"But--do you really not recognize me?" With these words, and with
friendly, outstretched hands, a young lady hastened toward a man who,
with gloomily contracted brow, wrapped in thought, went on his way
without noticing either her or his surroundings. He was foolish, for
his surroundings were picturesque--Rome, near the Fontana di Trevi, on
a bright March afternoon. And the young lady--she was charming.
Although she had called to him in French, something about her--one
could scarcely have told what--betrayed the Russian; everything, the
pampered woman from the highest circles of society.
The young man whose attention she had sought to attract in such a
violent and unconventional manner was just as evidently a Russian, but
of quite a different condition. One could hardly decide to what fixed
sphere of society he belonged, but one perceived immediately that his
manners had never been improved, polished, softened by society
discipline, that he was no man of the world. He was, evidently, a man
who was apart from the rank and file, a man who stood far out from the
conventional frame, a man whom no one could pass without twice looking
after him. His form was large and somewhat heavy; his face, framed by
dark, half-curled hair, in spite of the blunt profile, reminded one of
Napoleon Bonaparte, but Bonaparte in the first romantic period of his
life, before he had become fat and accustomed to pose for the classic
head of Caesar.
She was the Princess Natalie Alexandrovna Assanow; he the feted violin
virtuoso and well-known composer, Boris Lensky.
She had run herself quite out of breath to catch up with him; twice she
had called to him before he heard her; then he looked around and lifted
his hat.
"Boris Nikolaivitch, do you not really recognize me?" said she, now in
Russian, laughing and breathless.
"You here, Princess! Since when? Why have you given me no sign of your
existence?" and he took both the slender girlish hands, still
outstretched to him, in his.
"We only arrived here yesterday from Naples."
"Ah! and I go there to-day." His long-drawn words betrayed very
significantly a certain vexation.
"Yes, to give three concerts there. I know; it was in the newspapers,"
she nodded earnestly, and sighed.
"Hm!" he began; "then--" he hesitated.
"Then you do not understand why I did not wait for the concerts?" said
she, gayly; "it was impossible."
"Impossible?" said he with a short, defiant motion of the head, the
motion of a too-tightly checked race-horse who impatiently jerks at the
bridle. "How so impossible? What word is that from the mouth of a young
lady who has nothing else in the world to do but amuse herself?"
"As if I were independent!" she sighed, with comic despair. "First,
mamma could not leave Naples--hm--for family reasons. My sister is
married there, you know. Then--then--"
"Do not trouble yourself with polite excuses," he interrupted her. "I
see that you are no longer interested in my music;" and, half-jesting,
half-vexed, shrugging his shoulders, he added, "What of it? One must
put up with one's destiny!"
"I am no longer interested in your music!" said she, angrily; "and you
venture to say that to me, even after I have run after you--yes, really
run after you, which is not proper--only to----"
She stopped, her face wore a vexed, indignant expression. "Why did you
do it?" said he, roughly; "it is not becoming."
Instead of losing her self-possession, she laughed heartily. "But,
Boris Nikolaivitch," said she, "you speak as if you were a true man of
the world. However, as you please, I thank you for the lecture. Adieu!"
And nodding her head quite arrogantly, she was about to turn on her
heel, when her look met his. She saw that she had vexed him, remained
standing, blushed, and lowered her eyes.
The waters of the Acqua Nigo foamed and sparkled gayly between the
edges of the stone basin which Nicolo Salvi had made for them; the
noonday church-bells mingled their deep, solemn voices with the
caressing rippling of the waves; the sun shone full from the deep-blue,
ice-cold heaven, a glaring, unpleasant March sun, which was light
without warming, like the condescending smile of a great man, and
Natalie's maid who, grumbling and bored, stood a step behind her young
mistress, opened a round, green fan to shield her eyes, and at the same
time stamped her feet from the cold. Around, the Roman life went on in
its usual lazy way. Before a small, loaded cart stood a mule with a
number of red and blue tassels about its ears and on its forehead hung
a brass image of the Virgin. In the door of a vegetable shop, from
which came a strong smell of herbs, crouched a black-eyed, white Spitz
dog, that twitched its right ear uneasily. A fat, smooth-headed
Capuchin passed by, then came two shabbily dressed young people. The
Capuchin stopped to scratch the mule's head, the young people nudged
each other, and said in an undertone, while they pointed to the
virtuoso: "_E Borisso Lensky_."
"There you have it," said the princess, shaking off her vexation
with a charming, pleasant smile, and her head bent one side. "Great
man that you are, and still you take it amiss in me." She said
nothing more, only raised her great blue eyes and gave him a look, a
never-to-be-forgotten look, behind whose roguishness a riddle was
concealed.
"I take nothing amiss in you," said he, earnestly.
"Really nothing? Now, then, I can tell you how much, oh! how much, I
have longed to hear you play again, that I, _coute qu'il coute_, seized
the opportunity to ask you to stop in Rome on your return from Naples
only to--" She hesitated, as if she were suddenly afraid of being
indiscreet.
"Only to play something for the Princess Natalie Alexandrovna Assanow,"
he completed her sentence, laughing. "Good. I will come, Natalie
Alexandrovna; in two weeks I am there. But if you are then in Florence
or Nice----"
She was about to make a very positive assertion, when a slender,
fashionably dressed man, with a very high hat and faultless gloves,
passed by them, greeted the princess respectfully, and, with a slight
squint, measured Lensky from head to foot. Lensky recognized in him an
officer of the guard, Count Konstantin Paulovitch Pachotin, and
remembered last winter, during the season in St. Petersburg, he paid
court to Natalie. The scrutinizing look of the young man vexed him
beyond bounds; everything looked red before him. "Ah! he here?" he
asked the young princess with mocking emphasis. "May one congratulate
you?"
She frowned and turned away her head. "No!" murmured she. Then raising
her wonderful eyes to him again: "So, farewell for two weeks!"
"Perhaps."
"Say positively, I beg you, and throw the traditional soldo in the
fountain."
"With the best of intentions, I cannot do that; I have none with me,"
he laughed, now involuntarily.
She was charming. She wore a brown velvet bonnet that was fastened
under the chin with broad ribbons. She had pushed back her veil, and
the transparent brown gauze shining in the sun formed a golden
background for her pretty, pale face. It was cold, although the
beginning of March, and therefore her tall figure was wrapped to the
feet in a sable-trimmed velvet cloak, beneath which a scarcely visible
silk dress rustled very melodramatically. A delicate perfume of amber
and fresh violets exhaled from her.
"You have no soldo?" said she; "then I will lend you one." She
earnestly sought in her portemonnaie, whereupon she handed him the
coin. He threw it in the basin of the noisy, rippling Fontana di Trevi.
The water sparkled golden for a moment, when the coin sank, and tried
to form circles, but the spouting gayety of the cascade obliterated
them.
"You will come!" said Natalie, laughing gayly.
"Yes, I will come," said he, not gayly as she, but gloomily, even
grumbling. "But if you are not there," he added, "or----"
She had already turned to go, and without replying anything to his last
words, she called to him over her shoulder:
"_Via Giulia Palazzo Morsini!_"
He looked after her for a long time. The fashionable dress at that time
was very ugly. This little scene took place in the fifties, when the
Empress Eugenie had again brought into favor the hoop-skirt which had
disappeared quite a half-century before. But still Natalie Alexandrovna
was charming. How peculiar her walk was, so light and still a little
dragging, dreamily gliding, withal not weary, but with a peculiar
certain characteristic rhythm. He thoughtfully hummed a melody to it.
Yes, he would come back. Whether he would have come back if the glance
of the officer of the guard had not angered him? He must see, must
teach this dandy!
* * * * *
"You speak just as if you were a true man of the world," the princess
had replied to his--as he angrily told himself--highly unsuitable and
tasteless advice. Now it might perhaps be small; yes, certainly it was
small, but sometimes, sometimes he would secretly have preferred to be
a true man of the world instead of being--a celebrity.
"She ran after me!" he said to himself again. "Why did she run after
me? It was charming in her she would not have done it for any one else!
Bah! She is still only like all the others!" And the great artist,
whose life resembled a continual triumphal procession, of whom already
a finger-thick biography with glaringly false dates had appeared, and
concerning whom the papers every day reported something remarkable,
suddenly felt a kind of envy of Count Konstantin Paulovitch Pachotin, a
St. Petersburg dandy, whose name had never been in the papers, and whom
he despised for his narrow-mindedness.
He was a great genius, but, like many other great geniuses, he was of
quite obscure parentage. Some asserted he came from that horrible
citadel of the poor in Moscow where misery intrenches itself against
progress, in filth, stupidity, and vice; others said he had been found,
a scarcely week-old child, wrapped in rags, before the door of the
Conservatory in St. Petersburg. There were really all kinds of accounts
in the papers. This one said that he was the son of a princess of the
blood and a gypsy; that one, that he descended from an old princely
family of the Czechs, and many other such romantic inventions. He
shrugged his shoulders scornfully at all such improvisations, without
refuting them by accurate personal accounts. How did the cold, hungry,
maltreated sadness of his first youth concern the world? Now he was
Boris Lensky, one of the first musicians of his time. Everything else
could be indifferent to the man. It was indifferent to them; it was
quite indifferent to them all, only not to him. The wounds which the
tormenting martyrdom of his childhood had torn in his heart had never
quite healed; therefore he showed a sensitiveness and irritability
which even the most sympathetic person could scarcely comprehend.
But now he fared very well in the world. No one was so pampered, so
caressed as he.
His playing exercised such a penetrating, sense-ensnaring charm that
his listeners, transported in a kind of musical intoxication, lost
their capability of judging, and even the most well-bred women crowded
around him with allegiance so exaggerated that it tore down the
boundary of every customary demeanor.
Another would have enjoyed this allegiance without thinking further of
it; but for Lensky, on the contrary, it had a repellent effect. Child
of the people to the finger-tips, totally unused to the customs of
fashionable circles, his feeling of propriety was as wounded by what he
plainly called insolent shamelessness as that of a peasant who for the
first time sees a woman with bare shoulders.
Besides his sense of propriety, there was another that was wounded by
the lack of reserve which great ladies showed him, and that was his
pride. Not only gifted with musical genius, but with a very clear head,
he soon perceived that if the ladies of the great world permitted
themselves freer manners with him than did women of a more modest
sphere of life, they still took liberties with him of which they would
have been ashamed in association with companions of their own rank.
"_Mon dieu, avec un virtuose, cela ne tire pas a consequence_," he once
heard an elegant little St. Petersburg woman say. He never forgot the
words, and in consequence received all the feminine allegiance of good
society with hostile distrust.
He usually excused the tactless exuberance of a poorly cared for, badly
brought up woman of the Conservatory. In society of this kind, of
saddened womanly existence, incessantly touched with pity, he showed
kindness to the sad enthusiasts wherever he could, and laughed at their
tasteless animation. But for the great ladies, who should have known
better, who thought that they alone held the monopoly of good form, and
who still pursued a man like wild beasts--for these he had no
consideration. His roughness in intercourse with them had become almost
as proverbial as the success which he attained with them.
Still, in his home he quite unconsciously accustomed himself to an
aristocratic atmosphere, and, with the refined sense of a true artist
nature, susceptible to all beauty and distinction, in association with
great ladies he felt a mixture of irritation and pleasure, while
pleasure gradually won the upper hand; and in foreign countries, where
he was received only exceptionally and with official solemnity, and
really had intimate access to salons of the second rank only, he
renounced intercourse with that refined world which he abused, like so
many others, without being able to escape its perfidious charm, and
felt, every time that he met one of his despised pretty St. Petersburg
or Moscow enthusiasts, an unmistakable joy.
Two weeks after his meeting with Natalie at the Fontana di Trevi,
Lensky appeared for the first time in the Palazzo Morsini. From a very
large staircase, whose beauties he must admire by the light of the wax
matches which he had brought in his pocket, he stumbled into a large
vestibule, from which the servant conducted him through a heavy
portiere, painted with coats of arms as high as a man, into an immense
drawing-room with soiled and faded yellow damask hangings and
furniture.
"Monsieur Lensky!" announced the servant.
The virtuoso was accustomed to a universal exclamation following the
announcement of his name, and the looks of the whole assembly should be
directed to him.
Nothing of the sort this time. Natalie sat near an old French lady,
Marquise de C., whose knitting she kindly helped to arrange, and as the
young Russian introduced the virtuoso to her, she raised her lorgnette
and said: "Monsieur Lensky--ah! _vraiment_, that is very interesting!"
whereupon, without further troubling herself about him, she continued
to speak to Natalie of all kinds of social affairs, the marriage of
Marie X., the debts of Alexander T., the trousseau of Aurelie Z., and
the boldness of that parvenu A.
For the present he could not approach the hostess. She warded him
off with a nod from the distance, for she was engaged in a very
exciting occupation. Although the universal interest for spiritualistic
table-tapping and moving was already quite over, the repetition of this
experiment, which strangely enough often succeeded in the Palazzo
Morsini, was one of the favorite pastimes of Natalie's mother, the
Princess Irina Dimitrievna Assanow. She now sat at a table in the
middle of the drawing-room between many others, most of them old
Russians, men and women; opposite her a thin, very young man with long,
straight, blond hair, a well-known magnetizer.
It seemed to Lensky as if he had never seen anything more laughable
than these half-dozen almost exclusively gray-haired people who sat
with solemn bearing and attentive faces around a table whose edge they
could just surround with hands stretched out as far as possible.
Those present who did not directly participate in the attempt to
bewitch the table, stood around observing the interesting round
surface.
But the table continued in a state of desperately exciting passivity.
Lensky, usually specially invited to soirees, of which he formed the
centre of attraction, felt humiliated by the four-legged wooden rival,
who, to-day, took all the attention away from him.
At last the old French woman turned to the observation of the table,
which permitted the young girl to devote herself a little to Lensky,
rapidly becoming more gloomy; then the door opened and the butler
announced Count Pachotin. The virtuoso felt not at all pleasantly
toward the young dandy when he asked him unusually kindly and
sympathetically whether he was contented with the result of his last
concert tour.
After Pachotin had fulfilled the condescension, which as a finely
cultivated nobleman he thought he owed to an artistic star he turned to
Natalie and from then ignored Lensky as completely as the Marquise de
C. had done. Lensky meanwhile morosely pulled long horse-hairs from the
holes in the thread-bare arms of the damask chair. He was very helpless
in spite of his already great renown. His actions in society were
solely confined to playing and permitting the ladies to rave over him.
He did not understand how to take an inconspicuous part in the
conversation, and to cross the room for any other purpose than to take
up his violin made him quite giddy.
The table meanwhile still refused to move. The excitement became
general.
"_Voyons_, M. Lensky," called the Marquise de C., suddenly turning to
the young artist, lorgnette at her eyes; "if you should give us a
little music perhaps it would act upon the legs of this stiff-necked
table."
A man quick at repartee would have answered the silly remark with a gay
jest. But Lensky grew deathly pale, sprang up; in that moment the
resisting sacrifice of magnetism began to totter and tremble.
Even Pachotin left his place near Natalie in order to watch closely the
interesting spectacle. The magnetizers rose and, with earnest,
triumphant faces, accompanied the table, which now seemed to have
entered into the spirit of the affair and took the most remarkable
steps with its wooden legs.
"_Vous partez deja_?" asked Natalie, coming up to the virtuoso.
"I am no longer needed," said Lensky, with a glance at the table, and
bowed without touching the outstretched hand of the young girl.
Without, in the vestibule just as he was about to put his arms in the
overcoat which the servant held out to him, he saw the princess, who
had hastened after him.
[Illustration: "I cannot let you go away angry," said she. _p. 23_.]
"I cannot let you go away angry," said she. "Come to-morrow to lunch.
We never receive in the morning, but you will be welcome."
This time he took her hand in his, and looked in her eyes with a
peculiar mixture of anger and tenderness.
"You know I do everything that you wish," murmured he; "but----"
"Well?" She smiled pleasantly and encouragingly. He turned away his
head and went.
"Perhaps in reality she is only like the others, but still she is
bewitching!" he murmured, as he stumbled down the old marble steps of
the palace in the darkness.
* * * * *
Yes, she was bewitching. Many still remember how charming she was at
that time. She was from Moscow, and a true Moscow woman; that is to
say, deeper, more polished, more intellectual, than the average St.
Petersburg woman, whom a pert Frenchman has described as "_Parisiennes
a la sauce tartare_." Lensky had met her the former year at her
relatives' in Petersburg, where they had sent her for the ball season,
perhaps with the idea that she would make a good match.
Her domestic circumstances were quite disturbed. Her mother, a former
beauty, and who in her youth had been much admired at the court of
Alexander I., could not adapt herself to her poverty--that is to say,
she absolutely could not exist on the very moderate remains of a
splendid property which her husband had squandered. She never
complained; she only never kept within her means. She was always
planning new reforms, but her most saving plans always proved costly
when carried out.
When she summoned Natalie home from St. Petersburg the former May she
had just formed a quite special resolution: she would travel to a
foreign country, in order, as she expressed it, to be unconstrainedly
shabby and economical. Her unconstrained shabbiness in Rome consisted
in living in a very picturesque _palazzo_ with two maids brought with
her from Russia, a male factotum, and a number of Italian assistants;
by day, clad in a faded sky-blue _peignoir_, stretched on a lounge,
alternately reading French novels and playing patience; in the evening,
receiving an amusing assembly of _gens du monde_ and celebrities, among
whom the already mentioned magnetizer enjoyed her especial sympathy, at
dinner or tea. Her economy culminated in locking up the most trifling
articles with great punctiliousness and never being able to find the
keys; for which reason the locksmith must be frequently summoned.
The Russian maids naturally never moved their hands, the Italian
assistants wiped the dust from one piece of furniture to another, and
so the household would really have made quite an impression of having
come down in the world if the butler, whom they had brought with them
had not saved it by his aristocratic prestige. A Frenchman and valet of
the deceased prince, Monsieur Baptiste was not only outwardly
decorative, but of a useful nature. His principal occupation consisted
in sitting in the vestibule, with finely-shaved upper lip and imposing
side-whiskers, intrenched behind a newspaper, and overpowering the
creditors if they ventured to present their unpaid bills.
* * * * *
Lensky had resolved to leave Rome the next day, and to ignore the
invitation of the princess. Returned to the hotel, he immediately set
about packing; that is to say, he in all haste wrapped and squeezed his
effects together in any manner and threw them in his trunk as one
throws potatoes in a sack. Then he ordered his bill from the waiter and
a carriage for the next morning. When the waiter at the appointed hour
presented the bill and announced the carriage he showed him out. From
ten o'clock on he drew out his chronometer every quarter of an hour; at
twelve he appeared in the Palazzo Morsini.
"You are punctual," said the princess, stretching out her hand to him;
"that is nice of you. I was terribly afraid that you would not come. We
are quite among ourselves; only mamma and we two. Does that suit you?"
Again she bent her head to one side and looked at him with that
peculiar glance, behind whose roguishness a riddle was concealed. What
was it? Something sweet, perhaps something tender, earnest--or only a
gay triumph or planned conquest?
Meanwhile it cost him the greatest self-restraint not to fall at her
feet immediately, so charming and beautiful was she. Everything about
her was beautiful: her tall but beautifully rounded figure; her pale
oval face, framed in dark hair; her remarkable eyes, usually dreamily
half closed, and then suddenly looking at one so large and full; her
long small hands and her little feet. No Andalusian had a smaller,
slenderer, more finely-arched foot than Natalie. He had scarcely time
to reply to her amiability, when the butler announced that luncheon was
served, and they went into the dining-room.
It was a peculiar luncheon. The old princess presided in a wrapper. The
lukewarm dishes--brought every day from a restaurant in a tin box,
which Lensky had met on the steps were served by Monsieur Baptiste on
the largely shattered remnants of a Florentine faience service with
noticeable correctness. A broad golden sunbeam lay on the table between
Lensky and Natalie and gave the most extravagantly unsuitable colors to
the flowers which shed their fragrance from a low Japanese porcelain
bowl in the middle of the table, and over these flowers, sparkling like
diamonds, he looked at her.
She ate little and talked a great deal, told all kinds of droll
stories; one witty anecdote followed the other. He could not weary of
listening to her. Yes, even if what she said had not interested him, he
would not tire of hearing her. The sweet, somewhat veiled tone of her
voice seemed like a caress to his sensitive ear.
* * * * *
"I would like to ask you something, Boris Nikolaivitch," said the old
princess later, while they were taking coffee, in the drawing-room.
"I am at your disposition entirely, Princess," Lensky hastened to
assure her.
"It is about my violins," she began, in a drawling, whining voice,
which was her manner, and meant nothing.
"But, mamma," Natalie hastily interrupted her, "this is not the
moment----"
"Pray, permit me," said Lensky; and turning to the princess, "so it is
about your violins?"
"Yes. My husband--you know what an excellent player he was," continued
the old lady, "has left three violins. People have always told me they
were worth a small fortune, but I did not wish to part with them at any
price. I ask you--a souvenir. But finally--times are hard, and one must
not be too hard on the peasants, and, besides, as none of my children
play the violin, however musical they are--well, I would be very glad
if you would try the instruments and incidentally value them.
"You could perhaps advise me--yes---- What is the matter, Natascha?"
For Natalie had blushed to the roots of her hair. Tears stood in her
eyes.
Boris guessed that she feared he would look upon the explanation of her
mother as a bid.
"I remember the violins very well," he hastened to assure her;
"especially one of them excited my envy. It would please me very much
to try them again."
The servant brought the violins and at the same time a pile of hastily
snatched-up violin music, smelling of dust, dampness, and camphor. The
wonderfully beautiful instruments were in a pitiable condition--half of
the strings were gone, those that remained were brittle and dry. But
still there was a small stock of them. After Boris, with the loving
patience and surgical skill with which only a true violinist handles an
Amati, had put it in a suitable condition and then tuned it, he drew
the bow softly across it. A strangely sweet, tender, sad sound vibrated
through the great empty room. It seemed as if the violin awoke with a
sigh from an enchanted sleep. A pleasant shudder passed over Natalie.
Lensky bent his cheek to the splendid instrument like a lover. "Shall
we try something?" said he, and took from the pile of notes a nocturne
of Chopin, transposed for the violin, opened the piano, the only good
and costly piece of furniture in the room, and laid the notes on the
music-rack. "Now, Natalie Alexandrovna, may I beg you?"
Quite frightened by his artistic greatness--yes, trembling from
charming embarrassment--she sat down at the piano.
His violin began to sing; how full and soft, so delightfully
languishing, and also somewhat veiled, as is usually the case with an
instrument unused for years.
"How beautiful!" murmured Natalie, with eyes sparkling with animation.
"Yes, it is a splendid instrument," replied Lensky. "You cannot imagine
what it is to play on an instrument which understands one. It is still
only a little bit sleepy, but we will awaken it."
He placed a sonata of Beethoven before Natalie. They were alone. After
the first bar of the nocturne the princess had fallen asleep, at the
last she had waked, and had retired, with the remark that she could
hear much better in the adjoining room.
"Will you really tolerate my accompaniment?" murmured the young girl.
"And do you wish to hear again, vain little princess, what I already
told you in St. Petersburg, that I have seldom found a more sympathetic
accompaniment than yours?" he replied.
She was an uncommonly good pianist, and with an unusually fine
divination followed all the shades of his art. One piece followed the
other. After awhile a certain relaxation was perceptible in her.
"You are tired," said he, breaking off in the middle of the first
phrase of Mendelssohn's G-minor concerto. "I should not have given you
so much to do. Pardon me."
"Oh, what does that matter," said she, while she let her hands slide
from the keys. "It was splendid, only, do you see, I feel as if I am a
dragging-shoe for you. I would like to have a wish, a great immoderate
wish. I would like to hear you once alone, without accompaniment, from
your heart. Give me one glance into your soul, make your musical
confession to me!"
He felt a peculiar twitching and burning in his finger-tips. He would
rather have killed himself than let her glance into his inmost soul, as
the condition of that soul had been until then.
"Do not ask that of me," said he, hoarsely.
"It was very immodest in me, excuse me," said she hastily and confused.
"Oh, that is nothing," he assured her. "Do you think that I will spare
the little bit of pleasure that I can perhaps give you, only--but if
you really wish it--as far as I am concerned----"
He took up the violin.
It was a different affair now. Dragging-shoe or not in any case her
accompaniment had had a calming and perhaps purifying effect on his
musical instincts. With her he had played as a wonderfully deeply
sensitive and technically cultivated virtuoso; in spite of all the
heartfelt fulness of tone and vibrating passion, he had scarcely passed
the boundary of musical conventionality. It had been the highest
possibility of a quiet, artistic performance; but what Natalie now
heard was no longer art, but something at once splendid and fearful. It
was also no longer a violin on which he played, but a strange,
enchanted instrument that she had never known formerly and that he
himself had invented; an instrument from which everything that sounds
the sweetest and saddest on earth vibrated, from the low voice of a
woman to the soft, complaining sigh of the waves dying on the shore. A
depth of genial musical eloquence burst forth under his bow.
Inconsolable pain--dry, hard, cutting; tender teasing, winning grace,
mad rejoicing, a wild confusion of passion and music, the height and
depth of neck-breaking technical extravagance.
But what was most peculiar about his playing, and had the most magical
effect, was neither the mad bravura nor the flattering grace, but
something oppressive, mysterious, that crept maliciously into the heart
and veins, ensnaring and paralyzing--a thing of itself, a strange
horror. Again and again, like a mysterious call, appeared in his
improvisation the same bewitching, exciting succession of tones, taken
from the Arabian folk-songs, the devil's music.
Suddenly he seemed to be beside himself; he drew the bow across the
violin as if beset by an untamable, passionate excitement. It was no
longer one violin which one heard; it was twenty violins, or, rather,
twenty demons, who howled and cried together.
With hands lightly folded in her lap, and head leaned back against her
chair, Natalie had listened. In the beginning she had been carried out
of herself by a feeling of painfully sweet happiness. But now she felt
strangely oppressed. It seemed to her as if something pulled at every
fibre, every nerve, as if her heart was bursting. She would have liked
to cry out and hold her ears, and still did not move, but listened
eagerly to that piercing, wild, passionate tone. Never had she felt
within her such hot, beating, intense life as in this hour. Her whole
past existence now seemed to her like a long, stupid lethargy, from
which she had at last been awakened. Tears flowed from her eyes. Then
his look met hers. A kind of shame at his brutality overcame him, and
his playing died away in sad, sweet, anguished tenderness. With
contracted brows and trembling hands, he laid down the violin. "You
wished it!" said he. "You should not have asked it of me. I can refuse
you nothing. God! how pale you are! I have made you ill!"
She smiled at his anxious exaggeration, then murmured softly, as if
in a dream: "It was wonderfully beautiful, and I shall never forget
it--never forget it, only----"
"What have you to object?"
"Shall I really tell you?"
"Certainly; I beg you to."
"Well," she began, hesitatingly, with a somewhat uneasy smile, as if
she was afraid of wounding his irritable artistic sensibility, "I ask
myself how one can abuse an instrument from which one can charm such
bewitching harmonies, and which one loves as you love your violin, as
you have just now abused it?"
He was silent for a moment, surprised, looked at the violin with a
loving, compassionate glance, as if it were a living being. Then he
passed his hand across his forehead.
"I do not know how it is," said he, confusedly. "Sometimes something
comes over me. Ah! if you knew what it is to have, all one's life, such
a sultry, sneaking thunderstorm in one's veins as I have. Sometimes it
bursts forth; it must have vent. I cannot rule myself. Teach me how!"
He said that, so naively ashamed, quite pleadingly, like a great child;
he had strangely warm, touching tones in his deep, rough voice.
* * * * *
When Lensky presented himself again, the next day, in the Palazzo
Morsini, and, indeed, this time to arrange the purchase of the
wonderful violin, the princess called out gayly to him:
"The violins are no longer to be had. I have bought all three. I gave
all my savings for them. If you wish to play on them, you must come
here. But you may come as often as you wish!"
"For how long?" asked he, with a peculiar tremble in his voice.
She turned away her head. After awhile she said, apparently
irrelevantly, with her gay, ingenuous smile, that still never quite
banished the sadness from her pale face: "Do you know that we are
really as poor as church mice? It is comical. Mamma consoles herself
with the thought that I will make a good match. If she should be
mistaken, what a tragedy!"
She laughed merrily. What did she mean by that?
* * * * *
He came oftener and oftener to the old palace in the Via Giulia; came
every day, indeed.
Formerly intercourse with women of rank had always formed only a short
parenthesis in his otherwise dissolute life. Now the couple of hours,
or sometimes they were only minutes, which he daily passed with the
Assanows were the key-note of all the rest of his existence. How happy
he felt with them!
If elsewhere the great society ladies had raved over the artist Lensky
to an immoderate extent, they had quite ignored the man. But with the
Assanows it was different, or at least it seemed so. His fame was not
put forward from morning to night. There were days in which his
violin-playing was not even mentioned. The artist stopped in the
background, and in association with Natalie and her mother he was no
star, no lion, only a very wise, peculiar, sympathetic man, who pleased
quite aside from his artistic gifts. Besides, with them he appeared
differently than with any one else in the world.
His petulant defiance disappeared, as well as the helplessness for
which it was a shield.
He was completely uncultivated from the foundation. Grown up among
ignorant men who profited by his early unfolding talent, and misused it
in order to earn money thereby; sentenced consequently as a child to
just as many hours of hard musical practice as his poor still
undeveloped body could endure, he had, at fourteen years of age, when
he could barely read and write, not even the consciousness of his lack
of knowledge. That came later, came when great people began to be
interested in him. But then it was painful and humiliating beyond
measure.
Whatever one can acquire in later years he acquired. Another would have
made a show of the astonishing amount of reading which he had
accomplished in the course of years, but he never learned to display
his lately won intellectual riches with grace. He had not the frivolity
of superficial men. Much too clever not to be conscious that his little
bit of supplementary cultivation was still only patchwork, even if made
of very noble, large patches, he confined his remarks in society, if
the conversation was upon anything but music, to a few heavy
commonplaces.
With Natalie and her mother it was quite different. He never, indeed,
spoke very much, but everything that he said was characteristic,
stimulating, interesting, and as, in spite of his sad lack of
education, he was free from narrow provincialisms and affectations, and
with the capability of assimilation of all barbarians, understood
exactly Natalie's pure and poetic being, he never wounded her by a
coarse lack of tact, but attracted her doubly by the austere
unconventionality of his manner.
Every day he became more sympathetic to her; she had long been
indispensable to him.
He was suddenly struck with horror of his past. It seemed to him as if
everything that was beautiful in his life had just begun when her pure
bright apparition had entered it. She had brought a cooling, healing
element to his sultry existence. It was as if one had opened a window
in a room full of oppressive vapor--a great breath of sweet, spicy air
had purified the atmosphere.
A large part of his intellectual self which had formerly lain fallow,
now grew and blossomed. Often, in the morning, he accompanied the
ladies to some art collection. Very frequently he occupied a place in
the carriage which the princess had hired for their drives.
Every one looked after the carriage, and observed with the same
interest the wonderfully beautiful girl, and the great artist, who was
not handsome, but whose face once seen could never be forgotten.
What was most remarkable about it was the difference between the
expression of his eyes and that of his mouth, a difference which
betrayed the entire quality of his inner nature. While his eyes had a
spying, at times quite enthusiastic, expression, around the mouth was a
trace of intense earthly thirst for enjoyment.
This mingling predestinated him to that eternal discontent of certain
great natures who can just as little accustom themselves, on the earth,
to a condition of bloodless asceticism as to one of mindless
materialism. The first desires no enjoyment of the world, the second
pleases itself with whatever is to be had in the world. Those men only
who seek the heavenly spark in earthly joys remain forever deceived
here. He was destined never to cease to seek it. Even in gray old age,
when his finely cut lips were satiated with enjoyment, and were fixed
in a grimace of incessant, sad disgust, his eyes still sought it.
* * * * *
His colleagues in St. Petersburg asked each other what kept him so long
in Rome. He wrote one of them that he was working, and indeed he did
work. Through his soul vibrated melodies full of bewitching sad
loveliness, full of the rejoicing and complaint of a longing which
could not yet attain the longed-for happiness.
And there in Rome, in those mild fragrant spring nights, he wrote a
cyclus of songs which might rank at the side of the most beautiful
musical lyrics ever written.
In spite of their full richness of melody, his earlier compositions had
something too glaring, overladen, and trivially pleasing; they were too
much influenced by his virtuosity to please for themselves. In his
Roman cyclus of songs he showed himself for the first time a great
musician. And as until then he had distrusted his talent as composer,
he was pleasantly astonished over his own achievement.
He always worked at night. His writing-table stood in front of the
window of his room which looked out on the Piazza di Spagna. Very often
his glance wandered there. A dark-blue heaven lighted by thousands of
stars arched above the broad, irregular place, over the antique
columns, from whose height a modern art nonentity looks down on Rome.
All was silent, only the water, the resonant soul of Rome, tittered and
sobbed in the basins and fountains, and spouted up jubilantly in damp
silver streams, greeting from afar the unattainable heavens, and all
the tittering, sobbing, and rejoicing united in a long vibrating broken
chord.
Still vibrating in every fibre at the recollection of Natalie's
farewell smile, he sat at his shaky table and wrote. The mild night
wind, fragrant with the kisses which it had stolen from the magnolia
and orange blossoms, crept in to him and caressed his hot cheeks. He
inhaled it eagerly. He had often been warned of the Roman night air,
but he did not think of the warning, and if he had--? He was in that
happy mood in which man no longer believes in sickness and death.
The hateful melancholy which as he said often pressed him down to the
ground, and tormented him with predictions of his final annihilation,
was gone. He no longer saw, as formerly, an open grave at his feet.
Heaven had opened to him. An indescribable, light, elevating feeling
had overpowered him; he no longer felt the weight of his body. Had his
wings, then, grown in Rome?
* * * * *
He did not think what would come of all this. He did not wish to think
of it; did not wish to see clearly. With closed eyes he walked through
life--the angels led him.
* * * * *
It was the beginning of May, and he had finished his cyclus of songs.
With a beating heart he entered the Palazzo Morsini to ask Natalie
whether he might dedicate it to her.
The young princess was not at home, but her mother would be very happy
to see him, they told him.
It was very hot, the blinds were all lowered. The princess lay on a
lounge and fanned herself with a peacock feather fan.
After she had complained of the heat, she began to speak to him of all
kinds of family affairs. Her son had the best of opportunities to make
a career for himself, said she; her eldest daughter, who was far less
pretty than Natalie, added the princess, had married very well; her
husband was indeed a wealthy diplomat. "_Mois, je suis pauvre_,"
concluded the old lady; "but I could live quite without care, if
Natalie were only married. But she will hear nothing of that. She lets
the best years of her life pass, and if you only knew what good matches
she has refused. Pachotin has already offered himself twice to her, and
if you please----"
Just then a gay voice interrupted the inconsolable elegy. "Mamma, how
can any one boast so?" Natalie had entered, a large black hat on her
head, in her arms a huge bunch of flowers.
"I did not boast--I complained," replied the old woman, sighing.
After Natalie had greeted Lensky with her usual friendliness, she laid
the flowers on the table and arranged them in the vases which an
Italian chambermaid had brought her.
"Ah, Natalie, why will you have none of them?" sighed the princess.
"Little mother, I can love but once," replied Natalie, bending her
brown head over the flowers. "I have told you I will not marry until I
have found some one quite extraordinary--a hero or a genius."
"Am I dreaming, or did she look at me with those words?" Lensky asked
himself. "But why did she turn her eyes away so quickly when they met
mine?"