What
is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious
machine for turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz
into urine?
If,
in planting a coffee tree, you bend the taproot, that tree will start,
after a little time, to put out a multitude of small delicate roots near
the surface. That tree will never thrive, nor bear fruit, but it will
flower more richly than the others.
Those fine roots are the dreams of the tree. As it puts them out, it need
no longer think of its bent taproot. It keeps alive by them a little,
not very long. Or you can say that it dies by them, if you like. For really,
dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide.
If
all your life you had been tacking up against the winds and the currents,
and suddenly, for once, you were taken on board a ship which went, as
we do tonight, with a strong tide and before a following wind, you would
undoubtedly be much impressed with the power of that ship. You would be
wrong; and yet in a way you would also be right, for the power of the
waters and the winds might be said rightly to belong to the ship, since
she had managed, alone amongst all vessels, to ally herself with them.
|
N
a full-moon night of 1863 a dhow was on its way from Lamu to Zanzibar,
following the coast about a mile out. She carried full sails before the
monsoon, and had in her a freight of ivory and rhino-horn. This last is
highly valued as an aphrodisiac, and traders come for it to Zanzibar from
as far as China. But besides these cargoes the dhow also held a secret
load, which was about to stir and raise great forces, and of which the
slumbering countries which she passed did not dream.
This still
night was bewildering in its deep silence and peace, as if something had
happened to the world; as if the soul of it had been, by some magic, turned
upside down. The free monsoon came from far places, and the sea wandered
on under its sway, on her long journey, in the face of the dim luminous
moon. But the brightness of the moon upon the water was so clear that
it seemed as if all the light in the world were in reality radiating from
the sea, to be reflected in the skies. The waves looked solid, as if one
might safely have walked upon them, while it was into the vertiginous
sky that one might sink and fall, into the turbulent and unfathomable
depths of silvery worlds, of bright silver or dull and tarnished silver,
forever silver reflected within silver, moving and changing, towering
up, slowly and weightless.
The two
slaves in the prow were still like statues, their bodies, naked to the
waist in the hot night, iron-gray like the sea where the moon was not
shining on it, so that only the clear dark shades running along their
backs and limbs marked out their forms against the vast plane. The red
cap of one of them glowed dull, like a plum, in the moonlight. But one
corner of the sail, catching the light, glinted like the while belly of
a dead fish. The air was like that of a hothouse, and so damp that all
the planks and ropes of the boat were sweating a salt dew. The heavy waters
sang and murmured along the bow and stern.
On the
after deck a small lantern was hung up, and three people were grouped
round it.
The first
of them was young Said Ben Ahamed, the son of young water-carrier looked
up at the window too, and kept standing there, gazing at the maiden. So
the Sultan became very sad, and he had the virgin and the young man buried
alive together, in a marble chest broad enough to make a marriage bed,
under a palm tree of his garden, and seating himself below the same tree
he wondered at many things, and at how he was never to have his heart's
desire, and he had a young boy to play the flute to him. That was the
tale you heard once."
"Yes,
but better told then," said Lincoln.
"It was that," said Mira, "and the world could not do without
Mira then. People love to be frightened. The great princes, fed up with
the sweets of life, wished to have their blood stirred again. The honest
ladies, to whom nothing ever happened, longed to tremble in their beds
just for once. The dancers were inspired to a lighter pace by tales of
flight and pursuit. Ah, how the world loved me in those days! Then I was
handsome, round-cheeked. I drank noble wine, wore gold-embroidered clothes
and amber, and had incense burned in my rooms."
"But how has this change come upon you?" asked Lincoln.
"Alas!" said Mira, sinking back into his former quiet manner,
"as I have lived I have lost the capacity of fear. When you know
what things are really like, you can make no poems about them. When you
have had talk with ghosts and connections with the devils you are, in
the end, more afraid of your creditors than of them; and when you have
been made a cuckold you are no longer nervous about cuckoldry. I have
become too familiar with life; it can no longer delude me into believing
that one thing is much worse than the other. The day and the dark, an
enemy and a friendI know them to be about the same. How can you
make others afraid when you have forgotten fear yourself? I once had a
really tragic tale, a great tale, full of agony, immensely popular, of
a young man who in the end had his nose and his ears cut off. Now I could
frighten no one with it, if I wanted to, for now I know that to be without
them is not so very much worse than to have them. This is why you see
me here, skin and bone, and dressed in old rags, the follower of Said
in prison and poverty, instead of keeping near the thrones of the mighty,
flourishing and flattered, as was young Mira Jama."
"But could you not, Mira," Lincoln asked, "make a terrible
tale about poverty and unpopularity?"
"No," said the story-teller proudly, "that is not the sort
of story which Mira Jama tells."
"Well, yes, alas," said Lincoln, turning around on his side,
"what is life, Mira, when you come to think upon it, but a most excellent,
accurately set, infinitely complicated machine for turning fat playful
puppies into old mangy blind dogs, and proud war horses into skinny nags,
and succulent young boys, to whom the world holds great delights and terrors,
into old weak men, with running eyes, who drink ground rhino-horn?"
"Oh, Lincoln Forsner," said the noseless story-teller, "what
is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious
machine for turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz
into urine? You may even ask which is the more intense craving and pleasure:
to drink or to make water. But in the meantime, what has been done? A
song has been composed, a kiss taken, a slanderer slain, a prophet begotten,
a righteous judgment given, a joke made. The world drank in the young
story-teller Mira. He went to its head, he ran in its veins, he made it
glow with warmth and color. Now I am on my way down a little; the effect
has worn off. The world will soon be equally pleased to piss me out again,
and I do not know but that I am pressing on a little myself. But the tales
which I madethey shall last."
"What do you do in the meantime to keep so good a face toward it,
in this urgency of life to rid itself of you?" Lincoln asked.
"I dream," said Mira.
"Dream?" said Lincoln.
"Yes, by the grace of God," said Mira, "every night, as
soon as I sleep I dream. And in my dreams I still know fear. Things are
terrible to me there. In my dreams I sometimes carry with me something
infinitely dear and precious, such as I know well enough that no real
things be, and there it seems to me that I must keep this thing against
some dreadful danger, such as there are none in the real world. And it
also seems to me that I shall be struck down and annihilated if I lose
it, though I know well that you are not, in the world of the daytime,
struck down and annihilated, whatever you lose. In my dreams the dark
is filled with indescribable horrors, but there are also sometimes flights
and pursuits of a heavenly delight."
He sat for a while in silence.
"But what particularly pleases me about dreams," he went on,
"is this: that there the world creates itself around me without any
effort on my part. Here, now, if I want to go to Gazi, I have to bargain
for a boat, and to buy and pack my provisions, to tack up against the
wind, and even to make my hands sore by rowing. And then, when I get to
Gazi, what am I to do there? Of that also I must think. But in my dreams
I find myself walking up a long row of stone steps which lead from the
sea. These steps I have not seen before, yet I feel that to climb them
is a great happiness, and that they will take me to something highly enjoyable.
Or I find myself hunting in a long row of low hills, and I have got people
with me with bows and arrows, and dogs in leads. But what I am to hunt,
or why I have gone there, I do not know. One time I came into a room from
a balcony, in the very early morning, and upon the stone floor stood a
woman's two little sandals, and at the same moment I thought: they are
hers. And at that my heart overflowed with pleasure, rocked in ease. But
I had taken no trouble. I had had no expense to get the woman. And at
other times I have been aware that outside the door was a big black man,
very black, who meant to kill me; but still I had done nothing to make
him my enemy, and I shall just wait for the dream itself to inform me
how to escape from him, for in myself I cannot find out how to do it.
The air in my dreams, and particularly since I have been in prison with
Said, is always very high, and I generally see myself as a very small
figure in a great landscape, or in a big house. In all this a young man
would not take any pleasure at all; but to me, now, it holds such delight
as does making water when you have finished with wine."
"I do not know about it, Mira; I hardly ever dream," said Lincoln.
"Oh, Lincoln, live forever," said old Mira. "You dream
indeed more than I do myself. Do I not know the dreamers when I meet them?
You dream awake and walking about. You will do nothing yourself to choose
your own ways: you let the world form itself around you, and then you
open your eyes to see where you will find yourself. This journey of yours,
tonight, is a dream of yours. You let the waves of fate wash you about,
and then you will open your eyes tomorrow to find out where you are."
"To see your pretty face," said Lincoln.
"You know, Tembu," said Mira suddenly, after a pause, "that
if, in planting a coffee tree, you bend the taproot, that tree will start,
after a little time, to put out a multitude of small delicate roots near
the surface. That tree will never thrive, nor bear fruit, but it will
flower more richly than the others.
"Those fine roots are the dreams of the tree. As it puts them out,
it need no longer think of its bent taproot. It keeps alive by them
a little, not very long. Or you can say that it dies by them, if you like.
For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide.
"If you want to go to sleep at night, Lincoln, you must not think,
as people tell you, of a long row of sheep or camels passing through a
gate, for they go in one direction, and your thoughts will go along with
them. You should think instead of a deep well. In the bottom of that well,
just in the middle of it, there comes up a spring of water, which runs
out in little streamlets to all possible sides, like the rays of a star.
If you can make your thoughts run out with that water, not in one direction,
but equally to all sides, you will fall asleep. If you can make your heart
do it thoroughly enough, as the coffee tree does it with the little surface
roots, you will die."
"So that is the matter with me, you think: that I want to forget
my taproot?" asked Lincoln.
"Yes," said Mira, "it must be that. Unless it be that,
like many of your countrymen, you never had much of it."
"Unless it be that," said Lincoln.
They sailed on for a little while in silence. A slave took up a flute
and played a few notes on it, to try it.
"Why does not Said speak a word to us?" Lincoln asked Mira.
Said lifted his eyes a little and smiled, but did not speak.
"Because he thinks," said Mira. "This conversation of ours
seems to him very insipid."
"What is he thinking of?" asked Lincoln.
Mira thought for a little. "Well," he said, "there are
only two courses of thought at all seemly to a person of any intelligence.
The one is: What am I to do this next moment?or tonight, or tomorrow?
And the other: What did God mean by creating the world, the sea, and the
desert, the horse, the winds, woman, amber, fishes, wine? Said thinks
of the one or the other."
"Perhaps he is dreaming," said Lincoln.
"No," said Mira after a moment, "not Said. He does not
know how to dream yet. The world is just drinking him in. He is going
to its head and into its blood. He means to drive the pulsation of its
heart. He is not dreaming, but perhaps he is praying to God. By the time
when you have finished praying to Godthat is when you put out your
surface roots; that is when you begin to dream. Said tonight may be praying
to God, throwing his prayer at the Lord with such energy as that with
which the Angel shall, upon the last day, throw at the world the note
of his trump, with such energy as that with which the elephant copulates.
Said says to God: 'Let me be all the world.'
"He says," Mira went on after a minute, "I shall show no
mercy, and I ask for none. But that is where Said is mistaken. He will
be showing mercy before he has done with all of us."
"Do you ever dream of the same place twice?" asked Lincoln after
a time.
"Yes, yes," said Mira. "That is a great favor of God's,
a great delight to the soul of the dreamer. I come back, after a long
time, in my dream, to the place of an old dream, and my heart melts with
delight."
They sailed on for some time, and no one said anything. Then Lincoln suddenly
changed his position, sat up, and made himself comfortable. He spat out
on the deck the last of his Morungu, dived into a pocket, and rolled himself
a cigarette.
"I will tell you a tale tonight, Mira," he said, "since
you have none. You have reminded me of long-gone things. Many good stories
have come from your part of the world to ours, and when I was a child
I enjoyed them very much. Now I will tell this one, for the pleasure of
your ears, Mira, and for the heart of Said, to whom my tale may prove
useful. It all goes to teach you how I was, twenty years ago, taught,
as you say, Mira, to dream, and of the woman who taught me. It happened
just as I tell it to you. But as to names and places, and conditions in
the countries in which it all took place, and which may seem very strange
to you, I will give you no explanation. You must take in whatever you
can, and leave the rest outside. It is not a bad thing in a tale that
you understand only half of it."
Twenty
years ago, when I was a young man of twenty-three, I sat one winter night
in the room of a hotel, amongst mountains, with snow, storm, great clouds
and a wild moon outside.
Now the continent of Europe, of which you have heard, consists of two
parts, the one of which is more pleasant than the other, and these two
are separated by a high and steep mountain chain. You cannot cross it
except in a few places where the formation of the mountains is a little
less hostile than elsewhere, and where roads have been made, with much
trouble, to take you over them. Such a place there was near the hotel
where I was staying. A road that would admit pedestrians, horses and mules,
and even coaches had been cut in the rocks, and on the top of the pass,
where, from laboriously climbing upwards, cursing your fate, you begin
to descend, soon to feel the sweet air caressing your face and lungs,
a brotherhood of holy men have built a great house for the refreshment
of travelers. I was on my way from the North, where things were cold and
dead, to the blue and voluptuous South. The hotel was my last station
before the steep journey to the top of the pass, which I meant to undertake
on the next day. It was a little early in the season yet to travel this
way at all. There were only a few people on the road as yet, and higher
up in the mountains the snow was lying deep.
To the world I looked a pretty, rich, and gay young man, on his way from
one pleasure to another, and providing himself, on the way, with the best
of everything. But in truth I was just being whirled about, forward and
backward, by my aching heart, a poor fool out on a wild-goose chase after
a woman.
Yes, after a woman, Mira, if you believe it or not. I had already been
searching for her in a variety of places. In fact, so hopeless was my
pursuit of her that I should most certainly have given it up if it had
been at all within my power to do so. But my own soul, Mira, my dear,
was in the breast of this woman.
And she was not a girl of my own age. She was many years older than I.
Of her life I knew nothing except what was painful to me to swallow, and,
what was the worst of the business, I had no reason to believe that she
would be at all pleased should I ever contrive to find her.
The whole thing had come about like this: My father was a very rich man
in England, the owner of large factories and of a pleasant estate in the
country, a man with a big family and an enormous working capacity. He
read the Bible muchour Holy Bookand had come to feel himself
God's one substitute on earth. Indeed, I do not know if he was capable
of making any distinction between his fear of God and his self-esteem.
It was his duty, he thought, to turn the chaotic world into a universe
of order, and to see that all things were made usefulwhich, to him,
meant making them useful to him himself. Within his own nature I know
of two things only which he could not control: he had, against his own
principles, a strong love of music, particularly of Italian opera music;
and he sometimes could not sleep at night. Later on I was told by my aunt,
his sister, who much disliked him, that he had, as a young man in the
West Indies, driven to suicide, or actually killed, a man. Perhaps this
was what kept him awake. I and my twin sister were much younger than our
other brothers and sisters. What flea had bitten my father that he should
beget two more children when he had got through most of his trouble with
the rest of us, I do not know. At the day of judgment I shall ask him
for an explanation. I have sometimes thought that it was really the ghost
of the West Indian gentleman which had been after him.
My father was not pleased with anything which I did. In the end I think
that I became a carking care to him, for had I not been of his own manufacture
he would have been pleased to see me come to a bad end. Now I felt that
I was ever, as My Son Lincoln, being drawn, hammered and battered into
all sorts of shapes, in order to be made useful, between one o'clock and
three of the night. During these hours I myself generally had a pretty
heated and noisy time, for I had become an officer in a smart regiment
of the army, and there, to keep up my prestige amongst the sons of the
oldest families of the land, spent much of the money, time, and wit which
my father reckoned to be really and rightly his.
At about this time a neighbor of ours died, and left a young widow. She
was pretty and rich, and had been unhappily married, and in her trials
had consoled herself with a sentimental friendship with my twin sister,
who was so like me that if I dressed up in her clothes nobody would know
the one of us from, the other. Therefore my father now thought that this
lady might consent to marry me, and lift the burden of me from his shoulders
onto hers. This prospect suited me as well as anything that I at that
time expected from life. The only thing for which I asked my father was
his consent to let me travel on the continent of Europe during the lady's
year of mourning. In those days I had various strong inclinations, for
wine, gambling and cockfighting, and the society of gypsies, together
with a passion for theological discussion which I had inherited from my
father himselfall of which my father thought I had better rid myself
of before I married the widow, or, at least, which I had better not let
her contemplate at too close quarters while she could still change her
mind. As my father knew me to be quick and ardent in love affairs, I think
that he also feared that I might seduce my fiancee into too close a relation,
profiting by our neighborhood in the country, and, perhaps, by my likeness
to my sister. For all these reasons the old man agreed that I should go
traveling for nine months, in the company of an old schoolfellow of his,
who had lived on his charity and whom he was pleased to turn in this way
to some sort of use.
This man, however, I soon managed to rid myself of, for when we came to
Rome he took up the study of the mysteries of the ancient Priapean cult
of Lampsacus and I enjoyed myself very well.
But in the fourth month of my year of grace, it happened to me that I
fell in love with a woman within a brothel of Rome. I had gone there,
on an evening, with a party of theologians. It was thus not a dashing
place. Where people with lots of money went to amuse themselves, neither
was it a murky house frequented by artists or robbers. It was just a middling
respectable establishment. I remember the narrow street in which it stood,
and the many smells which met therein. If ever I were to smell them again,
I should feel that I had come home. To this woman I owe it that I have
ever understood, and still remember, the meaning of such words as tears,
heart, longing, stars, which you poets make use of. Yes, as to stars in
particular, Mira, there was much about her that reminded one of a star.
There was the difference between her and other women that there is between
an overcast and a starry sky. Perhaps you too have met in the course of
your life women of that sort, who are self-luminous and shine in the dark,
who are phosphorescent, like touchwood.
As, upon the next day, I woke up in my hotel in Rome, I remember that
I had a great fright. I thought: I was drunk last night; my head has played
a trick on me. There are no such women. At this I grew hot and cold all
over. But again I thought, lying in my bed: I could not possibly, all
on my own, have invented such a person as this woman. Why, only our greatest
poet could have done that. I could never have imagined a woman with so
much life in her, and that great strength. I got up and went straight
back to her house, and there I found her again, such indeed as I remembered
her.
Later on I learned that the extraordinary impression of great strength
which she gave me was somehow false after all; she had not all the strength
that she showed. I will tell you what it was like:
If all your life you had been tacking up against the winds and the currents,
and suddenly, for once, you were taken on board a ship which went, as
we do tonight, with a strong tide and before a following wind, you would
undoubtedly be much impressed with the power of that ship. You would be
wrong; and yet in a way you would also be right, for the power of the
waters and the winds might be said rightly to belong to the ship, since
she had managed, alone amongst all vessels, to ally herself with them.
Thus had I, all my life, under my father's aegis, been taught to tack
up against all the winds and currents of life. In the arms of this woman
I felt myself in accord with them all, lifted and borne on by life itself.
This, to my mind then, was due to her great strength. And still, at that
time I did not know at all to what extent she had allied herself with
all the currents and winds of life.
After this first night we were always together. I have never been able
to get anything out of the orthodox love affairs of my country, which
begin in the drawing-room with banalities, flatteries and giggles, and
go through touches of hands and feet, to finish up in what is generally
held to be a climax, in the bed. This love affair of mine in Rome, which
began in the bed, helped on by wine and much noisy music, and which grew
into a kind of courtship and friendship hitherto unknown to me, was the
only one that I have ever liked. After a while I often took her out with
me for the whole day, or for a whole day and night. I bought a small carriage
and a horse, with which we went about in Rome and in the Cpagna, as far
as Frascati and Nemi. We supped in the little inns, and in the early mornings
we often stopped on the road and let the horse graze on the roadside,
while we ourselves sat on the ground, drank a bottle of fresh, sour, red
wine, ate raisins and almonds, and looked up at the many birds of prey
which circled over the great plain, and whose shadows, upon the short
grass, would run alongside our carriage. Once in a village there was a
festival, with Chinese lamps around a fountain in the clear evening. We
watched it from a balcony. Several times, also, we went as far as the
seaside. It was all in the month of September, a good month in Rome. The
world begins to be brown, but the air is as clear as hill water, and it
is strange that it is full of larks, and that here they sing at that time
of the year.
Olalla was very pleased with all this. She had a great love for Italy,
and much knowledge of good food and wine. At times she would dress up,
as gay as a rainbow in cashmeres and plumes, as a prince's mistress, and
there never was a lady in England to beat her then; but at other times
she would wear the linen hood of the Italian women, and dance in the villages
in the manner of the country. Then a stronger or more graceful dancer
was not to be found, although she liked even better to sit with me and
watch them dance. She was extraordinarily alive to all impressions. Wherever
we went together she would observe many more things than I did, though
I have been a good sportsman all my life. But at the same time there never
seemed to be to her much difference between joy and pain, or between sad
and pleasant things. They were all equally welcome to her, as if in her
heart she knew them to be the same.
One afternoon we were on our way back to Rome, about sunset, and Olalla,
bareheaded, was driving the horse and whipping him into a gallop. The
breeze then blew her long dark curls away from her face, and showed me
again a long scar from a burn, which, like a little white snake, ran from
her left ear to her collar bone. I asked her, as I had done before, how
she had come to be so badly burned. She would not answer, but instead
began to talk of all the great prelates and merchants of Rome who were
in love with her, until I said, laughing, that she had no heart. Over
this she was silent for a little while, still going at full speed, the
strong sunlight straight in our faces.
"Oh, yes," she said at last, "I have a heart. But it is
buried in the garden of a little white villa near Milan."
"Forever?" I asked.
"Yes, forever," she said, "for it is the most lovely place."
"What is there," I asked her, oppressed by jealousy, "in
a little white villa of Milan to keep your heart there forever?"
"I do not know," she said. "There will not be much now,
since nobody is weeding the garden or tuning the piano. There may be strangers
living there now. But there is moonlight there, when the moon is up, and
the souls of dead people."
She often spoke in this vague whimsical way, and she was so graceful,
gentle, and somehow humble in it that it always charmed me. She was very
keen to please, and would take much trouble about it, though not as a
servant who becomes rigid by his fear of displeasing, but like somebody
very rich, heaping benefactions upon you out of a horn of plenty. Like
a tame lioness, strong of tooth and claw, insinuating herself into your
favor. Sometimes she seemed to me like a child, and then again old, like
those aqueducts, built a thousand years ago, which stand over the Campagna
and throw their long shadows on the ground, their majestic, ancient, and
cracked walls shining like amber in the sun. I felt like a new, dull thing
in the world, a silly little boy beside her then. And always there was
that about her which made me feel her so much stronger than myself. Had
I known for certain that she could fly, and might have flown away from
me and from the earth whenever she choose to, it would have given me the
same feeling, I believe.
It was not till the end of September that I began to think of the future.
I saw then that I could not possibly live without Olalla. If I tried to
go away from her, my heart, I thought, would run back to her as water
will run downhill. So I thought that I must marry her, and make her come
to England with me.
If when I asked her she had made the slightest objection, I should not
have been so much upset by her behavior later on. But she said at once
that she would come. She was more caressing, more full of sweetness toward
me from that time than she had ever been before, and we would talk of
our life in England, and of everything there, and laugh over it together.
I told her of my father, and how he had always been an enthusiast about
the Italian opera, which was the best thing that I could find to say of
him. I knew, in talking to her about all this, that I should never again
be bored in England.
It was about then that I was for the first time struck by the appearance,
whenever I went near Olalla, of a figure of a man that I had never seen
before. The first few times I did not think of it, but after our sixth
or seventh meeting he began to occupy my thoughts and to make me curiously
ill at ease. He was a Jew of fifty or sixty years, slightly built, very
richly dressed, with diamonds on his hands, and with the manners of a
fine old man of the world. He was of a pale complexion and had very dark
eyes.
I never
saw him with her, or in the house, but I ran into him when I went there,
or came away, so that he seemed to me to circle around her, like the moon
around the earth. There must have been something extraordinary about him
from the beginning, or I should not have had the idea, which now filled
my head, that he had some power over Olalla and was an evil spirit in
her life. In the end I took so much interest in him that I made my Italian
valet inquire about him at the hotel where he was living, and so learned
that he was a fabulously rich Jew of Holland, and that his name was Marcus
Cocoza.
I came to wonder so much about what such a man could have to do in the
street of Olalla's house, and why he thus appeared and again disappeared,
that in the end, half against my willfor I was afraid of what she
might tell meI asked her if she knew him. She put two fingers under
my chin and lifted it up. "Have you not noted about me, Carissime,"
she asked me, "that I have no shadow? Once upon a time I sold my
shadow to the devil, for a little heart-ease, a little fun. That man whom
you have seen outsidewith your usual penetration you will easily
guess him to be no other than this shadow of mine, with which I have no
longer anything to do. The devil sometimes allows it to walk about. It
then naturally tries to come back and lay itself at my feet, as it used
to do. But I will on no account allow it to do so. Why, the devil might
reclaim the whole bargain, did I permit it! Be you at ease about him,
my little star."
She was, I thought, in her own way obviously speaking the truth for once.
As she spoke I realized it: she had no shadow. There was nothing black
or sad in her nearness, and the dark shades of care, regret, ambition,
or fear, which seem to be inseparable from all human beingseven
from me myself, although in those days I was a fairly careless boyhad
been exiled from her presence. So I just kissed her, saying that we would
leave her shadow in the street and pull down the blind.
It was about this time, too, that I began to have a strange feeling, that
I have come to know since, and which I then innocently mistook for happiness.
It seemed to me, wherever I went, that the world around me was losing
its weight and was slowly beginning to flow upwards, a world of light
only, of no solidity whatever. Nothing seemed massive any longer. The
Castel San Angelo was entirely a castle in the air, and I felt that I
might lift the very Basilica of St. Peter between my two fingers. Nor
was I afraid of being run over by a carriage in the streets, so conscious
was I that the coach and the horses would have no more weight in them
than if they had been cut out of paper. I felt extremely happy, if slightly
light-headed, under the faith, and took it as a foreboding of a greater
happiness to come, a sort of apotheosis. The universe, and I myself with
it, I thought, was on the wing, on the way to the seventh heaven. Now
I know well enough what it means: it is the beginning of a final farewell;
it is the cock crowing. Since then, on my travels, I have known a country
or a circle of people to have taken on that same weightless aspect. In
one way I was right. The world around me was indeed on the wing, going
upwards. It was only me myself, who, being too heavy for the flight, was
to be left behind, in complete desolation.
I was occupied with the thought of a letter that I must write to my father,
to tell him that I could not marry the widow, when I was informed that
one of my brothers, who was an officer in the navy, was at Naples with
his ship. I reflected that it might be better to give him the letter to
carry, and told Olalla that I should have to go to Naples for a couple
of days. I asked her if she would be likely to see the old Jew while I
was away, but she assured me that she would neither see him nor speak
to him.
I did not get on quite well with my brother. When I talked to him, I saw
for the first time how my plans for the future would appear to the eyes
of others, and it made me feel very ill at ease. For while I still held
their views to be idiotic and inhuman, I was yet, for the first time since
I had met Olalla, reminded of the dead and clammy atmosphere of my former
world and my home. However, I gave my letter to my brother, and asked
him to plead my cause with my father as well as he could, and I hastened
to return to Rome.
When I came back there I found that Olalla had gone. At first they told
me, in the house where she had been, that she had died suddenly from fever.
This made me deadly ill and nearly drove me mad for three days. But I
soon found out that it could not possibly be so, and then I went to every
inhabitant of the house, imploring and threatening them to tell me all.
I now realized that I ought to have taken her away from the place before
I went to Naples although what would it have helped me if she herself
had meant to leave me? A strange superstition made me connect her disappearance
with the Jew, and in a last interview with the madama of the house I seized
her by the throat, told her that I knew all, and promised her that I would
strangle her if she did not tell me the truth. In her terror the old woman
confessed: Yes, it had been he. Olalla had left the house one day and
had not come back. The next day a pale old Jewish gentleman with very
dark eyes had appeared at the house, had settled Olalla's debts and paid
a sum to the madama to raise no trouble. She had not seen the two together.
"And where have they gone?" I cried, sick because I had not
had an outlet for my despair in killing off the old yellow female. That
she could not tell me, but on second thought she believed that she had
heard the Jew mention to his servant the name of a town called Basel.
To Basel I then proceeded, but people who have not themselves tried it
can have no idea of the difficulties you have in trying to find, in a
strange town, a person whose name you do not know.
My search was made more difficult by the fact that I did not know at all
in what station of life I was to seek Olalla. If she had gone with the
Jew she might be a great lady by now, whom I should meet in her own carriage.
But why had the Jew left her in the house where I had found her in Rome?
He might do the same thing now, for some reason unknown to me. I therefore
searched all the houses of ill renown in Basel, of which there are more
than one would think, for Basel is the town in Europe which stands up
most severely for the sanctity of marriage. But I found no trace of her.
I then bethought me of Amsterdam, where I should have, at least, the name
of Cocoza to go by. I did indeed find, in Amsterdam, the fine old house
of the Jew, and learned about him that he was the richest man of the place,
and that his family had traded in diamonds for three hundred years. But
he himself, I was told, was always traveling. It was thought that he was
now in Jerusalem. I ran, from Amsterdam, upon various false tracks which
took me to many countries. This maddening journey of mine went on for
five months. In the end I made up my mind to go to Jerusalem, and I was
on my way back to Italy, to take ship at Genoa, and these things were
all running through my mind when I was sitting, as I have told you, at
the Hotel of Andermatt, waiting to cross the pass upon the following day.
On the previous day I had found a letter from my father, which had been
following at my heels for some months, being sent after me from one place
to another. My father wrote to me:
"I am now able to look upon your conduct with calm and understanding.
This I owe to the perusal of a collection of family papers, to which I
have during the three last months given much of my time and attention.
From the study of these papers it has become clear to me that a highly
remarkable fate lies, and for the last two hundred years has lain, upon
our family.
"We are, as a family, only so much better than others because we
have always had amongst us one individual who has carried all the weakness
and vice of his generation. The faults which normally would have been
divided up among a whole lot of people have been gathered together upon
the head of one of them only, and we others have in this way come to be
what we have been, and are.
"In
going through our papers I can no longer have any doubt of this fact.
I have been able to trace the one particular chosen delinquent through
seven generations, beginning with our great-aunt Elizabeth, into whose
behavior I do not want here to go. I shall only quote the examples of
my uncles Henry and Ambrose, who in their days without any doubt . . ."
Here followed various names and facts for the support of my father's theory.
He then continued:
"I do not know whether it would not be more of a fatal blow than
of a blessing to our name and family should this strange condition ever
cease to be. It might do away with much trouble and anxiety, but it might
also lead to the family becoming no better than other people.
"As to you, you have so perseveringly declined to follow my command
or advice that I feel I have reason to believe you the chosen victim of
your generation. You have refused to make, by your example, virtue attractive
and the reward of good conduct obvious. I have now reached, in my relation
to you, a sufficiently philosophical outlook to give you my blessing in
the completion of a career which may make filial disobedience, weakness,
and vice a usefully repugnant and deterring example to your generation
of our family."
I never saw my father again. But from my former tutor, whom, many years
later, I happened to meet again in Smyrna, in melancholy circumstances,
I heard of him. My father had so far reconciled himself to the situation
as to marry my young widow himself. They had a son, and him he christened
Lincoln. But whether he did so because after all he had liked me better
than I had known, or with the purpose of removing any unpleasant sensations
which might present themselves to him between one and three o'clock of
a night, in connection with the thought of his son Lincoln, I cannot tell.
I had read his letter twice, and was taking it from my pocket to read
it again to pass the time, when, looking up, I saw two young men come
into the dining-room of the hotel from the cold night outside. One of
them I knew, and I thought that if he caught sight of me he would come
and sit down with me, which he did, so that the three of us spent the
rest of the night together.
The first of these two nicely dressed and well-mannered young gentlemen
was a boy of a noble family of Coburg, whom, a year before, I had known
in England, where he was sent to study parliamentary procedure, since
he meant to become a diplomat, and also to study horse-breeding, which
was the livelihood of his people. His name was Friederich Hohenemser,
but he was, in looks and manners, so like a dog I had once owned and which
was named Pilot, that I used to call him that. He was a tall and fair,
handsome, young man.
But since it will please you, Mira, to hear your own ingenious parable
made use of, I am going to tell you of him that he was a person whom life
would on no account consent to gulp down. He had himself a burning craving
to be swallowed by life, and on every occasion would try to force himself
down her throat, but she just as stubbornly refused him. She might, from
time to time, just to imbue him with an illusion, sip in a little of him,
though never a good full draught; but even on these occasions she would
vomit him up again. What it was about him which thus made her stomach
rise, I cannot quite tell you; only I know this: that all people who came
near him had, somehow, the same feeling about him, that, while they had
nothing against him, here was a fellow with whom they could do nothing
at all. In this way he was, mentally, in the state of a very young embryo.
It probably takes a certain amount of cunning, or luck, in a man to get
himself established as an embryo. My friend Pilot had never got beyond
that. His condition was often felt by himself, I believe, as very alarming;
and so indeed it was. His blue eyes at times gave out a most painful reflection
of the hopeless struggle for existence which went on inside him. If he
ever found in himself any original taste at all, he made the most of it.
Thus he would go on talking of his preference for one wine over another,
as if he meant to impress such a precious finding deeply upon you. A philosopher,
about whom I was taught in school and whom you would have liked, Mira,
has said: "I think; consequently I am." In this way did my friend
Pilot repeat to himself and to the world: "I prefer Moselle to Rhenish
wine; consequently I exist." Or, if he enjoyed a show or a game,
he would dwell upon it the whole evening, telling you: "That sort
of thing amuses me." But he had no imagination, and was, besides,
very honest. He could invent nothing for himself, but was left to describe
such preferences as he really found in his own mind, which were always
preciously few. Probably it was, altogether, his lack of imagination which
prevented him from existing. For if you will create, as you know, Mira,
you must first imagine, and as he could not imagine what Friederich Hohenemser
was to be like, he failed to produce any Friederich Hohenemser at all.
I had named him, I have told you, after a dog of mine, which had so much
the same sort of dispositionnever having the slightest idea of what
he wanted to do, or had to dothat I finished up by shooting him.
The God of Friederich Hohenemser was more forbearing to him in the end.
With all this, Pilot did not get on badly in society, which, I suppose,
demands but a minimum of existence from its members, on the continent
of Europe. He was, besides, a rich young man, pink and white, with a pair
of vigorous calvesabout all of which he was not a little vainand
he was even thought by elderly ladies to be a very model of a youth. He
liked me, and was pleased at having made such a definite impression on
me that I had given him a nickname. A person, he thought, has given me
a nickname. Consequently I exist.
As he now came up to me I noticed that a change had come upon him. He
had come to life; there was a shine about him. Thus did the dog Pilot
shine and wag his tail upon the rare occasions on which he hoped to have
proved that he did really exist. It might have been, in the boy, the effect
of his new friendship with the young gentleman who accompanied him. In
any case he would be sure, I felt, to play out his ace to me in the course
of the evening. I sighed. I would have given much, on that night, for
the company of a really good dog. I thought regretfully of my old dogs
in England.
He presented his friend to me as Baron Guildenstern of Sweden. I had not
had the pleasure of their company for ten minutes before I had been informed
by both of them that the Baron in his own country held the reputation
of a great seducer of women. This made me meditatealthough all the
time my intercourse with other people was carried on only upon the surface
of my mindon what kind of women they have in Sweden. The ladies
who have done me the honor of letting me seduce them have, all of them,
insisted upon deciding themselves which was to be the central point in
the picture. I have liked them for it, for therein lay what was to me
the variety of an otherwise monotonous performance. But in the case of
the Baron it was clear that the point of gravity had always been entirely
with him. You would suppose him to be of an unenthusiastic nature, even
while he was talking of the beauties whom he had pursued, but you would
not find him lacking in enthusiasm when he had once turned your eyes toward
what he wanted you really to admire. It appeared from his talk that all
his ladies had been of exactly the same kind, and that kind of woman I
have never met. With himself so absolutely the hero of each single exploit,
I wondered why he should have taken so much troubleand he was obviously
prepared to go to any length of trouble in these affairsto obtain,
time after time, a repetition of exactly the same trick. To begin with
I was, being a young man myself, highly impressed by such a superabundance
of appetite.
Still I got, after a while, from his conversation, which was very lively
and became more so after we had emptied a few bottles together, the key
to the existence of the young Swede, which lay in the single word "competition."
Life, to him, was a competition in which he must needs shine beyond the
other entrants. I had myself been fairly keen for competition as a boy,
but even while I had been still at school I had lost my sense of it, and
by this time, unless a thing was in itself to my taste, I thought it silly
to exert myself about it just because it happened to be to the taste of
others. Not so this Swedish Baron. Nothing in the whole world was in itself
good or bad to him. He was waiting for a cue, and a scent to follow, from
other people, and to find out from them what things they held precious,
in order to outshine them in the pursuit of such things, or to bereave
them of them. When he was left alone he was lost. In this way he became
more dependent upon others than Pilot himself, and probably he shunned
solitude as the very devil. His past life, I found from his talk, he saw
as a row of triumphs over a row of rivals, and as nothing else whatever,
although he was a little older than I. Neither in his rivals nor in his
victims had he any interest at all. He had in him neither admiration nor
pity, no feeling that was not either envy or contempt.
Yet he was no fool. On the contrary, I should say that he was a very shrewd
person. He had adopted in life the manner of a good, plain, outspoken
fellow who is a little unpolished but easily forgiven on account of his
open, simple mind. With that he had an attentive, lurking glance, and
spied on you, when you least expected it, in order to get from you a valuation
of things, so as to be able to defraud you of them. As he was without
the nerves which make ordinary people feel the strain of things, he had
without doubt an extraordinary strength and stamina, and was held by himself
and by others to be a giant in comparison with those who have imagination
or compassion in them.
The two got on very well together, Pilot being flattered into existence
by the cute young SwedeI have got, Pilot thought, a friend who is
a terrible seducer of women; consequently I existand the Baron quite
pleased to have outshone all former friends of the rich young German,
and to be admired by him. They would really rather have been without me.
But they were drawn magnetically toward me, Pilot to show off his friend
to me, and the Baron hot on the track of something which I might value
or want, and which he might win or trick from me.
I was so bored, after a while, with the conversation of the Baron that
I turned my attention to Pilota thing rarely done by anyone and
as soon as he got the chance he began to reveal to me the great happenings
in his life.
"You might not care to be seen in my company, Lincoln," he said,
"if you knew all. I shall not be out of danger till I am out of Switzerland.
The walls have ears in a country of so much political unrest." He
waited to watch the effect of his words, then went on: "I come from
Lucerne."
Now I knew that there had been a fight in that town, but it had never
occurred to me that Pilot might have been in it.
"It was hot there," he said. Poor Pilot! In his little, bashfully
smiling mouth the very truth sounded badly invented. The Baron, I am sure,
would have made a whole chain of lies come out with such aplomb that his
audience would not for a moment have doubted them. "I shot a man
in the barricade fight on the third of March," said Pilot.
I knew that there had been a fight in the streets between, on the one
side, the parties in power, and particularly the partisans of the priests,
and on the other, the common people in rebellion. "You did?"
I asked, with a deep pang of envy because he had been in a fight. "You
shot a rebel?" For Pilot had always been to me a figure of high respectability
and small intellect. I took it for granted that he had sided with the
priests, and this at least I did not envy him.
Pilot shook his head proudly and secretively. After a moment he said,
"I shot the chaplain of the Bishop of St. Gallen."
The newspapers had been full of this murder, and the murderer had been
searched for everywhere. I naturally became interested to know how the
great deed had fallen to Pilot, and made him tell me his tale from the
beginning. The Baron, bored by the recount of somebody else's martial
exploits, sat without listening, drinking and watching the people as they
went in and out.
"When I went away from Coburg," said Pilot, "I meant to
stay in Lucerne for three weeks with my uncle De Watteville. As I was
about to depart, all the elegant ladies of the place, one after the other,
begged me to bring her back from Lucerne a bonnet from a milliner whom
they called Madame Lola. This woman, they assured me, was famous from
one end of Europe to the other. Ladies from the great courts and capitals
came to her for their bonnets, and never in the history of millinery had
there been such a genius. I was naturally not averse to doing the ladies
of my native town a service, so I went off, my pockets bulging with little
silk patterns, and even, will you believe it, with little locks of hair
for Madame Lola to match her bonnets to. Still, in Lucerne, where the
air was filled with political discussions, I forgot all about Madame Lola
until one night, when I was dining with a party of high officials and
politicians, I suddenly drew out, with my handkerchief, a little slip
of rose-colored satin, and had to furnish my explanation. To my surprise
the whole conversation immediately turned to the milliner. The married
men, at least, and all the clericals, all knew about her. It was true,
said the Bishop of St. Gallen, who was present, that the woman was a genius.
The slightest touch of her hand, like a magic wand, created miracles of
art and elegance, and the great ladies of St, Petersburg and Madrid, and
of Rome itself, made pilgrimages to the milliner's shop. But she was more
than that. She was suspected of being a conspirator of the first water,
who made use of her atelier as a meeting place for the most dangerous
revolutionists. And in this capacity, also, she was a genius, a Circe,
moving and organizing things with her little hands, and the roughest of
her partisans would have died for her.
"They all warned me so strongly against her that naturally the first
thing which I did on the following day was to go to her house, in the
street which had been pointed out to me. On that occasion I found her
only a highly intelligent and agreeable woman. She took all my orders,
and talked to me of my journey and even of my character and career. A
red-haired young man came in while I was there, and went out again, who
looked much like a revolutionist, but to whom she paid but little attention.
"While she was completing all these bonnets for me, the atmosphere
of Lucerne was darkening more and more; a thunderstorm hung over the town.
My uncle, who held a high position in the town council, foresaw disaster.
He sent my aunt and his daughters away to his chateau, and advised me
to go with them. But I felt that I could not go away without having seen
Madame Lola again, and having collected my goods from her.
"On the day on which I went to her at last, the disturbance in the
streets was so great that I had to approach her abode by a network of
little side streets, and even that was extremely difficult. But upon entering
the house I found it, from doorway to garret, one seething mass of armed
people streaming in and out, the whole place indeed like a witch's cauldron.
There was no time to talk of bonnets. She herself, standing on the counter,
discoursing and directing the people, at the sight of me jumped straight
into my arms. 'Ah,' she cried, 'your heart has driven you the right way
at last!' And the whole crowd, she with it, at this moment advanced out
of the house and down the street. It dragged me with it, or I was so filled
with the very enthusiasm of the woman that I went freely. In this way,
in a second, I was whirled into a barricade fight, and on to the barricades,
always at the side of Madame Lola.
"She was loading the guns and handing them to the combatants, and
she was using for the terrible task all the verve and adroitness which
she had used in trimming her bonnets. Now all the people around her, although
they were brave, were afraid, and had reason to be so; but she was not
in the least afraid. As she handed the rifles to the men on the barricade,
she handed them with the weapons some of her own fearlessness. I saw this
on their faces. And it was strange that I myself was at the time convinced
that nothing could harm her, or could harm me as long as I was with her.
I remembered our old cook at Coburg telling me that a cat has nine lives.
Madame Lola, I thought, must have in her the life of nine cats. At that
moment I really saw her as something more than human, although she was,
as I think I told you, no lady of noble birth, but only a milliner of
Lucerne, not young.
"It was then that I myself, carried away by the rage around me, seized
a rifle and fired into the crowd of soldiers and town militia which was
slowly advancing up the street against us. My own uncle De Watteville,
for all I knew, might be leading them, but I had no thought for him. At
the same moment I was struck down, I know not how, and dropped like dead.
"When I woke up I was in a small room, in bed, and Madame Lola was
in the room with me. As I tried to move I found that my right leg was
all done up in bandages. She gave a great exclamation of joy at seeing
me awake, but then approached with her finger on her lips. In the darkened
room she told me of how the fight was over, and how I had killed the chaplain
of the Bishop of St. Gallen. She begged me to be very still, first because
my leg had been broken by a shot, and secondly, because things were still
upset in Lucerne. I was in great danger and must be kept a secret in her
house.
"I was there in the garret of her house, for three weeks, being nursed
by her. The fighting was still going on, and I heard shots. But of this,
of my wound, of what I had done and what my people would say, even of
my dangerous position, I hardly thought. It seemed to me that I had, somehow,
got up very high outside the world in which I used to live, and that I
was now quite alone there, with her. A doctor came to see me from time
to time. Nobody else came, but Lola would put on her shawl and leave me
for a while, begging me to keep very quiet till she came back. These hours
when she was away were to me infinitely long.
"But while I was with her we talked together much. When I have since
thought of it, I remember that she did not say a great deal, but that
I myself talked as well as I have always wished to do. Altogether, I understood
life and the world, myself and God even, while I was in the garret. In
particular we talked of the great things which I was to do in life. I
had, you understand, already done enough to be known amongst people, but
both of us felt that this was only the beginning.
"I understood that many of her friends had left Lucerne, and that
she was exposing herself to dangers for my sake, and I begged her to go
away. No, she said, she would not leave me for anything in the world.
First of all, after what I had done, the revolutionists of Lucerne looked
upon me as a brother, and would all be ready to die foi my sake. But more
than that, she explained, blushing deeply, in case we were found by the
tyrants of the town or their militia, she and I must both insist that
we had taken no part in the fight, but were here together because of a
love affair. She would have to pose as my mistress, and I as her lover,
while my wound would be said to have been given me by a jealous rival.
These words of hers, although the whole thing was only a comedy, again
made me feel extraordinarily happy, and made me dream of what I would
do when I got well again. Yes, I do not know if any real love affair could
possibly have made me as happy.
"At last one evening she told me that the doctor had declared me
to be out of danger, and that we must part. She was leaving Lucerne herself
that night. I was to go away, secretly, in the early morning. A friend,
she said, would place his carriage at my disposal, and himself escort
me out of town. A sort of terror came over me at her words. But I was
too slow. I did not know what was the matter with me till it was too late.
Madame Lola went on talking gently to me. I was, she said, to have something
Nobody else came, but Lola would put on her shawl and leave me for a while,
begging me to keep very quiet till she came back. These hours when she
was away were to me infinitely long.
"But while I was with her we talked together much. When I have since
thought of it, I remember that she did not say a great deal, but that
I myself talked as well as I have always wished to do. Altogether, I understood
life and the world, myself and God even, while I was in the garret. In
particular we talked of the great things which I was to do in life. I
had, you understand, already done enough to be known amongst people, but
both of us felt that this was only the beginning.
"I understood that many of her friends had left Lucerne, and that
she was exposing herself to dangers for my sake, and I begged her to go
away. No, she said, she would not leave me for anything in the world.
First of all, after what I had done, the revolutionists of Lucerne looked
upon me as a brother, and would all be ready to die foi my sake. But more
than that, she explained, blushing deeply, in case we were found by the
tyrants of the town or their militia, she and I must both insist that
we had taken no part in the fight, but were here together because of a
love affair. She would have to pose as my mistress, and I as her lover,
while my wound would be said to have been given me by a jealous rival.
These words of hers, although the whole thing was only a comedy, again
made me feel extraordinarily happy, and made me dream of what I would
do when I got well again. Yes, I do not know if any real love affair could
possibly have made me as happy.
"At last one evening she told me that the doctor had declared me
to be out of danger, and that we must part. She was leaving Lucerne herself
that night. I was to go away, secretly, in the early morning. A friend,
she said, would place his carriage at my disposal, and himself escort
me out of town. A sort of terror came over me at her words. But I was
too slow. I did not know what was the matter with me till it was too late.
Madame Lola went on talking gently to me. I was, she said, to have something
for my trouble, and she would give me all the bonnets that she had in
her shop. 'For I myself,' she said, 'am not coming back to Lucerne.' So
with the assistance of her little maid she made the journey up and down
the stairs twelve times, each time loaded with bandboxes, which she placed
around me. I began to laugh, and in the end could not stop again, for
I found myself nearly drowned in bonnets of all the colors of the rainbow,
trimmed with flowers, ribbons, and plumes. The floor, the bed, chair,
and table were covered with them, probably the prettiest bonnets in all
the world.
'Now,' she said, when she had filled the room with them, 'here you have
the wherewithal to conquer the hearts of women.' She herself put on a
plain bonnet and shawl, and took my hand. 'Do not ever,' said she, 'bear
me any grudge. I have tried to do you good.' She put her arms around my
neck, kissed me, and was gone. 'Lola!' I cried, and sank back in my chair
in a faint. I passed, when I woke up, a terrible night. There was not
a single pleasant thing for me to think of. The image of the curate of
the Bishop of St. Gallen also began to worry me, and it seemed to me that
I had nothing to turn to in all the world.
"Lola was as good as her word. The next morning an elderly Jewish
gentleman, of great elegance, presented himself in my garret, and at the
foot of the stair I found his handsome carriage waiting for me. He drove
me through the town, where here and there I still saw traces of the fighting,
and entertained me pleasantly on the way. As we were nearing the outskirts
of the city he said to me: 'The Baron de Watteville's carriage will meet
us at such and such a park. But the feelings of Monsieur your Uncle have
been hurt by your behavior, and he has charged me to say that he prefers
you to continue your journey straight on, so that he and you should not
meet until later.'
"'But does my uncle,' I exclaimed in great surprise, 'know of what
has happened to me?'
" 'Yes,' said the old Jew, 'he has indeed known all the time. The
Baron has much influence with the clergy of Lucerne, and it is doubtful
whether we could have done without him.' He said no more, so we drove
on in silence, I in a disturbed mind.
"My uncle's carriage was indeed waiting near a park, as the Jew had
said. As we stopped, a man got out of it and slowly came up to meet us,
and I recognized the red-haired young man whom I had seen in Lola's house
on my first visit there, and later, I now remembered, on the barricade.
He now looked as if he had gone through much. He limped when he walked,
and his face was very pale and stern as he bowed to my companion. Still,
as he looked around at me, he suddenly smiled. 'So this,' I heard him
say, 'is Madame Lola's little caged goldfinch?'
"'Yes,' said the old Jew, smiling, 'that is her golem.'
"Then I did not know what I found out later, that the word golem,
in the Jewish language, means a big figure of clay, into which life is
magically blown, most frequently for the accomplishment of some crime
which the magician dares not undertake himself. These golems are imagined
to be very big and strong.
"The two saw me into my uncle's carriage, and we took leave of one
another. I drove on, but I had too much to think of now, and I did not
know where to find myself again. The smell of gunpowder of the barricades,
our talks of God and Lola's kiss in the attic, together with all these
bonnets which she had given me, all ran before my eyes, like the colored
spots which you see before your eyes when you have for a long time been
looking at the sun, I have not been able, since then, to think much of
those great deeds which I was to perform. I cannot even remember what
they were. But still, I have killed the curate of the Bishop of St. Gallen,
and I must be careful until I get out of this country. I have seen a doctor,
who tells me that my leg has been so skillfully put together that it is
as if it had never been broken."
"And so you are," I said, "trying to find this woman, and
searching for her everywhere, lying awake at night?"
"You guess that?" said Pilot. "Yes, I am looking for her.
I do not know what to think or feel about anything until I shall see her
again. Still she was not young, you know, and no woman of noble birth,
but only a milliner of Lucerne."
Now I had heard Pilot's tale. And while I had been listening to it, I
had been frightened more than once. There were many things in it alarming
to my ears. I thought, I have not been drunk a single time since I lost
Olalla, till tonight. It is obvious that when I drink now, even as much
as two bottles of this Swiss wine, my head betrays me. That comes from
thinking, for a long time, of one single thing only. This tale of my friend's
is too much like a dream of my own. There is much in his woman of the
barricades which recalls to me the manner of my courtesan of Rome, and
when, in the middle of his story, an old Jew appears like a djinn of the
lamp, it is quite clear that I am a little off my head. How far can I
be, I wonder, from plain lunacy?
To clear up this question I went on drinking.
The Baron Guildenstern, during the course of Pilot's narration, had from
time to time looked at me with a smile, and sometimes winked at me. But
as it drew on he had lost his interest in it, and had had a new bottle
brought in. Now he opened it, and refilled the glasses.
"My good Fritz," he said, laughing, "I know that ladies
love their bonnets. A husband to them means a person who will buy them
bonnets of all possible shapes and colors, God bless him. But it is a
poor article of dress to get off a woman. I have let them keep the bonnet
on after everything else had gone; and as to having it flung at your head,
I prefer the chemise."
"Have you never, then, paid your court to a woman without getting
the chemise?" Pilot asked, a little nervously, looking straight in
front of him at things far away.
The Baron watched him attentively, as if he were on the point of finding
out that a failure and an unsatisfied appetite might have a value for
some kinds of people. "My dear friend," he said, "I will
tell you an adventure of mine in return for your confession":
"Seven years ago I was sent by the colonel of my regiment in Stockholm,
the Prince Oscar, to the riding school of Saumur. I did not stay my term
out there, as I got into some sort of trouble at Saumur, but while I was
there I had some pleasant hours in the company of two rich young friends
of mine, one of whom was Waldemar Nat-og-Dag, who had come with me from
Sweden. The other was the Belgian Baron Clootz, who belonged to the new
nobility, and possessed a large fortune.
"Through letters of introduction of old aunts of ours, my Swedish
friend and I dropped for a time into a curious community of old ruined
Legitimists of the highest aristocracy, who had lost all that they had
in the French Revolution, and who lived in a small provincial town near
Saumur.
"They were all of them very aged, for when they had been young the
ladies had had no dowries to marry on, and the gende-men no money to maintain
a family in the style of their old names, so there had been no younger
generation produced. They could thus foresee the near end of all their
world, and with them to be young was synonymous with being of the second-best
circles. The ladies held their heads together over my aunts' letters,
wondering at the strangeness of conditions in Sweden, where the nobility
still had the courage to breed.
"It all bored me to death. It was like being put on a shelf with
a lot of bottles of old wine and old pickle pots, sealed and bound with
parchment.
"In these circles there was much talk of a rich young woman who had
for a year been renting a pretty country house outside the town. I had
seen it myself, within its walled gardens, on my morning rides. In the
beginning she interested me as little as possible. I thought her only
one more of the company of Beguines. I wondered, though, how it was that
the qualities of youth and prosperity were in her no faults, but on the
contrary seemed to endear her to all the dry old hearts of the town.
"They themselves eagerly furnished me the explanation, informing
me that this lady had consecrated her life to the memory of General Zumala
Carregui, who had been, I believe, a hero and a martyr to the cause of
the rightful king of Spain, and had been killed by the rebels. In his
honor she dressed forever in white, lived on lenten food and water, and
every year undertook a pilgrim's voyage to his tomb in Spain. She gave
much charity to the poor, and kept a school for the children of the village,
and a hospital. From time to time she also had visions and heard voices,
probably the sweet and martial voice of General Zumala. For all this she
was highly thought of. That she had, before his death, stood in a more
earthly relation to the martyr in no way damaged her reputation. The collection
of old maids of both sexes were on the contrary much intrigued by the
idea of experience in this holy person, as were, very likely, the eleven
thousand martyrized virgins of Cologne when they were, in paradise, introduced
to the highly ranking saint of heaven, St. Mary of Magdala.
"But the heart of my friend Waldemar, when he met her, melted as
quickly as a lump of sugar in a cup of hot coffee.
" 'Arvid,' he said to me, 'I have never met such a woman, and I know
that it was the will of fate that I should meet her. For as you know my
name is Night-and-Day, and my arms two-parted in black and white. Therefore
she is meant for meor I for her. For this Madame Rosalba has in
her more life than any person I have ever met. She is a saint of the first
magnitude, and she uses in being a saint as much vigor as a commander
in storming a citadel. She sits like a fresh, full flower in the circle
of old dry perisperms. She is a swan in the lake of life everlasting.
That is the white half of my shield. And at the same time there is death
about her somewhere, and that is the black half of the Nat-og-Dag arms.
This I can only explain to you by a metaphor, which presented itself to
me as I was looking at her.
"
'We have heard much of wine growing since we came here, and have learned,
too, how, to obtain perfection in the special white wine of this district,
they leave the grapes on the vines longer than for other wines. In this
way they dry up a litde, become over-ripe and very sweet. Furthermore,
they develop a peculiar condition which is called in French pourriture
noble, and in German, Edelfaule, and which gives the flavor to the wine.
In the atmosphere of Rosalba, Arvid, there is a flavor which there is
about no other woman. It may be the true odor of sanctity, or it may be
the noble putrefaction, the royal corrodent rust of a strong and rare
wine. Or, Arvid, my friend, it may be both, in a soul two-parted white
and black, a Nat-og-Dag soul.'
"On the following Sundayin May, it wasI managed to be
introduced to Madame Rosalba, after mass, at dinner in the house of an
old friend of mine.
"These old aristocrats, in the midst of their ruin, kept a fairly
good table, and did not despise a bottle of wine. But the younger woman
ate lentils and dry bread, with a glass of water, and did this with such
a sweet and frank demureness that the diet seemed very noble, and nobody
would have thought of offering her anything else. After dinner, in the
fresh, darkened salon, she entertained the company, with the same frankness
and modesty, by describing a vision which she had lately had. She had
found herself, she said, in a vast flowery meadow, with a great flock
of young children, each of whom had around its head a small halo, as clear
as the flame of a little candle. St. Joseph himself had come to her there,
to inform her that this was paradise, and that she was to act as nurse
to the children. These, he explained, were none other than those first
of all martyrs, the babes of Bethlehem murdered by Herod. He pointed out
to her what a sweet task was hers, inasmuch as, just as the Lord had suffered
and died in the stead of humanity, so had these children suffered and
died in the stead of the Lord. A great felicity had at his words come
upon her, she said, and sighing with bliss she had declared that she should
never want anything of all eternity but to look after and play with the
martyrized children.
"I am not a great believer in visions or in paradise, but as this
young woman told her tale I had no doubt that she had really seen with
her own eyes what she described, or that she had been chosen for paradise.
She had so much life in her that she made one feel how well the choice
had been made; the little martyrs would have a great deal of fun.
"Once, while she was talking, she lifted her eyes. Good God, what
a pair of eyes to have! They were, indeed, of the greatest power; and
when she gave you one of her thirty-pound glances puff!
"Now, as I was listening demurely myself and looking around at her
happy circle of old disciples, I became convinced that somewhere in all
this stuff there was a very bold piece of deceit. Rosalba might very well
be a saint of the first water. She might also be heaping benefactions
on rich and poor, out of a horn of plenty. And she might have loved the
General Zumala Carregui, in which case the general was to be envied. But
she had not loved him only in all the world, and she was not living now
for his memory alone. Monogamyfor it does exist, and I have myself
been loved by women of a monogamous dispositionshows in a woman.
You may confound the nun and the whore, but those ladies who in India,
I am told, beg to be committed to the flames of their husbands' funeral
pyres, you know when you see them. Either, I thought, this white swan
Rosalba can count the names of her lovers with the beads of her rosary,
or she is some perverse old maidfor as a maid she was not young;
she had passed her thirtieth yearwho, out of desperation, poses
to my Legitimists as the mistress of a general.
"Rosalba had not looked at me more than once, but she was aware of
me. She and I, for all that we were placed far apart, were as much in
contact as if we had been performing a fas-de-deux upon the center of
a stage, with the aged corps du ballet grouped around us. When she went
to the window to look for her carriage, the folds of her white dress and
the tresses of her dark hair moved and floated all for my benefit.
"I thought: I have never in rny life had a dead rival. Let us see
now what the General Zumala is capable of. At Easter I had to listen to
a sermon on St. Mary Magdalenthis holy Mary, would she have been
more difficult to seduce than any of the others of the name; or easier?
The old war horse, we are told, raises its head to the war trumpet.
"I soon became a frequent visitor at Madame Rosalba's chateau. I
do not know whether the old aristocratic community of the town had any
idea of the peril of its saint. I was accepted as her companion on her
visits to the poor and the sick. In the beginning I consulted her much
upon my soul. I confessed to her many of my sins, and none of them seemed
to impress her much. They might well have appeared familiar to her. I
think that she really gave me good advice, and that if I had meant to
reform I should have done well to follow it. She had the same earnest
and sweet manner, and seemed to like me, but in our amorous pas-de-deux
she was slow of movement. I, on my side, was patient. I had to keep my
young friend Waldemar in view, and I knew that I had a pleasant surprise
for her at the end of the dance.
"One thing was strange to me in that house. I have been brought up
a Lutheran, and taken to church on Christmas Day by my good grandmother.
I have heard many sermons, and I know the difference between saintliness
and sin as well as old Pastor Methodius himself, even if we disagreed
a little as to our personal tastes in the matter. But upon my honor as
a guardsman, with her it was difficult to know which was which. She preached
theology with as much voluptuousness as if the table of the Lord was the
one real treat to a gourmet, and when we talked about love she would make
it look like a pastime in a kindergarten. This I did not like. I had a
nurse who believed in witches, and at times, in Rosaiba's society, I remembered
the dark tales of old Maja-Lisa. Even so, such a holy witch and wanton
saint I had not come across before.
"In the end, however, I obtained from Rosalba the promise of a rendezvous
in her house late on a Friday afternoon. On that day all the people were
going to the funeral of a maréchal's widow, who had been a hundred
years old. This was late in June. By then I was bored with her dallying,
and I thought, It is to be on Friday, or I will never make love to a woman
again.
"All this, I can tell you, might have ended up in a different way,
had not something else happened in Saumur. But it came to pass that a
very rich old Jewish gentlemanin the style of the Jew of your tale,
Fritzstopped there for a week on his way from Spain. He had everything
of the best. His coach, his servants, and his diamonds were much talked
of. But what struck our riding school to the heart was a pair of Andalusian
horses which he brought with him. They were, particularly the one of them,
the finest that had been seen in France. Even at my regiment in Sweden
there were hardly any like that. Moreover they had been trained in the
royal manège at Madrid, and it was a shame that they should
be in the hands of a Jew, and a civilian.
"Because of these horses I neglected Madame Rosalba for a few days,
so much talk was there about them. Few of us would have been rich enough
to buy them, and still we thought it a point of honor with us that they
should not leave Saumur. In the end Baron Clootz, who was a millionaire
and a young nobleman of much wit, one evening after dinner made a proposition
to five of us who had been for a long time his closest friends and associates.
He promised that he would buy the horse of the Jew, and put it up as the
prize in a competition in which we were to show what we were worth. The
rule of this competition was that we were to ride, within one day, three
French miles, drink three bottles of the wine of the district, and make
love to three ladies in the course. In what order we would take the events
it was for our own judgment to decide, but the Jew's horse was to belong
to that one of us who arrived first at Baron Clootz's house after having
fulfilled the conditions.
"His proposition was a great success, and I was already in my mind
arranging the consecutive order of the items, and going through my circle
of acquaintances amongst the pretty women of the district, when I found
that the day chosen for the contest was the day of my rendezvous with
Madame Rosalba. The day had been chosen for both purposes from the same
reason: because the elite of the town would be occupied, and not able
to poke their noses into our affairs.
"I had, however, confidence in myself, and as I walked away arm in
arm with young Waldemar I thought it a good joke. He was still worshiping
Rosalba from the footstep of her pedestal, so much so as to want to change
his religion for her sake, even, I believe, and become a monk. I often
had to listen to his panegyrics upon her. Still after some argument we
had persuaded him to come into our contest. I think that he meant to show
himself to Rosalba on the Spanish horse, for he was a tolerably good horseman.
"I was, without vanity, punctual at my rendezvous at the white chateau
of Rosalba on that Friday afternoon. By her own maid for there was
not another soul in the house; they had all gone to the funeralI
was taken to her boudoir in the tower, and at the top of a long stone
stair. The shutters were closed, the room was hah: dark, and, when you
came from outside, as cool as a church. There were a great many white
lilies, so that the air was heavy with their scent. Upon a table were
glasses, and a bottle of the best wine that I have ever tasted, a dry
Chateau Yquem. This made my third bottle of the day.
"Rosalba also was there. She was as ever very plainly attired, but
she had shaken herself, with one shake, into very great beauty.
"If what happened to me in this tower seems somehow wild and fantastical,
and more like a fairy tale or a ghost story than a romance, the fault
is not mine. It is true that the day was hot; a thunderstorm followed
it in the night; and that as I came in from the white road, heavy in my
riding boots, I was not too sure of my head. I may even have been more
in love with her than I myself knew, for everything seemed to me to turn
on her, and my bottles and my wildly galloped races to be only the reasonably
fit initiatory ceremonies to this great moment of love-making. But I remember
well all that happened.
"I had not much time to give away. Light-headed as I was, with the
room swinging up and down before my eyes, my words came easily to me,
and I had her in my arms pretty soon, her clothes disheveled. She was
like a lily in a thunderstorm herself, white and swaying, her face wet.
But she held me back with her outstretched arms. 'Listen for one moment,'
she said. 'Here we are all alone. There is no one in the house but we
and my maid who brought you here, that pretty girl. Are you not afraid?
" 'Arvid,' she said, 'have you ever heard the story of Don Giovanni?'
She looked at me so intently that I had to answer that I had even heard
that opera about him. 'Do you remember, then,' she said, 'the scene in
which the statue of the Commandante comes for him ? Such a statue there
is on the tomb of the General Zumala, in Spain.' I said, 'Oh, let it keep
him down in it, then.'
" 'Wait,' said Rosalba. 'Rosalba belonged to General Zumala Carregui.
When she betrays him, poor Rosalba must disappear. But then, an opera
must have a fifth act to it sooner or later. And you, my star of the north,
are to be the hero of it. You have your honor in the matter, as if you
were a woman. You would have no mercy on St. Mary of Magdala. Rosalba
was such a shining bubble, and when you break her, a little bit of wet
will be all that you get out of it. But it was time that she went. The
people, and her creator even, were becoming too fond of her. You give
her her great tragic end. No other man in the world, I think, could have
done that so well. You are well worthy of coming in.'
" 'Let me come in, then,' I gasped.
"'You have no pity on poor Rosalba at all?' she asked. 'That she
should lose her last refuge, and be haunted and doomed foreverthat
means nothing to you?'
" 'You yourself have no pity on me,' I cried.
" 'Ah, how much you are mistaken,' she exclaimed. 'For you, Arvid,
I am worried, I am terribly sorry. An awful future awaits youwaste,
a desertoh, tortures! If I could help you, I would; but that is
impossible to me. The thought of Rosalba will never be any good to you;
her example cannot help you. The thought of this hour might, afterward,
do you some good, but even that is not certain. Oh, my lover, if to save
you I made you a present of a lovely horse, all saddled within my stable,
fiery enough to carry you away in a gallop from this terrible fall and
the perdition of us both, and if I sent my maid, that pretty girl who
showed you up here, with you to find him, would you not go?
" 'For soon,' she said, drawing herself up to her full height, her
hand still on my breast, as mine in hers, and speaking in the manner of
a sibyl, 'it may be too late, and we shall hear the fatal step on the
stair, marble upon marble.'
"In our agitation her dark hair, which used to hang down in ringlets
on both sides of her face, was flung back, and I saw that she had indeed
the brand of the witch upon her. From her left ear to her collar bone
a deep scar ran, like a little white snake"
At these words of the Baron, Pilot cried out: "What! What are you
saying?"
"I said," said the Baron patiently, pleased with the impression
made by his tale," that from her left ear to the collar bone ran
a scar, like a snake."
"I heard it," cried Pilot. "Why are you repeating my words?
The milliner of Lucerne, Madame Lola, had on her neck just such a scar,
and I have this hour described it to you."
"You have not said one word of it," said the Baron.
"Have I not?" cried Pilot to me.
I said nothing at all. I thought: I am dreaming. By now I am quite sure
that I am dreaming. This hotel, Pilot, and the Swedish Baron are all parts
of a dream. Good God, what a nightmare! I have at last lost my reason
for good and all, and the next thing that will happen will be that Olalla
will walk in through that door, swiftly, as she always comes in dreams.
With that thought I kept my eyes on the door.
From time to time, while we had been talking, new guests had come in from
the outside, to sit down or to walk through the room to the inner apartments
of the hotel. Now a lady and her maid came in, and passed us quickly and
quietly. The lady wore a black cloak, which disguised her face and figure.
The maid had her hair wrapped around her head in the Swiss way, and carried
the shawls. Both looked so demure that not even the Baron gave them more
than one glance. It was not till they were already gone that Pilot, suddenly
stopping in his heated debate with the Baron, stood up like a statue,
staring in their direction. When we asked him, laughingfor we had
drunk enough to think one another ridiculouswhat was the matter
with him, he turned his big face toward us. "That," he cried,
deeply moved, and even more so by the sound of his own voice, "was
she. That was Madame Lola of Lucerne."
The lightning of madness had struck, then, but it had hit Pilot and not
me. Still no one could tell what would happen next; and indeed at his
words it seemed to me that there had been something familiar about the
lady. Pilot began to pull his hair. "Come, my boy," I said,
taking hold of his arm. "It is not necessary to be mad. We will go
together and ask the porter, who will know her, if this lady be not the
midwife of Andermatt, who will be found to have nothing whatever in common
with the Maid of Orleans." Still laughing, I dragged him to the porter's
loge and began to question the bald old Swiss about the newcomers. The
porter was at first busy counting up various pieces of elegant luggage,
and did not pay much attention to us.
"Come," I said to him, "here is a handsome reward for a
little favor. Is that lady, in the black juste-au-corps, a revolutionist,
who inspired the murder of the Bishop of St. Gallen's curate ? Or is she
a mystic who has dedicated her life to the memory of General Zumala Carregui?
Or is she a prostitute of Rome?" The old man dropped his pencil and
stared at me.
"God help me, Sir, of what are you talking?" he exclaimed. "The
lady who has just gone through the dining room, and who is occupying our
number nine, is no other than the wife of Herr Councilor Heerbrand, of
Altdorf. The Councilor is the greatest man of the town, and was a widower
with a large family. The present Frau Councilor Heerbrand is the widow
of an Italian wine-grower, and owns a property in Tuscany, which obliges
her to travel back and forth in this way. At Altdorf, where my own three
granddaughters are in service, she is highly respected. She gives tone
to all the town, and is known as a very fine card player."
"Well, Pilot," I said, as I guided him back, for he was so stupefied
that he would have stood where he was left had I let go my hold, "this
is a prosaic solution to our enigma. We may sleep calmly tonight in rooms
eight and ten with the Frau Councilor in the bed next to the other side
of the wall."
I did not look much where I was going, and knocked into a person who,
with a little stick in his hand, was walking slowly through the dining
room, in our own direction. As I apologized he lifted his tall hat a little
to me, and I saw that it was the old Jew of Rome, Marcus Cocoza. At the
same second he went on, and passed through the same door as had the lady.
"After my first moment of sheer terror at looking into his pale face
and deep dark eyes I was seized with a fury which shook me from head to
foot. I am slow to get angry, as you know, Mira, and was so even as a
young man. When I really become so, it is a great relief to me. I had
been depressed, disappointed, and made a fool of, and inactive for a very
long time, and my despair had reached its climax in my meeting with the
two friends at the hotel. Now, I thought, if all things in the world were
really against me, and all of them equally damnable, the moment had come
for a fight.
At least
that was how I felt it at the time. Later on I reflected that it was nothing
in myself which worked the change, but just the nearness of the woman.
She had passed within six feet of me, and had liberated my heart by the
waft of her petticoat, and I had once more the winds of life in my sails,
and its currents under my keel.
I looked at my two companions and saw that they had both recognized the
Jew. In their amazement they looked like two lay figures. Whatever magic
I had encountered was encircling them as well as me, or else they were
themselves creatures of my imagination. It mattered little to me. I was
determined by now to drive fate into a corner. I took out my card, wrote
on it the name of the old Jew, and a regular challenge in the best style,
asking him to see me at once, and sent the waiter of the hotel to his
room with it. I was not a little frightened of the old man whom Ollala
had called her shadow. I truly believed that he belonged to the devil,
but I had to see him. But the waiter returned to say that it was out of
the question. The old gentleman had gone to bed, had had a hot drink brought
him by his valet, and now had locked his door and would not be disturbed.
I told the man that it was a matter of great importance, but he declined
to do anything for me. He knew their guest, who went in his own splendid
coach with his own servants, and was a man of unfathomable wealth.
"Has he traveled this way," I asked the waiter, "in the
company of Madame Heerbrand?"
"No, never," declared the poor fellow, scared, I think, by my
looks. He did not think that the lady and the gentleman knew each other
at all, he said.
It was a loathsome thought to me that I should have to wait all night
before I could do anything in the matter. Still, it could not be helped,
and I therefore dragged a chair to the fireplace arid stirred up the fire,
not daring to go to sleep. I was afraid that the woman might leave the
hotel early, so I called the waiter back, gave him money, and enjoined
him to let me know when the lady of number nine should be about to leave
the hotel in the morning.
"But, Sir," said the young man, "the lady has gone."
"Gone?" I cried, with Pilot and the Baron repeating my exclamation
like a double echo. Yes, she had gone. No sooner had she left the room
by one door than she had come back to the porter's loge by another, in
great distress, and had ordered a coach at once to take her to the monastery
even tonight. She had, she told the porter, found a letter for her at
the hotel, informing her that her sister lay dying in Italy. It was a
matter of life and death to her to get on.
"But is it possible," I asked, "to go up that road tonight,
and in this storm?" The waiter agreed that it would be difficult,
but she had insisted, offered to double and triple the fare, and had wrung
her hands in such grief that she had moved the heart of the coachman.
Besides, it was not easy to disobey Frau Heerbrand. She was no ordinary
lady. She had gone. We must ourselves have heard the wheels of her coach.
That was true. We had indeed just heard wheels.
There we stood, like three hounds around a fox hole.
I did not doubt but that it was the sight of the old Jew which had driven
away the woman. He was, indeed, a conjurer and a devil, the djinn who
had somehow got the fair lady into his power. For a moment it threw me
into the most terrible distress that I could not get at him and kill him.
But it would cause too much stir, and they would prevent it. Now there
was nothing to do but to follow her and protect her against him. At this
idea my heart flew up like a lark.
We had some trouble in getting a coach, but this in the end was overcome
by the Baron, who showed much energy and efficiency in the matter. I understood
that my two companions, who were unaware of any personal interest of mine
in the matter, felt surprised at my zeal. The Baron, holding me to be
very drunk, was still not averse to one more spectator for his exploits.
Pilot took my eagerness as a proof of my friendship for him. He even,
although he seemed the whole time to have been struck dumb, tried to give
words to his gratitude. "Go to hell, Pilot," I said to him.
He thereupon contented himself with pressing my hand.
At last, at great cost, a coach was produced, and the three of us set
off together for the monastery.
The wind was terrible, and the snow was thick on the road. Our coach,
in consequence, went very irregularly in bumps and starts, and at times
stood quite still. We sat inside it, each in his corner. From the time
when we got into the stifling atmosphere of the closed carriage, behind
the panes which were swiftly blinded by the snow beating in upon them,
we did not talk together. Each of us would, I am sure, willingly have
had his two fellow passengers perish on the journey. I myself, however,
was soon so entirely swallowed up by the idea of seeing Olalla again that
the outside world sank away and disappeared for me. We were going upwards
all the time. We might, for all I knew, be driving into heaven. My heaven,
had I been free to choose it then, must also have been turbulent, filled
with wild galloping air.
As we drove on, the road became steeper and the snow more fierce. Our
coachman and groom were unable to see six feet in front of them. Suddenly
the coach gave a particularly bad jump, and stopped altogether. The coachman,
descending from his box, tore open the carriage door to a great gust of
wind and snow, and, himself all covered with snow, roared in, infuriated,
that it was impossible to get out of the drift in which the coach was
stuck.
We held a short consultation inside, which meant nothing to any of us,
as no one would give up the journey. We tumbled out, buttoning our coats
and turning up the collars, and, doubling over like old men, we took up
the pursuit.
It had stopped snowing. The sky was almost clear. The moon, running along
behind thin clouds, showed us the way. But the wind was terrible here.
I remembered, just as I got out of the coach, a fairy tale, which I had
been told as a child, in which an old witch keeps all the winds of heaven
imprisoned in a sack. This pass, I thought, must be the sack. The locked-up
winds were raging wildly in it, jumping down straight, like fighting dogs
chained by their collars. Sometimes they seemed to beat down vertically
upon our heads, again they rose from the ground, whirling the snow sky-high.
In the carriage it had been cold, but here, as we were already high up
in the mountains, the air felt as frigid as if someone had emptied a bucket
of iced water over our heads. We could hardly breathe in it. But all this
wildness of the elements did me good. In such a world and night I should
find her, and she would need me.
The figures of my fellow travelers, even at arm's length dim and vague
like shadows on the snowy road, were insignificant to me. This search
I felt to be mine alone, and soon I was a good bit in front of them. Pilot
dropped out of sight. The Baron kept fairly close to me, but did not reach
me.
Suddenly, after perhaps an hour's walk, as the road turned around a rock,
a large square object, slanting on the edge of the track, loomed like
a large tower in front of me. It was Olalla's carriage. It was standing
there, stuck like our own and half upset, and there were neither horses
nor coachman with it. I jerked open the door, and a woman inside gave
a terrible shriek. It was the maid whom I had seen in the hotel. She was
crouching on the carriage floor with shawls pulled over her. She was alone,
and when she saw that I did not mean to kill or rob her, she cried to
me that the coachman had unhitched the horses to get them into a shelter,
after he had had to give up, like our own coachman, the hope of getting
any farther. But where, I cried back to her, was her mistress? She had,
the maid told me, gone ahead on foot. The girl was horribly scared, and
in describing her lady's flight and danger she sobbed and cried, and could
hardly get her words out. I tore myself loose from her, for she did not
want to let me go, and banged the door upon her. What terror, what danger,
I thought, had there been in that coach to drive a woman out of it, alone,
in the dead of the night and amongst wild mountains? What could it be
that threatened her at the hands of the old Jew of Amsterdam?
I had stopped beside the coach for a quarter of an hour, perhaps, and
this had enabled the Baron to catch up with me. The two lanterns on the
coach were still burning, and as he came up behind me and spoke to me
it was curious to see, in the moon-cold night, his face appear, flaming
scarlet in the light of them. In the shelter of the coach we exchanged
a few words. We started again, going for a while side by side.
At a place where the road got steeper, through the mist of the loose whirling
snow which was driven along the ground like the smoke from a cannon, I
caught sight of a dark shadow in front of me, not a hundred yards away,
which might be a human figure. At first it seemed to disappear and to
appear again, and it was difficult in the night and in the storm to keep
your eyes fixed upon it. But after a time, although I got no nearer, my
eyes became used to their task, and I could follow her steadily. She walked,
on this steep and heavy road, as quickly as I myself did, and my old fancy
about her, that she could fly if she would, came back. The wind whirled
her clothes about. Sometimes it filled them and stretched them out, so
that she looked like an angry owl on a branch, her wings spread out. At
other times it screwed them up all around her, so that on her long legs
she was like a crane when it runs along the ground to catch the wind and
get on the wing.
At the sight of her I felt the Baron's nearness intolerable. If I had
chased Olalla for six months, to rim her down in this mountain pass, I
must have her alone to myself. It would be of no use to try to explain
this to him. I stopped, and as he stopped with me, I seized him by the
front of his cloak and threw him back. He was tired by our climb. He was
breathing heavily, and had stopped a couple of times. But he came to life
at my grip and on seeing the expression of my face. Now he would by no
means let me go on alone. His eyes and teeth glinted at me. We had a few
minutes' fight on the stony road, and he knocked off my hat, which rolled
away. But, still gripping his clothes with my left hand, I struck him
a strong blow in the face, which made him lose his balance. The road was
slippery, and he fell and rolled backwards. As he fell he had taken hold
of a muffler around my neck, and had nearly strangled me. Cursing the
delay, I sprang on, hot and shaking from the effort.
Alone again, and certain now to catch Olalla in the end here in the high
hills, I was filled both with great happiness and with that fear which
had first taken hold of me beside the coach. Both drove me forth with
equal strength. I thought again, as I ran along down here on the dark
ground, like the moon up in the sky, that I was very likely mad. It was
indeed a maddening situation, suitable for an extravaganza for the theaters
of Rome. Here was I, out after a woman whom I loved, and she fleeing before
me in the night as fast as her legs would take her, in the belief that
I was that same old enemy of hers and mine who had first parted us, and
whom I longed to kill. She did not turn her head a single time, and it
would have been quite hopeless to shout to her against the wind. Also,
we were, both of us, exerting ourselves to our utmost strength in the
flight and pursuit; and even at that, going along, as we were, bent double
like old people, we could cover only about two miles to the hour. But
the strangest thing of all, and the one which worried me most, was how
she could possibly take me to be the old Jew. In the streets of Rome and
in the room of Andermatt he had been walking very slowly on a stick. I
was a young man and a good athlete, and yet she could mistake me for him.
He must be, in reality, a devil, or he must have it in his power to dispatch
devils on his errands. I began to feel myself as his messenger, sent on
by him. Was I, perhaps, without knowing it, already in his power, and
was I, against my will, the familiar of the old wizard of Amsterdam?
While all this had been running through my head I had been gaining on
her. And then, spurred on by her nearness, quite mad to catch and hold
her, I made a few last long leaps. Suddenly her long cloak, swept backwards,
blew against my face, and in the next moment I was at her side, I leaped
past her, and, spinning around, stopped her. She ran on straight into
my arms and would have fallen had I not caught her. In a moment we were
under the wild winter moon, in a tight embrace. Pressed to each other
by the elements themselves, we both panted for breath.
Do you know, Mira, it is a great thing, the foolishness of human beings.
I had run for my life, sure that the moment I caught her up, my happiness
of Rome should be caught again. I do not remember now what I had meant
to doto lift her up, make love to her there, or kill her, perhaps,
so that she should not make me unhappy again. I did have one moment of
it, too, just as I held her in my arms and felt her breath on my face,
and her long-missed form on my own body. That was a very short time to
have, surely. Her bonnet, like my hat, had blown off and away. Her upturned
face, white as bone, with its big eyes like two pools, was quite close
to me. I saw now that she was terrified of me. It was not from the Jew
that she had runit was from me.
Many years later, on crossing the Mediterranean in a storm, I looked,
for one moment, into the face of a falcon which had tried many times in
vain to hook itself to the rigging of my ship, before it was blown off
and down into the sea for good. That was again the face of Olalla in the
mountain pass. That bird, too, was wild and mad with fear, broken by overstrain,
without hope.
I suppose that I stared at her, just as terrified as she was herself,
when I understood, and cried her name into her face two or three times.
She herself had no breath left to speak, and I do not know if she heard
me.
Now that I was sheltering her from the wind her long dark hair and dark
clothes sank down all around her. She seemed to change her form, and to
be transformed into a pillar in my arms. After we had stood there for
a little while I said to her: "Why do you run away from me?"
She looked at me.
"Who are you?" she said at last. I held her closer to me and
kissed her twice. Her face was quite cold and fresh. She stood still and
let me kiss her. It might as well have been the snowflakes and the wild
air pressing themselves upon her lips as my face and mouth. "Olalla,"
I said, "I have sought you all over this world my whole life. Can
we not be together here now?"
"I am all alone here," she said after a little time. "You
frightened me. Who are you?"
By this time I had been chased all around the compass, and thought that
it might be enough just for the present. So I stood still to think the
situation over. I could not leave her alone in the night and wind. I released
her a little, still supporting her with my right arm.
"Madame," I said, "I am an Englishman, traveling in these
cursed mountains. My name is Lincoln Forsner. It is not right that a lady
should be out alone on this bad road, at this time of the night. If you
will therefore allow me to escort you to the monastery I shall feel much
honored."
This she thought over, and she seemed to lean with a good grace on my
arm. But she said: "I cannot possibly walk any farther."
It was clear that she could not. If I had not held her she would have
fallen. What were we to do? She herself looked all around her, and up
at the moon. When she had regained her balance a little, she said: "Let
me rest a little. Let us sit down here and rest ourselves; then I can
go with you to the monastery."
I looked around for a place of shelter, and saw one that was not too bad,
close to where we stood, under a great rock which projected over the road.
The snow had been whirled in there, but into the hook of it the wind could
not quite get. It was perhaps ten yards away. I led or carried her to
that place. I took off my cloak, and the muffler with which the Baron
had come near to strangling me, and made her as comfortable as I could.
The night grew clearer at the same time. The whole great landscape was
quite white and bright, except when from time to time a cloud passed over
the moon. I sat beside her, and hoped that we might be left in peace for
a little, up here.
Olalla sat close to me, her shoulder even touching mine, calm and perfectly
friendly. I felt again the same thing about her that I have talked of
before: that pain and suffering did not affect her, but that all things
were in some way the same to her. She sat in the cold, waste, mountain
pass as a little girl would sit in a flower meadow, her skirt filled with
the flowers she had picked.
After a time I said to her: "What brings you up in these mountains,
Madame? I am traveling myself in search of something, but I have no luck.
I wanted, also, to assist you, and am sorry that I frightened you, because
it makes it more difficult for me to be of any help."
"Yes," she said, after a silence, "it is not easy to live,
for any of you. That was so, too, with Madame Nanine. She wanted to keep
her girls well disciplined, and at the same time she did not like to crush
our spirits, for then we should have been no good to the house."
"Madame Nanine was the woman who ran the house in Rome of which I
have spoken. This she said to me in a friendly way, as if to show me a
courtesy. She evidently thought that since I had been kind enough to admit
that she was a perfect stranger to me, she would make me a return by admitting
that we had known each other long ago.
I said to her: "It is only here that it is so cold. Tomorrow, when
you descend the pass, you will meet the spring winds. In Italy it is spring
now, and in Rome, I think, the swallows are back."
"Is it spring there?" she said. "No, not yet. But it will
be soon, .and that will be very pleasant to you, who are so young."
"Do you know, Mira," Lincoln said, interrupting himself in his
tale, "that this is the first time that I have thought at all of
that hour up there? I only remember it now step by step, so to say, as
I tell you of it. I do not know why I have not thought of it before. Does
this moon remember it perhaps? She was there, too."
"Madame," I said to her, "if we were now in my own country
I should prepare for you a drink, when we arrive at a house, which would
revive youyes, and ginger should be hot in the mouth, too."
I described to her our strong spirits and how one comes home on a winter
day, with fingers and toes frozen, and drinks them in front of the fire.
We came to talk about drinks and food, and of how we should manage if
we were left up here forever. It was pleasant that here one could speak
and be heard without shouting. Altogether, this cave under the rock was
very much like a house to her and me, such as we had never before owned
between us. It seemed to me that everything would fit in well here, that
even my father, could I have conjured forth his ghost, would have joined
us with pleasure and pride. She did not say much, but laughed a little
at me. Neither did I speak all the time. We sat there, I believe, for
three-quarters of an hour or so. I knew that it would be dangerous to
go to sleep.
Just then I caught sight of a light on the road, and of two doleful figures
advancing in it, pausing from time to time. It was Pilot, dead tired and
sore from his climb, with the Baron leaning on his arm and limping along
the heavy road in the moonlight. I learned afterward that the Swede had
sprained his ankle in his fall, and that Pilot, coming up behind him,
had helped him up and assisted him. The Baron had sent the other back
to take off the one lantern which was then still burning on Olalla's coach.
This they carried with them, with much trouble, and they were both benumbed
with the cold.
My bad luck had it that they stopped to gather up strength to go on with
their journey, and put down their lantern on the ground just beside our
refuge. Pilot did not see us; he never saw anything of the world around
him. But the Baron, even limping, his face white with pain, was watchful
and quick of eye as a lynx.
He turned
around, pulling Pilot with him. I had got up at the sight of them. I thought
that it might perhaps be as well that they had come; they might help me
to bring Olalla to the house.
I do not think that the Baron wanted to fight me once more, but he was
in a rage against me. It was probably always difficult to get him out
in a fight with anyone as strong as himself. But here he felt, I think,
that he had got Pilot with him. He must have described our encounter to
him, and made me out a madman or dead drunk.
"Hullo," he cried, "the chase is up and the Englishman
has won. He has improved the occasion at once, and that at ten degrees
of frost. We ought not to have told him of so many attractions. He has
seen only the women of his own country till now, and we drove him mad
straight away. Let us have a look at the lady now ourselves, Fritz."
They looked like two big birds of ill omen as they came upon us. Pilot
had turned the lantern around, so that the light fell upon Olalla. She
had got up, and stood by my side, but she did not lean upon me at all
now.
The Baron stared at her. So did Pilot. "So it is you, indeed, my
sainted Rosalba," said the former, "pausing a moment on your
way to heaven. I wish you luck in the more pleasant career."
I could see that at his words Olalla could with difficulty keep from laughing.
In fact every time she looked at the Swede she was tempted to laugh. But
she was very pale, and with every minute she grew paler.
Now Pilot, who had been holding the lantern, and had stood as if he was
himself blinded by the light, made a step nearer to us and stared into
her face. "Madame Lola," he cried, "is it you?"
"No, that is not I," said she. "You are making a mistake."
This confused Pilot terribly. He pulled his hair. I believed that he would
go mad then and there. "Do not deceive me, I beg you," he said,
"tell me who you are, then."
"That
would not mean anything to you," she said. "I do not know you
at all."
"I know that you are angry with me," he cried, "for having
told our story to other people. But I did not know what to do. Indeed,
since I saw you last, I have not known what to do at all. I am unhappy,
Madame Lola. Tell me who you are."
By the light of the lantern I saw that Olalla's clothes were stiff and
shining with frozen snow, her shoes thickly covered with it. But still
I did not drag her away, but stood on and listened.
Suddenly Pilot dropped on his knees, in the snow, before her.
"Madame Lola," he cried, "save me. You are the only person
in the world who can do it. Those weeks of Lucerne were the only time
of my life that I have been happy. And all the things which I was to do!
I myself have forgotten what they were. Tell me who you are!"
The Baron snatched the lantern, which Pilot had dropped, and held it high.
I think that he was upset at seeing his partner brought so low. "That
Madame Rosalba," he cried, "elle se moque des gens! I was told
that from the first. But not for a long time of little Arvid Guildenstern.
That holy lady has on her back a little brown mole. We can find out quickly
enough about that, between us, to know who she is."
Again I saw Olalla restrain herself from laughing at him. But she spoke
to Pilot gently. "If I had ever known you," she said to him,
"I should have done you no harm. I should have tried to give you
a little pleasure. But I do not know you. Now let me go."
She turned to me, slowly, and looked at me, as if she were confident that
I would be on her side. So I should have been, against all the world,
ten minutes before, but it is extraordinary how quickly one is corrupted
in bad company. When I heard these other people talking of their old acquaintance
with her, I myself, who stood so much closer than the others, turned toward
her, staring into her face. "Tell them," I cried. "Tell
them who you are!"
She gave
me a great dark and radiant look, then turned her eyes off me and looked
up at the moon. A long shiver ran through her body.
"We shall put an end to the mystery," cried the Baron, "when
we get hold of your old Jew. He seems to have held the paint-cup to all
your disguises."
"Of whom are you talking?" said Olalla, laughing a little, "there
is no old Jew here."
"But not far off," said the Baron, "we shall all be together
at the monastery."
At this she stood quite still, like a statue. And this stillness of hers,
toward the others, was intolerable to me. "I will chase these two
away for you," I said to her, "but this once tell me only the
truth Who are you?"
She did not turn, or look at me. But the next moment she did what I had
always feared that she might do: she spread out her wings and flew away.
Below the round white moon she made one great movement, throwing herself
away from us all, and the wind caught her and spread out her clothes.
I have said already that on her flight from me up the hill she had looked
like some big bird which runs to catch the wind and get on the wing. Now
again she behaved exactly like a black martin when you see it throw itself
out from a slope or a roof to get off the ground and take flight. For
one second she seemed to lift herself up with the wind, then, running
straight across the road, with all her might she threw herself from the
earth clear into the abyss, and disappeared from our sight.
I had had no time to try to stop her, and for a moment I meant to follow
her. But standing on the brink of the precipice I saw that she had not
fallen far, but onto a sort of projection about twenty feet down. She
seemed in the dim light to be lying on her face, all covered by her large
cloak.
I found Pilot weeping aloud at my side, and together the three of us worked
for an hour or more to bring her up. We cut our cloaks by the light of
the lantern, knotting the strips together. When we had finished we hung
the lantern out over the edge of the road. Our task was made more difficult
for us, first by the lantern suddenly going out, as the candle within
it burnt down, and then by the snow, which started to fall again.
The first time that they lowered me down, I missed the terrace and kept
hanging in the air. Finally I found my foothold on it, and touched her.
She seemed quite without life. Her head fell back as I lifted it, like
the head of a dead flower, but still her body was not quite cold. I tried
to make fast the rope around her, but it would not do. As they dragged
her up, her body beat against the rocks in a dreadful manner. I had to
shout to the others and to lift her back into my arms. The terrace on
which we stood was narrow and covered with thick snow. It was not easy
to move about on it. The great gulf was below us, and once or twice I
despaired of getting her up. I thought then of how it had been my question
to her which had driven her into this great white full-moon death, in
the end.
At last I managed to make a sort of noose in which to place my one foot,
and to make fast her body to mine somehow, and I cried to the others to
draw us up. This they did more quickly and easily than I had thought they
could do it. As they loosened her from me, and I fell down flat, unable
to hold myself up, I heard many voices around us, crying out that she
was not dead.
When again I could lift my head I saw, without surprise, the old Jew of
Rome, Amsterdam and Andermatt, with our party. It seemed to me natural
that he should have come up with us. His coach was standing on the road,
and his coachman and valet had helped to draw up Olalla and me. How he
had ever managed to get his heavy carriage along in the night, on that
road, I do not know; only to a Jew anything is possible.
They lifted Olalla into the carriage, and the Jew made me come in with
her, as I was bleeding at the hands and knees. I sat there with him, holding
her feet, and remembering how I had first met him in the street of Rome.
I was very thirsty and cold, for I had been wet with sweat, and the night
air went to my bones. At last we got to the large square stone building
of the monastery, from a couple of windows of which light was shining
out. People came out to meet us.
Here I had some hot wine to drink, and my hands washed. When I then inquired
about Olalla, they showed me into a large room, where on a table two candles
were burning.
Olalla was lying, as immovable as before, upon a stretcher which they
had placed on the floor. I think that they had meant to carry her somewhere,
but had given it up. They had only loosened her clothes. A large fur rug,
which belonged to the Jew, was spread over her. Her head was slightly
turned upon the pillow, and a dark shadow covered the one side of her
face.
The old Jew sat on a chair near her, still in his furred cloak and with
his tall hat on his head, his chin resting on the button of his walking
stick. He did not take his dark eyes off her face, and hardly moved. I
was surprised, on looking at a big clock in the room, to find that it
was only three hours after midnight.
I sat down myself, for a long time without speaking. As then the clock
struck, I made up my mind to speak to the Jew. If I had killed Olalla
by my question, I might as well get an answer now, and he would know.
I talked to him a little, and he answered me very civilly. I then told
him all that I knew about her, and asked him, while we were waiting here,
to tell me of her. For a time he did not seem to want to speak. Then in
the end he spoke with much energy. Pilot and the Baron were in there too.
Pilot came up from his chair at the other end of the room to look at her,
and went back again. The Baron had fallen asleep in his chair. Later on,
however, he woke up and joined us.
"I have indeed," said the Jew, "known this woman at a time
when all the world knew her and worshiped her by her real name. She was
the opera singer, Pellegrina Leoni."
At first these words meant nothing to me, so that there was a silence.
But then my memory woke up, and recalled to me my childhood.
"Why," I cried, "that is not possible. That great singer
was the star of whom my father and mother used to rave. When they came
back from Italy they would talk of nothing else. And I well remember their
tears when she was hurt at the theater fire of Milan, and died. But all
this must have been when I was ten years old, thirteen years ago."
"No," said the Jew. "Yes, she died. The great opera singer
died. Thirteen years ago, as you rightly say. But the woman lived on,
for these thirteen years."
"Explain yourself," I said to him.
"Explain myself?" he repeated. "Young Sir, you are asking
much. You might say: 'Disguise your meaning into such phrases as I am
used to hear, which mean nothing.' Pellegrina was, at the theater fire
of Milan, badly hurt. From the injuries and the shock she lost her voice.
She never sang a note again as long as she lived."
It was clear to me, as he spoke, that this was the first time that he
had ever given words to this story. I was so much impressed by his suffering
and terror at his own words that I could find nothing to say, even though
I wanted to hear more, for I found no explanation in his statement. But
Pilot asked him: "Did she, then, not die?"
"Die, live. Live, die," said the Jew. "She lived as much
as any of you, or more."
"Still," Pilot said, "all the world believed her to be
dead."
"She made it believe that," said the Jew. "Weshe
and Itook much trouble to make it believe so. I saw her grave filled.
I erected a monument upon it."
"Were you her lover?" the Baron asked.
"No," said the old Jew with great pride and contempt. "No,
I have seen her lovers running about, yapping around her, flattering and
fighting. No. I was her friend. When at the gate of paradise the keeper
shall ask me: 'Who are you?' I shall give that great angel no name, no
position or deed of mine in the world to be recognized by, but I shall
answer him: 'I am the friend of Pellegrina Leoni.' You, who killed her
now, as you have told me, by asking her who she waswhen in your
time you are asked, on the other side of the grave, 'Who are you?"what
will you have to answer ? You will have, before the face of God, to give
your names, as at the Hotel of Andermatt."
Pilot, at these words, seemed ill at ease; he wanted to speak, but thought
better of it.
"Now, young gentlemen," said the old Jew, "leave me to
tell this tale at my pleasure. Listen well, for there will be no such
tale again.
"All my life I have been a very rich man. I inherited great fortunes
from my father and mother, and from their people, who were all great traders.
Also, for the first forty years of my life I was a very unhappy man, such
as you yourselves are. I traveled much. I had always been fond of music.
I was even a composer, and composed and arranged ballets, for which I
had a liking. For twenty years I kept my own corps du ballet, to
perform my works before me and my friends, or before me alone. I had a
staff of thirty young girls, none more than seventeen, whom my own ballet
master taught, and who used to dance naked before me."
The Baron woke up to attention, and grinned kindly at the old man. "You
were not bored," he said.
"Why not?" asked the old Jew. "I was, on the contrary terribly
bored, bored to death. I might very well then have died from boredom,
had I not happened to hear, upon a small theater stage of Venice, Pellegrina
Leoni, who was then sixteen years old. Then I understood the meaning of
heaven and earth, of the stars, life and death, and eternity. She took
you out to walk in a rose garden, filled with nightingales, and then,
the moment she wanted to, she rose and lifted you with her, higher than
the moon. Had you ever been frightened of anything, miserable creature
that you were, she made you feel as safe, above the abyss, as in your
own chair. Like a young shark in the sea, mastering the strong green waters
by a strike of her fins, thus did she swim along within the depths and
mysteries of the great world. Your heart would melt at the sound of her
voice, till you thought: This is too much; the sweetness is killing me,
and I cannot stand it. And then you found yourself on your knees, weeping
over the unbelievable love and generosity of the Lord God, who had given
you such a world as this. It was all a great miracle."
I felt a great compassion for this old Jew, who had to pour out his heart
to us. He had not talked of these things till now; and now that he had
begun he could not stop himself. His long delicate nose threw a sad shadow
upon the whitewashed wall.
"I had the honor, as I have said," he went on, "to become
her friend. I bought for her a villa near Milan. When she was not traveling,
she stayed there, and had many friends around her, and sometimes also
we were alone together, and then used to laugh much at the world, and
to walk arm in arm in the gardens in the afternoons and evenings.
"She turned to me as a child to its mother. She gave me many pet
names, and she used to take my fingers and play with them, telling me
that I had the finest hands in the world, hands made to handle only diamonds.
As we had first met in Venice, and as my name was Marcus, she used to
call herself my lioness. That was what she was: a winged lioness. I alone,
of all people, knew her.
"She had in her life two great, devouring passions, which meant everything
to her proud heart.
"The first was her passion for the great soprano, Pellegrina Leoni.
This was a zealous, a terribly jealous love, such as that of one of your
priests for the miracle-working image of the Virgin, which he attends,
or of a woman for her husband, who is a hero, or of a diamond-cutter for
the purest diamond that has ever been found. In her relation to this idol
she had no forbearance and no rest. She gave no mercy, and she asked for
none. She worked in the service of Pellegrina Leoni like a slave under
the whip, weeping, dying at times, when it was demanded of her.
"She was a devil to the other women of the opera, for she needs must
have all the parts for Pellegrina. She was indignant because it was impossible
for her to perform two roles within the same opera. They called her Lucifera
there. More than one time she boxed the ears of a rival on the stage.
Both old and young singers were constantly in tears when acting with her.
And for all this she had no cause whatever, she was so absolutely the
star of all the heavens of music. It was not only, either, in regard to
her voice that she was jealous of Pellegrina Leoni's honor. She meant
Pellegrina to be, likewise, the most beautiful, elegant, and fashionable
of women, and in this connection she was fairly ridiculous in her vanity.
On the stage she would wear none but real jewels, and the most magnificent
attire. She would appear in the role of Agatha, a village maiden, all
covered with diamonds and with a train three yards long. She drank nothing
but water for fear of spoiling the complexion of Pellegrina. And were
a prince or a cardinal or the pope himself to call on her before noon,
she would meet him with her hair done up in curling pins, and her face
covered with zinc cream, so that in the evening she might sweep the floor
with all the other women, not only of the stage but of the parquet and
boxes as welland she had the most brilliant audiences of all the
world. It was the fashion to adore Pellegrina Leoni. The greatest people
of Italy, Austria, Russia, and Germany thronged to her salons. And she
was pleased about it; she liked to see them all at Pellegrina's feet.
But she would be rude to the Czar of Russia himself, and risk a sojourn
in Siberia, before she would give up her own repertoire or her regular
hours of practice.
"And the other great passion, young gentlemen, of this great heart
was her love for her audience. And that was not for the great people,
the proud princes and magnates and the lovely ladies, all in jewels; not
even for the famous composers, musicians, critics, and men of letters,
but for her galleries. Those poor people of the back streets and market
places, who would give up a meal or a pair of shoes, the wages of hard
labor, to crowd high up in the hot house and hear Pellegrina sing, and
who stamped the floor, shrieked and wept over hershe loved them
beyond everything in the world. This second passion of hers was as mighty
as the first, but it was as gentle as the love of God, or of your Virgin,
for the world. You people of the North, you do not know the women of the
South and the East when they love. When they embrace their children, and
weep over their dead, they are like holy flames. When, after the first
performance of Medée, the people of the town outspanned
the horses of my carriage, in which she was driving, to draw it themselves,
she did not look at the Ducas who put their noble shoulders to the task.
No, she wept a rain of warm tears, more precious than diamonds, she lifted
a rainbow of sweet smiles, over the streetsweepers, the carriers, the
fruitsellers and watermen of Milan. She would have died for them. I was
with her in the carriage, and she held my hand. She was not herself the
child of very poor people. She was a baker's daughter, and her mother,
the child of a Spanish farmer. I do not know where she had caught her
passion for those lowest in the world. It was not exactly for them alone
that she sang, for she wanted the applause of the great connoisseurs as
well; but she wanted that for the sake of her galleries. She grieved for
them when times were hard and they were suppressed. She would give them
all her money and sell her clothes for them. It was curious that they
never begged much of her, as if they had realized that she had given them
the best she had to give when she sang to them. Had they asked her, they
should have had all. Her gardens and her house were open to them, and
she would sit with the children of the poor under the oleander trees of
her terraces when she refused to receive great lords of England, who had
crossed the sea to see her.
"In the relation between these two great passions of hers lay all
her happiness. During the years of her triumphs it was perfect. Her voice
and her art grew more wonderful every day. It was an incredible thing.
I myself do not hold that she had, at the time of her fall, reached the
fulfillment of her possibilities. The world rang with her name. She held
in her little hand the philosopher's stone of music, which turned everything
that she touched into gold. You, Sir," he said, turning to me, "have
told me how, in far countries, people wept at the remembrance of that
deep river of gold, of those tall cascades of diamonds, sapphires, and
pigeon-blood rubies. And she was adored by the people. They felt that
as long as Pellegrina was singing to them, on the stage, the earth had
not been abandoned by the angels.
"This, thenthat Pellegrina should sing like an angel to her
galleries, to melt their hearts and make them shed tears of heavenly joy,
and to make them forget all the hardships of their existence, and remember
the lost paradise; that she should scatter her soul over them, like a
swarm of stars, and that they, on their side, should worship Pellegrina
as a Madonna of their own, and the manifestation upon earth of God in
his heaven, and to them all that was lovely, great, elegant, and brilliantin
this was her happiness.
"Even when she played, as I have told you, the village maidens of
the opera, all in brocades and plumes, it was not from personal vanity
either. It was as much from a feeling of duty to her galleries, just as
the priests of your churches will deck out the image of the Virgin in
the most elegant clothes that they can find. Within the pictures of the
Nativity themselves, where all are moved by the sight of the Mother and
child of God in the stables, on straw, and with a crib for a cradle, the
priest cannot bear to see the Virgin poorly dressed, but adorns her in
silks, and hangs gold chains on her.
"I myself smiled at this passion of hers for the poor, for to me
the common people have always smelled badly, and I have no conviction
of their virtue. 'Oh, must we all be cut to the same pattern,' she asked
me then, 'and be sinners worshiping the divinities?
Come,
let me be what I am, Marcus, and choose to be. Let me be a divinity worshiping
the sinners.'
"As to her lovers, I knew most of them, and they meant very little
either to her or me. In fact, until she got used to them, they caused
her more grief than pleasure.
"For she was ever in life, in spite of her excellent good sense,
a Donna Quixotta de la Mancha. The phenomena of life were not great enough
for her; they were not in proportion with her own heart. She was like
a man who has been given an elephant gun and is asked to shoot litde birds.
Or like a great bird, an albatross, asked to hop and twitter with the
little birds within an aviary. When she was hurt in her love affairs,
it was not her vanity which was wounded. For outside of the stage she
had none of it, and she knew well herself that the young men were not
making love to the great soprano, but to the lovely woman of fashion,
with eyes like two stars, and the grace of those gentle and wise gazelles
of which a countryman of mine has written poems. On that ac-count she
took their shallowness and falsity lightly. But she was badly hurt and
disappointed because the world was not a much greater place than it is,
and because nothing more colossal, more like the dramas of the stage,
took place in it, not even when she herself went into the show with all
her might.
"She came back from these first love affairs of hers, when she was
still a very young girl, even a little ashamed of herself. She would then,
I think, have liked to become a man, and saw no sense in being a woman.
For in all this splendor of woman's beauty, the magnificence of bosom
and limb, and radiance of eye, of lip, and flesh, she was like a lady
who has put on her richest attire to meet the prince at a great ball,
only to find that what she has been invited to is a homely gathering in
honor of the police magistrate, at which everyday clothes are worn. Such
ladies also feel a little ashamed, and drag their long trains and rivières
of diamonds along with anger and bashfulness, feeling that they are likely,
in this place, to put them to ridicule.
"I
should think," said the old Jew, "that many women, in their
love affairs, must feel like that.
"In these hours of trouble she would turn to me, sure of my understanding.
The world would have laughed at her, had it been at all possible for the
vulgar and the unimaginative to recognize in one so beautiful and rich
the traits of the knight of the woeful countenance. But I could not help
laughing at her, as it was. I said to her: 'To the world, and to your
lovers as part of it, the whole doctrine of love, and in fact of all human
intercourse, presents itself under the aspect of toxicology, the science
of poisons and counterpoisons. They are all of them prepared for and adjusted
to poisons. They are like little vipers or scorpions, proud of their bite,
and proof against poison proportionate to their own virulence. To most
of them love is a mutual distribution of poisons and counterpoisons, and
in the course of a long career of love affairs they pride themselves on
having become immune to all poisons, as natives of India are said to train
themselves to become immune to the venom of all snakes. But you, Pellegrina,
are no venomous snake, but a python. Very often, in your walk, you recall
to me the dancing snakes which I was once shown by an Indian snake-charmer.
But you have no poison whatever in you, and if you kill it is by the force
of your embrace. This quality upsets your lovers, who are familiar with
little vipers, and who have neither the strength to resist you, nor the
wisdom to value the sort of death which they might obtain with you. And,
in fact, the sight of you unfolding your great coils to revolve around,
impress yourself upon, and finally crush a meadow mouse is enough to split
one's side with laughter.' In this way I used to make her laugh, even
through her tears.
"However, as she was so intelligent, and had been trained by my intelligence,
it was she who learned from her lovers, and in the end these matters meant
no more to her than to them. For this I owed the young men much thanks.
For they had assisted her to achieve a lightness in such things which
was not hers by birth.
From the
time that she had taken their lessons to heart, she reached perfection,
on the stage, in the part of the young innocent girl in love."
"And this," said Lincoln, interrupting the tale, "you will
yourself know to be true, Mira. You remember the old immortal song of
the young maiden who refuses all the gifts of the Sultan to be true to
her lover, which begins: Ah Rupia, fama na Majasee. It is a very
lovely song about true and pure love. Only a whore has ever sung it well,
that I know of."
He then returned to the story told by the old Jew:
"Thus did we live," the old Jew went on, "in the white
villa of Milan, until the day of her disaster.
"Young men, you remember your fathers weeping over this Tuesday.
It happened during a performance of Don Giovanni, in the second
act, where Donna Anna comes on the stage, with Ottavio's letter in her
hand, and begins the recitative: Crudele? Ah nò, mio bene! Troppo
mi spiace allontanarti un ben che lungamente la nostr' alma desia.
Just as Pellegrina entered, two or three bits of flaming wood fell down
from the ceiling in front of her. She had a brave heart; she just steadily
went on, gazing up a little only, taking the high note as easily as she
breathed. But a whole burning beam followed, and the entire theater rose
up in a panic, the orchestra stopping in the middle of a measure. People
rushed to the doors, and women fainted. Pellegrina took a step back and
looked around until her eyes met mine, where I sat in the front row of
the parquet. Yes, she looked for me in that moment of despair. And have
I no cause to be proud? She was not at all frightened. She stood there
quite calm, as if she meant to say:
'Here we are to die together now, you and I, Marcus.' But I, I was afraid.
I dared not force my way up onto that flaming stage, where all the trees,
and the houses of the streets, were cardboard only. At that same moment,
as a great cloud of smoke wafted out from the one wing of the stage to
the other, and the heat struck out like the breath of a great furnace,
she was hidden from my eyes. I ran along with the crowd and got out somehow,
and in the street, which was like a madhouse, the cold air met me again.
My servant, who had been waiting for me in the hall, held me up. We were
informed then that Pellegrina had been saved by the man who sang the part
of Leporelle, and whom she had helped in his career. He had carried her
with him all through the burning wing, and down the stairs, her hair and
her clothes all aflame. The people, when they heard that she was saved,
fell on their knees.
"I brought her to her house, and collected the doctors of Milan around
her, and she lived. She had been struck by a falling beam, and had a deep
burn, where the smoldering wood had hit her, from the ear to the collar
bone. Otherwise her burns were not deep. She recovered from them quickly.
But it was found that from the shock she had lost her voice. She would
never sing one note again.
"When I think of her as she was this first week after her loss, it
seems to me that she had in reality been burned up, and was lying on her
side in the bed, immovable, black and charred like those bodies which
they have dug up from the burned town of Pompeii. I sat with her for six
days, and she did not speak a word. And it seemed to me the most cruel
thing amongst them all that the grief of Pellegrina Leoni should be dumb.
"I did not speak to her, either. The carriages of all the world drove
up and turned on the paved terrace outside her room, asking for news of
her.
"I sat in the darkened room and thought of the case. This to her
is, I thought, like what it would be to the priest to find the miracle-working
image of the Virgin, which he has served, only a profane, an obscene,
pagan idol, hollow and gnawed by rats. Like what it would be to the wife
to find her heroic husband no hero, but a lunatic or a clown.
"No, I thought again, it is not like that. I knew the distress to
which hers might be compared. The distress of the royal bride, who goes,
with a kingdom for her dowry, adorned with the treas-
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