Part 10 (1/2)

None of the ladies remembered. ”What of him?” they asked.

”Nothing remarkable. I only cited him apropos of wonder children. Never have I heard finer improvisation than his and what has come of it?” At this moment there was a slight stir, de Sterny stepped upon the platform. They clapped applause, they bowed before him, they pressed his hands.

He stood at the conductor's desk and let his eye run over his musical forces--they were all there. Suddenly he turned pale, the baton sank at his side, he longed to flee, the eyes of his aristocratic friends were s.h.i.+ning all around him; he rapped on the desk, and the bombastic introduction to ”Satan” sounded through the hall.

There was disappointed shrugging of shoulders in the audience. Gesa von Zuylen's mouth showed deep mocking corners. Slowly, painfully, but with increasing confidence he raised his eyes to the director's face, the face that had once been to him as the countenance of a G.o.d. He smiled bitterly.

And now the Alto is singing her first song. The audience rouses up as if from an electric shock--and listens amazed, but none listens with such intentness as Gesa von Zuylen.

A strange, strange feeling trembles through him, the feeling of warm young delight, of joyful intoxication with which he wrote that song.

Indignation had no chance to be heard, so mighty is the bliss of hearing his own work. It is as if some one had given him back his lost soul. The applause grows louder and louder. As if in a dream he plays on, sometimes he shrinks when some blatant interlude of de Sterny's disfigures his own composition.

”Now comes the most beautiful of all,” they whisper in the audience, ”the duet of the Outcasts.”

In mournful lament are heard the exile's voices, softly, lightly floating, the violin's Angel song mingles with theirs, above, around them, whispering memories of joys forever lost.

Gesa listens--listens--his bow stops, he sees the little green chamber, the smiling friend at the old spinet, and beside him the lovely maiden, her hands clasped in one another, her delicate head slightly bent toward the shoulder, as if it were grown too heavy. ”Nessun maggior dolore,” he murmurs. The whole audience shouts. The orchestra applauds standing--the amateurs crowd round the stage. But there!--what is this?

Panting, breathless, foam on his lips, rage in his eyes, the violinist presses forward through the ranks of the orchestra, up to the director.

”Wretch! Murderer!” he shrieks and strikes him with his bow across the face, then sinks unconscious to the floor. De Sterny pa.s.ses a hand across his brow, and while the violinist is being carried out, he turns to the capelmeister, who is hurrying up and says with that practiced presence of mind which teaches a man of the world heroism on the scaffold.

”A sudden attack of delirium tremens. You really might have taken pains to spare me such a painful scene!”

The rehearsal proceeded. Gesa was taken home. As soon as he recovered consciousness he sought in all the closets and chests for the original score of his ”Inferno” of which he had lent a copy to de Sterny. He never found the ma.n.u.script. All he discovered were the disconnected parts of his unfinished opera.

XIX

Between the Boulevard exterieur, ”Boulevard des Crimes” as the popular voice has named it, and the b.u.t.tes Montmartre, stretches a quarter of Paris which is behind the Rue Ravestein in remoteness from the world, but far surpa.s.ses it in wretchedness. No mournful redeemer here stretches out his crucified arms to mankind, as if he would say: ”I would have warmed you all in my bosom, but you have nailed my hands fast!”

No colored church windows glimmer changefully here, amidst misery and depravity. The old Montmartre church is broken up,--they are building on the new one!

In a temporary wooden tower on the b.u.t.tes Montmartre, hangs a shrill bell that sounds like the bell of a railroad or a factory, and at certain hours of the day, it tinkles a little despairing Catholicism down into the empty republican clatter below.

One junk shop crowds another here, and wooden booths full of second-hand rubbish and guarded mostly by poodle dogs stand in the wind.

One thing is especially noticeable in the Faubourg Montmartre. Every article one buys there is handed to him wrapped in old drawings, old ma.n.u.scripts, or old copied music. On everything lies the mould and dust of defunct artist existences, and the debris of fallen air castles. The countless miserable lodgings swarm with young artists who never will accomplish anything, with old ones who never have accomplished anything. Against a background of impudent vice and grumbling poverty are drawn the relaxed figures of enthusiasts weary into death.

In his ”_pet.i.ts poems en prose_,” Bandelaire described three people sinking from fatigue, yet without revolting against their burdens, carrying on their backs three enormous, grinning chimeras, whose claws are fastened in their patient shoulders. Every artist in the Faubourg Montmartre bears his chimera. His burden holds him upright; when that disappears he disappears with it. Whole troops of pretentious non-geniuses are to be met there, but also here and there among these eccentric jack fools, a really great, although long ruined artist nature making its last attempt to live and writing its name with trembling hand in the dust. There they dream, and peer across to the Boulevard, the high road of fortune, listening and waiting, with the vigor-and reason-devouring hope of the gambler.

One morning a man climbed up to the humblest lodging of Rue de Steinkerque in the Faubourg Montmartre; Gesa von Zuylen. He had come to Paris partly to escape from the Rue Ravestein, and partly because Paris is supposed to be the California of artists.

A tenor, whom he met on the railroad gave him the address of this lodging; he said it was a place where a man could work.

And Gesa wanted to work! He had a thousand francs in his pocket, the price of an Amati, once presented him by a distinguished patron. The violin was thrown away at a thousand francs. But what of that? He needed money and would have sold the blood from his veins to compa.s.s this sojourn in Paris.

He still heard the thundering tribute of applause paid to his work, and saw de Sterny's complacent bows. His clenched nails dug into the palms, but he forced himself back to calmness. He would work, he must work, that he might tear away his stolen royal mantle from the shoulders of the traitor! Surely for every genuine talent the hour of triumph strikes at least once in a life time, and he, he was no man of talent, he was a genius! How freely he breathed after that first day after his arrival in Paris. His new acquaintance, the tenor, had asked him ”if he would like to take a walk to the real Boulevard.” He meant the Boulevard between the New Opera House and the Madeleine. But Gesa shrank from the bustle and confusion--and while the tenor, with the haste of a newly-arrived provincial hurried off into the heart of Paris, Gesa crept slowly up the hill of Montmartre. There was a shabby public garden on the top, with newly set forlorn vegetation, a slippery flight of wooden steps led up to it. Lean, badly nurtured children, not in the least resembling the elves in the Champs Elysees and the Park Monceau, tumbled about in the crowded walks. Behind the garden was some waste land where gra.s.s covered with chalky dust stretches up to the doors of some miserable little huts. Paris seemed far away.