Part 14 (1/2)
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”TWIN GRAY STARS”]
Even Svengali perceived the strange metamorphosis. ”Ach, Drilpy,” he would say, on a Sunday afternoon, ”how beautiful you are! It drives me mad! I adore you. I like you thinner; you have such beautiful bones! Why do you not answer my letters? What! you do not _read_ them? You _burn_ them? And yet I--Donnerwetter! I forgot! The grisettes of the quartier latin have not learned how to read or write; they have only learned how to dance the cancan with the dirty little pig-dog monkeys they call men.
Sacrement! We will teach the little pig-dog monkeys to dance something else some day, we Germans. We will make music for them to dance to!
Boum! boum! Better than the waiter at the Cafe de la Rotonde, hein? And the grisettes of the quartier latin shall pour us out your little white wine--'fotre bet.i.t fin planc,' as your pig-dog monkey of a poet says, your rotten verfluchter De Musset, 'who has got such a splendid future behind him'! Bah! What do _you_ know of Monsieur Alfred de Musset? We have got a poet too, my Drilpy. His name is Heinrich Heine. If he's still alive, he lives in Paris, in a little street off the Champs elysees. He lies in bed all day long, and only sees out of one eye, like the Countess Hahn-Hahn, ha! ha! He adores French grisettes. He married one. Her name is Mathilde, and she has got sussen fussen, like you. He would adore you too, for your beautiful bones; he would like to count them one by one, for he is very playful, like me. And, ach! what a beautiful skeleton you will make! And very soon, too, because you do not smile on your madly-loving Svengali. You burn his letters without reading them! You shall have a nice little mahogany gla.s.s case all to yourself in the museum of the ecole de Medecine, and Svengali shall come in his new fur-lined coat, smoking his big cigar of the Havana, and push the dirty carabins out of the way, and look through the holes of your eyes into your stupid empty skull, and up the nostrils of your high bony sounding-board of a nose without either a tip or a lip to it, and into the roof of your big mouth, with your thirty-two big English teeth, and between your big ribs into your big chest, where the big leather lungs used to be, and say, 'Ach! what a pity she had no more music in her than a big tomcat!' And then he will look all down your bones to your poor crumbling feet, and say, 'Ach! what a fool she was not to answer Svengali's letters!' and the dirty carabins shall--”
”Shut up, you sacred fool, or I'll precious soon spoil _your_ skeleton for you.”
Thus the short-tempered Taffy, who had been listening.
Then Svengali, scowling, would play Chopin's funeral march more divinely than ever; and where the pretty, soft part comes in, he would whisper to Trilby, ”That is Svengali coming to look at you in your little mahogany gla.s.s case!”
And here let me say that these vicious imaginations of Svengali's, which look so tame in English print, sounded much more ghastly in French, p.r.o.nounced with a Hebrew-German accent, and uttered in his hoa.r.s.e, rasping, nasal, throaty rook's caw, his big yellow teeth baring themselves in a mongrel canine snarl, his heavy upper eyelids drooping over his insolent black eyes.
Besides which, as he played the lovely melody he would go through a ghoulish pantomime, as though he were taking stock of the different bones in her skeleton with greedy but discriminating approval. And when he came down to the feet, he was almost droll in the intensity of his terrible realism. But Trilby did not appreciate this exquisite fooling, and felt cold all over.
He seemed to her a dread, powerful demon, who, but for Taffy (who alone could hold him in check), oppressed and weighed on her like an incubus--and she dreamed of him oftener than she dreamed of Taffy, the Laird, or even Little Billee!
Thus pleasantly and smoothly, and without much change or adventure, things went on till Christmastime.
Little Billee seldom spoke of Trilby, or Trilby of him. Work went on every morning at the studio in the Place St. Anatole des Arts, and pictures were begun and finished--little pictures that didn't take long to paint--the Laird's Spanish bull-fighting scenes, in which the bull never appeared, and which he sent to his native Dundee and sold there; Taffy's tragic little dramas of life in the slums of Paris--starvings, drownings--suicides by charcoal and poison--which he sent everywhere, but did not sell.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”AN INCUBUS”]
Little Billee was painting all this time at Carrel's studio--his private one--and seemed preoccupied and happy when they all met at mealtime, and less talkative even than usual.
He had always been the least talkative of the three; more p.r.o.ne to listen, and no doubt to think the more.
In the afternoon people came and went as usual, and boxed and fenced and did gymnastic feats, and felt Taffy's biceps, which by this time equalled Mr. Sandow's!
Some of these people were very pleasant and remarkable, and have become famous since then in England, France, America--or have died, or married, and come to grief or glory in other ways. It is the Ballad of the Bouillabaisse all over again!
It might be worth while my trying to sketch some of the more noteworthy, now that my story is slowing for a while--like a French train when the engine-driver sees a long curved tunnel in front of him, as I do--and no light at the other end!
My humble attempts at characterization might be useful as ”memoires pour servir” to future biographers. Besides, there are other reasons, as the reader will soon discover.
There was Durien, for instance--Trilby's especial French adorer, ”pour le bon motif!” a son of the people, a splendid sculptor, a very fine character in every way--so perfect, indeed, that there is less to say about him than any of the others--modest, earnest, simple, frugal, chaste, and of untiring industry; living for his art, and perhaps also a little for Trilby, whom he would have been only too glad to marry. He was Pygmalion; she was his Galatea--a Galatea whose marble heart would never beat for _him_!
Durien's house is now the finest in the Parc Monceau; his wife and daughters are the best-dressed women in Paris, and he one of the happiest of men; but he will never quite forget poor Galatea:
”La belle aux pieds d'albatre--aux deux talons de rose!”
Then there was Vincent, a Yankee medical student, who could both work and play.
He is now one of the greatest oculists in the world, and Europeans cross the Atlantic to consult him. He can still play, and when he crosses the Atlantic himself for that purpose he has to travel incognito like a royalty, lest his play should be marred by work. And his daughters are so beautiful and accomplished that British dukes have sighed after them in vain. Indeed, these fair young ladies spend their autumn holiday in refusing the British aristocracy. We are told so in the society papers, and I can quite believe it. Love is not always blind; and if he is, Vincent is the man to cure him.