Lenyard disliked Neshevna before he saw her; when they met he made no
attempt to conceal his hatred. He again told himself this, as with
Scheff he pursued the gravel path leading to the porter's lodge of
Illowski's house. In Auteuil it overlooked the Seine which flowed a
snake of sunny silver between its green-ribbed banks. Together the pair
entered, mounted a low flight of steps and rang the private bell.
Neshevna opened the door. In the flood of a westering sun the accents of
her fluid Slavic face and her mannish head set upon narrow
shoulders--all the disagreeable qualities of the woman--were exaggerated
by this bath of clear light. Her hard gaze softened when she saw Scheff.
She spoke to him, not noticing the other:
"The master is not at home." Lenyard contradicted her: "He is; the
concierge said so."
"The concierge lies; but come in. I will see."
Following her they reached the music room, which was bare of
instruments, pictures, furniture, all save a tall desk upon which lay a
heap of music paper. Neshevna made a loping dart to the desk--she was
like a wolf in her movements--and threw a handkerchief over it. Lenyard
watched her curiously. Scheff gave one of his good-natured yawns and
then laughed:
"Neshevna, we come to ask!"
"What?" she gravely inquired. There was a lithe alertness in the woman
that puzzled Lenyard. Scheff lounged on the window-sill. "Now, Neshevna,
be a good girl! Don't forget Moscow or your old adorer."
She answered him with sarcastic emphasis: "You fat fool, you and your
clerical friend there, what do you both want spying upon Illowski like
police?" Her voice became shrill as she rapidly uttered these questions,
her green eyes seemed shot with blood. "If you think I'll tell either of
you anything concerning the new music--"
"That's all we are here to learn."
"All? Imbeciles! As if you or your American could understand Illowski
and his message!"
"What message?" Lenyard's grave face was not in the least discomposed by
the Cossack passion of the woman. "What message has Illowski? I've heard
queer stories, and cannot credit them. You are in his confidence. Tell
us, we ask in humility, what message can any man's music have but the
revelation of beauty?"
Lenyard's diplomatic question did not fail of its mark. Neshevna pushed
back her flamboyant gray hair and walked about the room.
"Mummies!" she suddenly cried. "As if beauty will content a new
generation fed on something besides the sweetmeats and pap of your
pretty, meaningless music! Why, man, can't you see that all the arts are
dead--save music? Don't you know that painting, literature, creeds--aye,
and the kingdoms are dying for want of new blood, new ideas? Music alone
is a vital force, an instrument for rescuing the world from its moral
and spiritual decay. Nietzsche was a potent force in the nineteenth
century, but not understood. They condemned him to a living death.
Lingwood Evans, poet, prophet, is now too old to enforce his message--it
is Illowski, Illowski alone who shall be the destructive Messiah of the
new millennial. 'He cometh not to save; not peace, but blood!'"
The fire of fanaticism was in her eyes, in her speech. She grasped
Lenyard by the elbow: "You, you should serve the master. Scheff is too
fond of pleasure to do anything great. He is to give the signal--that's
glory enough for him. But you, discontented American, have the stuff in
you to make a martyr. We need martyrs. You hate me? Good! But you must
worship Illowski. Art gives place to life, and in Illowski's music is
the new life. He will sweep the globe from pole to pole, for all men
understand his tones. Other gods have but prepared the way for him. No
more misery, no more promises unfulfilled by the rulers of body and
soul--only music, music like the air, the tides, the mountains, the
moon, sun, and stars! Your old-fashioned melody and learning, your
school-boy rules of counterpoint--all these Illowski ignores."
Lenyard eagerly interrupted her: "You say that he does away with melody,
themes, harmony--how does he replace them, and how does he treat the
human voice?" Neshevna let his arm fall and went slowly to the tall
desk. She leaned against it, her hand upon her square chin. Scheff still
gazed out upon the lawn where splashed a small, movable fountain. To
Lenyard the air seemed as if charged with electric questionings. His
head throbbed.
"You ask me something I dare not tell. Even Scheff, who knows some
things, dares not tell. If Illowski's discovery--which is based on the
great natural laws of heat, light, gravitation, electricity--if this
discovery were placed in the hands of fools, the world would perish.
Music has been so long the plaything of sensuality, the theatre for idle
men and women, that its real greatness is forgotten. In Illowski's hands
it is a moral force. He comes to destroy that he may rebuild. He
accomplishes it with the raw elements themselves. Remember--'I hear the
grinding of the swords, and He shall come--!'" Neshevna made a nervous
gesture and disappeared through a door near the tall desk covered with
music-paper--the desk whereon Illowski plotted the ruin of civilization.
"Now since you have seen the dread laboratory, don't hang around that
desk; there's nothing there you can understand. The music-paper is
covered with electrical and chemical formulæ, not notes. I've seen them.
Lenyard, let's go back to Paris and dine, like sensible men,--which we
are not." Scheff dragged his friend out of the house, for the other was
in a stupor. Neshevna's words cleaved his very soul. The American, the
puritan in him, swiftly rose to her eloquent exhortation. All life was
corrupt, he had been taught; art was corrupt, a snare, a delusion.
Yet--was all its appalling power, its sensuous grandeur to be wasted in
the service of the world, the flesh, the devil? Lenyard paused. "Oh,
come on, Len. Why do you bother your excitable, sick heart with that
lunatic's prophecies? Illowski is a big man, a very big man; but he is
mad, mad! His theories of the decomposition of tone--he only imitates
the old painter-impressionist of long ago--and his affected
simplicity--why, he is after the big public, that's all. As to your
question about what part the human voice plays in his scheme, I may tell
you now that he doesn't care a farthing for it except as color. He uses
the voice as he would use any instrumental combination, and he mixes his
colors so wonderfully that he sometimes polarizes them--they no longer
have any hue or scent. He should have been a painter not a composer. He
makes panoramas, psychological panoramas, not music."
"You heard them, saw them?"
"Yes," said Scheff, sourly. "Some of the early ones, and I had brain
fever for months afterward."
"Yet," challenged Lenyard, "you deny his powers?"
"I don't know what he has written recently," was the sullen answer, "but
if the newspapers are to be believed, he is crazy. Music all color, no
rhythm, no themes, and then his preaching of Nietzsche--it's all wrong,
all wrong, my boy. Art was made for joy. When it is anything else, it's
a dangerous explosive. Chemically separate certain natural elements and
they rush together with a thunder-clap. That's what Illowski has done.
It isn't art. It's science--the science of dangerous sounds. He
discovered that sound-vibrations rule the universe, that they may be
turned into a musical Roentgen ray. He presents this in a condensed art,
an electric form--"
"But the means, man, the methods, the instruments, the form?" Lenyard's
voice was tense with excitement. The phlegmatic Scheff noticed this and
soothingly said:
"The means? Why, dear boy, he just hypnotizes people, and promises them
bank accounts and angel-wings. That's how he does the trick. Here's the
tramcar. Jump in. I'm dying of thirst. To the Monferino!" ...
* * * * *
Paris laughed when Illowski announced the performance of his new
orchestral drama named "Nietzsche." The newspapers printed columns
about the composer and his strange career. A disused monster music-hall,
near the Moulin Rouge on Montmartre, was to be the scene of the concert
and the place was at once christened "Théâtre du Tarnhelm"--for a story
had leaked out about the ebon darkness in which the Russian's music was
played. This was surpassing the almost forgotten Richard Wagner.
Concerts in the dark must be indeed spirituelle. The wits giggled over
their jokes; and when the kiosks and bare walls were covered by placards
bearing the names of "Illowski--'Nietzsche,'" with a threatening sword
beneath them, the excitement became real. Satirical songs were sung in
the cafés chantants, and several fashionable clerics wove the name of
Illowski into their Sunday preachments. In a week he was popular, two a
mystery, three a necessity. The authorities maintained a dignified
silence--and watched. Politics, Bourbonism, Napoleonism, Boulangerism
ere this had crept in unawares sporting strange disguises. Perhaps
Illowski was a friend of the Vatican, of the Czar; perhaps a
destructive, bomb-throwing Nihilist, for the indomitable revolutionists
still waged war against the law. Might not this music be the signal for
a dangerous uprising of some sort?...
Lenyard was asked to sit in a box with Neshevna that last night. Scheff
refused to join them; he swore that he was tired of music and would
remain in town. The woman smiled as he said this, then she handed him a
letter, made a little motion--"the signal."
It was on the esplanade that Neshevna and Lenyard stood. The young man,
weary with vigils, his face furrowed by curiosity, regarded the city
below them as it lay swimming in the waves of a sinking sun. He saw the
crosses of La Trinité as molten copper, then dusk and dwindle in the
shadows. The twilight seemed to prefigure the fading of the human race.
Neshevna walked with this dreamer to the rear of the theatre--the
theatre of the Tarnhelm, that was to darken all civilization. He asked
for Illowski, but she did not reply; she, too, was steeped in dreams.
And all the streets were thick with men and women tumbling up to the
top.
"We sit in a second-tier box," she presently said. "If you get tired,
or--annoyed, you may go out on the balcony and look down upon the lights
of Paris, though I fear it will be a dark night. There is no moon," she
added, her voice dropping to a mumble....
They sat in a dark box that last night. The auditorium, vast and silent
with the breath-catching silence of thousands, lay below them; but their
eyes were glued upon a rosy light beginning to break over the space
where was the stage. It spread, deepened, until it fairly hummed with
scarlet tones. Gradually emerging from this cruel crimson the image of a
huge sword became visible. Neshevna touched Lenyard's hand.
"The symbol of his power!" she crooned.
Blending with the color of the light a musical tone made itself seen,
heard, felt. Lenyard shuddered. At last, the new dispensation was about
to be revealed, the new gospel preached. It was a single vibratile tone,
and was uttered by a trumpet. Was it a trumpet? It pealed with the peal
of bells shimmering high in heaven. No occidental instrument had ever
such a golden, conquering tone. It was the tone of one who foretold the
coming, and was full of invincible faith and sweetness. Lenyard closed
his eyes. That a single tone could so thrill his nerves he would have
denied. This, then, was the secret. For the first time in the Christian
world, the beauties of tonal timbres were made audible--almost visible;
the quality appealed to the eye, the inner eye. Was not the tinted music
so cunningly merged as to impinge first on the optic nerve? Had the
East, the Hindus and the Chinese, known of this purely material fact for
ages, and guarded it in esoteric silence? Here was music based on
simple, natural sounds, the sounds of birds and air, the subtle sounds
of silk. For centuries Europe had been on the wrong track with its
melodic experimenting, its complex of harmonies. Illowski was indeed
the saviour of music--and Neshevna, her great, green, luminous eyes upon
him, held Lenyard's hand.
The sound grew in volume, grew less silken, and more threatening, while
the light faded into mute, misty music like the purring of cats. A
swelling roar assaulted their ears; nameless creeping things seemed to
fill the tone. Yet it was in one tonality; there was no harmony, no
melody. The man's quick ear detected many new, rich timbres, as if made
by strange instruments. He also recognized interior rhythms, the result
of color rather than articulate movement. Then came silence, a silence
that shouted cruelly across the gulfs of blackness, a silence so
profound as to be appalling. Sound, rhythm, silence--the material from
which is fashioned the creative stuff of the universe! Lenyard became
restless; but the grip on his fingers tightened. He felt the oppressive
dread that precedes the flight of a nightmare; the dread that mankind
knows when sunk in shallow, horrid sleep. A low, frightened wail mounted
out of the darkness wherein massed the people. Another tone usurped the
ear, pierced the eyes. It was a blinding beam of tone, higher and more
undulating. His heart harshly ticking like a clock, he viewed, as in a
vision, the march of the nations, the crash of falling theocracies, of
dying dynasties. On a stony platform, vast and crowded, he knelt in
sackcloth and ashes; the heavens thundered over the weeping millions of
Nineveh; and the Lord of Hosts would not be appeased. Stretching to the
clouds were black, basaltic battlements, and above them reared white
terraced palaces, as swans that strain their throats to the sky. The day
of wrath was come. And amid the granitic clashing of the elements,
Lenyard saw the mighty East resolving into dust. Neshevna pressed his
hand.
By the waters of Babylon he wandered, and found himself at the base of a
rude little hill. The shock of the quaking earth, the silent passing of
the sheeted dead, and the rush of affrighted multitudes told him that
another cosmic tragedy was at hand. In a flare of lightning he saw
silhouetted against an angry sky three crosses at the top of the sad
little hill. He reeled away, his heart almost bursting, when Neshevna
grasped him. "You saw the death of the gods!" she hoarsely whispered.
He could not answer, for the music showed him a thunder-blasted shore
fringing a bituminous sea. This sea stirred not, while the air above it
was frozen in salty silence. Faint, thin light came up through the
waters, and Lenyard caught a glimpse in the deeps below of sparkling
pinnacles and bulbous domes of gold; a dead sea rolled over the dead
cities of the bitter plain. He trembled as Neshevna said, with a
grinding sob, "That was the death of life."
Lenyard's sombre soul modulated to another dream--the last. Suffocating
and vague, the stillness waxed and ran over the troubled edges of
eternity. The Plain, gloomy and implacable, was illuminated on its
anonymous horizon by one rift of naked, leering light. Over its
illimitable surface surged and shivered women, white, dazzling,
numberless. As waves that, lap on lap, sweep fiercely across the
sky-line, as bisons that furiously charge upon grassy wastes, "as the
rill that runs from Bulicamé to be portioned out among the sinful
women," these hordes of savage creatures rose and fell in their mad
flight across the Plain. No sudden little river, no harsh accent of
knoll or hill, broke the immeasurable whiteness of bared breast and
ivoried shoulder. It was a white whirl of women, a ferocious vortex of
terrified women. Lenyard saw the petrified fear upon the faces of them
that went into the Pit; and he descried the cruel and looming figure of
Illowski piping to them as they went into the Pit. The maelstrom of
faces turned to their dream-master; faces blanched by regret, sunned by
crime, beaming with sin; faces rusted by vain virtue; wan, weary faces,
and the triumphant regard of those who loved--all gazed at the Piper as
vertiginously they boiled by. The world of women passed at his feet
radiant, guilty, white, glittering and powerless. Lenyard felt the
inertia of sickness seize him when he saw the capital expression upon
these futile faces--the expression of insurgent souls that see for the
last time their conqueror. Not a sign made these mystic brides, not a
sound; and, as in the blazing music they dashed despairingly down the
gulf of time, Lenyard was left with eyes strained, pulses jangled,
lonely and hopeless. He shivered, and his heart halted....
"This is the death of love," shouted Neshevna. But Lenyard heard her
not; nor did he hear the noise of the people beneath--the veritable
booming of primordial gorilla-men. And now a corrosive shaft of tone
rived the building as though its walls had been of gauze and went
hissing towards Paris, in shape a menacing sword. Like the clattering of
tumbrils in narrow, stony streets men and women trampled upon each
other, fleeing from the accursed altar of this arch-priest of
Beelzebub--Illowski. They over-streamed the sides of Montmartre, as ants
washed away by water. And the howling of them was heard by the watchers
in the doomed city below.
Neshevna, her arm clutched by Lenyard's icy fingers, shook him
violently, and tried to release herself. Finding this impossible she
dragged her silent burden out upon the crumpling balcony.
Paris was draped in flaming clouds--the blood-red smoke of mad torches.
Tongues of fire twined about the towers of Notre Dame; where the Opéra
once stood yawned a blackened hole. The air was shocked by fulminate
blasts--the signals of the careless Scheff.
And the woman, her mouth filled with exultant laughter, screamed, "Thou
hast conquered, O Pavel Illowski!"