Rafael spent a sleepless night tossing about in his bed.
Party admirers had honored him with a serenade that had lasted beyond
midnight. The "prominents" among them had shown some pique at having
cooled their heels all afternoon at the Club waiting for the deputy in
vain. He put in an appearance well on towards evening, and after shaking
hands once more all around and responding to speeches of congratulation,
as he had done that morning, he went straight home.
He had not dared raise his head in Doña Bernarda's presence. He was
afraid of those glowering eyes, where he could read, unmistakably, the
detailed story of everything he had done that afternoon. At the same
time he was nursing a resolve to disobey his mother, meet her
domineering, over-bearing aggressiveness with glacial disregard.
The serenade over, he had hurried to his room, to avoid any chance of an
accounting.
Snug in his bed, with the light out, he gave way to an intense, a
rapturous recollection of all that had taken place that afternoon. For
all the fatigue of the journey and the bad night spent in a
sleeping-car, he lay there with his eyes open in the dark, going over
and over again in his feverish mind all that Leonora told him during
that final hour of their walk through the garden. Her whole, her real
life's story it had been, recorded in a disordered, a disconnected
way--as if she must unburden herself of the whole thing all at
once--with gaps and leaps that Rafael now filled in from his own lurid
imagination.
Italy, the Italy of his trip abroad, came back to him now, vivid,
palpitant, vitalized, glorified by Leonora's revelations.
The shadowy majestic Gallery of Victor Emmanuel at Milan! The immense
triumphal arch, a gigantic mouth protended to swallow up the Cathedral!
The double arcade, cross-shaped, its walls covered with columns, set
with a double row of windows under a vast crystal roof. Hardly a trace
of masonry on the lower stories; nothing but plate glass--the windows of
book-shops, music shops, cafés, restaurants, jewelry stores,
haberdasheries, expensive tailoring establishments.
At one end, the Duomo, bristling with a forest of statues and perforated
spires; at the other, the monument to Leonardo da Vinci, and the famous
_Teatro de la Scala_! Within the four arms of the Gallery, a continuous
bustle of people, an incessant going and coming of merging, dissolving
crowds: a quadruple avalanche flowing toward the grand square at the
center of the cross, where the Café Biffi, known to actors and singers
the world over, spreads its rows of marble tables! A hubbub of cries,
greetings, conversations, footsteps, echoing in the galleries as in an
immense cloister, the lofty skylight quivering with the hum of busy
human ants, forever, day and night, crawling, darting this way and that,
underneath it!
Such is the world's market of song-birds; the world's Rialto of Music;
the world's recruiting office for its army of voices. From that center,
march forth to glory or to the poorhouse, all those who one fine day
have touched their throats and believed they have some talent for
singing. In Milan, from every corner of the earth, all the unhappy
aspirants of art, casting aside their needles, their tools or their
pens, foregather to eat the macaroni of the _trattoria_, trusting that
the world will some day do them justice by strewing their paths with
millions. Beginners, in the first place, who, to make their start, will
accept contracts in any obscure municipal theatre of the Milan district,
in hopes of a paragraph in a musical weekly to send to the folks at home
as evidence of promise and success; and with them, overwhelming them
with the importance of their past, the veterans of art--the celebrities
of a vanished generation: tenors with gray hair and false teeth; strong,
proud, old men who cough and clear their throats to show they still
preserve their sonorous baritone; retired singers who, with incredible
niggardliness, lend their savings at usury or turn shopkeepers after
dragging silks and velvets over world famous "boards."
Whenever the two dozen "stars," the stars of first magnitude that shine
in the leading operas of the globe, pass through the Gallery, they
attract as much admiring attention as monarchs appearing before their
subjects. The _pariahs_, still waiting for a contract, bow their heads
in veneration; and tell, in bated breath, of the castle on Lake Como
that the great tenor has bought, of the dazzling jewels owned by the
eminent soprano, of the graceful tilt at which the applauded baritone
wears his hat; and in their voices there is a tingle of jealousy, of
bitterness against destiny--the feeling that they are just as worthy of
such splendor--the protest against "bad luck," to which they attribute
failure. Hope forever flutters before these unfortunates, blinding them
with the flash of its golden mail, keeping them in a wretched despondent
inactivity. They wait and they trust, without any clear idea of how they
are to attain glory and wealth, wasting their lives in impotence, to die
ultimately "with their boots on," on some bench of the Gallery.
Then, there is another flock, a flock of girls, victims of the Chimera,
walking with a nimble, a prancing step, with music scores under their
arms, on the way to the _maestro's_; slender, light-haired English
_misses_, who want to become prima donnas of comic opera; fair-skinned,
buxom Russian _parishnas_ who greet their acquaintances with the
sweeping bow of a dramatic soprano; Spanish _señoritas_ of bold faces
and free manners, preparing for stage careers as Bizet's
cigarette-girl--frivolous, sonorous song-birds nesting hundreds of
leagues away, and who have flown hither dazzled by the tinsel of glory.
At the close of the Carnival season, singers who have been abroad for
the winter season appear in the Gallery. They come from London, St.
Petersburg, New York, Melbourne, Buenos Aires, looking for new
contracts. They have trotted about the globe as though the whole world
were home to them. They have spent a week in a train or a month on a
steamer, to get back to their corner in the Gallery. Nothing has
changed, for all of their distant rambles. They take their usual table.
They renew their old intrigues, their old gossip, their old jealousies,
as if they had been gone a day. They stand around in front of the
show-windows with an air of proud disdain, like princes traveling
incognito, but unable quite to conceal their exalted station. They tell
about the ovations accorded them by foreign audiences. They exhibit the
diamonds on their fingers and in their neckties. They hint at affairs
with great ladies who offered to leave home and husband to follow them
to Milan. They exaggerate the salaries they received on their trip, and
frown haughtily when some unfortunate "colleague" solicits a drink at
the nearby Biffi. And when the new contracts come in, the mercenary
nightingales again take wing, indifferently, they care not whither. Once
more, trains and steamers distribute them, with their conceits and their
petulances, all over the globe, to gather them in again some months
later and bring them back to the Gallery, their real home--the spot to
which they are really tied, and on which they are fated to drag out
their old age.
Meantime, the _pariahs_, those who never arrive, the "bohemians" of
Milan--when they are left alone console themselves with tales of famous
comrades, of contracts they themselves refused to accept, pretending
uncompromising hauteur toward impresarios and composers to justify their
idleness; and wrapped in fur coats that almost sweep the ground, with
their "garibaldis" on the backs of their heads, they hover around
Biffi's, defying the cold draughts that blow at the crossing of the
Gallery, talking and talking away to quiet the hunger that is gnawing at
their stomachs; despising the humble toil of those who make their living
by their hands, continuing undaunted in their poverty, content with
their genius as artists, facing misfortune with a candor and an
endurance as heroic as it is pathetic, their dark lives illumined by
Hope, who keeps them company till she closes their eyes.
Of that strange world, Rafael had caught a glimpse, barely, during the
few days he had spent in Milan. His companion, the canon, had run across
a former chorister from the cathedral of Valencia, who could find
nothing to do but loiter night and day about the Gallery. Through him
Brull had learned of the life led by these journeymen of art, always on
hand in the "marketplace", waiting for the employer who never comes.
He tried to picture the early days of Leonora in that great city, as one
of the girls who trot gracefully over the sidewalks with music sheets
under their arms, or enliven the narrow side streets with all those
trills and cadences that come streaming out through the windows.
He could see her walking through the Gallery at Doctor Moreno's side: a
blonde beauty, svelte, somewhat thin, over-grown, taller than her years,
gazing with astonishment through those large green eyes of hers at the
cold, bustling city, so different from the warm orchards of her
childhood home; the father, bearded, wrinkled, nervous, still irritated
at the ruin of his Republican hopes; a veritable ogre to strangers who
did not know his lamb-like gentleness. Like exiles who had found a
refuge in art, they two went their way through that life of emptiness,
of void, a world of greedy teachers anxious to prolong the period of
study, and of singers incapable of speaking kindly even of themselves.
They lived on a fourth floor on the _Via Passarella_--a narrow, gloomy
thoroughfare with high houses, like the streets of old Alcira, preempted
by music publishers, theatrical agencies and retired artists. Their
janitor was a former chorus leader; the main floor was rented by an
agency exclusively engaged from sun to sun in testing voices. The others
were occupied by singers who began their vocal exercises the moment they
got out of bed, setting the house ringing like a huge music-box from
roof to cellar. The Doctor and his daughter had two rooms in the house
of _Signora Isabella_, a former ballet-dancer who had achieved notorious
"triumphs" in the principal courts of Europe, but was now a skeleton
wrapped in wrinkled skin, groping her way through the corridors,
quarreling over money in foul-mouthed language with the servants, and
with no other vestiges of her past than the gowns of rustling silk, and
the diamonds, emeralds and pearls that took their turns in her stiff,
shrivelled ears. This harpy had loved Leonora with the fondness of the
veteran for the new recruit.
Every day Doctor Moreno went to a café of the Gallery, where he would
meet a group of old musicians who had fought under Garibaldi, and young
men who wrote _libretti_ for the stage, and articles for Republican and
Socialist newspapers. That was his world: the only thing that helped him
endure his stay in Milan. After a lonely life back there in his native
land, this corner of the smoke-filled café seemed like Paradise to him.
There, in a labored Italian, sprinkled with Spanish interjections, he
could talk of Beethoven and of the hero of Marsala; and for hour after
hour he would sit wrapt in ecstasy, gazing, through the dense
atmosphere, at the red shirt and the blond, grayish locks of the great
Giuseppe, while his comrades told stories of this, the most romantic, of
adventurers.
During such absences of her father, Leonora would remain in charge of
_Signora Isabella_; and bashful, shrinking, half bewildered, would spend
the day in the salon of the former ballet-dancer, with its coterie of
the latter's friends, also ruins surviving from the past, burned-out
"flames" of great personages long since dead. And these witches, smoking
their cigarettes, and looking their jewels over every other moment to be
sure they had not been stolen, would size up "the little girl," as they
called her, to conclude that she would "go very far" if she learned how
to "play the game."
"I had excellent teachers," said Leonora, in speaking of that period of
her youth. "They were good souls at bottom, but they had very little
still to learn about life. I don't remember just when I began to see
through them. I don't believe I was ever what they call an 'innocent'
child."
Some evenings the Doctor would take her to his group in the café, or to
some second balcony seat under the roof of _La Scala_, if a couple of
complimentary tickets happened to come his way. Thus she was introduced
to her father's friends, bohemians with whom music went hand in hand
with the ideas and the ideals of revolution, curious mixtures of artist
and conspirator; aged, bald-headed, near-sighted "professors," their
backs bent by a lifetime spent leaning over music stands; and swarthy
youths with fiery eyes, stiff, long hair and red neckties, always
talking about overthrowing the social order because their operas had
not been accepted at _La Scala_ or because no _maestro_ could be found
to take their musical dramas seriously. One of them attracted Leonora.
Leaning back on a side-seat in the cafe, she would sit and watch him for
hours and hours. He was a fair-haired, extremely delicate boy. His
tapering goatee and his fine, silky hair, covered by a sweeping, soft
felt hat, made her think of Van Dyck's portrait of Charles I of England
that she had seen in print somewhere. They called him "the poet" at the
café, and gossip had it that an old woman, a retired "star," was paying
for his keep--and his amusements--until his verses should bring him
fame. "Well," said Leonora, simply, with a smile, "he was my first
love--a calf-and-puppy love, a schoolgirl's infatuation which nobody
ever knew about"; for though the Doctor's daughter spent hours with her
green golden eyes fixed upon the poet, the latter never suspected his
good fortune; doubtless because the beauty of his patroness, the
superannuated _diva_, had so obsessed him that the attractions of other
women left him quite unmoved. How vividly Leonora remembered those days
of poverty and dreams!... Little by little the modest capital the Doctor
owned in Alcira vanished, what with living expenses and music lessons.
Doña Pepa, at her brother's instance, sold one piece of land after
another; but even such remittances were often long delayed; and then,
instead of eating in the _trattoria_, near _la Scala_, with dancing
students and the more successful of the young singers, they would stay
at home; and Leonora would lay aside her scores and take a turn at
cooking, learning mysterious recipes from the old _danseuse_. For weeks
at a time they would live on nothing but macaroni and rice served _al
burro_, a diet that her father abhorred, the Doctor, meanwhile,
pretending illness to justify his absence from the café. But these
periods of want and poverty were endured by father and daughter in
silence. Before their friends, they still maintained the pose of
well-to-do people with plenty of income from property in Spain.
Leonora underwent a rapid transformation. She had already passed her
period of growth--that preadolescent "awkward age" when the features are
in constant change before settling down to their definitive forms and
the limbs seem to grow longer and longer and thinner and thinner. The
long-legged spindling "flapper," who was never quite sure where to stow
her legs, became the reserved, well-proportioned girl with the
mysterious gleam of puberty in her eyes. Her clothes seemed, naturally,
willingly, to curve to her fuller, rounding outlines. Her skirts went
down to her feet and covered the skinny, colt-like appendages that had
formerly made the denizens of the Gallery repress a smile.
Her singing master was struck with the beauty of his pupil. As a tenor,
Signor Boldini had had his hour of success back in the days of the
_Statuto_, when Victor Emmanuel was still king of Piedmont and the
Austrians were in Milan. Convinced that he could rise no higher, he had
come to earth, stepping aside to let those behind him pass on, turning
his stage experience to the advantage of a large class of girl-students
whom he fondled with an affectionate, fatherly kindliness. His white
goatee would quiver with admiring enthusiasm, as, playfully, lightly, he
would touch his fingers to those virgin throats, which, as he said,
were his "property." "All for art, and art for all!" And this motto, the
ideal of his life, he called it, had quite endeared him to Doctor
Moreno.
"That fellow Boldini could not be fonder of my Leonora if she were his
own daughter," the Doctor would say every time the _maestro_ praised the
beauty and the talent of his pupil and prophesied great triumphs for
her.
And Leonora went on with her lessons, accepting the light, the playful,
the innocent caresses of the old singer; until one afternoon, in the
midst of a romanza, there was a hateful scene: the _maestro_, despite
her horrified struggling, claimed a feudal right--the first fruits of
her initiation into theatrical life.
Through fear of her father Leonora kept silent. What might he not do on
finding his blind confidence in the _maestro_ so betrayed? She sank into
resigned passivity at last, and continued to visit Boldini's house
daily, learning ultimately to accept, as a matter of professional
course, the repulsive flattery of refined vice.
Poor Leonora entered on a life of wrong through the open door, learning,
at a single stroke, all the turpitude acquired by that shrivelled
_maestro_ during his long career back-stage. Boldini would have kept her
a pupil forever. He could never find her just well enough prepared to
make her debut. But hardly any money was coming from Spain now. Poor
doña Pepa had sold everything her brother owned and a good deal of her
own land besides. Only at the cost of painful stinting could she send
him anything at all. The Doctor, through connections with itinerant
directors and impresarios _à l'aventure_, "launched" his daughter
finally. Leonora began to sing in the small theatres of the Milan
district--two or three night engagements at country fairs. Such
companies were formed at random in the Gallery, on the very day of the
performance sometimes,--troupes like the strolling players of old,
leaving at a venture in a third-class compartment on the train with the
prospect of returning on foot if the impresario made off with the money.
Leonora began to know what applause was, what it meant to give _encore_
after _encore_ before crowds of rustic landowners, dressed in their
Sunday clothes, and ladies with false rings and plated chains; and she
had her first thrills of feminine vanity on receiving bouquets and
sonnets from subalterns and cadets in small garrison towns. Boldini
followed her everywhere, neglecting his lessons, in pursuit of this, his
last depraved infatuation. "All for art, art for all!" He must enjoy the
fruits of his creation, be present at the triumphs of his star pupil! So
he said to Doctor Moreno; and that unsuspecting gentleman, thankful for
this added courtesy of the master, would leave her more and more to the
old satyr's care.
The escape from that life came when she secured a contract for a whole
winter in Padua. There she met the tenor Salvatti, a high and mighty
_divo_, who looked down upon all his associates, though tolerated
himself, by the public, only out of consideration for his past.
For years now he had been holding his own on the opera stage, less for
his voice than for his dashing appearance, slightly repaired with pencil
and rouge, and the legend of romantic love affairs that floated like a
rainbow around his name--noble dames fighting a clandestine warfare for
him; queens scandalizing their subjects by blind passions he inspired;
eminent divas selling their diamonds for the money to hold him faithful
by lavish gifts. The jealousy of Salvatti's comrades tended to
perpetuate and exaggerate this legend; and the tenor, worn out, poor,
and a wreck virtually for all of his pose of grandeur, was able to make
a living still from provincial publics, who charitably applauded him
with the self-conceit of climbers pampering a dethroned prince.
Leonora, playing opposite that famous man, "starring," singing duets
with him, clasping hands that had been kissed by the queens of art, was
deeply stirred. This, at last, was the world she had dreamed of in her
dingy garret in Milan. Salvatti's presence gave her just the illusion of
aristocratic grandeur she had longed for. Nor was he slow in perceiving
the impression he had made upon that promising young woman. With a cold
calculating selfishness, he determined to profit by her naïve
admiration. Was it love that thrust her toward him? As, so long
afterwards, she analyzed her passion to Rafael, she was vehemently
certain it had not been love: Salvatti could never have inspired a
genuine feeling in anyone. His egotism, his moral corruptness, were too
close to the surface. No, he was a philanderer simply, an exploiter of
women. But for her it had been a blinding hallucination nevertheless,
fraught, during the first days, at least, with the delicious
exhiliration, the voluptuous abandonment of true love. She became the
slave of the decrepit tenor, voluntarily, just as she had become her
_maestro's_ slave through fear. And so complete had her infatuation
been, so overpowering its intoxication, that, in obedience to Salvatti,
she fled with him at the end of the season, and deserted her father, who
had objected to the intimacy.
Then came the black page in her life, that filled her eyes with
anguished tears as she went on with her story. What folks said about her
father's end was not true. Poor Doctor Moreno had not committed suicide.
He was altogether too proud to confess in that way the deep grief that
her ingratitude had caused him.
"Don't talk to me about that woman," he would say fiercely to his
landlady at Milan whenever the old _danseuse_ would mention Leonora. "I
have no daughter: it was all a mistake."
Unbeknown to Salvatti, who became terribly grasping as he saw his power
waning, Leonora would send her father a few hundred francs from London,
from Naples, from Paris. The Doctor, though in direst poverty, would at
once return the checks "to the sender" and, without writing a word;
where-upon Leonora paid an allowance every month to the housekeeper,
begging her not to abandon the old man.
The unhappy Doctor needed, indeed, all the care the landlady and her old
friends could give him. The _povero signor spagnuolo_--the poor Spanish
gentleman--spent his days locked up in his room, his violoncello between
his knees, reading Beethoven, the only one "in his family"--as he
said--"who had never played him false." When old Isabella, tired of his
music, would literally put him out of the house to get a breath of air,
he would wander like a phantom through the Gallery, distantly greeted
by former friends, who avoided closer contact with that black
despondency and feared the explosions of rage with which he received
news of his daughter's rising fame.
A rapid rise she was making in very truth! The worldly old women who
foregathered in the ballet-dancer's little parlor, could not contain
their admiration for their "little girl's" success; and even grew
indignant at the father for not accepting things "as things had to be."
Salvatti? Just the support she needed! An expert pilot, who knew the
chart of the opera world, who would steer her straight and keep her off
the rocks.
The tenor had skilfully organized a world wide publicity for his young
singer. Leonora's beauty and her artistic verve conquered every public.
She had contracts with the leading theatres of Europe, and though
critics found defects in her singing, her beauty helped them to forget
these, and one and all they contributed loyally to the deification of
the young goddess. Salvatti, sheltering his old age under this prestige
which he so religiously fostered, was keeping in harness to the very
end, and taking leave of life under the protecting shadow of that woman,
the last to believe in him and tolerate his exploitation.
Applauded by select publics, courted in her dressing-room by celebrated
men and women, Leonora began to find Salvatti's tyranny unbearable. She
now saw him as he really was: miserly, petulant, spoiled by praise.
Every bit of her money that came into his hands disappeared, she knew
not where. Eager for revenge, though really answering the lure of the
elegant world she glimpsed in the distance but was not yet a part of,
she began to deceive Salvatti in passing adventures, taking a diabolical
pleasure in the deceit. But no; as she looked back on that part of her
life with the sober eye of experience, she understood that she had
really been the one deceived. Salvatti, she remembered, would always
retire at the opportune moment, facilitating her infidelities. She
understood now that the man had carefully prepared such adventures for
her with influential men whom he himself introduced to make certain
profits out of the meeting--profits that he never declared.
After three years of this sort of life, when Leonora had reached the
full splendor of her beauty, she chanced to become the favorite of
fashion for one whole summer at Nice. Parisian newspapers, in their
"society columns" referred, in veiled language, to the passion of an
aged king, a democratic monarch, who had left his throne, much as a
manufacturer of London or a stockbroker of Paris would leave his office,
for a vacation on the Blue Coast. This tall, robust gentleman with a
patriarchal beard--the very type of the good king in fairy tales--had
not hesitated to be seen in public with a beautiful _artiste_.
That conquest, fleeting though it had been, put the finishing touch on
Leonora's eminence! "Ah! La Brunna!" people would declare
enthusiastically. "The favorite of king Ernesto.... Our greatest
artist." And troops of adorers began to besiege her under the keen,
mercenary eyes of the tenor Salvatti.
About this time her father died in a hospital at Milan--a very sad end,
as Signora Isabella, the former ballet-dancer, explained in her letters.
Of what had he died?... The old lady could not say, as the physicians
had differed; but her own view of the matter was that the _povero signor
spagnuolo_ had simply grown tired of living--a general collapse of that
wonderful constitution, so strong, so powerful, in a way, yet strangely
susceptible to moral and emotional influences. He was almost blind when
admitted to the hospital. He seemed quite to have lost his mind--sunk in
an unbreakable silence. Isabella had not dared to keep him in her house
after he had fallen into that coma. But the strange thing was, that as
death drew near, his memory of the past suddenly cleared, and the nurses
would hear him groan for nights at a time, murmuring in Spanish with
tenacious persistency:
"Leonora! My darling! Where are you?... Little girl, where are you?"
Leonora wept and wept, and did not leave her hotel for more than a week,
to the great disgust of Salvatti, who observed, in addition, that tears
were not good for her complexion.
Alone in the world!... Her own wrong-doing had killed her poor father!
No one was left now except her good old aunt, who was "existing" far
away in Spain, like a vegetable in a garden, her stupid mind entirely on
her prayer-book. Leonora vented her anguish in a burst of hatred for
Salvatti. He was responsible for her abandonment of her father! She
deserted him, taking up with a certain count Selivestroff, a handsome
and wealthy Russian, captain in the Imperial Guard.
So she had found her destiny! Her life would always be like that! She
would pass from stage to stage, from song to song, belonging to
everybody--and to nobody!
That fair Russian, so strong, so manly, so thoroughly a gentleman, had
loved her truly, with a passionate humble adoration.
He would kneel submissively at her feet, like Hercules in the presence
of Adriadne, resting his chin on her knees, looking up into her face
with his gray, kindly, caressing eyes. Timidly, doubtfully, he would
approach her every day as if he were meeting her for the first time and
feared a repulse. He would kiss her softly, delicately, with hushed
reserve, as if she were a fragile jewel that might break beneath his
tenderest caress. Poor Selivestroff! Leonora had wept at the thought of
him. In Russia and with princely Russian sumptuousness, they had lived
for a year in his castle, in the country, among a population of sodden
_moujiks_ who worshipped that beautiful woman in the white and blue furs
as devotedly as if she had been a Virgin stepping forth from the gilded
background of an ikon.
But Leonora could not live away from stageland: the ladies of the rural
aristocracy avoided her, and she needed applause and admiration. She
induced Selivestroff to move to St. Petersburg, and for a whole winter
she sang at the Opera there, like a grand dame turned opera singer out
of love for the work.
Once more she became the reigning _belle_. All the young Russian
aristocrats who held commissions in the Imperial Guard, or high posts in
the Government, spoke enthusiastically of the great Spanish beauty; and
they envied Selivestroff. The count yearned moodily for the solitude of
his castle, which held so many loving memories for him. In the bustling,
competitive life of the capital, he grew jealous, sad, melancholy,
irritable at the necessity of defending his love. He could sense the
underground warfare that was being waged against him by Leonora's
countless admirers.
One morning she was rudely awakened and leapt out of bed to find the
count stretched out on a divan, pale, his shirt stained with blood. A
number of gentlemen dressed in black were standing around him. They had
just brought him in from a carriage. He had been wounded in the chest.
The evening before, on leaving the theatre, the count had gone up for a
moment to his Club. He had caught an allusion to Leonora and himself in
some words of a friend. There had been blows--then hasty arrangements
for a duel, which had been fought at sunrise, with pistols. Selivestroff
died in the arms of his mistress, smiling, seeking those delicate,
powerful, pearly hands for one last time with his bleeding lips. Leonora
mourned him deeply, truly. The land where she had been so happy with the
first man she had really loved became intolerable to her, and abandoning
most of the riches that the count had given her, she went forth into the
world again, storming the great theatres in a new fever of travel and
adventure.
She was then just twenty-three, but already felt herself an old woman.
How she had changed!... More affairs? As she went over that period of
her life in her talk with Rafael, Leonora closed her eyes with a shudder
of modesty and remorse. Drunk with fame and power she had rushed about
the world lavishing her beauty on anyone who interested her for the
moment. The property of everybody and of nobody! She could not remember
the names, even, of all the men who had loved her during that era of
madness, so many had been caught in the wake of her stormy flight across
the world! She had returned to Russia once, and been expelled by the
Czar for compromising the prestige of the Imperial Family, through an
affair with a grand duke who had wanted to marry her. In Rome she had
posed in the nude for a young and unknown sculptor out of pure
compassion for his silent admiration; and she herself made his "Venus"
public, hoping that the world-wide scandal would bring fame to the work
and to its author. In Genoa she found Salvatti again, now "retired," and
living on usury from his savings. She received him with an amiable
smile, lunched with him, treated him as an old comrade; and at dessert,
when he had become hopelessly drunk, she seized a whip and avenged the
blows she had received in her time of slavery to him, beating him with a
ferocity that stained the apartment with gore and brought the police to
the hotel. Another scandal! And this time her name bandied about in a
criminal court! But she, a fugitive from justice, and proud of her
exploit, sang in the United States, wildly acclaimed by the American
public, which admired the combative Amazon even more than the artist.
There she made the acquaintance of Hans Keller, the famous orchestra
conductor, and a pupil and friend of Wagner. The German _maestro_ became
her second love. With stiff, reddish hair, thick-rimmed eyeglasses, an
enormous mustache that drooped over either side of his mouth and framed
his chin, he was certainly not so handsome as Selivestroff. But he had
one irresistible charm, the charm of Art. With the tragic Russian in her
mind and on her conscience, she felt the need of burning herself in the
immortal flame of the ideal; and she adored the famous musician for the
artistic associations that hovered about him. For the first time, the
much-courted Leonora descended from her lofty heights to seek a man's
attention and came with her amorous advances to disturb the placid calm
of that artist so wholly engrossed in the cult of the sublime Master.
Hans Keller noticed the smile that fell like a sunbeam upon his music
scrolls. He closed them and let himself be drawn off on the by-paths of
love. Leonora's life with the _maestro_ was an absolute rupture with all
her past. Her one wish was to love and be loved--to throw a cloak of
mystery over her real self, ashamed as she now was of her previous wild
career. Her passion enthralled the musician and she in turn felt at once
stirred and transfigured by the atmosphere of artistic fervor that
haloed the illustrious pupil of Wagner.
The spirit of Him, the Master, as Hans Keller called Wagner with pious
adoration, flashed before the singer's eyes like the revealing glory
that converted Paul on the road to Damascus. Music, as she now saw
clearly for the first time, was not a means of pleasing crowds,
displaying physical beauty, and attracting men. It was a religion--the
mysterious power that brings the infinite within us into contact with
the infinite that surrounds us. She became the sinner awakening to
repentance, and yearning for the atoning peace of the cloister, a
Magdalen of Art, touched on the high road of worldliness and frivolity
by the mystic sublimity of the Beautiful; and she cast herself at the
feet of Him, the supreme Master, as the most victorious of men, lord of
the mystery that moves all souls.
"Tell me more about Him," Leonora would say. "How much I would give to
have known him as you did!... I did see him once in Venice: during his
last days ...he was already dying."
And that meeting was, indeed, one of her most vivid and lasting
memories. The declining afternoon enlivening the dark waters of the
Grand Canal with its opalescent spangles; a gondola passing hers in the
opposite direction; and inside, a pair of blue, imperious eyes, shining,
under thick eyebrows, with the cold glint of steel--eyes that could
never be mistaken for common eyes, for the divine fire of the Elect, of
the demi-God, was bright within them! And they seemed to envelop her in
a flash of cerulean light. It was He--ill, and about to die. His heart
was wounded, bleeding, pierced, perhaps, by the shafts of mysterious
melody, as hearts of the Virgin sometimes bleed on altars bristling with
swords.
Leonora could still see him as if he were there in front of her. He
looked smaller than he really was, dwarfed, apparently, by illness, and
by the wrack of pain. His huge head, the head of a genius, was bent low
over the bosom of his wife Cosima. He had removed the black felt hat so
as to catch the afternoon breeze full upon his loose gray locks. His
broad, high curved forehead, seemed to weigh down upon his body like an
ivory chest laden full of unseen jewels. His arrogant nose, as strong as
the beak of a bird of prey, seemed to be reaching across the sunken
mouth toward the sensuous, powerful jaw. A gray beard ran down along the
neck, that was wrinkled, wasted with age. A hasty vision it had been, to
be sure; but she had seen him; and his venerable figure remained in her
memory like a landscape glimpsed at the flare of a lightning-flash. She
had witnessed his arrival in Venice to die in the peace of those canals,
in that silence which is broken only by the stroke of the oar--where
many years before he had thought himself dying as he wrote his
_Tristan_--that hymn to the Death that is pure, to the Death that
liberates! She saw him stretched out in the dark boat; and the splash of
the water against the marble of the palaces echoed in her imagination
like the wailing, thrilling trumpets at the burial of Siegfried--the
hero of Poetry marching to the Valhalla of immortality and glory upon a
shield of ebony--motionless, inert as the young hero of the Germanic
legend--and followed by the lamentations of that poor prisoner of life,
Humanity, that ever eagerly seeks a crack, a chink, in the wall about
it, through which the inspiriting, comforting ray of beauty may
penetrate.
And the singer gazed with tearful eyes at the broad _boina_ of black
velvet, the lock of gray hair, two broken, rusty steel pens--souvenirs
of the Master, that Hans Keller had piously preserved in a glass case.
"You knew him--tell me how he lived. Tell me everything: talk to me
about the Poet ... the Hero."
And the musician, no less moved, described the Master as he had seen him
in the best of health; a small man, tightly wrapped in an
overcoat--with a powerful, heavy frame, however, despite his slight
stature--as restless as a nervous woman, as vibrant as a steel spring,
with a smile that lightly touched with bitterness his thin, colorless
lips. Then came his "genialities," as people said, the caprices of his
genius, that figure so largely in the Wagner legend: his smoker, a
jacket of gold satin with pearl flowers for buttons; the precious cloths
that rolled about like waves of light in his study, velvets and silks,
of flaming reds and greens and blues, thrown across the furniture and
the tables haphazard, with no reference to usefulness--for their sheer
beauty only--to stimulate the eye with the goad of color, satisfy the
Master's passion for brightness; and perfumes, as well, with which his
garments--always of oriental splendor--were literally saturated; phials
of rose emptied at random, filling the neighborhood with the fragrance
of a fabulous garden, strong enough to overcome the hardiest uninitiate,
but strangely exciting to that Prodigy in his struggle with the Unknown.
And then Hans Keller described the man himself, never relaxed, always
quivering with mysterious thrills, incapable of sitting still, except at
the piano, or at table for his meals; receiving visitors standing,
pacing back and forth in his salon, his hands twitching in nervous
uncertainty; changing the position of the armchairs, rearranging the
furniture, suddenly stopping to hunt about his person for a snuff-box or
a pair of glasses that he never found; turning his pockets inside out,
pulling his velvet house-cap now down over one eye, now back over the
crown of his head, or again, throwing it into the air with a shout of
joy or crumpling it in his hand, as he became excited in the course of a
discussion!
And Keller would close his eyes, imagining that he could still hear in
the silence, the faint but commanding voice of the Master. Oh, where was
he now? On some star, doubtless, eagerly following the infinite song of
the spheres, a divine music that only his ears had been attuned to hear!
And to choke his emotion, the musician would sit down at the piano,
while Leonora, responsive to his mood, would approach him, and standing
as rigid as a statue, with her hands lost in the musician's head of
rough tangled hair, sing a fragment from the immortal _Tetralogy_.
Worship of Wagner transformed the butterfly into a new woman. Leonora
adored Keller as a ray of light gone astray from the glowing star now
extinguished forever; she felt the joy of humbleness, the sweetness of
sacrifice, seeing in him not the man, but the chosen representative of
the Divinity. Leonora could have grovelled at Keller's feet, let him
trample on her--make a carpet of her beauty. She willed to become a
slave to that lover who was the repository of the Master's thoughts; and
who seemed to be magnified to gigantic proportions by the custody of
such a treasure.
She tended him with the exquisite watchfulness of an enamored servant,
following him, on his trips in the summer, the season of the great
concerts, to Leipzig, Geneva, Paris; and she, the most famous living
prima donna, would stay behind the scenes, with no jealousy for the
applause she heard, waiting for Hans, perspiring and tired, to drop the
baton amid the acclamations of the audience and come back-stage to have
her dry his forehead with an almost filial caress.
And thus they traveled about Europe, spreading the light of the Master;
Leonora, voluntarily in the background, like a patrician of old, dressed
as a slave and following the Apostle in the name of the New Word.
The German musician let himself be adored, receiving all her caresses of
enthusiasm and love with the absent-mindedness of an artist so
preoccupied with sounds that at last he comes to hate words. He taught
his language to Leonora that she might some day realize a dream of hers
and sing in Bayreuth; and he grounded her in the principles that had
guided the Master in the creation of his great characters. And so, when
Leonora made her appearance on the stage one winter with the winged
helmet and the lance of the Valkyrie, she attained an eminence in
Wagnerian interpretation that was to follow her for the remainder of her
career. Hans himself was carried away by her power, and could never
recover from his astonishment at Leonora's complete assimilation of the
spirit of the Master.
"If only He could hear you!" he would say with conviction. "I am sure He
would be content."
And the pair traveled about the world together. Every springtime she, as
spectator, would watch him directing Wagnerian choruses in the "Mystic
Abyss" at Bayreuth. Winters it was he who went into ecstasies under her
tremendous "_Hojotoho_!"--the fierce cry of a Valkyrie afraid of the
austere father Wotan; or at sight of her awakening among the flames for
the spirited Siegfried, the hero who feared nothing in the world, but
trembled at the first glance of love!
But artists' passions are like flowers, fragrant, but quickly
languishing. The rough German musician was a simple person, unstable,
fickle, ready to be amused at any new plaything. Leonora admitted to
Rafael that she could have lived to old age submissively at Keller's
side, pampering his whims and selfish caprices. But one day Keller
deserted her, as she had deserted others, to take up with a sickly,
languid contralto, whose best charms could have been hardly comparable
to the morbid delicacy of a hot-house flower. Leonora, mad with love and
jealousy, pursued him, knocking at his door like a servant. For the
first time she felt the voluptuous bitterness of being scorned,
discarded, until reaction from despair brought her back to her former
pride and self-control!
Love was over. She had had enough of artists; though an interesting sort
of folk they were in their way. Far preferable were the ordinary, normal
men she had known before Keller's time! The foolisher--the more
commonplace--the better! She would never fall in love again!
Wearied, broken in spirit, disillusioned, she went back into her old
world. But now the legend of her past beset her. Again men came,
passionately besieging her, offering her wealth in return for a little
love. They talked of killing themselves if she resisted, as if it were
her duty to surrender, as if refusal on her part were treachery. The
gloomy Macchia committed suicide in Naples. Why? Because she did not
capitulate to his melancholy sonnets! In Vienna there had been a duel,
in which one of her admirers was slain. An eccentric Englishman followed
her about, looming in her pathway everywhere like the shadow of a fatal
Destiny, vowing to kill anybody she should prefer to him.... She had had
enough at last! She was wearied of such a life, disgusted at the male
voracity that dogged her every step. She longed to fall out of sight,
disappear, find rest and quiet in a complete surrender to some boundless
dream. And the thought--a comforting, soothing thought, it had been--of
the distant land of her childhood came back to her, the thought of her
simple, pious aunt, the sole survivor of her family, who wrote to her
twice every year, urging her to reconcile her soul with God--to which
end the good old Doña Pepa was herself aiding with prayer!
She felt, too, somehow, without knowing just why, that a visit to her
native soil would soften the painful memory of the ingratitude that had
cost her father's life. She would care for the poor old woman! Her
presence would bring a note of cheer into that gray, monotonous
existence that had gone on without the slightest change, ever. And
suddenly, one night, after an "Isolde" in Florence, she ordered Beppa,
the loyal and silent companion of her wandering life, to pack her
things!
Home! Home! Off for her native land! And might she find there something
to keep her ever from returning to the troubled stirring world she was
leaving!
She was the princess of the fairy tales longing to become a shepherdess.
There she meant to stay, in the shade of her orange-trees, now and then
fondling a memory of her old life, perhaps, but wishing eternally to
enjoy that tranquillity, fiercely repelling Rafael, therefore, because
he had tried to awaken her, as Siegfried rouses Brunhilde, braving the
flames to reach her side.
No; friends, friends, nothing else! She wanted no more of love. She
already knew what that was. Besides, he had come too late....
And Rafael tossed sleeplessly in his bed, rehearsing in the darkness the
story he had been told. He felt dwarfed, annihilated, by the grandeur of
the men who had preceded him in their adoration of that woman. A king,
great artists, handsome and aristocratic paladins, Russian counts,
potentates with vast wealth at their command! And he, a humble country
boy, an obscure junior deputy, as submissive as a child to his mother's
despotic ways, forced to beg for the money for his personal expenses
even--he was trying to succeed them!
He laughed with bitter irony at his own presumptuousness. Now he
understood Leonora's mocking tone, and the violence she had used in
repulsing all boorish liberties he had tried to take. But despite the
contempt he began to feel for himself, he lacked the strength to
withdraw now. He had been caught up in the wake of seduction, the
maelstrom of love that followed the actress everywhere, enslaving men,
casting them, broken in spirit and in will, to earth, like so many
slaves of Beauty.