unsteadily homeward, full of generous resolves and pianistic ambitions.
As he intermittently undressed he discovered, to his rage and amazement,
that both his purse and watch had disappeared. The one was well filled;
the other, gold. Blastion's technic had proved unimpeachable.
XVI
AN IRON FAN
Effinghame waited for Dr. Arn in the study, a small chamber crowded with
the contents of the universe--so it seemed to the visitor. There was a
table unusual in size, indeed, big enough to dissect a body thereon. It
was littered with books and medical publications and was not very
attractive. The walls were covered with original drawings of famous
Japanese masters, and over the fireplace hung a huge fan, dull gray in
colouring, with long sandalwood spokes. Not a noteworthy example of
Japanese art, thought Effinghame, as he glanced without marked curiosity
at its neutral tinting, though he could not help wondering why the
cunning artificers of the East had failed to adorn the wedge-shaped
surfaces of this fan with their accustomed bold and exquisite
arabesques.
He impatiently paced the floor. His friend had told him to come at nine
o'clock in the evening. It was nearly ten. Then he began to finger
things. He fumbled the papers in the desk. He examined the two Japanese
swords--light as ivory, keen as razors. He stared at each of the prints,
at Hokusai, Toyokimi, Kuniyoshi, Kiyonaga, Kiosai, Hiroshighé, Utamaro,
Oukoyo-Yé,--the doctor's taste was Oriental. And again he fell to
scrutinizing the fan. It was large, ugly, clumsy. What possessed Arn to
place such a sprawling affair over his mantel? Tempted to touch it, he
discovered that it was as silky as a young bat's wing. At last, his
curiosity excited, he lifted it with some straining to the floor. What
puzzled him was its weight. He felt its thin ribs, its soft, paper-like
material, and his fingers chilled as they closed on the two outermost
spokes. They were of metal, whether steel or iron he could not
determine. A queer fan this, far too heavy to stir the air, and--
Effinghame held the fan up to the light. He had perceived a shadowy
figure in a corner. It resolved itself into a man's head--bearded,
scowling, crowned with thorns or sunbeams. It was probably a Krishna.
But how came such a face on a Japanese fan? The type was Oriental,
though not Mongolian, rather Semitic. It vaguely recalled to Effinghame
a head and face he had seen in a famous painting. But where and by whom?
It wore a vile expression, the eyes mean and revengeful; there was a
cruel mouth and a long, hooked, crafty nose. The forehead was lofty,
even intellectual, and bore its thorns--yes, he was sure they were
thorns--like a conqueror. Just then Dr. Arn entered and laughed when he
saw the other struggling with the fan.
"My _Samurai_ fan!" he exclaimed, in his accustomed frank tones; "how
did you discover it so soon?"
"You've kept me here an hour. I had to do something," answered the
other, sulkily.
"There, there, I apologize. Sit down, old man. I had a very sick patient
to-night, and I feel worn out. I'll ring for champagne." They talked
about trifling personal matters, when suddenly Effinghame asked:--
"Why _Samurai_? I had supposed this once belonged to some prehistoric
giant who could waft it as do ladies their bamboo fans, when they brush
the dust from old hearts--as the Spanish poet sang."
"That fan is interesting enough," was the doctor's reply. "When a
_Samurai_, one of the warrior caste Japanese, was invited to the house
of a doubtful friend, he carried this fan as a weapon of defence.
Compelled to leave his two swords behind a screen, he could close this
fighting machine and parry the attack of his hospitable enemy until he
reached his swords. Just try it and see what a formidable weapon it
would prove." He took up the fan, shut it, and swung it over his head.
"Look out for the bottles!" cried Effinghame.
"Never fear, old chap. And did you notice the head?"
"That's what most puzzled me."
"No wonder. I too was puzzled--until I found the solution. And it took
me some years--yes, all the time you were in Paris learning how to
paint and live." He paused, and his face became gloomy.
"Well--well?"
"There is no well. It's a damned bad fan, that iron one, and I don't
mind saying so to you."
"Superstitious--you! Where is your Haeckel, your Wundt, your Weismann?
Do you still believe in the infallibility of the germ-plasm? Has the fan
brought you ill-luck? The fact is, Arn, ever since your return from
China you've been a strange bird!" It was Effinghame's turn to laugh.
"Don't say another word." The doctor was vivacious in a moment and
poured out wine. They both lighted cigars. Slowly puffing, Arn took up
the fan and spread it open.
"See here! That head, as you must have noticed, is not Japanese. It's
Jewish. Do you recall the head of Judas painted by Da Vinci in his Last
Supper? Now isn't this old scoundrel's the exact duplicate--well, if not
exact, there is a very strong resemblance." Effinghame looked and
nodded.
"And what the devil is it doing on a fan of the _Samurai_? It's not
caprice. No Japanese artist ever painted in that style or ever expressed
that type. I thought the thing out and came to the conclusion--"
"Yes--yes! What conclusion?" eagerly interrupted his listener.
"To the conclusion that I could never unravel such a knotty question
alone." Effinghame was disappointed.
"So I had recourse to an ally--to the fan itself," blandly added Arn, as
he poured out more wine.
"The fan?"
"Precisely--the fan. I studied it from tip to tip, as our bird-shooting
friends say, and I, at last, discovered more than a picture. You know I
am an Orientalist. When I was at Johns Hopkins University I attended the
classes of the erudite Blumenfeld, and what you can't learn from
him--need I say any more? One evening I held the fan in front of a vivid
electric light and at once noticed serried lines. These I deciphered
after a long time. Another surprise. They were Chinese characters of a
remotely early date--Heaven knows how many dynasties back! Now what, you
will ask, is Chinese doing on a _Samurai_ fighting fan! I don't know. I
never shall know. But I do know that this fan contains on one side of it
the most extraordinary revelation ever vouchsafed mankind, particularly
Christian mankind." Excited by his own words, Arn arose.
"Effinghame, my dear fellow, I know you have read Renan. If Renan had
seen the communication on this iron fan, he would have never written his
life of the Messiah." His eyes blazed.
"Why, what do you mean?"
"I mean that it might have been a life of Judas Iscariot."
"Good God, man, are you joking?" ejaculated Effinghame.
"I mean," sternly pursued Arn, "that if De Quincey had studied this
identical fan, the opium-eater would have composed another gorgeous
rhetorical plea for the man preëlected to betray his Saviour, the
apostle who spilt the salt." He sat down and breathed heavily.
"Go on! Go on!"
"Shall I relate the history upon the fan?" And without waiting for an
answer he began at the left of the fan and slowly read to the right:--
I who write this am called Moâ the Bonze. What I write of I
witnessed in a walled city of Judea. I travelled there attracted by
the report of miraculous happenings brought about by the magic art
of a youthful barbarian called Ieshua. The day I arrived in the
city they had sentenced the wise man to death by crucifixion. I was
disappointed. I had come many moons and many leagues from the
Yellow Kingdom to see something rare. I was too late. The magician,
whom his disciples called a god, had been executed. I tarried a few
days in the city. After many questions put to beggars and outcasts,
I heard that a certain woman of rank had a portrait of Ieshua. I
called and without hesitation asked her to show me this picture.
She was an exalted soul. She wept bitter tears as she drew from a
secret cabinet a scarf upon which was imprinted a bloody image. She
continued to weep as I made a copy of the head. I confess I was not
impressed. The face was bearded and ugly. The new god was said to
have been as fair as the sun. And I told the woman this. She only
wept the more.
"If he were a god," I asked, "where are outward evidences?" She
became frantic.
"The real man!" she cried; "_this_ one died for the man he
betrayed," and again fell to lamenting. Seeing I could gain nothing
more from her, I left, wondering at the strange heretics I had
encountered. I went back to my country and after weaving this tale
and painting the head, there awaited the fifth Buddha, the
successor to Siddartha, whose coming has been predicted.
Arn's voice ceased. There was silence in the chamber. Then Effinghame
started up and fiercely growled:--
"What do _you_ make of it, Arn?"
"Isn't it clear enough? There's been a frightful error somewhere, one of
incalculable consequences. A tremendous act of heroism has been
committed by a man whose name has been universally execrated through the
ages. Perhaps he repented at the eleventh hour and by some means
impersonated his betrayed friend; perhaps--"
"But that _other_ body found in the blasted field of Aceldama!"
demanded the agitated Effinghame. Dr. Arn did not answer.
After a lugubrious pause, he whispered:--
"There's more to follow. You haven't heard the worst."
"What--more! I thought your damnable old Bonze died in the odour of
sanctity over there in his Yellow Kingdom."
"True. He died. But before he died he recorded a vision he had. It is
inscribed on the other side of the fan."
Effinghame's features lengthened.
"Still the same fan."
"The same. Here is what it prophesies." Reversing the clumsy fan, Arn
again read:--
Before I pass over into Nirvana I must relate what I saw in the
country of the Christians. It was not a dream. It was too real. And
yet it is to be, for it has not yet happened. The Campagna was now
become a shallow lake from the sea almost to the Sabine Mountains.
What had been Rome was a black waste spot, full of stones and
weeds. And no two stones stood together. Ah! our war with the white
races had been successful. We had not used their fighting machines,
as did that nation of little brown men, the Japanese. The Chinese
were too sage. They allowed the Christians to exterminate the
Japanese; but when they attacked us and attempted to rob us of our
land, we merely resorted to our old-time weapon--the Odour-Death.
With it we smothered their armies, sunk their navies, swept through
their countries like the simoon. The awful secret of the
Odour-Death is one that has been ours from the beginning of time.
Known only to the College of Bonzes, it was never used except in
extreme peril. Its smell is more revolting in its consequences than
the Black Plague. It ravaged the earth.
I sat in a flat-bottomed boat, enjoying the soft melancholy Italian
evening. Not a human did I see; nor had I encountered one on my
slow voyage from the Middle Seas. In meditation I pondered the
ultimate wisdom of Confucius and smiled at the folly of the white
barbarians who had tried to show us a new god, a new religion. At
last they, too, had succumbed like the nations before their era.
The temple of Jupiter on the Capitol had fallen, so had the holy
temple of Jerusalem. And now St. Peter's. Their central religion
had been destroyed, and yet prophecies of the second coming of
their divinity had not been accomplished. When the last Pope of
Rome dies, so it was said, then time would be accomplished. The
last Pope _had_ died. Their basilica with its mighty dome was a
desert where scorpions and snakes abounded. The fifth Buddha would
appear, not the second Christos. Suddenly I saw before me in a puny
boat a beautiful beardless youth. He was attired in some symbolical
garments and upon his head a triple tiara. I could not believe my
aged eyes. He sat upright. His attitude was hieratic. His eyes
were lifted heavenwards. He clasped his hands and prayed:--
"O Lord, remove thy servant. The time is at hand foretold by thy
slaughtered saints. I am the last Pope and the humblest of thy
servants. Though the heathen hath triumphed upon the earth, I go to
thy bosom, for all things are now accomplished." And he tumbled
forward, dead. The last Pope! I had seen him. Nothing could happen
after that.
And as I turned my boat in the direction of the sea a moaning came
upon the waters. The sky became as brass. A roar, like the rending
asunder of the firmament, caused my soul to expand with horror and
joy. Yes, time _was_ accomplished. The last Pope had uttered the
truth. Eternity was nigh. But the Buddha would now prove to the
multitudes awakened from their long sleep that _He_, not other
gods, was the true, the only God. In a flare of light sounded the
trumpets of destiny; eternity unrolled before me, and on the vast
plain I saw the bones of the buried dead uniting, as men and women
from time's beginnings arose in an army, the number whereof is
unthinkable. And oh! abomination of desolation, the White Horse,
not _Kalki_ the tenth incarnation of Vishnu, but the animal
foretold in _their_ Apocalypse, came through the lightnings, and in
the whirlwinds of flame and thunder I saw the shining face of Him,
the Son of Man! Where our Buddha? Alas! the last Pope spake truth.
I, Moâ the Bonze, tell you this ere it be too late to repent your
sins and forswear your false gods. The Galilean is our master....
"_Farceur!_ Do you know what I would do with that accursed fan? I'd
destroy it, sell it, get rid of it somehow. Or else--" Effinghame
scrutinized the doctor, whose eyes were closed--"or else I would return
to the pious practices of my old religion." No smile crossed the face of
his friend as he firmly held the fighting fan, the iron and mystical fan
of the _Samurai_.
XVII
THE WOMAN WHO LOVED CHOPIN
I
When Marco Davos left Ischl on the midday train, that picturesque,
huddled Austrian watering-place was stuffy. He was surprised then most
pleasantly by the coolness of Aussee, further down the line in the
direction of Vienna. Ischl is not a bad place, but it lies, as the
natives say, smothered in a kettle. He rode over from the station to the
stadt park, where the band was playing. There he dismounted, for he was
going further--Aussee is not very interesting, but it principally serves
as a good starting-point for trips to many of the charming lakes with
which Styria is dotted. After asking his way, Davos passed the swimming
baths, and keeping on the left bank of a tiny stream, he presently found
himself walking through an earthly paradise. Since his advent in Ischl,
where he drank the waters and endeavoured to quiet his overtaxed nerves,
he had made up his mind to visit Alt-Aussee; several Viennese friends
had assured him that this hamlet, beneath a terrific precipice and on
the borders of a fairy-like lake, would be well worth the while.
It was a relief to breathe the thinner mountain air, and the young
artist inhaled it with satisfaction, his big hat in hand, his long curly
black hair flowing in the gentle breeze. He found himself in tunnels of
verdure, the sunlight shut off by the heavy leafage; then the path
debouched into the open and, skirting closely the rocky wall, it widened
into an island of green where a shady pagoda invited. He sat down for a
few minutes and congratulated himself that he had escaped the intimate
discomforts of the omnibus he discerned on the opposite bank, packed
with stout people. This was the third week of his vacation, one enforced
by a nerve specialist in the Austrian capital, and for the first time
Davos felt almost cheerful. Perhaps the absolute hush of the country and
the purity of the atmosphere, with its suggestion of recent rain,--the
skies weep at least once a day in the Salzkammergut region,--proved a
welcome foil to fashionable Ischl, with its crowds, its stiffness, its
court ceremonial--for the emperor enjoys his _villegiatura_ there. And
Davos was sick and irritable after a prolonged musical season. He had
studied the pianoforte with Rosenthal, and his success, from his début,
had been so unequivocal that he played too much in public. There was a
fiery particle in his interpretations of Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt
that proclaimed the temperament, if not the actual possession, of
genius. Still in his early manhood--he was only twenty--the maturity of
his musical intelligence and the poetry of his style created havoc in
impressionable hearts. With his mixed blood, Hungarian and Italian,
Marco Davos' performance of romantic composers was irresistible; in it
there was something of Pachmann's wayward grace and Paderewski's
plangency, but with an added infusion of gypsy wildness which evoked for
old concert-goers memories of Liszt the brilliant rhapsodist.
But he soon overpaid the score presented by the goddess Fortune--his
nerves were sadly jangled. A horror of the human face obsessed his
waking and sleeping hours; he dreamed of colossal countenances with
threatening eyes, a vast composite of the audiences he nightly faced. As
his popularity increased the waning of his self-respect told him that he
must go into retreat, anywhere out of the musical world--else would his
art suffer. It did suffer. The nervous diffidence, called stage-fright,
which had never assailed his supreme self-balance, intruded its
unwelcome presence. Marco, several months after he had discovered all
these mischievous symptoms, the maladies of artistic adolescence, was
not assured when the critics hinted of them--the public would surely
follow suit in a few weeks. Then came the visit to the learned Viennese
doctor and the trip to Ischl. A few more months of this appalling
absorption in his own personality, this morbid marriage of man to his
own image, and he suspected that his brain would be irretrievably
injured.
He was a curious student of matters psychologic as well as musical. A
friendly laboratory had inducted him into many biologic mysteries.
Particularly fascinating to him was the tactile sense, that sense of
touch wherewith man acquaints himself with this earth-clot swimming in
space. Davos contemplated the tips of his fingers as he sat in the
grateful cool, his ten voices as he named them. With them he sang,
thundered, and thought upon the keyboard of his grand piano-forte. A
miracle, indeed, these slender cushions of fat, ramified by a network of
nerves, sinews, and bones as exquisite in their mechanism as the motion
of the planets. If hearing is a miracle, so is touch; the ear is not a
resonator, as has been so long maintained, but an apparatus which
records variations of pressure. This makes it subservient to the laws of
sensation; touch and hearing are akin. It aroused the pride of Davos
after he had read the revolutionary theories of Pierre Bounier regarding
the touch. So subtle could the art of touch be cultivated, the pianist
believed, that the blind could _feel_ colour on the canvas of the
painter. He spent weeks experimenting with a sensitive manometer,
gauging all the scale of dynamics. No doubt these fumblings on the edge
of a new science temporarily hurt his play. With a dangerous joy he
pressed the keys of his instrument, endeavouring to achieve more
delicate shadings. He quarrelled with the piano manufacturers for their
obstinate adherence to the old-fashioned clumsy action; everything had
been improved but the keyboard--that alone was as coldly unresponsive
and inelastic as a half-century ago. He had fugitive dreams of wires
that would vibrate like a violin. The sounding-board of a pianoforte is
too far from the pianist, while the violinist presses his strings as one
kisses the beloved. Little wonder it is the musical monarch. A new
pianoforte, with passionately coloured overtones, that could sob like a
violoncello, sing like a violin, and resound with the brazen clangours
of the orchestra--Liszt had conceived this synthesis, had by the sheer
force of his audacious genius compelled from his instrument ravishing
tones that were never heard before or--alas!--since.
Even the antique harpsichord had its compensations; not so powerful in
its tonal capacity, it nevertheless gave forth a pleading, human quality
like the still small angelic voice. Davos pondered these problems,
pondered Chopin's celestial touch and the weaving magic of his many-hued
poems; Chopin--Keats, Shelley, and Heine battling within the walls of a
frail tender soul.
The sound of footsteps and voices aroused him. He shivered with disgust.
More people! Two men, well advanced in life, followed by two women,
barely attracted his notice, until he saw that the little creature who
waddled at the rear of the party was a Japanese in European clothes.
Notwithstanding her western garb, she resembled a print of Utamaro.
Beside her walked a tall, grave girl, with dark hair and gray eyes,
attired in the quaint garb of some early nineteenth-century epoch--1840
or thereabouts. As old-fashioned as she looked, a delicate girlish
beauty was hers, and when she indifferently gazed at Davos, straightway
he heard humming in his head the "glance motive" from Tristan and
Isolde. They passed on, but not leaving him as he was before; a voice
whispered in the secret recesses of his being: "You love! Follow! Seek
her!" And under the sudden impulsion of this passion he arose and made a
few steps toward the curve of the path around which the girl and her
companions had disappeared. The absurdity of this hasty translation into
action of his desire halted him. Yes, his nerves must be in a bad way if
a casual encounter with a pretty woman--but was she pretty? He did not
return to his seat. He continued his stroll leisurely. Pretty! Not
exactly pretty--distinguished! Noble! Lovely! Beautiful! He smiled. Here
he was playing the praises of the unknown in double octaves. He did not
overtake her. She had vanished on the other side of the bridge, and in a
few minutes he found himself entering Alt-Aussee. It wore a bright
appearance, with its various-coloured villas on the lake shores, and its
church and inn for a core. The garden of this hotel he found to be
larger than he had imagined; it stretched along the bank and only
stopped as if stone and mortar had been too lazy to go farther.
Again he hesitated. The garden, the _restauration_--full of people:
women knitting, children bawling, men reading; and all sipping coffee to
a background of gossip. He remembered that it was the sacred hour of
_Kaffeeklatsch_, and he would have escaped by a flight of steps that led
down to the beach, but he was hailed. A company of a half-dozen sat at a
large table under the trees, and the host was an orchestral conductor
well known to Davos. There was no alternative. He took a chair. He was
introduced as the celebrated pianoforte-virtuoso to men and women he had
never seen before, and hoped--so rancorous was his mood--never to see
again. A red-headed girl from Brooklyn, who confessed that she thought
Maeterlinck the name of some new Parisian wickedness, further bothered
him with questions about piano teachers. No, he didn't give lessons! He
never would! She dropped out of the conversation. Finally by an effort
he swore that his head was splitting, that he must return to Ischl. He
broke away. When he discovered that the crowd was also bound for the
same place, he abruptly disappeared. It took him just two hours to
traverse the irregular curves of the lake on the Franz Carl Promenade,
and he ate his dinner in peace at the inn upon a balcony that projected
over the icy waters.
Davos decided, as he smoked a mild cigarette, that he would remain at
Alt-Aussee for the night. The peace of the landscape purified his soul
of its irritability, though he wished that the Dachstein would not
dominate so persistently the sky-line--it was difficult to avoid the
view of this solitary and egotistic peak, the highest in Styria. He was
assigned a comfortable chamber, but the night was too fine for bed. He
did not feel sleepy, and he went along the road he had come by; the
church was an opaque mass, the spire alone showing in the violet
twilight, like some supernatural spar on a ship far out at sea. He
attempted to conjure to his tired brain the features, the expression, of
the girl. They would not reappear; his memory was traitorous.