The man with the crutches was named Lucas Anselmo Rappard. He saved Eva
and awakened her. He taught her her art. He took her under his care,
and this care was tyrannical enough. He did not set her free again
until she had become all that he had desired to make of her.
He had long lived in retirement at Toledo, because there were three or
four paintings in the Spanish city that rewarded him for his isolation
from the busy world. Also he found that the sun of Spain warmed him
through and through, and that he liked the folk.
In spite of his crippled state he journeyed northward once a year to
be near the ocean. And like the men of old he went slowly from place
to place. His sister Susan was his unfailing companion. It was on
one of his return journeys that he had seen Eva quite by chance. The
village fairs of this region had long attracted him. And there he found
unexpectedly something that stimulated his creative impulse. It was a
sculptor’s inspiration. He saw the form in his mind’s eye. Here was the
material ready to his hand. The sight of Eva relit an idea in him to
which he had long despaired of giving a creative embodiment.
First he called the whole matter a whim. Later, absorbed in his task,
he knew the passion of a Pygmalion.
He was forty at that time or a little more. His beardless face was
thick-boned, peasant-like, brutal. But on closer observation the
intellect shone through the flesh. The greenish-grey eyes, very
deep-set in their hollows, had so compelling a glance that they
surprised and even frightened others.
This remarkable man had an origin and a fate no less remarkable. His
father had been a Dutch singer, his mother a Dalmatian. They had
drifted to Courland, where an epidemic killed both at almost the same
time. The two children had been taken into the ballet school of the
theatre at Riga. Lucas Anselmo justified the most brilliant hopes. His
incomparable elasticity and lightness surpassed anything that had yet
been seen in a young dancer. At seventeen he danced at the Scala in
Milan, and roused the public to a rare exhibition of enthusiasm. But
his success was out of its due time--too late or too early. His whole
personality had something strange and curiously transplanted; and soon
he became estranged from himself and from the inner forces of his life.
At twenty a morbid melancholy seized him.
He happened at that time to be dancing in Petrograd. A young but lately
married lady of the court fell in love with him. She persuaded him
to visit her on a certain night in a villa beyond the city. But her
husband had been warned. He pleaded the necessity of going on a journey
to make his wife the more secure. Then with his servants he broke into
the lovers’ chamber, had the lad beaten cruelly, then tied, and thrown
naked into the snow. Here in the bitter cold the unhappy dancer lay for
six hours.
A dangerous illness and a permanent crippling of his legs were the
result of this violent adventure. Susan nursed him and never left him
for an hour. She had always admired and loved him. Now she worshipped
him. He had already earned a little fortune, and an inheritance from
his mother’s side increased it, so he was enabled to live independently.
A new man developed in him. His deformity gave to his mind the
resilience and power that had been his body’s. In a curious way
he penetrated all the regions of modern life; and above pain,
disappointment, and renunciation, he built a road from the senses to
the mind. In his transformation from a dancer to a cripple he divined
a deep significance. He now sought an idea and a law; and the harsh
contrast between external calm and inner motion, of inner calm and
outward restlessness, seemed to him important in any interpretation of
mankind and of his age.
At twenty-two he set himself to study Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. He
became a thorough student, and took courses at the German universities.
And this strange student, who dragged himself along on crutches, was
often an object of curiosity. At the age of thirty he travelled with
Susan to India, and lived for four years at Delhi and Benares. He
associated with learned Brahmins and received their mystic teachings.
Once he had sight of an almost legendary Thibetan priest, who had lived
in a cave of the mountains for eighty years, and whom the eternal
darkness had blinded, but whom the eternal loneliness had made a saint.
The sight of the centenarian moved him, for the first time in his life,
to tears. He now understood saintliness and believed in it. And this
saint danced: he danced at dawn, turning his blinded eyes to the sun.
He saw the religious festivals in the temple cities on the Ganges, and
felt the nothingness of life and the indifference of death when he saw
those who had died of pestilence float by hundreds down the stream.
He had himself carried into primeval forests and jungles, and saw
everywhere in the inextricable coil of life and death each taking the
other’s form and impulse--decay becoming birth and putrefaction giving
life. He was told of the marble-built city of a certain king, in which
dwelled only dancing girls taught by priests. When their flesh faded
and their limbs lost their agility, they were slain. They had vowed
chastity, and none was permitted to survive the breaking of that vow.
He approached the fabled city but could not gain admission. At night
he saw the fires on its roofs, and heard the songs of its virginal
dancers. Now and then it seemed to him that he heard a cry of death.
This night, with its fires and songs, its unseen dancers and uncertain
cries, stored up new energies within his soul.
X
He took Eva with him to Toledo. He had rented a house there in which,
men said, the painter El Greco had once dwelled.
The building was a grey cube, rather desolate within. Cats shared the
dwelling, and owls, bats, and mice.
Several rooms were filled with books, and these books became Eva’s
silent friends in the years that came now, and during which she saw
almost no one but Rappard and Susan.
In this house she learned to know loneliness and work and utter
dedication to a task.
She entered the house full of fear of him who had forced her into
it. His speech and behaviour intimidated her so that she had
terror-stricken visions when she thought of him. But Susan did all in
her power to soothe the girl.
Susan would relate stories concerning her brother at morning or in
the evening hours, when Eva lay with her body desperately exhausted,
too exhausted often to sleep. She had not been spoiled. The life with
the troupe of jugglers had accustomed her to severe exertions. But
the ceaseless drill, the monotonous misery of the first few months,
in which everything seemed empty and painful, without allurement or
brightness or intelligible purpose, made her ill and made her hate her
own limbs.
It was Susan’s hollow voice that besought her to be patient; it was
Susan who massaged her arms and legs, who carried her to bed and
read to her. And she described her brother, who in her eyes was a
magician and an uncrowned king, and on whose eyes and breath she hung,
described him through his past, which she retold in its scenes and
words, at times too fully and confusedly, at others so concretely and
glowingly that Eva began to suspect something of the good fortune of
the coincidence that had brought her to his attention.
Finally came a day on which he spoke to her openly: “Do you believe
that you were born to be a dancer?” “I do believe it,” she answered.
Then he spoke to her concerning the dance, and her wavering feeling
grew firmer. Gradually she felt her body growing lighter and lighter.
When they parted on that day, ambition was beginning to flame in her
eyes.
He had taught her to stand with outstretched arms and to let no muscle
quiver; to stand on the tips of her toes so that her crown touched a
sharp arrow; to dance definite figures outlined by needles on the floor
with her naked feet, and, when each movement had passed into her very
flesh, to brave the needles blindfolded. He taught her to whirl about a
taut rope adjusted vertically, and to walk on high stilts without using
her arms.
She had had to forget how she had walked hitherto, how she had stridden
and run and stood, and she had to learn anew how to walk and stride and
run and stand. Everything, as he said, had to become new. Her limbs and
ankles and wrists had to adjust themselves to new functions, even as a
man who has lain in the mire of the street puts on new garments. “To
dance,” he would say, “means to be new, to be fresh at every moment, as
though one had just issued from the hand of God.”
He inducted her into the meaning and law of every movement, into the
inner structure and outer rhythm of every gesture.
He created gestures with her. And about every gesture he wove some
experience. He showed her the nature of flight, of pursuit, of parting,
of salutation, of expectancy and triumph and joy and terror; and there
was no motion of a finger in which the whole body did not have a part.
The play of the eyes and of facial expression entered this art so
little that the swathing of the face would not have diminished the
effect that was aimed at.
He drew the kernel from each husk; he demanded the quintessential only.
“Can you drink? Let me see you!” It was wrong. “Your gesture was a
shopworn phrase. The man who had never seen another drink did not drink
thus.”
“Can you pray? Can you pluck flowers, swing a scythe, gather grain,
bind a veil? Give me an image of each action! Represent it!” She could
not. But he taught her.
Whenever she fell into a flat imitation of reality he foamed with rage.
“Reality is a beast!” he roared, and hurled one of his crutches against
the wall. “Reality is a murderer.”
In the statues and paintings of great artists he pointed out to her
the essential and noble lines, and illustrated how all that had been
thus created and built merged harmoniously again with nature and her
immediacy of truth.
He spoke of the help of music to her art. “You need no melody and
scarcely tone. The only thing that matters is the division of time,
the audibly created measure which leads and restrains the violence,
wildness, and passion, or else the softness and sustained beauty of
motion. A tambourine and a fife suffice. Everything beyond that is
dishonesty and confusion. Beware of a poetry of effect that does not
issue from your naked achievement.”
At night he took her to wine rooms and taverns, where the girls of the
people danced their artless and excited dances. He revealed to her the
artistic kernel of each, and let her dance a bolero, a fandango, or
a tarantella, which in this new embodiment had the effect of cut and
polished jewels.
He reconstructed antique battle-dances for her, the Pyrrhic and the
Karpaian; the dance of the Muses about the altar of Zeus on Helicon;
the dance of Artemis and her companions; the dance of Delos, which
imitated the path of Theseus through the labyrinth; the dance of the
maidens in honour of Artemis, during which they wore a short chiton and
a structure of willow on their heads; the vintners’ dance preserved on
the cup of Hiero, which includes all the motions used by the gatherers
of the vine and the workers at the winepress. He showed her pictures
of the vase of François, of the geometrical vase of Dipylon, of many
reliefs and terracotta pieces, and made her study the figures that had
an entrancing charm and incomparable rhythm of motion. And he procured
her music for these dances, which Susan copied from old manuscripts,
and which he adapted.
And from these creative exercises he led her on to a higher freedom.
He now stimulated her to invent for herself, to feel with originality
and give that feeling a creative form. He vivified her glance, that
was so often in thrall to the technical or merely beautiful, liberated
her senses, and gave her a clear vision of that deaf, blind swarm and
throng whom her art would have to affect. He inspired her with love
for the immortal works of man, armoured her heart against seduction by
the vulgar, against a game but for the loftiest stakes, against action
without restraint, being without poise.
But it was not until she left him that she understood him wholly.
When he thought her ripe for the glances of the world he gave her
recommendations to smooth the way, and also Susan. He was willing to be
a solitary. Susan had trained a young Castilian to give him the care he
needed. He did not say whether he intended to stay in Toledo or choose
some other place. Since they had left him, neither Eva nor Susan had
heard from him: he had forbidden both letters and messages.