Chapter VIII: Part 8

"Johann, two more beers, please. Yes?"

Pinton became interested. There was something appealing in the signal the man flashed from his eyes when he realized that he had unbosomed himself to a perfect stranger, and not to a member of his beloved guild. The organist put his hand on the man's arm and said--faint memories of flatulent discourses from the Reverend Bulgerly coming to his aid: "Be not alarmed, my friend. I will not betray you. I am a musician, but I respect art ever, even when it reveals itself in manifold guises."

Pinton felt that he was a man of address, a fellow of some wit; his confidential and rather patronizing pose moved his companion, who slyly grimaced.

"So you are an organist and not a member of the noble Knights of the Centrebit and Jimmy?" he asked rather sarcastically.

"Yes," admitted Pinton, "I am an organist, and an organist who would fain become a pianist." The other started.

"I am a pianist myself, and yet I cannot say that I would like to play the organ."

"You are a pianist?" said Pinton, in a puzzled voice.

"Well, why not? I studied in Paris, and I suppose my piano technic stood me in good stead in my newer profession. Just look at my hands if you doubt my word."

Aghast, the organist examined the shapely hands before him. Without peradventure of a doubt they were those of a pianist, an expert pianist, and one who had studied assiduously. He was stupefied. A burglar and a pianist! What next?

Mr. Blastion continued his edifying remarks: "Yes, I studied very hard. I was born in the Southwest, and went to Paris quite young. I had good fingers and was deft at sleight-of-hand tricks. I could steal a handkerchief from a rabbi--which is saying volumes--and I played all the Chopin études before I was fifteen. At twenty-one I knew twenty-five concertos from memory, and my great piece was the _Don Juan Fantasy_. Oh, I was a wonder! When Liszt paid his last visit to Paris I played before him at the warerooms of the Pleyels.

"Monsieur Théodore Ritter was anxious for his old master to hear such a pupil. I assure you there must be some congenital twist of evil in me, for I couldn't for the life of me forbear picking the old fellow's pockets and lifting his watch. Now don't look scandalized, Mr. ---- eh? Oh! thank you very much, Mr. Pinton. If you are born that way, all the punishments and preachments--excuse the alliteration--will not stand in your way as a warning. I have done time--I mean I have served several terms of imprisonment, but luckily not for a long period. I suffered most by my incarceration in not having a piano. Not even a dumb keyboard was allowed, and I practised the Jackson finger exercises in the air and thus kept my fingers limber. On Saturdays the warden allowed me, as a special favour, to practise on the cabinet organ--an odious instrument--so as to enable me to play on Sundays in chapel. Of course no practice was needed for the wretched music we poor devils howled once a week, but I gained one afternoon in seven for study by my ruse.

"Oh, the joy of feeling the ivory--or bone--under my expectant fingers! I played all the Chopin, Henselt, and Liszt études on the miserable keyboard of the organ. Yes, of course, without wind. It was, I assure you, a truly spiritual consolation. You can readily imagine if a man has been in the habit of practising all day, even if he does 'burgle' at night, that to be suddenly deprived of all instrumental resources is a bitter blow."

Pinton stuttered out an affirmative response. Then both arose after paying their checks, and the organist shook the burglar's hand at the corner, after first exacting a promise that Blastion should play for him some morning.

"With pleasure, my boy. You're a gentleman and an artist, and I trust you absolutely." And he walked away, whistling with rare skill the D flat valse of Chopin.

"You can trust me, I swear!" Pinton called after him, and then went unsteadily homeward, full of generous resolves and pianistic ambitions. As he intermittently undressed he discovered, to his rage and amazement, that both his purse and watch had disappeared. The one was well filled; the other, gold. Blastion's technic had proved unimpeachable.

XVI

AN IRON FAN

Effinghame waited for Dr. Arn in the study, a small chamber crowded with the contents of the universe--so it seemed to the visitor. There was a table unusual in size, indeed, big enough to dissect a body thereon. It was littered with books and medical publications and was not very attractive. The walls were covered with original drawings of famous Japanese masters, and over the fireplace hung a huge fan, dull gray in colouring, with long sandalwood spokes. Not a noteworthy example of Japanese art, thought Effinghame, as he glanced without marked curiosity at its neutral tinting, though he could not help wondering why the cunning artificers of the East had failed to adorn the wedge-shaped surfaces of this fan with their accustomed bold and exquisite arabesques.

He impatiently paced the floor. His friend had told him to come at nine o'clock in the evening. It was nearly ten. Then he began to finger things. He fumbled the papers in the desk. He examined the two Japanese swords--light as ivory, keen as razors. He stared at each of the prints, at Hokusai, Toyokimi, Kuniyoshi, Kiyonaga, Kiosai, Hiroshighé, Utamaro, Oukoyo-Yé,--the doctor's taste was Oriental. And again he fell to scrutinizing the fan. It was large, ugly, clumsy. What possessed Arn to place such a sprawling affair over his mantel? Tempted to touch it, he discovered that it was as silky as a young bat's wing. At last, his curiosity excited, he lifted it with some straining to the floor. What puzzled him was its weight. He felt its thin ribs, its soft, paper-like material, and his fingers chilled as they closed on the two outermost spokes. They were of metal, whether steel or iron he could not determine. A queer fan this, far too heavy to stir the air, and--

Effinghame held the fan up to the light. He had perceived a shadowy figure in a corner. It resolved itself into a man's head--bearded, scowling, crowned with thorns or sunbeams. It was probably a Krishna. But how came such a face on a Japanese fan? The type was Oriental, though not Mongolian, rather Semitic. It vaguely recalled to Effinghame a head and face he had seen in a famous painting. But where and by whom? It wore a vile expression, the eyes mean and revengeful; there was a cruel mouth and a long, hooked, crafty nose. The forehead was lofty, even intellectual, and bore its thorns--yes, he was sure they were thorns--like a conqueror. Just then Dr. Arn entered and laughed when he saw the other struggling with the fan.

"My _Samurai_ fan!" he exclaimed, in his accustomed frank tones; "how did you discover it so soon?"

"You've kept me here an hour. I had to do something," answered the other, sulkily.

"There, there, I apologize. Sit down, old man. I had a very sick patient to-night, and I feel worn out. I'll ring for champagne." They talked about trifling personal matters, when suddenly Effinghame asked:--

"Why _Samurai_? I had supposed this once belonged to some prehistoric giant who could waft it as do ladies their bamboo fans, when they brush the dust from old hearts--as the Spanish poet sang."

"That fan is interesting enough," was the doctor's reply. "When a _Samurai_, one of the warrior caste Japanese, was invited to the house of a doubtful friend, he carried this fan as a weapon of defence. Compelled to leave his two swords behind a screen, he could close this fighting machine and parry the attack of his hospitable enemy until he reached his swords. Just try it and see what a formidable weapon it would prove." He took up the fan, shut it, and swung it over his head.

"Look out for the bottles!" cried Effinghame.

"Never fear, old chap. And did you notice the head?"

"That's what most puzzled me."

"No wonder. I too was puzzled--until I found the solution. And it took me some years--yes, all the time you were in Paris learning how to paint and live." He paused, and his face became gloomy.

"Well--well?"

"There is no well. It's a damned bad fan, that iron one, and I don't mind saying so to you."

"Superstitious--you! Where is your Haeckel, your Wundt, your Weismann? Do you still believe in the infallibility of the germ-plasm? Has the fan brought you ill-luck? The fact is, Arn, ever since your return from China you've been a strange bird!" It was Effinghame's turn to laugh.

"Don't say another word." The doctor was vivacious in a moment and poured out wine. They both lighted cigars. Slowly puffing, Arn took up the fan and spread it open.

"See here! That head, as you must have noticed, is not Japanese. It's Jewish. Do you recall the head of Judas painted by Da Vinci in his Last Supper? Now isn't this old scoundrel's the exact duplicate--well, if not exact, there is a very strong resemblance." Effinghame looked and nodded.

"And what the devil is it doing on a fan of the _Samurai_? It's not caprice. No Japanese artist ever painted in that style or ever expressed that type. I thought the thing out and came to the conclusion--"

"Yes--yes! What conclusion?" eagerly interrupted his listener.

"To the conclusion that I could never unravel such a knotty question alone." Effinghame was disappointed.

"So I had recourse to an ally--to the fan itself," blandly added Arn, as he poured out more wine.

"The fan?"

"Precisely--the fan. I studied it from tip to tip, as our bird-shooting friends say, and I, at last, discovered more than a picture. You know I am an Orientalist. When I was at Johns Hopkins University I attended the classes of the erudite Blumenfeld, and what you can't learn from him--need I say any more? One evening I held the fan in front of a vivid electric light and at once noticed serried lines. These I deciphered after a long time. Another surprise. They were Chinese characters of a remotely early date--Heaven knows how many dynasties back! Now what, you will ask, is Chinese doing on a _Samurai_ fighting fan! I don't know. I never shall know. But I do know that this fan contains on one side of it the most extraordinary revelation ever vouchsafed mankind, particularly Christian mankind." Excited by his own words, Arn arose.

"Effinghame, my dear fellow, I know you have read Renan. If Renan had seen the communication on this iron fan, he would have never written his life of the Messiah." His eyes blazed.

"Why, what do you mean?"

"I mean that it might have been a life of Judas Iscariot."

"Good God, man, are you joking?" ejaculated Effinghame.

"I mean," sternly pursued Arn, "that if De Quincey had studied this identical fan, the opium-eater would have composed another gorgeous rhetorical plea for the man preëlected to betray his Saviour, the apostle who spilt the salt." He sat down and breathed heavily.

"Go on! Go on!"

"Shall I relate the history upon the fan?" And without waiting for an answer he began at the left of the fan and slowly read to the right:--

I who write this am called Moâ the Bonze. What I write of I
witnessed in a walled city of Judea. I travelled there attracted by
the report of miraculous happenings brought about by the magic art
of a youthful barbarian called Ieshua. The day I arrived in the
city they had sentenced the wise man to death by crucifixion. I was
disappointed. I had come many moons and many leagues from the
Yellow Kingdom to see something rare. I was too late. The magician,
whom his disciples called a god, had been executed. I tarried a few
days in the city. After many questions put to beggars and outcasts,
I heard that a certain woman of rank had a portrait of Ieshua. I
called and without hesitation asked her to show me this picture.
She was an exalted soul. She wept bitter tears as she drew from a
secret cabinet a scarf upon which was imprinted a bloody image. She
continued to weep as I made a copy of the head. I confess I was not
impressed. The face was bearded and ugly. The new god was said to
have been as fair as the sun. And I told the woman this. She only
wept the more.

"If he were a god," I asked, "where are outward evidences?" She
became frantic.

"The real man!" she cried; "_this_ one died for the man he
betrayed," and again fell to lamenting. Seeing I could gain nothing
more from her, I left, wondering at the strange heretics I had
encountered. I went back to my country and after weaving this tale
and painting the head, there awaited the fifth Buddha, the
successor to Siddartha, whose coming has been predicted.

Arn's voice ceased. There was silence in the chamber. Then Effinghame started up and fiercely growled:--

"What do _you_ make of it, Arn?"

"Isn't it clear enough? There's been a frightful error somewhere, one of incalculable consequences. A tremendous act of heroism has been committed by a man whose name has been universally execrated through the ages. Perhaps he repented at the eleventh hour and by some means impersonated his betrayed friend; perhaps--"

"But that _other_ body found in the blasted field of Aceldama!" demanded the agitated Effinghame. Dr. Arn did not answer.

After a lugubrious pause, he whispered:--

"There's more to follow. You haven't heard the worst."

"What--more! I thought your damnable old Bonze died in the odour of sanctity over there in his Yellow Kingdom."

"True. He died. But before he died he recorded a vision he had. It is inscribed on the other side of the fan."

Effinghame's features lengthened.

"Still the same fan."

"The same. Here is what it prophesies." Reversing the clumsy fan, Arn again read:--

Before I pass over into Nirvana I must relate what I saw in the
country of the Christians. It was not a dream. It was too real. And
yet it is to be, for it has not yet happened. The Campagna was now
become a shallow lake from the sea almost to the Sabine Mountains.
What had been Rome was a black waste spot, full of stones and
weeds. And no two stones stood together. Ah! our war with the white
races had been successful. We had not used their fighting machines,
as did that nation of little brown men, the Japanese. The Chinese
were too sage. They allowed the Christians to exterminate the
Japanese; but when they attacked us and attempted to rob us of our
land, we merely resorted to our old-time weapon--the Odour-Death.
With it we smothered their armies, sunk their navies, swept through
their countries like the simoon. The awful secret of the
Odour-Death is one that has been ours from the beginning of time.
Known only to the College of Bonzes, it was never used except in
extreme peril. Its smell is more revolting in its consequences than
the Black Plague. It ravaged the earth.

I sat in a flat-bottomed boat, enjoying the soft melancholy Italian
evening. Not a human did I see; nor had I encountered one on my
slow voyage from the Middle Seas. In meditation I pondered the
ultimate wisdom of Confucius and smiled at the folly of the white
barbarians who had tried to show us a new god, a new religion. At
last they, too, had succumbed like the nations before their era.
The temple of Jupiter on the Capitol had fallen, so had the holy
temple of Jerusalem. And now St. Peter's. Their central religion
had been destroyed, and yet prophecies of the second coming of
their divinity had not been accomplished. When the last Pope of
Rome dies, so it was said, then time would be accomplished. The
last Pope _had_ died. Their basilica with its mighty dome was a
desert where scorpions and snakes abounded. The fifth Buddha would
appear, not the second Christos. Suddenly I saw before me in a puny
boat a beautiful beardless youth. He was attired in some symbolical
garments and upon his head a triple tiara. I could not believe my
aged eyes. He sat upright. His attitude was hieratic. His eyes
were lifted heavenwards. He clasped his hands and prayed:--

"O Lord, remove thy servant. The time is at hand foretold by thy
slaughtered saints. I am the last Pope and the humblest of thy
servants. Though the heathen hath triumphed upon the earth, I go to
thy bosom, for all things are now accomplished." And he tumbled
forward, dead. The last Pope! I had seen him. Nothing could happen
after that.

And as I turned my boat in the direction of the sea a moaning came
upon the waters. The sky became as brass. A roar, like the rending
asunder of the firmament, caused my soul to expand with horror and
joy. Yes, time _was_ accomplished. The last Pope had uttered the
truth. Eternity was nigh. But the Buddha would now prove to the
multitudes awakened from their long sleep that _He_, not other
gods, was the true, the only God. In a flare of light sounded the
trumpets of destiny; eternity unrolled before me, and on the vast
plain I saw the bones of the buried dead uniting, as men and women
from time's beginnings arose in an army, the number whereof is
unthinkable. And oh! abomination of desolation, the White Horse,
not _Kalki_ the tenth incarnation of Vishnu, but the animal
foretold in _their_ Apocalypse, came through the lightnings, and in
the whirlwinds of flame and thunder I saw the shining face of Him,
the Son of Man! Where our Buddha? Alas! the last Pope spake truth.
I, Moâ the Bonze, tell you this ere it be too late to repent your
sins and forswear your false gods. The Galilean is our master....

"_Farceur!_ Do you know what I would do with that accursed fan? I'd destroy it, sell it, get rid of it somehow. Or else--" Effinghame scrutinized the doctor, whose eyes were closed--"or else I would return to the pious practices of my old religion." No smile crossed the face of his friend as he firmly held the fighting fan, the iron and mystical fan of the _Samurai_.

XVII

THE WOMAN WHO LOVED CHOPIN

I

When Marco Davos left Ischl on the midday train, that picturesque, huddled Austrian watering-place was stuffy. He was surprised then most pleasantly by the coolness of Aussee, further down the line in the direction of Vienna. Ischl is not a bad place, but it lies, as the natives say, smothered in a kettle. He rode over from the station to the stadt park, where the band was playing. There he dismounted, for he was going further--Aussee is not very interesting, but it principally serves as a good starting-point for trips to many of the charming lakes with which Styria is dotted. After asking his way, Davos passed the swimming baths, and keeping on the left bank of a tiny stream, he presently found himself walking through an earthly paradise. Since his advent in Ischl, where he drank the waters and endeavoured to quiet his overtaxed nerves, he had made up his mind to visit Alt-Aussee; several Viennese friends had assured him that this hamlet, beneath a terrific precipice and on the borders of a fairy-like lake, would be well worth the while.

It was a relief to breathe the thinner mountain air, and the young artist inhaled it with satisfaction, his big hat in hand, his long curly black hair flowing in the gentle breeze. He found himself in tunnels of verdure, the sunlight shut off by the heavy leafage; then the path debouched into the open and, skirting closely the rocky wall, it widened into an island of green where a shady pagoda invited. He sat down for a few minutes and congratulated himself that he had escaped the intimate discomforts of the omnibus he discerned on the opposite bank, packed with stout people. This was the third week of his vacation, one enforced by a nerve specialist in the Austrian capital, and for the first time Davos felt almost cheerful. Perhaps the absolute hush of the country and the purity of the atmosphere, with its suggestion of recent rain,--the skies weep at least once a day in the Salzkammergut region,--proved a welcome foil to fashionable Ischl, with its crowds, its stiffness, its court ceremonial--for the emperor enjoys his _villegiatura_ there. And Davos was sick and irritable after a prolonged musical season. He had studied the pianoforte with Rosenthal, and his success, from his début, had been so unequivocal that he played too much in public. There was a fiery particle in his interpretations of Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt that proclaimed the temperament, if not the actual possession, of genius. Still in his early manhood--he was only twenty--the maturity of his musical intelligence and the poetry of his style created havoc in impressionable hearts. With his mixed blood, Hungarian and Italian, Marco Davos' performance of romantic composers was irresistible; in it there was something of Pachmann's wayward grace and Paderewski's plangency, but with an added infusion of gypsy wildness which evoked for old concert-goers memories of Liszt the brilliant rhapsodist.

But he soon overpaid the score presented by the goddess Fortune--his nerves were sadly jangled. A horror of the human face obsessed his waking and sleeping hours; he dreamed of colossal countenances with threatening eyes, a vast composite of the audiences he nightly faced. As his popularity increased the waning of his self-respect told him that he must go into retreat, anywhere out of the musical world--else would his art suffer. It did suffer. The nervous diffidence, called stage-fright, which had never assailed his supreme self-balance, intruded its unwelcome presence. Marco, several months after he had discovered all these mischievous symptoms, the maladies of artistic adolescence, was not assured when the critics hinted of them--the public would surely follow suit in a few weeks. Then came the visit to the learned Viennese doctor and the trip to Ischl. A few more months of this appalling absorption in his own personality, this morbid marriage of man to his own image, and he suspected that his brain would be irretrievably injured.

He was a curious student of matters psychologic as well as musical. A friendly laboratory had inducted him into many biologic mysteries. Particularly fascinating to him was the tactile sense, that sense of touch wherewith man acquaints himself with this earth-clot swimming in space. Davos contemplated the tips of his fingers as he sat in the grateful cool, his ten voices as he named them. With them he sang, thundered, and thought upon the keyboard of his grand piano-forte. A miracle, indeed, these slender cushions of fat, ramified by a network of nerves, sinews, and bones as exquisite in their mechanism as the motion of the planets. If hearing is a miracle, so is touch; the ear is not a resonator, as has been so long maintained, but an apparatus which records variations of pressure. This makes it subservient to the laws of sensation; touch and hearing are akin. It aroused the pride of Davos after he had read the revolutionary theories of Pierre Bounier regarding the touch. So subtle could the art of touch be cultivated, the pianist believed, that the blind could _feel_ colour on the canvas of the painter. He spent weeks experimenting with a sensitive manometer, gauging all the scale of dynamics. No doubt these fumblings on the edge of a new science temporarily hurt his play. With a dangerous joy he pressed the keys of his instrument, endeavouring to achieve more delicate shadings. He quarrelled with the piano manufacturers for their obstinate adherence to the old-fashioned clumsy action; everything had been improved but the keyboard--that alone was as coldly unresponsive and inelastic as a half-century ago. He had fugitive dreams of wires that would vibrate like a violin. The sounding-board of a pianoforte is too far from the pianist, while the violinist presses his strings as one kisses the beloved. Little wonder it is the musical monarch. A new pianoforte, with passionately coloured overtones, that could sob like a violoncello, sing like a violin, and resound with the brazen clangours of the orchestra--Liszt had conceived this synthesis, had by the sheer force of his audacious genius compelled from his instrument ravishing tones that were never heard before or--alas!--since.

Even the antique harpsichord had its compensations; not so powerful in its tonal capacity, it nevertheless gave forth a pleading, human quality like the still small angelic voice. Davos pondered these problems, pondered Chopin's celestial touch and the weaving magic of his many-hued poems; Chopin--Keats, Shelley, and Heine battling within the walls of a frail tender soul.

The sound of footsteps and voices aroused him. He shivered with disgust. More people! Two men, well advanced in life, followed by two women, barely attracted his notice, until he saw that the little creature who waddled at the rear of the party was a Japanese in European clothes. Notwithstanding her western garb, she resembled a print of Utamaro. Beside her walked a tall, grave girl, with dark hair and gray eyes, attired in the quaint garb of some early nineteenth-century epoch--1840 or thereabouts. As old-fashioned as she looked, a delicate girlish beauty was hers, and when she indifferently gazed at Davos, straightway he heard humming in his head the "glance motive" from Tristan and Isolde. They passed on, but not leaving him as he was before; a voice whispered in the secret recesses of his being: "You love! Follow! Seek her!" And under the sudden impulsion of this passion he arose and made a few steps toward the curve of the path around which the girl and her companions had disappeared. The absurdity of this hasty translation into action of his desire halted him. Yes, his nerves must be in a bad way if a casual encounter with a pretty woman--but was she pretty? He did not return to his seat. He continued his stroll leisurely. Pretty! Not exactly pretty--distinguished! Noble! Lovely! Beautiful! He smiled. Here he was playing the praises of the unknown in double octaves. He did not overtake her. She had vanished on the other side of the bridge, and in a few minutes he found himself entering Alt-Aussee. It wore a bright appearance, with its various-coloured villas on the lake shores, and its church and inn for a core. The garden of this hotel he found to be larger than he had imagined; it stretched along the bank and only stopped as if stone and mortar had been too lazy to go farther.

Again he hesitated. The garden, the _restauration_--full of people: women knitting, children bawling, men reading; and all sipping coffee to a background of gossip. He remembered that it was the sacred hour of _Kaffeeklatsch_, and he would have escaped by a flight of steps that led down to the beach, but he was hailed. A company of a half-dozen sat at a large table under the trees, and the host was an orchestral conductor well known to Davos. There was no alternative. He took a chair. He was introduced as the celebrated pianoforte-virtuoso to men and women he had never seen before, and hoped--so rancorous was his mood--never to see again. A red-headed girl from Brooklyn, who confessed that she thought Maeterlinck the name of some new Parisian wickedness, further bothered him with questions about piano teachers. No, he didn't give lessons! He never would! She dropped out of the conversation. Finally by an effort he swore that his head was splitting, that he must return to Ischl. He broke away. When he discovered that the crowd was also bound for the same place, he abruptly disappeared. It took him just two hours to traverse the irregular curves of the lake on the Franz Carl Promenade, and he ate his dinner in peace at the inn upon a balcony that projected over the icy waters.

Davos decided, as he smoked a mild cigarette, that he would remain at Alt-Aussee for the night. The peace of the landscape purified his soul of its irritability, though he wished that the Dachstein would not dominate so persistently the sky-line--it was difficult to avoid the view of this solitary and egotistic peak, the highest in Styria. He was assigned a comfortable chamber, but the night was too fine for bed. He did not feel sleepy, and he went along the road he had come by; the church was an opaque mass, the spire alone showing in the violet twilight, like some supernatural spar on a ship far out at sea. He attempted to conjure to his tired brain the features, the expression, of the girl. They would not reappear; his memory was traitorous.

The murmur of faint music, piano music, made his ears wince--how he hated music! But afar as were these tonal silhouettes, traced against the evening air, his practised hearing told him that they were made by an artist. He languidly followed the clue, and soon he was at the gate of a villa, almost buried in the bosk, and listening with all his critical attention to a thrilling performance--yes, thrilling was the word--of Chopin's music. What! The last movement of the B flat minor sonata, the funeral march sonata, but no more like the interpretation he had heard from others--from himself--than--than....

But, good heavens! _Who_ was playing! The unison passages that mount and recede were iridescent columns of mist painted by the moonlight and swaying rhythmically in the breeze. Here was something rare. No longer conscious of the technical side of the playing, so spiritualized was it, so crystalline the touch, Davos forgot his manners and slipped through the gateway, through the dark garden, toward an open window in which burned a solitary candle. The mystery of this window and the quicksilver dartings of the music--gods, what a touch, what gossamer delicacy!--set his heart throbbing. He forgot his sick nerves. When the trumpet blows, the war-horse lusts for action--and this was not a trumpet, but a horn of elf-land. He moved as closely as he dared to the window, and the music ceased--naturally enough, the movement had concluded. His ears burned with the silence. _She_ came to the window. Arrested by the vision--the casement framed her in a delicious manner--he did not stir. She could not help seeing this intruder, the light struck him full in the face. She spoke:--

"Dear Mr. Davos, won't you come into the house? My father and my uncle will be most happy to receive you."

* * * * *

She knew him! Stunned by his overstrung emotions, he could only bow his head.

II

He received the welcome of a king. The two men he had seen earlier in the day advanced ceremoniously and informed him that the honour of his presence was something they had never hoped for; that--as news flies swiftly in villages--they had heard he was at Alt-Aussee; they had recognized the _great_ Marco Davos on the road. These statements were delivered with exaggerated courtesy, though possibly sincere. The elder of the pair was white-whiskered, very tall and spare, his expression a sadly vague one. It was her father. The other an antique person, a roly-poly fellow who chuckled and quavered, was her uncle. Davos sat in a drawing-room containing a grand pianoforte, a few chairs, and couches. The floor was stained, and when a cluster of lights was brought by the uncle, he noticed that only Chopin portraits hung on the walls. He apologized for his intrusion--the music had lured him from the highroad.

"We are very musical," said the father.

"I should say so," reiterated his brother-in-law.

"Musical!" echoed Davos. "Do you call it by such an everyday phrase? I heard the playing of a marvellous poet a moment ago." The two men looked shyly at each other. She entered. He was formally presented.

"Monsieur Davos, this is Constantia Grabowska, my daughter. My name is Joseph Grabowski; my late wife's brother, Monsieur Pelletier." Davos was puzzled by the name, Constantia Grabowska! She sat before him, dressed in black silk with crinoline; two dainty curls hung over her ears; her profile, her colouring, were slightly Oriental, and in her nebulous gray eyes with their greenish light there was eternal youth. Constantia! Polish. And how she played Chopin--ah! it came to him before he had finished his apologies.

"You are named after Chopin's first love," he ejaculated. "Pardon the liberty." She answered him in her grave, measured contralto.

"Constantia Gladowska was my grandmother." The playing, the portraits, were now explained. A lover of the Polish composer, Davos knew every incident of his biography.

"I am the son of that Joseph Grabowski, the Warsaw merchant who married the soprano singer, Constantia Gladowska, in 1832," said the father, smilingly. "My father became blind."

"Chopin's _Ideal_!" exclaimed Marco. He was under the spell of the girl's beauty and music. He almost stared at her, for the knowledge that she was a great artiste, perhaps greater than himself, rather dampened his passion. She was adorable as she returned without coquetry his ardent gaze; but she was--he had to admit it--a rival. This composite feeling he inwardly wrestled with as the conversation placidly proceeded. They only spoke of Poland, of Chopin. Once the name of Emilia Plater, the Polish Joan of Arc, was mentioned--she, too, was a distant connection. The young pianist hinted that more music would be agreeable, but there was no response. He was quite alone with Constantia, and they talked of Poland's tone-poet. She knew much more of Chopin than he did, and she recited Mickïewicz's patriotic poems with incomparable verve.

"Do you believe in heredity?" he cried, as the father entered with the tea. "Do you believe that your love of Chopin is inherited? Chopin composed that wonderful slow movement of the F minor concerto because of his love for your grandmother. How I wish I could have seen her, heard her."

The girl, without answering him, detached from her neck a large brooch and chain. Davos took it and amazedly compared the portrait with the living woman.

"You _are_ Constantia Gladowska." She smiled.

"Her love of Chopin--she must have loved her youthful adorer--has been transmitted to you. Oh, please play me that movement again, the one Rubinstein called 'the night wind sweeping over the churchyard graves.'" Constantia blushed so deeply that he knew he had offended her. She had for him something of the pathos of old dance music--its stately sweetness, its measured rhythms. After drinking a cup of tea he drifted to the instrument--flies do not hanker after honey as strongly as do pianists in the presence of an open keyboard. A tactful silence ensued. He began playing, and, as if exasperated at the challenge implied by her refusal, he played in his old form. Then he took the theme of Chopin's E flat minor Scherzo, and he juggled with it, spun it into fine fibres of tone, dashed it down yawning and serried harmonic abysses. He was magnificent as he put forth all the varied resources of his art. Constantia, her cheeks ablaze, her lips parted, interposed a fan between her eyes and the light. There was something dangerous and passionate in her regard. In all the fury of his play he knew that he had touched her. Once, during a pause, he heard her sigh. As he finished in a thunderous crash he saw in the doorway the figure of the Japanese maid--an ugly, gnarled idol with slitted eyes. She withdrew when he arose to receive the unaffected homage of his hosts. He was curious. Monsieur Pelletier, who looked like a Brazilian parrot in beak and hue, cackled:--

"That's Cilli, our Japanese. She was born in Germany, and is my niece's governess. Quite musical, too, I should say so. Just look at my two Maltese cats! I call them Tristan and Isolde because they make noises in the night. Don't you _loathe_ Wagner?"

It was time to go. Enamoured, Davos took his leave, promising to call the next forenoon before he went back to Ischl. He held her fingers for a brief moment and longed to examine their tips,--the artist still struggled to subdue the man,--but the pressure he received was so unmistakable that he hurried away, fearing to betray his emotion. He hovered in the vicinity of the house, longing for more music. He was disappointed. For a full hour he wandered through the dusty lanes in the faded light of an old moon. When he reached his chamber, it was long past one o'clock; undaunted, his romantic fervour forced him to the window, and he watched the shining lake. He fell asleep thinking of Constantia. But he dreamed of Cilli, the Japanese maid with the hideous eyes.

III

Not only that morning, but every morning for two weeks, did Marco Davos visit Alt-Aussee. He came down from Ischl on the earliest train, and some nights he stopped at the hotel near his new friends. After a few visits he saw little of the father and uncle, and he was not sorry--they were old bores with their archaic anecdotes of dead pianists. Two maniacs on the subject of music, Davos wished them to the devil after he had known them twenty-four hours. His passion had reached the acute key. He could not eat or drink in normal fashion, and no sooner had he left the girl than the sky became sombre, his pulse weakened, and he longed to return to her side to tell her something he had forgotten. He did this several times, and hesitated in his speech, reddened, and left her, stumbling over the grass like a lame man. Never such a crazy wooer, never a calmer maiden. She looked unutterable sentiment, but spoke it not.

When he teased her about her music, she became a statue. She was too timid to play before artists; her only master had been her father. Once more he had heard the piano as he returned unexpectedly, and almost caught her; he saw her at the instrument, but some instinct must have warned her that she was being spied upon. She stopped in the middle of a phrase from a Mendelssohn song, and even to his prejudiced ears her touch had seemed commonplace. Yet he loved her all the more despite her flat refusal to play. The temptation to his excited artistic temperament was removed. He played, often, gloriously. His nerves were steel. This was a cure his doctor had not foreseen. What did it matter, anyhow?--he was near Constantia daily, and the sunshine was royal. Only--why did her relatives absent themselves so obstinately! She told him, with her secret smile, that she had scolded them for talking so much; but when he played they were never far away, she assured him. Nor was the Japanese woman, Cilli--what a name! A nickname given by Constantia in her babyhood. Cilli was a good soul. He hoped so--her goodness was not apparent. She had a sneering expression as he played. He never looked up from the keyboard that he did not encounter her ironical gaze. She was undoubtedly interested. Her intensity of pose proved it; but there was no sympathy in her eyes. And she had a habit of suddenly appearing in door or window, and always behind her mistress. She ended by seriously annoying him, though he did not complain. It was too trivial.

One afternoon he unfolded his novel views on touch. If the action of the modern pianoforte could be made as sensitive in its response as the fingerboard of a fiddle.... Constantia listened with her habitual gravity, but he knew that she was bored. Then he shifted to the subject of fingers. He begged to be allowed the privilege of examining hers. At first she held back, burying her hand in the old Mechlin lace flounce of her sleeves. He coaxed. He did not attempt to conceal his chagrin when he finally saw her fingers. They were pudgy, good-humoured, fit to lift a knife and fork, or to mend linen. They did not match her cameo-like face, and above all they did not reveal the musical soul he knew her to possess. For the first time since he met her she gave evidence of ill humour. She sharply withdrew her hand from his, and as she did so a barbaric croon was heard, a sort of triumphant wailing, and Constantia, without making an excuse, hurriedly left the room. The singing stopped.

"It's that devil of a Japanese woman," he muttered testily. He waited for nearly an hour, and in a vile temper took up his hat and stick and went away. Decidedly this was his unlucky day, he grumbled, as he reached the water. He saw Grabowski and Pelletier, arm in arm, trudging toward the villa, but contrived to evade them. In ten minutes he found himself spying on the house he had quitted. He skirted a little private way back of the villa, and to his amazement father, uncle, and Constantia came out and hailed the omnibus which travelled hourly to Aussee. Davos was furious. He did not risk following them, for he realized he had been treated shabbily. His wrath softened as he reflected; perhaps Constantia, agitated by his rudeness,--had he been rude?--persuaded her family to follow him to Ischl. The sky cleared. That was the solution--Marco Davos straightened himself--his pride was no longer up in arms. Poor child--she was so easily wounded! How he loved her!

His body trembled. He could not believe he was awake. Incredible music was issuing from behind the closed blinds of the villa. Music! And the music he had overheard that first night. But Constantia had just gone away; he had seen her. There must be some mistake, some joke. No, no, by another path she had managed to get back to the house. Ay! but what playing. Again came that purling rush of notes, those unison passages, as if one gigantic hand grasped them--so perfect was the tonal accord. He did not hesitate. At a bound he was in the corridor and pushed open the door of the drawing-room....

At first the twilighted room blinded him. Then to his disgust and terror he saw the apelike features of the squat Japanese governess. She sat at the piano, her bilious skin flushed by the exertion of playing.

"You--you!" he barely managed to stammer. She did not reply, but preserved the immobility of a carved idol.

"You are a wonderful artiste," he blurted, going to her. She stolidly answered:--

"The Japanese have the finest sense of touch in the world. I was once a pupil of Karl Tausig." Involuntarily he bowed his head to the revered name of the one man he had longed to hear. Then his feelings almost strangled him; his master passion asserted itself.

"Your fingers, your fingers--let me see them," he hoarsely demanded. With a malicious grin she extended her hands--he groaned enviously. Yes, they were miracles of sculpture, miracles of colour and delicacy, the slender tips well-nigh prehensile in their cunning power. And the fingers of Constantia, of his love, of the woman who loved Chopin--that Chopin whose first passion was for her grandmother, the opera singer Constantia Gladowska!

The knowledge of her cruel deception crept into his consciousness. He was chilled for several seconds. Grief at his lost love, implacable anger at her trickery, crowded into his unhappy brain. But he only bowed to Cilli, and summoning all his will he politely said:--

"It is quite true that when the Japanese choose to play the piano, we Europeans must shut up shop." He hurried out to the road and walked desperately....

The next morning, as he nervously paced the platform of the Ischl railway station, he encountered his old friend Alfred Brünfeld, the jovial Viennese pianist.

"Hullo!"

"Hullo!"

"Not going back to Vienna?"

"Yes--I'm tired of the country."

"But, man, you are pale and tired. Have you been studying up here after your doctor bade you rest?" The concern in Brünfeld's voice touched Davos. He shook his head, then bethought himself of something.

"Alfred, you are acquainted with everybody in Europe. How is it you never told me about that strange Grabowski crowd--you know, the granddaughter of Chopin's first love?" Brünfeld looked at him with instant curiosity.

"You also?" he said. The young man blushed. After _that_ he could never forgive! The other continued:--

"Granddaughter, fiddlesticks! They are not Poles, those Grabowskis, but impostors. Their real name is--is--" Davos started.

"What, you have met them?"

"Yes, the stupid father, the odious uncle, the fair Constantia--what a meek saint!--and that diabolical Japanese, who plays the piano like a house on fire." Tears came to the eyes of Marco Davos.

"Did they--I mean, did _she_ take you in, too?"

"Here, at Ischl, last summer," was the grim reply.

XVIII

THE TUNE OF TIME

Ferval returned to Rouen after a fatiguing trip down the Seine as far as Croisset, the old home of Gustave Flaubert. Here he viewed, not without a dismal sense of fame and its futility, the little garden-house in which the masterpieces of the great Frenchman had been conceived in joy and executed in sorrow. He met the faithful Colange, one-time attendant of Flaubert, and from him learned exacerbating details of the novelist's lonesome years; so he was in a mood of irritation as he went ashore near the Boïeldieu Bridge and slowly paced toward his hotel. He loved this Norman Rouen, loved the battered splendour of Nôtre-Dame Cathedral, loved the church of Saint-Ouen--that miracle of the Gothic, with its upspringing turrets, its portal as perfect as a Bach fugue. And in the Solferino Garden he paid his tribute of flowers at the monuments of Maupassant and Flaubert. Ferval was modern in his tastes; he believed nothing in art was worth the while which did not date from the nineteenth century.

Deplorably bored, he passed his hotel on the Quai and turned into the Rue Jeanne d'Arc, which led by the façade of the Palais de Justice. He had studied it carefully, and it did not, this dull afternoon in September, hold his interest long; he sauntered on, not feeling strong enough to light a cigarette. Decidedly, Rouen was become tiresome. He would go back to Paris by the evening train--or to Dieppe, thence to London, on the morning boat. Presently he found himself nearing the Porte de la Grosse Horloge. Through its opening poured vivacious working girls and men in blouse and cap, smoking, chattering, gesticulating. It was all very animated, and the wanderer tried to enjoy the picture. Then over against the crenellated wall, under the tablet bearing the quaint inscription picked out in choice Latin, Ferval saw a tall girl. Her bare head would not have marked her in a crowd where motley prevailed; it was her pose that attracted him,--above all, her mediæval face, with its long, drooping nose which recalled some graven image of Jean Goujon. Her skin was tanned; her hair, flame-coloured, was confined by a classic fillet; her eyes, Oriental in fulness, were light blue--Ferval had crossed to the apparition and noted these things. She did not return his stare, but continued to gaze at the archway as if expecting some one. Young, robust, her very attitude suggested absolute health; yet her expression was so despairing, her eyes so charged with misery, that involuntarily he felt in his pocket for money. And then he saw that in her hand she held a tambourine. She wore a faded uniform of the Salvation Army.

Suddenly an extraordinary noise was heard; music, but of such a peculiar and excruciating quality that the young man forgot his neighbour and wondered what new pain was in store for his already taut nerves. The shops emptied, children stopped their games, and the Quarter suspended its affairs to welcome the music. Ferval heard rapturous and mocking remarks. "Baki, Baki, the human orchestra!" cried one gossip to another. And the reverberating music swelled, multifarious and amazing as if a military band from piccolo to drum were about to descend the highway. A clatter and bang, a sweet droning and shrill scraping, and then an old man proudly limped through the gateway of the Great Clock. This was the conjurer, this white-haired fellow, who, with fife, cymbals, bells, concertinas,--he wore two strapped under either arm,--at times fiddler, made epileptic music as he quivered and danced, wriggled, and shook his venerable skull. The big drum was fastened to his back, upon its top were placed cymbals. On his head he wore a pavilion hung with bells that pealed when he twisted or nodded his long, yellow neck. He carried a weather-worn fiddle with a string or two missing, while a pipe that might have been a clarinet years before, now emitted but cackling tones from his thin lips, through which shone a few fanglike teeth. By some incomprehensible coördination of muscular movements he contrived to make sound simultaneously his curious armoury of instruments, and the whistling, screeching, scratching, drumming, wheezing, and tinkling of metal were appalling. But it was rhythmic, and at intervals the edge of a tune could be discerned, cutting sharply through the dense cloud of vibrations, like the prow of a boat cleaving the fog. Baki, his face red and swollen by his exertions, moved to the spot where waited the girl.

"_Ai_, Debora!" cried a boy, "here's the old man. Pass the plate, pass the plate!" To his amazement, though he could give no reason for the feeling, Ferval saw the girl go from group to group, her tambourine outstretched, begging for coppers. Once she struck an insulting youth across the face, but when she reached Ferval and met his inquiring look, she dropped her eyes and did not ask for alms. A red-headed Sibyl, he thought discontentedly, a street beggar, the daughter of an old ruffian. And as he walked away rapidly he remembered her glance, in which there lurked some touch of antique pride and wrath.

II

Rouen lay below him, a violet haze obscuring all but the pinnacles of its churches. The sinking sun had no longer power to pierce this misty gulf, at the bottom of which hummed the busy city; but Ferval saw through rents in the twirling, heat-laden atmosphere the dim shapes of bridges mirrored by the water beneath him; and once the two islands apparently swept toward him, a blur of green; while at the end of the valley, framed by hills, he seemed to discern the odd-looking Transbordeur spanning the Seine.

For twenty-four hours he had not ceased thinking of the girl with the tambourine, of her savage, sullen grace, her magnificent poise and strange glance. He had learned at his hotel that she was called "_Debora la folle_," and that she was the daughter of the still crazier Baki. Was she some sort of a gypsy, or a Continental version of Salvation Army lass? No one knew. Each year, at the beginning of autumn, the pair wandered into Rouen, remained a few weeks, and disappeared. Where? Paris, perhaps, or Italy or--_là bas!_ The shoulder-shrugging proved that Baki and his daughter were not highly regarded by reputable citizens of Rouen, though the street people followed their music and singing as long as it lasted. Singing? queried Ferval; does the woman sing?

He became more interested. His visits to the country where Pissarro painted and Flaubert wrote revealed other possibilities besides those purely artistic ones in which this amateur of fine shades and sensations delighted. He did not deny, on the esplanade where behind him stood Bonsecours and the monument of Jeanne d'Arc, that souvenirs of the girl had kept his eyelids from closing during the major portion of the night. To cool his brain after the midday breakfast he had climbed the white, dusty, and winding road leading to the Monumental Cemetery wherein, true Flaubertian, he had remained some moments uncovered at the tomb of the master. Now he rested, and the shade of the trees mellowed the slow dusk of a Rouen evening.

A deep contralto voice boomed in his ears. As he had seen but a scant half-dozen persons during the afternoon on the heights, Ferval was startled from his dreams. He turned. Sitting on a bank of green was the girl. Her hands were clasped and she spoke carelessly to her father, who, unharnessed from his orchestra, appeared another man. Rapidly Ferval observed his striking front, his massive head with the long, white curls, the head of an Elijah disillusioned of his mission. He, too, was sitting, but upright, and his arm was raised with a threatening gesture as if in his desolating anger he were about to pronounce a malediction upon the vanishing twilighted town. Ferval moved immediately, as he did not care to be caught spying upon his queer neighbours. He was halted by their speech. It was English. His surprise was so unaffected that he turned back and went up to the two and bade them good-day. At once he saw that the girl recognized him; the father dropped his air of grandeur and put on the beggar's mask. What an actor! thought Ferval, at the transformation. "Would the good gentleman please--?"