A FALLEN GIANT
One afternoon in November, Stelio returned on the steamer from the
Lido, accompanied by Daniele Glauro. They had left behind them the
thunder of the greenish waves of the Adriatic, the trees of San Niccolò
despoiled by a predaceous wind, whirlwinds of dead leaves, heroic
phantoms of departures and arrivals, the memory of the archers playing
to win the scarlet ensign, and the mad rides of Lord Byron, devoured by
the desire to surpass his own destiny.
"I too, to-day, would have given a kingdom for a horse," said Effrena,
in self-ridicule, irritated by the mediocrity of life. "Not a cross-bow
nor a horse in San Niccolò, not even the courage of an oarsman! _Perge
andacter!_ So here we are, on this ignoble gray carcass that smokes and
seethes like a kettle. Look at Venice, dancing down there!"
The anger of the waves was extending to the lagoon. The waters were
agitated by a violent wind, and the agitation seemed to reach to the
foundations of the city, and the palaces, cupolas, and campaniles
appeared to heave like vessels on the water. Clusters of floating
seaweed showed their white roots; and flocks of sea-gulls circled in
the wind, their strange, wild laughter echoing above the crested waves.
"Wagner!" Daniele Glauro said suddenly, in a low tone, touched with
emotion, as he pointed at an old man leaning against the railing of a
prow. "There he is, with Franz Liszt and Donna Cosima. Do you see him?"
Stelio's heart beat quicker; for him too all other surrounding figures
disappeared; his bitter sense of ennui and inertia disappeared; and
he felt remaining only the suggestion of superhuman power evoked by
that name, and realized that the only reality hovering over all those
indistinct phantoms was the ideal world conjured up by that name around
the little old man leaning over the troubled waters.
Victorious genius, fidelity of love, unchangeable friendship, the
supreme apparitions of heroic nature, were reassembled in silent union
beneath the tempestuous sky. The same dazzling whiteness crowned
the three heads, whose hair had become blanched through sadness. A
troubled sorrow was revealed in their faces and attitudes, as if the
same undefined presentiment oppressed their blended spirits. The
white face of the woman had a beautiful, strong mouth, with clear-cut
lines, revealing a tenacious soul; and her light, steel-like eyes were
fixed continually on him who had chosen her for the companion of his
noble warfare, watching over him who, having vanquished all hostile
forces, would be powerless to vanquish Death, whose menace perpetually
pursued him. That feminine vigil, full of fear, opposed itself to the
invisible gaze of the other Woman, and threw around the old man a
vague, funereal shadow.
"He seems to be suffering," said Daniele Glauro. "Do you not see? He
seems almost on the point of swooning. Shall we go to them?"
Effrena looked with inexpressible emotion at those white locks blown
about by the sharp wind on the aged neck under the broad brim of the
felt hat, and at the almost livid ear, with its swollen lobe. That
body, which had withstood the keenest warfare by the proud instinct of
its own domination, now looked as limp as some rag which the wind could
bear away and destroy.
"Ah, Daniele! what can we do for him?" said Stelio, yielding to an
almost religious impulse to manifest in some way his reverence and pity
for that great oppressed heart.
"What can we do?" repeated Glauro, to whom that ardent desire to
offer something of himself to the hero now suffering the human fate
had immediately communicated itself. Their souls were blended in that
impulse of fervor and gratitude, that sudden exaltation of their innate
nobility; but they could give nothing more than that. Nothing could
check the secret ravages of the fatal malady; and both were filled with
profound sorrow as they saw the snowy hair tossed about on the old
man's neck by the wind coming from afar, and bringing to the quivering
lagoon the murmur and the foam of the open sea.
"Ah, glorious sea, thou shalt hear me still! Never shall I find on the
earth the health I seek. To thee, therefore, will I remain faithful,
O waves of the boundless sea!" The impetuous harmonies of _The Flying
Dutchman_ returned to Effrena's memory, with the despairing call that
pierces through them from time to time; he fancied that in the rushing
wind he could hear again the wild chant of the crew on the ship with
the blood-red sails: _"Iohohé! Iohohé!_ come ashore, black Captain!
Seven years have passed!" Again his imagination conjured up the figure
of Richard Wagner in youth; he saw once more the lonely one wandering
in the living horror of Paris, poor yet undaunted, devoured by the
fever of genius, his eyes fixed on his star, and his mind resolved to
force the world to recognize it. In the myth of the shadowy captain,
the exiled one had seen the image of his own breathless race, his
furious struggle, his supreme hope. "But some day the pale hero may be
delivered, should he meet on earth a woman that will be faithful to him
until death."
The woman was there, beside the hero, an ever vigilant guardian. She
too, like Senta, knew the sovereign law of fidelity; and death was soon
to dissolve the sacred vow.
"Do you think that, steeped as he is in poetic myths, he has dreamed of
some extraordinary manner of dying, and that he now prays every day to
Nature to conform his end to his dream?" said Glauro, thinking of the
mysterious will that induced the eagle to mistake for a rock the brow
of Æschylus, and led Petrarch to die alone over the pages of a book.
"What would be an end worthy of him?"
"A new melody of unheard-of power, which in his youth had been to him
indistinct and impossible to fix, should suddenly rend his soul like a
terrible sword."
"True!" said Glauro.
The wind-driven clouds were battling in phalanxes through space; the
towers and cupolas seemed swaying in the background; the shadows
of city and sky, equally vast and mobile on the troubled waters,
alternately changed and blended, as if they had been produced by things
equally near dissolution.
"Look at the Magyar, Daniele; there is a generous soul! He has served
the hero with boundless faith and devotion; and by this service, more
than by his art, he has won glory. But see how this very feeling, so
strong and so sincere, inspires him with almost theatrical affectation,
because of his continual wish to impose upon his spectators a
magnificent image of himself, which shall delude them."
The Abbé Liszt straightened his thin and bony frame, which seemed
encased by a coat of mail, and drawing himself to his full height
he bared his head to pray, addressing a mute prayer to the God of
Tempests. The wind stirred his thick white hair, that leonine mane that
at times seemed to emit electric currents which affected his listeners,
and many women. His magnetic eyes were raised to heaven, while the
words of his inaudible prayer moved his thin lips, lending a mystic air
to that face so deeply furrowed with wrinkles.
"What matters it?" said Glauro. "He possesses the divine faculty of
fervor and a taste for all-powerful strength and dominating passion.
Does not his art aspire toward Prometheus, Orpheus, Dante, Tasso? He
was attracted by Richard Wagner as by some great force of nature;
perhaps he heard in him the theme he has attempted to express in his
symphonic poem: 'That which is heard on the Mountain'."
"That may be," said Effrena.
But both started on seeing the old man turn suddenly, with the gesture
of one groping in darkness, and clutch convulsively at his companion,
who uttered a cry. They ran toward the group. Everyone on the boat
crowded around them, struck by that cry of anguish. A look from the
woman prevented the curious from venturing too close to the apparently
lifeless body. She herself supported him, laid him on a bench, felt
his pulse, and bent over to listen to his heart-beats. Her love and
her grief traced an inviolable circle around the stricken one. The
bystanders stepped back and waited in silence, anxiously looking on
that livid face for signs of either life or death.
The face was still and pale, as it lay on the woman's knees. Two
deep furrows descended along the cheeks toward the half-open mouth,
deepening near the imperious nose. Puffs of wind ruffled the thin,
fine hair on the full forehead, and the white collar of beard below
the square chin where the vigor of the jawbone was visible through the
wrinkled skin. The temples were covered with perspiration, and one of
the feet twitched slightly. The smallest detail of that fallen figure
impressed itself forever on the minds of the two young men.
How long did his suffering endure? The shadows continued to float over
the dark water, broken at intervals by long shafts of sun-rays that
appeared to pierce the air and bury themselves like arrows in the dark
waves. The regular cadence of the engine beat upon the air; and now
arose the wild laughter of the sea-gulls, and a sort of dull, prolonged
moan from the tempest-stricken city.
"We must carry him," said Stelio in his friend's ear; he was
intoxicated by the sadness of the situation and by the solemnity of his
own visions.
The motionless face gave a slight sign of returning life.
"Yes, let us offer our services," said Glauro, whose face was pale.
They looked at the woman with the snow-white cheeks; then they advanced
and offered their arms.
How long did that terrible removal last? The distance from the boat to
the shore was not great, but those few steps seemed a long journey. The
waves dashed against the posts of the pier; the distant moan came to
them from the Grand Canal as if from the winding paths of a cavern; the
bells of San Marco rang for vespers; but this confusion of sounds had
lost all immediate reality, and seemed infinitely profound and distant,
like a lament of the ocean itself.
In their arms they bore the Hero's body--the unconscious form of
him who had inundated the world with the flood of melody from his
oceanic soul, the mortal being of the Revealer who had translated into
infinite song the essence of the Universe for man's adoration. With an
ineffable thrill of terror and joy, such as would stir a man who should
see a mighty river dashing itself over vast rocks, a volcano bursting
into flame, a conflagration devouring a forest, a dazzling meteor
obscuring the light of the stars, Effrena felt beneath the hand that
he had slipped under the shoulder to sustain the body--and he paused
an instant to gather his strength, which was failing him, and gazed at
that white head against his breast--he felt the renewed beating of that
sacred heart.