
twisting the corner of his pocket-handkerchief round his dirty
forefinger, he delicately dipped it, and removed the offending stains.
His fingers, he thought, would do very well for another day or two as
they were; he ran them through his matted black mane, pushed it behind
his ears, and gave it the twist he liked (and that was so much disliked
by his English friends). Then he put on his béret and his velveteen
cloak, and went forth into the sunny streets, with a sense of the
fragrance and freedom and pleasantness of Sunday morning in Paris in the
month of May.
He found Little Billee sitting in a zinc hip-bath, busy with soap and
sponge; and was so tickled and interested by the sight that he quite
forgot for the moment what he had come for.
"Himmel! Why the devil are you doing that?" he asked, in his
German-Hebrew-French.
"Doing _what_?" asked Little Billee, in his French of
Stratford-atte-Bowe.
"Sitting in water and playing with a cake of soap and a sponge!"
"Why, to try and get myself _clean_, I suppose!"
"Ach! And how the devil did you get yourself _dirty_, then?"
To this Little Billee found no immediate answer, and went on with his
ablution after the hissing, splashing, energetic fashion of Englishmen;
and Svengali laughed loud and long at the spectacle of a little
Englishman trying to get himself clean--"tâchant de se nettoyer!"
When such cleanliness had been attained as was possible under the
circumstances, Svengali begged for the loan of two hundred francs, and
Little Billee gave him a five-franc piece.
Content with this, _faute de mieux_, the German asked him when he would
be trying to get himself clean again, as he would much like to come and
see him do it.
"Demang mattang, à votre sairveece!" said Little Billee, with a
courteous bow.
"_What!! Monday too!!_ Gott in Himmel! you try to get yourself clean
_every day_?"
And he laughed himself out of the room, out of the house, out of the
Place de l'Odéon--all the way to the Rue de Seine, where dwelt the "Man
of Blood," whom he meant to propitiate with the story of that original,
Little Billee, trying to get himself clean--that he might borrow another
five-franc piece, or perhaps two.
[Illustration: "AND SO, NO MORE."]
As the reader will no doubt anticipate, he found Taffy in his bath too,
and fell to laughing with such convulsive laughter, such twistings,
screwings, and doublings of himself up, such pointings of his dirty
forefinger at the huge naked Briton, that Taffy was offended, and all
but lost his temper.
"What the devil are you cackling at, sacred head of pig that you are?
Do you want to be pitched out of that window into the Rue de Seine? You
filthy black Hebrew sweep! Just you wait a bit; _I'll_ wash your head
for you!"
And Taffy jumped out of his bath, such a towering figure of righteous
Herculean wrath that Svengali was appalled, and fled.
"Donnerwetter!" he exclaimed, as he tumbled down the narrow staircase of
the Hôtel de Seine; "what for a thick head! what for a pig-dog! what for
a rotten, brutal, verfluchter kerl of an Englander!"
Then he paused for thought.
"Now will I go to that Scottish Englander, in the Place St. Anatole des
Arts, for that other five-franc piece. But first will I wait a little
while till he has perhaps finished trying to get himself clean."
So he breakfasted at the crèmerie Souchet, in the Rue Clopin-Clopant,
and, feeling quite safe again, he laughed and laughed till his very
sides were sore.
Two Englanders in one day--as naked as your hand!--a big one and a
little one, trying to get themselves clean!
He rather flattered himself he'd scored off those two Englanders.
After all, he was right perhaps, from his point of view: you can get as
dirty in a week as in a lifetime, so what's the use of taking such a lot
of trouble? Besides, so long as you are clean enough to suit your kind,
to be any cleaner would be priggish and pedantic, and get you disliked.
Just as Svengali was about to knock at the Laird's door, Trilby came
down-stairs from Durien's, very unlike herself. Her eyes were red with
weeping, and there were great black rings round them; she was pale under
her freckles.
"Fous afez du chacrin, matemoiselle?" asked he.
She told him that she had neuralgia in her eyes, a thing she was subject
to; that the pain was maddening, and generally lasted twenty-four hours.
"Perhaps I can cure you; come in here with me."
The Laird's ablutions (if he had indulged in any that morning) were
evidently over for the day. He was breakfasting on a roll and butter,
and coffee of his own brewing. He was deeply distressed at the sight of
poor Trilby's sufferings, and offered whiskey and coffee and gingernuts,
which she would not touch.
Svengali told her to sit down on the divan, and sat opposite to her, and
bade her look him well in the white of the eyes.
"Recartez-moi pien tans le planc tes yeux."
Then he made little passes and counterpasses on her forehead and temples
and down her cheek and neck. Soon her eyes closed and her face grew
placid. After a while, a quarter of an hour perhaps, he asked her if she
suffered still.
"Oh! presque plus du tout, monsieur--c'est le ciel."
In a few minutes more he asked the Laird if he knew German.
"Just enough to understand," said the Laird (who had spent a year in
Düsseldorf), and Svengali said to him in German: "See, she sleeps not,
but she shall not open her eyes. Ask her."
"Are you asleep, Miss Trilby?" asked the Laird.
"No."
"Then open your eyes and look at me."
She strained her eyes, but could not, and said so.
Then Svengali said, again in German, "She shall not open her mouth. Ask
her."
[Illustration: "'TWO ENGLANDERS IN ONE DAY'"]
"Why couldn't you open your eyes. Miss Trilby?" She strained to open her
mouth and speak, but in vain. "She shall not rise from the divan. Ask
her." But Trilby was spellbound, and could not move.
"I will now set her free," said Svengali.
And, lo! she got up and waved her arms, and cried, "Vive la Prusse! me
v'là guérie!" and in her gratitude she kissed Svengali's hand; and he
leered, and showed his big brown teeth and the yellow whites at the top
of his big black eyes, and drew his breath with a hiss.
"Now I'll go to Durien's and sit. How can I thank you, monsieur? You
have taken all my pain away."
"Yes, matemoiselle. I have got it myself; it is in my elbows. But I love
it, because it comes from you. Every time you have pain you shall come
to me, 12 Rue Tire-Liard, au sixième au-dessus de l'entresol, and I will
cure you and take your pain myself--"
"Oh, you are too good!" and in her high spirits she turned round on her
heel and uttered her portentous war-cry, "Milk below!" The very rafters
rang with it, and the piano gave out a solemn response.
"What is that you say, matemoiselle?"
"Oh! it's what the milkmen say in England."
"It is a wonderful cry, matemoiselle--wunderschön! It comes straight
through the heart; it has its roots in the stomach, and blossoms into
music on the lips like the voice of Madame Alboni--voce sulle labbre! It
is good production--c'est un cri du coeur!"
Trilby blushed with pride and pleasure.
"Yes, matemoiselle! I only know one person in the whole world who can
produce the voice so well as you! I give you my word of honor."
"Who is it, monsieur--yourself?"
"Ach, no, matemoiselle; I have not that privilege. I have unfortunately
no voice to produce.... It is a waiter at the Café de la Rotonde, in the
Palais Royal; when you call for coffee, he says 'Boum!' in basso
profondo. Tiefstimme--F. moll below the line--it is phenomenal! It is
like a cannon--a cannon also has very good production, matemoiselle.
They pay him for it a thousand francs a year, because he brings many
customers to the Café de la Rotonde, where the coffee isn't very good.
When he dies they will search all France for another, and then all
Germany, where the good big waiters come from--and the cannons--but they
will not find him, and the Café de la Rotonde will be bankrupt--unless
you will consent to take his place. Will you permit that I shall look
into your mouth, matemoiselle?"
She opened her mouth wide, and he looked into it.
"Himmel! the roof of your mouth is like the dome of the Panthéon; there
is room in it for 'toutes les gloires de la France,' and a little to
spare! The entrance to your throat is like the middle porch of St.
Sulpice when the doors are open for the faithful on All-Saints' day; and
not one tooth is missing--thirty-two British teeth as white as milk and
as big as knuckle-bones! and your little tongue is scooped out like the
leaf of a pink peony, and the bridge of your nose is like the belly of a
Stradivarius--what a sounding-board! and inside your beautiful big chest
the lungs are made of leather! and your breath, it embalms--like the
breath of a beautiful white heifer fed on the buttercups, and daisies of
the Vaterland! and you have a quick, soft, susceptible heart, a heart of
gold, matemoiselle--all that sees itself in your face!
[Illustration: "'HIMMEL! THE ROOF OF YOUR MOUTH'"]
"'Votre coeur est un luth suspendu!
Aussitôt qu'on le touche, il résonne....'
What a pity you have not also the musical organization!"
"Oh, but I _have_, monsieur; you heard me sing 'Ben Bolt,' didn't you?
What makes you say that?"
Svengali was confused for a moment. Then he said: "When I play the
'Rosemonde' of Schubert, matemoiselle, you look another way and smoke a
cigarette.... You look at the big Taffy, at the Little Billee, at the
pictures on the walls, or out of window, at the sky, the chimney-pots of
Notre Dame de Paris; you do not look at Svengali!--Svengali, who looks
at you with all his eyes, and plays you the 'Rosemonde' of Schubert!"
"Oh, maïe, aïe!" exclaimed Trilby; "you _do_ use lovely language!"