in our room, on the dressing-table were the two letters which had
arrived in our absence. They had been forwarded from Athens. Ordering
a carriage, I at once drove to the Ministry of Finance, and alighting
with the guide, hurriedly made for the ditch I had seen for the first
time in the shining disk! In the middle of the pool, badly mangled,
half-famished, but still alive, lay my beautiful spaniel Ralph, and
near him were the blinking curs, unconcernedly snapping at the flies.
FROM THE POLAR LANDS
(A Christmas Story)
Just a year ago, during the Christmas holidays, a numerous society had
gathered in the country house, or rather the old hereditary castle,
of a wealthy landowner in Finland. Many were the remains in it of our
forefathers’ hospitable way of living; and many the medieval customs
preserved, founded on traditions and superstitions, semi-Finnish and
semi-Russian, the latter imported into it by its female proprietors
from the shores of the Neva. Christmas trees were being prepared and
implements for divination were being made ready. For, in that old
castle there were grim worm-eaten portraits of famous ancestors and
knights and ladies, old deserted turrets, with bastions and Gothic
windows; mysterious somber alleys, and dark and endless cellars, easily
transformed into subterranean passages and caves, ghostly prison cells,
haunted by the restless phantoms of the heroes of local legends. In
short, the old Manor offered every commodity for romantic horrors. But
alas! this once they serve for nought; in the present narrative these
dear old horrors play no such part as they otherwise might.
Its chief hero is a very commonplace, prosaical man—let us call him
Erkler. Yes; Dr. Erkler, professor of medicine, half-German through
his father, a full-blown Russian on his mother’s side and by education;
and one who looked a rather heavily built, and ordinary mortal.
Nevertheless, very extraordinary things happened with him.
Erkler, as it turned out was a great traveler, who by his own choice
had accompanied one of the most famous explorers on his journeys round
the world. More than once they had both seen death face to face from
sunstrokes under the Tropics, from cold in the Polar Regions. All this
notwithstanding, the doctor spoke with a never-abating enthusiasm
about their “winterings” in Greenland and Novaya Zemla, and about the
desert plains in Australia, where he lunched off a kangaroo and dined
off an emu, and almost perished of thirst during the passage through a
waterless track, which it took them forty hours to cross.
“Yes,” he used to remark, “I have experienced almost everything, save
what you would describe as _supernatural_.... This, of course if we
throw out of account a certain extraordinary event in my life—a man
I met, of whom I will tell you just now—and its ... indeed, rather
strange, I may add quite _inexplicable_, results.”
There was a loud demand that he should explain himself; and the doctor,
forced to yield, began his narrative.
“In 1878 we were compelled to winter on the north-western coast of
Spitsbergen. We had been attempting to find our way during the short
summer to the pole; but, as usual, the attempt had proved a failure,
owing to the icebergs, and, after several such fruitless endeavors,
we had to give it up. No sooner had we settled than the polar night
descended upon us, our steamers got wedged in and frozen between the
blocks of ice in the Gulf of Mussel, and we found ourselves cut off
for eight long months from the rest of the living world.... I confess
I, for one, felt it terribly at first. We became especially discouraged
when one stormy night the snow hurricane scattered a mass of materials
prepared for our winter buildings, and deprived us of over forty deer
from our herd. Starvation in prospect is no incentive to good humor;
and with the deer we had lost the best _plat de résistance_ against
polar frosts, human organisms demanding in that climate an increase
of heating and solid food. However, we were finally reconciled to
our loss, and even got accustomed to the local and in reality more
nutritious food—seals, and seal-grease. Our men from the remnants of
our lumber built a house neatly divided into two compartments, one for
our three professors and myself, and the other for themselves; and, a
few wooden sheds being constructed for meteorological, astronomical
and magnetic purposes, we even added a protecting stable for the few
remaining deer. And then began the monotonous series of dawnless nights
and days, hardly distinguishable one from the other, except through
dark-gray shadows. At times, the “blues” we got into were fearful! We
had contemplated sending two of our three steamers home in September,
but the premature and unforeseen formation of ice walls round them had
thwarted our plans; and now, with the entire crews on our hands, we had
to economize still more with our meager provisions, fuel and light.
Lamps were used only for scientific purposes: the rest of the time
we had to content ourselves with God’s light—the moon and the Aurora
Borealis.... But how describe these glorious, incomparable northern
lights! Rings, arrows, gigantic conflagrations of accurately divided
rays of the most vivid and varied colors. The November moonlight
nights were as gorgeous. The play of moonbeams on the snow and the
frozen rocks was most striking. These were fairy nights.
“Well, one such night—it may have been one such _day_, for all I know,
as from the end of November to about the middle of March we had no
twilights at all, to distinguish the one from the other—we suddenly
espied in the play of colored beams, which were then throwing a golden
rosy hue on the snow plains, a dark moving spot.... It grew, and seemed
to scatter as it approached nearer to us. What did this mean?... It
looked like a herd of cattle, or a group of living men, trotting over
the snowy wilderness.... But animals there were white like everything
else. What then was this?... human beings?...
“We could not believe our eyes. Yes, a group of men was approaching
our dwelling. It turned out to be about fifty seal-hunters, guided by
Matiliss, a well-known veteran mariner, from Norway. They had been
caught by the icebergs, just as we had been.
“‘How did you know that we were here?’ we asked.
“‘Old Johan, this very same old party, showed us the way’—they
answered, pointing to a venerable-looking old man with snow-white locks.
“In sober truth, it would have beseemed their guide far better to have
sat at home over his fire than to have been seal-hunting in polar lands
with younger men. And we told them so, still wondering how he came to
learn of our presence in this kingdom of white bears. At this Matiliss
and his companions smiled, assuring us that ‘old Johan’ _knew all_.
They remarked that we must be novices in polar borderlands, since we
were ignorant of Johan’s personality and could still wonder at anything
said of him.
“‘It is nigh forty-five years,’ said the chief hunter, ‘that I have
been catching seals in the Polar Seas, and as far as my personal
remembrance goes, I have always known him, and just as he is now, an
old, white-bearded man. And so far back as in the days when I used to
go to sea, as a small boy with my father, my dad used to tell me the
same of old Johan, and he added that his own father and grandfather
too, had known Johan in their days of boyhood, none of them having ever
seen him otherwise than white as our snows. And, as our forefathers
nicknamed him “the white-haired all-knower,” thus do we, the seal
hunters, call him, to this day.’
“‘Would you make us believe he is two hundred years old?’—we laughed.
“Some of our sailors crowding round the white-haired phenomenon, plied
him with questions.
“‘Grandfather! answer us, how old are you?’
“‘I really do not know it myself, sonnies. I live as long as God has
decreed me to. As to my years, I never counted them.’
“‘And how did you know, grandfather, that we were wintering in this
place?’
“‘God guided me. How I learned it I do not know; save that I knew—I
knew it.’”
THE ENSOULED VIOLIN
I
In the year 1828, an old German, a music teacher, came to Paris with
his pupil and settled unostentatiously in one of the quiet faubourgs
of the metropolis. The first rejoiced in the name of Samuel Klaus; the
second answered to the more poetical appellation of Franz Stenio. The
younger man was a violinist, gifted, as rumor went, with extraordinary,
almost miraculous talent. Yet as he was poor and had not hitherto
made a name for himself in Europe, he remained for several years in
the capital of France—the heart and pulse of capricious continental
fashion—unknown and unappreciated. Franz was a Styrian by birth, and,
at the time of the event to be presently described, he was a young
man considerably under thirty. A philosopher and a dreamer by nature,
imbued with all the mystic oddities of true genius, he reminded one of
some of the heroes in Hoffmann’s _Contes Fantastiques_. His earlier
existence had been a very unusual, in fact, quite an eccentric one, and
its history must be briefly told—for the better understanding of the
present story.
Born of very pious country people, in a quiet burg among the Styrian
Alps; nursed “by the native gnomes who watched over his cradle”;
growing up in the weird atmosphere of the ghouls and vampires who play
such a prominent part in the household of every Styrian and Slavonian
in Southern Austria; educated later, as a student, in the shadow of
the old Rhenish castles of Germany; Franz from his childhood had
passed through every emotional stage on the plane of the so-called
“supernatural.” He had also studied at one time the “occult arts” with
an enthusiastic disciple of Paracelsus and Kunrath; alchemy had few
theoretical secrets for him; and he had dabbled in “ceremonial magic”
and “sorcery” with some Hungarian Tziganes. Yet he loved above all else
music, and above music—his violin.
At the age of twenty-two he suddenly gave up his practical studies in
the occult, and from that day, though as devoted as ever in thought
to the beautiful Grecian Gods, he surrendered himself entirely to his
art. Of his classic studies he had retained only that which related
to the muses—Euterpe especially, at whose altar he worshipped—and
Orpheus whose magic lyre he tried to emulate with his violin. Except
his dreamy belief in the nymphs and the sirens, on account probably of
the double relationship of the latter to the muses through Calliope and
Orpheus, he was interested but little in the matters of this sublunary
world. All his aspirations mounted, like incense, with the wave of the
heavenly harmony that he drew from his instrument, to a higher and a
nobler sphere. He dreamed awake, and lived a real though an enchanted
life only during those hours when his magic bow carried him along the
wave of sound to the Pagan Olympus, to the feet of Euterpe. A strange
child he had ever been in his own home, where tales of magic and
witchcraft grow out of every inch of the soil; a still stranger boy he
had become, until finally he had blossomed into manhood, without one
single characteristic of youth. Never had a fair face attracted his
attention; not for one moment had his thoughts turned from his solitary
studies to a life beyond that of a mystic Bohemian. Content with his
own company, he had thus passed the best years of his youth and manhood
with his violin for his chief idol, and with the Gods and Goddesses of
old Greece for his audience, in perfect ignorance of practical life.
His whole existence had been one long day of dreams, of melody and
sunlight, and he had never felt any other aspirations.
How useless, but oh, how glorious those dreams! how vivid! and why
should he desire any better fate? Was he not all that he wanted to
be, transformed in a second of thought into one or another hero; from
Orpheus, who held all nature breathless, to the urchin who piped away
under the plane tree to the naiads of Callirrhoe’s crystal fountain?
Did not the swift-footed nymphs frolic at his beck and call to the
sound of the magic flute of the Arcadian Shepherd—who was himself?
Behold, the Goddess of Love and Beauty herself descending from on high,
attracted by the sweet-voiced notes of his violin!... Yet there came
a time when he preferred Syrinx to Aphrodite—not as the fair nymph
pursued by Pan, but after her transformation by the merciful Gods into
the reed out of which the frustrated God of the Shepherds had made
his magic pipe. For also, with time, ambition grows and is rarely
satisfied. When he tried to emulate on his violin the enchanting sounds
that resounded in his mind, the whole of Parnassus kept silent under
the spell, or joined in heavenly chorus; but the audience he finally
craved was composed of more than the Gods sung by Hesiod, verily of the
most appreciative _mélomanes_ of European capitals. He felt jealous of
the magic pipe, and would fain have had it at his command.
“Oh, that I could allure a nymph into my beloved violin!”—he often
cried, after awakening from one of his day-dreams. “Oh, that I could
only span in spirit flight the abyss of Time! Oh, that I could find
myself for one short day a partaker of the secret arts of the Gods,
a God myself, in the sight and hearing of enraptured humanity; and,
having learned the mystery of the lyre of Orpheus, or secured within my
violin a siren, thereby benefit mortals to my own glory!”
Thus, having for long years dreamed in the company of the Gods of his
fancy, he now took to dreaming of the transitory glories of fame upon
this earth. But at this time he was suddenly called home by his widowed
mother from one of the German universities where he had lived for the
last year or two. This was an event which brought his plans to an end,
at least so far as the immediate future was concerned, for he had
hitherto drawn upon her alone for his meager pittance, and his means
were not sufficient for an independent life outside his native place.
His return had a very unexpected result. His mother, whose only love
he was on earth, died soon after she had welcomed her Benjamin back;
and the good wives of the burg exercised their swift tongues for many a
month after as to the real causes of that death.
Frau Stenio, before Franz’s return, was a healthy, buxom, middle-aged
body, strong and hearty. She was a pious and a God-fearing soul
too, who had never failed in saying her prayers, nor had missed an
early mass for years during his absence. On the first Sunday after
her son had settled at home—a day that she had been longing for and
had anticipated for months in joyous visions, in which she saw him
kneeling by her side in the little church on the hill—she called him
from the foot of the stairs. The hour had come when her pious dream was
to be realized, and she was waiting for him, carefully wiping the dust
from the prayer-book he had used in his boyhood. But instead of Franz,
it was his violin that responded to her call, mixing its sonorous voice
with the rather cracked tones of the peal of the merry Sunday bells.
The fond mother was somewhat shocked at hearing the prayer-inspiring
sounds drowned by the weird, fantastic notes of the “Dance of the
Witches”; they seemed to her so unearthly and mocking. But she almost
fainted upon hearing the definite refusal of her well-beloved son to
go to church. He never went to church, he coolly remarked. It was loss
of time; besides which, the loud peals of the old church organ jarred
on his nerves. Nothing should induce him to submit to the torture of
listening to that cracked organ. He was firm and nothing could move
him. To her supplications and remonstrances he put an end by offering
to play for her a “Hymn to the Sun” he had just composed.
From that memorable Sunday morning, Frau Stenio lost her usual serenity
of mind. She hastened to lay her sorrows and seek for consolation at
the foot of the confessional; but that which she heard in response
from the stern priest filled her gentle and unsophisticated soul with
dismay and almost with despair. A feeling of fear, a sense of profound
terror, which soon became a chronic state with her, pursued her from
that moment; her nights became disturbed and sleepless, her days passed
in prayer and lamentations. In her maternal anxiety for the salvation
of her beloved son’s soul, and for his _post mortem_ welfare, she made
a series of rash vows. Finding that neither the Latin petition to the
Mother of God written for her by her spiritual adviser, nor yet the
humble supplications in German, addressed by herself to every saint
she had reason to believe was residing in Paradise, worked the desired
effect, she took to pilgrimages to distant shrines. During one of these
journeys to a holy chapel situated high up in the mountains, she caught
cold, amidst the glaciers of the Tyrol, and redescended only to take
to a sick bed, from which she arose no more. Frau Stenio’s vow had led
her, in one sense, to the desired result. The poor woman was now given
an opportunity of seeking out in _propria persona_ the saints she had
believed in so well, and of pleading face to face for the recreant son,
who refused adherence to them and to the Church, scoffed at monk and
confessional, and held the organ in such horror.
Franz sincerely lamented his mother’s death. Unaware of being the
indirect cause of it, he felt no remorse; but selling the modest
household goods and chattels, light in purse and heart, he resolved to
travel on foot for a year or two, before settling down to any definite
profession.
A hazy desire to see the great cities of Europe, and to try his luck
in France, lurked at the bottom of this traveling project, but his
Bohemian habits of life were too strong to be abruptly abandoned. He
placed his small capital with a banker for a rainy day, and started
on his pedestrian journey _via_ Germany and Austria. His violin paid
for his board and lodging in the inns and farms on his way, and he
passed his days in the green fields and in the solemn silent woods,
face to face with Nature, dreaming all the time as usual with his eyes
open. During the three months of his pleasant travels to and fro, he
never descended for one moment from Parnassus; but, as an alchemist
transmutes lead into gold, so he transformed everything on his way
into a song of Hesiod or Anacreon. Every evening, while fiddling for
his supper and bed, whether on a green lawn or in the hall of a rustic
inn, his fancy changed the whole scene for him. Village swains and
maidens became transfigured into Arcadian shepherds and nymphs. The
sand-covered floor was now a green sward; the uncouth couples spinning
round in a measured waltz with the wild grace of tamed bears became
priests and priestesses of Terpsichore; the bulky, cherry-cheeked and
blue-eyed daughters of rural Germany were the Hesperides circling
around the trees laden with the golden apples. Nor did the melodious
strains of the Arcadian demi-gods piping on their syrinxes, and audible
but to his own enchanted ear, vanish with the dawn. For no sooner was
the curtain of sleep raised from his eyes than he would sally forth
into a new magic realm of day-dreams. On his way to some dark and
solemn pine-forest, he played incessantly, to himself and to everything
else. He fiddled to the green hill, and forthwith the mountain and the
moss-covered rocks moved forward to hear him the better, as they had
done at the sound of the Orphean lyre. He fiddled to the merry-voiced
brook, to the hurrying river, and both slackened their speed and
stopped their waves, and, becoming silent, seemed to listen to him in
an entranced rapture. Even the long-legged stork who stood meditatively
on one leg on the thatched top of the rustic mill, gravely resolving
unto himself the problem of his too-long existence, sent out after
him a long and strident cry, screeching, “Art thou Orpheus himself, O
Stenio?”
It was a period of full bliss, of a daily and almost hourly exaltation.
The last words of his dying mother, whispering to him of the horrors
of eternal condemnation, had left him unaffected, and the only vision
her warning evoked in him was that of Pluto. By a ready association of
ideas, he saw the lord of the dark nether kingdom greeting him as he
had greeted the husband of Eurydice before him. Charmed with the magic
sounds of his violin, the wheel of Ixion was at a standstill once more,
thus affording relief to the wretched seducer of Juno, and giving the
lie to those who claim eternity for the duration of the punishment of
condemned sinners. He perceived Tantalus forgetting his never-ceasing
thirst, and smacking his lips as he drank in the heaven-born melody;
the stone of Sisyphus becoming motionless, the Furies themselves
smiling on him, and the sovereign of the gloomy regions delighted, and
awarding preference to his violin over the lyre of Orpheus. Taken _au
sérieux_, mythology thus seems a decided antidote to fear, in the face
of theological threats, especially when strengthened with an insane and
passionate love of music; with Franz, Euterpe proved always victorious
in every contest, aye, even with Hell itself!
But there is an end to everything, and very soon Franz had to give up
uninterrupted dreaming. He had reached the university town where dwelt
his old violin teacher, Samuel Klaus. When this antiquated musician
found that his beloved and favorite pupil, Franz, had been left poor
in purse and still poorer in earthly affections, he felt his strong
attachment to the boy awaken with tenfold force. He took Franz to his
heart, and forthwith adopted him as his son.
The old teacher reminded people of one of those grotesque figures which
look as if they had just stepped out of some medieval panel. And yet
Klaus, with his fantastic _allures_ of a night-goblin, had the most
loving heart, as tender as that of a woman, and the self-sacrificing
nature of an old Christian martyr. When Franz had briefly narrated to
him the history of his last few years, the professor took him by the
hand, and leading him into his study simply said:
“Stop with me, and put an end to your Bohemian life. Make yourself
famous. I am old and childless and will be your father. Let us live
together and forget all save fame.”
And forthwith he offered to proceed with Franz to Paris, _via_ several
large German cities, where they would stop to give concerts.
In a few days Klaus succeeded in making Franz forget his vagrant life
and its artistic independence, and reawakened in his pupil his now
dormant ambition and desire for worldly fame. Hitherto, since his
mother’s death, he had been content to received applause only from the
Gods and Goddesses who inhabited his vivid fancy; now he began to crave
once more for the admiration of mortals. Under the clever and careful
training of old Klaus his remarkable talent gained in strength and
powerful charm with every day, and his reputation grew and expanded
with every city and town wherein he made himself heard. His ambition
was being rapidly realized; the presiding genii of various musical
centers to whose patronage his talent was submitted soon proclaimed him
_the one_ violinist of the day, and the public declared loudly that he
stood unrivaled by any one whom they had ever heard. These laudations
very soon made both master and pupil completely lose their heads.
But Paris was less ready with such appreciation. Paris makes
reputations for itself, and will take none on faith. They had been
living in it for almost three years, and were still climbing with
difficulty the artist’s Calvary, when an event occurred which put
an end even to their most modest expectations. The first arrival of
Niccolo Paganini was suddenly heralded, and threw Lutetia into a
convulsion of expectation. The unparalleled artist arrived, and—all
Paris fell at once at his feet.
II
Now it is a well known fact that a superstition born in the dark days
of medieval superstition, and surviving almost to the middle of the
present century, attributed all such abnormal, out-of-the-way talent as
that of Paganini to “supernatural” agency. Every great and marvelous
artist had been accused in his day of dealings with the devil. A few
instances will suffice to refresh the reader’s memory.