wished himself down in Rouen. But he held his position.
"Yes," he continued, "your music. It interested me. And now I find you
speaking my own tongue. I must confess that I am curious, that my
curiosity has warrant." Thus was he talking to beggars as if they were
his social equals. Unconsciously the tone he adopted had been forced
upon him by the bearing of his companions, above all by their accent,
that of cultivated folk. Who and what were they? The musician no longer
smiled.
"You are a music-lover, monsieur?" he asked in a marked French _patois_.
"I love music, and I am extremely engaged by your remarkable combination
of instruments," answered Ferval. Baki regarded his wretched orchestra
on the grass, then spoke to his daughter.
"Debora," he said in English, and his listener wondered if it were
Celtic or Scotch in its unusual intonations, "Debora, you must sing
something for the gentleman. He loves our art,"--there was indescribable
pathos in this phrase,--"so sing something from Purcell, Brahms, or
Richard Strauss."
These words were like the sting of hail; they seemed to drop from the
sky, so out of key were they with the speaker's ragged clothes and the
outlandish garb of his daughter. Purcell! Brahms! Strauss! What could
these three composers mean to such outcasts? Believing that he was the
victim of a mystification, Ferval waited, his pulses beating as if he
had been running too hard. The girl slowly moved her glorious eyes in
his direction; light as they were in hue, their heavy, dark lashes gave
them a fantastic expression--bright flame seen through the shadow of
smoke. He felt his own dilating as she opened her throat and poured out
a broad, sonorous stream of sound that resolved into Von ewiger Liebe by
Brahms. He had always loved deep-voiced women. Had he not read in the
Talmud that Lilith, Adam's first wife, was low of voice? And this
beggar-maid? Maybe a masquerading singer with a crazy father! What else
could mean such art wasted on the roads, thrown in the faces of a
rabble! Ferval kindled with emotion. Here was romance. Brahms and his
dark song under the bowl of the troubled blue sky strongly affected him.
He took the lean, brown hand of the singer and kissed it fervently. She
drew back nervously, but her father struck her on the shoulder
chidingly.
"A trifle too dreary," he rumbled in his heavy bass. "Now, Purcell for
the gentleman, and may he open his heart and his purse for the poor."
"Father," she cried warningly, "we are not beggars, _now_!" She turned
supplicatingly to the young man and made a gesture of dismissal. He
gently shook his head and pretended that he was about to leave, though
he felt that his feet were rooted in the earth, his power of willing
gone.
"Ay, ay, my girl!" continued the musician, "you can sing as well as the
best of them, only you love your sinful old father so much that you have
laid aside your ambitions, to follow him in his pilgrimage of expiation
about this wicked globe. Ah, sir, if you but knew--I _will_ speak,
Debora, for he is a gentleman and a lover of music! If you but knew our
history, you would not be surprised at us. Have ye ever been in Wales?"
Ferval stumbled in his answer. It was overlooked; the old man continued:
"If ye have, ye must have heard of the sin-eaters. I am one of them, I
am an eater of sin--"
Again the girl exclaimed, this time piteously, "Oh, father, remember
your vow!"
"Poor lass! Yes, I was a doer of evil, and I became an eater of sin.
Some day my sins will be forgiven--this is my penance." He pointed to
his instruments. Ferval kept silence. He feared a word would blow away
the cobweb foundations of the narrative. The girl had turned and was
watching a young tilted moon which with a single star made silvery dents
low in the western horizon.
"I am an eater of sin. We still have a few such in Wales. They put a
piece of bread and cheese on the breast of a dead man and when the
sin-eater eats it, the sins of the dead are passed into the bread and
cheese and the soul of the dead is shrived of them. Ay, ay, but it's a
grave duty, my friend, to take upon your own soul the crime of another.
If you are free from sin yourself, you may walk through life a brave
creature; but ... I took his sins, sins, the sins of the wickedest
composer of our century, God rest his soul. And for the wicked things he
put into his symphonies I must march through life playing on this
terrible collection of instruments the Tune of Time--" His daughter
faced him.
"Father, we must go; you are only keeping the gentleman." Again she
signalled Ferval, but he disregarded her warning. He would not stir. The
story and the man who told it, a prophet shorn of his heaven-storming
powers, fascinated him.
"I took his sins to myself and they were awful. Once every night I play
the Tune of Time in which the wickedness of the dead man is spread out
like dry rot in a green field. This man kept his genius so long stagnant
that it decayed on his hands, and then into his pestilential music he
poured his poison, and would have made the world sick. Oh, for delivery
from the crushing transgressions of another! His name? Ah, but that is
my secret! I ate his sin, and truth, my son, is stranger than theology!
Listen!"
Before his daughter could check him he had hastily donned his armament
of instruments and, tramping slowly the broad, smooth path, began
playing. Ferval, much disappointed, was about to disappear, for he
remembered the racking noises of the previous day. But this music, this
Tune of Time!...
III
It was like the flare of lightning which illuminates strange regions
beyond the borders of the soul. Ferval no longer heard, he felt; he felt
no more, he saw. The white veil was torn asunder, and it showed him a
melodious thunder-pool wherein tapering tiny bodies swam, whose eyes
were the eyes of Debora. They split and coalesced into other creatures,
and to the drummings of spheric harmonies resolved themselves scaly and
monstrous. Never did they cease changing. As the music buzzed he saw the
great ladder of life, the lowermost rungs resting in lakes of melted
amber, the top threatening the remotest rims of the universe. And still
the Tune of Time whirred on, as facet after facet of the Infinite
wheeled toward creation. Numberless legions of crumpled nightmare shapes
modulated into new, familiar forms. Ferval saw plasmic dew become
anthropoidal apes, fiercely roaming primeval forests in search of prey.
The music mounted ever upward, for the Tune of Time is the Tune of
Love--love and its inseparable shadow, hate, fashion the firmament. The
solid, circular earth shivered like a mighty harp under this lyric
burden of love. The very stars sported in their orbits; and from the
fulgurating ovens of the Milky Way there shot forth streams of audible
light that touched the heart-strings of the hairy, erect primates and
set them chanting; thus were the souls born which crowned them men. This
space-bridging music ranged from sun to sun, and its supernatural
symphony had no beginning and never shall end.
But the magician or devil who revealed this phantasmagoria of the
Cosmos--how had he wrested from the Inane the Tune of Time that in a
sequence of chromatic chords pictured the processes of the eternal
energy? Was this his sin, the true sin against the Holy Ghost? How had
he blundered upon the secret of the rhythmic engine which spun souls
through the ages? No man could live after this terrific peep at the
Ancient of Days. Debora's eyes peered into Ferval's, filled with the
music that enmeshes. And now sounded the apocalyptic trumpets even unto
the glittering edges of eternity....
Amid this vertiginous tempest of tones Debora danced the Dance of Space.
She revolved in lenten movement to the lilt of the music, her eyes
staring and full of broken lights. As her gaze collided with her
companion's he saw a disk of many-coloured fire; and then her languorous
gestures were transformed into shivering intensities. She danced like
the wine-steeped Noah; she danced as danced David before the Ark of the
Covenant. And she was Herodias pirouetting for the price of John's head,
and her brow was wreathed with serpents. Followed the convulsive
curvings of the Nautch and the opaque splendours of stately Moorish
slaves. Debora threw her watcher into a frenzy of fear. He crouched
under a sky that roofed him in with its menacing blackness; the orbs of
the girl were shot with crescent lightnings. Alien in his desolation, he
wondered if her solemn leaps, as the music dashed with frantic speed
upon his ear-drums, signified the incarnation of Devi, dread slayer of
men! The primal charmers affrighted his vision: Lilith, Ourania,
Astarté, Ashtaroth, Belkis, Ishtar, Mylitta, Cotytto, and many
immemorial figures from before the Flood streamed by and melted into the
woven paces of Debora--this new Jephtha's daughter dancing to her doom
as her father fingered the Tune of Time. In the whirling patterns of her
dance, Ferval discerned, though dimly, the Veil of Maya, the veil of
illusion called Space, on the thither side of which are embroidered the
fugacious symbols of Time....
... As the delirious music faltered and fainted, he watched the tragic
eyes of Debora yellowing cat-like. His senses and imagination had been
hypnotized by all this fracas and by the beauty of the girl. With such a
mate and such formidable music, he could conquer the earth! His brain
was afire with the sweetness of the odour that enveloped them, an odour
as penetrating as the music of the nocturnal Chopin.
"Debora," he whispered, "you must never go away from me." She hung her
head. The old man was not to be seen; the darkness had swallowed him.
Ferval quietly passed his arm about the waist of the silent woman and
slowly they walked in the tender night. She was the first to speak:--
"You did not hear a madman's story," she asserted in her clear, candid
voice, which had for him the hue of a cleft pomegranate. "It is the
history of my father's soul. It is his own sin he expiates."
"But you, you!" Ferval cried unsteadily. "Why must your life be
sacrificed to gratify the bizarre egotism of such a--" He cut short the
phrase, fearful of wounding her. He felt her body tremble and her arm
contract. They reached the marble staircase of the Jeanne d'Arc
memorial. She stopped him and burst forth:--
"Would you be willing to share his burden? Would you take upon your
shoulders his sin? He may have committed the one unpardonable sin, for
he discovered the true philosopher's stone, that can transmute metals,
make mountains nod, the stars to stop, and command the throne of
Jehovah--oh, what blasphemy has been his in his daring music! If he
could persuade one other soul besides mine to help him, he might be
released from his woe. Will you be that other?"
She put this question as if she were proposing a commonplace human
undertaking. Ferval in his confusion fancied that she was provoking him
to a declaration. To grasp his receding reason he fatuously exclaimed:--
"Is this a Salvation Army fantasy?"
With that she called out, in harsh resentment:
"Not salvation for you!"
She then thrust him from her so violently that he tumbled backward down
the steps to the very bottom, where, unnerved by the ferocity of the
attack and his head bruised by the fall, he felt his consciousness
escape like gas from a punctured balloon. When found the next morning,
he was barely covered by the old sin-eater's rags, while near by was
scattered the entire orchestra of that eloquent wizard. Shudderingly he
realized that it had been no dream; shudderingly he wondered if upon his
soul had been shifted the unknown crime of the fanatic! The witching,
enigmatic Debora haunted his memory; and with dismay he recalled the
blistering vision evoked by the music, through which she had glided like
some tremulous Lamia. Decidedly his imagination had carried him far. He
cursed his easy credulity, he reviled his love of the exotic....
Ferval made inquiry of the authorities, but received little comfort.
Salvation Army people they were not, this father and daughter; the
tambourine, assumed garb, and prophet's beard had deceived him.
Impostors! But of what incredible caliber, of what illusion-creating
power! For years he could not see a Salvation Army girl without a sense
of cerebral exaltation. If he could have met Debora again, he would have
forgiven her sibylline deceptions, her father's chicanery. And how did
they spin their web? Ferval, student of the occult, greedy of
metaphysical problems, at first set it down to Indian Yogi magic. But
the machinery--the hideously discordant human orchestra, the corybantic
dancing! No, he rejected the theory. Music is sometimes hypnotic, but
not such music; dancing is the most alluring of the spatial arts, and
Debora's miming was a delight to the eye; but could it have so obscured
his judgments as to paint upon the canvas of his fancy those prodigious
frescoes of time and space?
In the iron solitude of his soul he tortured himself with these
questions. His stupor lasted for days--was it the abrupt fall or was it
the result of his absinthe-like dreams? He was haunted by an odour that
assailed his brain like one tune persistently played. The odour! Whence
did it come with its sickly sweetness? Perhaps therein lay the secret of
his hallucinating visions. Perhaps a drug had perverted his brain. But
within the week the dangerous perfume had become dissipated, and with it
vanished all hope of solving the riddle. Oh, to sense once more the
enchantments of its fragrance, once more revel in the sublimated
intoxication of mighty forces weaving at the loom of life! By the
cadences of what infernal art had he been vouchsafed a glimpse of the
profiles of the gods? Henceforth Ferval became a lover of shadows.
XIX
NADA
The tenderness of the growing night disquieted the dying woman.
"Aline!" she called. But it was only the name that reverberated within
the walls of her brain, harrowed by fever. A soft air rustled the drawn
curtains of lawn; and on the dressing table the two little lamps
fluttered in syncopated sympathy. One picture the room held. It was
after a painting by Goya, and depicted a sneering skeleton scrawling on
his dusty tomb, with a bony fore-finger, the sinister word,
_Nada_--nothing! The perturbation of the woman increased, though
physical power seemed denied her. "Aline, my child!" This time a
clucking sound issued from her throat.
The girl went to the bedside and gently fanned. Her aunt wagged her head
negatively. "No, no!" she stuttered. Aline stopped, and kneeling, took
the sick hands in her own. Their eyes met and Aline, guided by the
glance, looked over at the picture with its sardonic motto.
"Shall I take it away, Aunt Mary?" The elder woman closed her eyes as if
to shut out the ghoulish mockery. Then Aline saw the tabouret that stood
between the windows--it was burdened with magnolias in a deep white
bowl.
"Do you wish them nearer?"
"No, no," murmured her aunt. Her eyes brightened. She pushed her chin
forward, and the young girl removed the flowers, knowing that their
odour had become oppressive. She was not absent more than a few seconds.
As she returned the maid touched her arm.
"The gentlemen are waiting below, miss. They won't leave until they see
you."
"How can I go now? Send them away, send them away!"
"Yes, miss; but I told them what you said this afternoon about the
danger of Holiest Mother--"
"Hush! she is calling." Aline slipped into the room on hurried feet, her
eyes dilated, her hair in anxious disorder. But the invalid made no
signal. She lay with closed eyelids, the contraction of her nostrils a
faint proclamation of life. Again the niece took her place at the
headboard, and with folded fingers watched the whispering indications of
speedy flight. The maid soon beckoned her from a narrowed door. Aline
joined her.
"They say that if you don't go down, they will come up."
"Who says?" was the stern query.
"The Second Reader and the Secretary. I think you had better see them;
they both look worried. Really I do, Miss Allie."
"Very well, Ellen; but you must stay here, and if Holiest Mother makes
the slightest move, touch the bell. I'll not be gone five minutes."
Without arranging her hair or dress, Aline opened the folding doors of
the drawing-room. Only the centre lamp was lighted, but she recognized
the two men. They were sitting together, and arose as she entered. The
burly Second Reader wore a dismayed countenance. His cheeks were flabby,
his eyes red. The other was a timid little man who never had anything to
say.
"How is Holiest Mother?" asked the Reader.
"Dying."
"Oh, Sister Aline! Why such a blunt way of putting it? _She_ may be
exchanging her earthly garb for a celestial one--but die! We do not
acknowledge death in the Church of the New Faith." He paused and blandly
stroked his huge left hand, covered with red down.
"Holiest Mother, my aunt, has not an hour to live," was the cool
response of the girl. "If you have no further question, I must ask you
to excuse me; I am needed above." She stepped to the door.
"Wait a moment, sister! Not so fast. The situation is serious. Hundreds
of thousands of the faithful depend on our report of this--of this sad
event. We may tell them that the female pope of our great religion"--he
bent his big neck reverently--"was wafted to her heavenly abode by the
angels. But there are the officers of the law, the undertaker, the
cemetery people, to be considered. Shall we acknowledge that our founder
has died like any other human--in bed, of a fever? And who is to be her
successor? Has she left a will?"
"Poor Aunt Mary!" muttered the girl.
"It must be a woman, will or no will," continued the Second Reader, in
the tone of a conqueror making terms with a stricken foe. "Now Aline,
sister, you are the nearest of kin. You are a fervent healer. _You_ are
the Woman."
"How can you stand there heartlessly plotting such things and a dying
woman in the house?" Aline's voice was metallic with passion. "You care
only for the money and power in our church. I refuse to join with you in
any such scheme. Aunt Mary will die. She will name her successor. Then
it will be time to act. Have you forgotten her last words to the
faithful?" She pointed to a marble tablet above the fireplace, which
bore this astounding phrase: "My first and forever message is one and
eternal." Nothing more,--but the men cowered before the sublime wisdom
uttered by a frail woman, wisdom that had started the emotional
machinery of two continents.
"But, great God! Miss Aline, you mustn't go off and leave us in this
fix." Drops of water stood on the forehead of the Second Reader. His
hands dropped to his side with a gesture of despair. His companion kept
to the corner, a scared being.
"You know as well as I do that _somebody_ has to take the throne seat
after--after your Aunt Mary dies--I mean, after Holiest Mother is
translated to eternity. Ask her, beg her, for some advice. We can't let
the great undertaking go to pieces--"
"You have little faith, brother," replied Aline. "If that message means
anything, then the New Faith will take care of itself--"
"Yes, yes, I know," was the testy interruption; "but the world is not so
easily led in matters of religion. The message, as you say, is divine;
but it may sound like meaningless twaddle to the world at large. If we
are to heal mankind and dispel the heresy of disease and death, why
can't Holiest Mother save herself? Mind you, I am looking at this thing
with the eyes of the sceptics--"
"You are an unbeliever, a materialist, yourself," was the bold retort.
"Do as you please, but you can't drag me into your money calculations."
The swift slam of the door left them to their fears.
Her aunt, sitting as upright as a candle, was conducting an invisible
orchestra when Aline returned. The frightened maid tried to hold the
lean, spasmodic arms as they traced in the air the pompous rhythm of a
march that moved on silent funereal pinions through the chamber. The
woman stared threateningly at the picture on the wall, the picture of
the skeleton which had come from nothingness to reveal nothingness to
the living. The now distraught girl, her nerves crisped by her doubts,
threw herself upon the bed, her fears sorely knocking at her heart.
"Aunt, Aunt Mary--Holiest Mother, in Christ's name, in the name of the
New Faith, tell me before you go--tell me what is to become of our holy
church after you die--after you pass over to the great white light. Is
it all real? Or is it only a dream, _your_ beautiful dream?--What is the
secret truth? Or--or--is there no secret--no--" her voice was cracked by
sobs. The stately, soundless music was waved on by her aunt. Then
Holiest Mother fell back on her pillow, and with a last long glance at
the picture, she pointed, with smiling irony at the picture.
_Nada, Nada ..._
The night died away in tender complicity with the two little lamps on
the dressing table, and the sweet, thick perfume of magnolias modulated
into acrid decay as day dawned. Below, the two men anxiously awaited the
message from the dead. And they saw again upon the marble tablet above
the fireplace her cryptic wisdom:--
"My first and forever message is one and eternal."
XX
PAN
For the Great God Pan is alive again.
--DEAN MANSEL.
I
The handsome Hungarian kept his brilliant glance fixed upon Lora Crowne;
she sat with her Aunt Lucas and Mr. Steyle at a table facing the
orchestra. His eyes were not so large as black; the intensity of their
gaze further bewildered the young woman, whose appearance that evening
at the famous café on the East Side was her initial one. The heat, the
bristling lights, the terrific appealing clamour of the gypsy band, set
murmuring the nerves of this impressionable girl. And the agility of the
_cymbalom_ player, his great height, clear skin, and piercing eyes,
quite enthralled her.
"It is the gypsy dulcimer, Lora; I read all about it in Liszt's book on
gypsy music," said Aunt Lucas, in an airy soprano.
Mr. Steyle was impressed. Lora paid no attention, but continued to gaze
curiously at the antics of the player, who hammered from his instrument
of wire shivering, percussive music. With flexible wrists he swung the
felt-covered mallets that brought up such resounding tones; at times
his long, apelike arms would reach far asunder and, rolling his eyes, he
touched the extremes of his _cymbalom_; then he described furious
arpeggios, punctuated with a shrill tattoo. And the crazy music defiled
by in a struggling squad of chords; but Aŕpad Vihary never lifted his
eyes from Lora Crowne....
The vibration ceased. Its withdrawal left the ear-drums buzzing with a
minute, painful sensation, like that of moisture rapidly evaporating
upon the naked skin. A battalion of tongues began to chatter as the
red-faced waiters rushed between the tables, taking orders. It was after
eleven o'clock, and through the swinging doors passed a throng of motley
people, fanning, gossiping, bickering--all eager and thirsty. Clarence
Steyle pointed out the celebrities with conscious delight. Over
yonder--that man with the mixed gray hair--was a composer who came every
night for inspiration,--musical and otherwise, Clarence added, with a
laugh. And there was the young and well-known decadent playwright who
wore strangling high collars and transposed all his plays from French
sources; he lisped and was proud of his ability to dramatize the latest
mental disease. And a burglar who had written a famous book on the
management of children during hot weather sat meekly resting before a
solitary table.
The leader of the Hungarian band was a gypsy who called himself Alfassy
Janos, though he lived on First Avenue, in a flat the door of which
bore this legend: _Jacob Aron_. The rest of the band seemed gypsy. Who
is the _cymbalom_ player? That is not difficult to answer; the programme
gives it.
"There you are, Miss Lora."
She looked. "Oh, what a romantic name! He must be a count at least."
"Lora, dear, gypsies never bear titles," remarked Aunt Lucas,
patronizingly.
"How about the Abbé Liszt?" triumphantly asked her charge.