The Story of a Genius Part 10

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.

He seated himself on a bench. Shrill children's voices, in whose strident tones could already be heard the curse of the factory hand, and the coa.r.s.e laugh of the paissarde surrounded him. He was deadly tired. In other times he had not even noticed the little journey from Brussels to Paris. His head sank on his breast. He dreamed that he was walking under the sleepy rustling trees of the park in Brussels, Annette Delileo was on his arm. The blue sky mirrored itself in an enormous pool, whereon some red poppy leaves were floating, and he told Annette how that "he was a genius, and was going to do something great."

He felt the tender nestling of her warm young form against him.

Suddenly he started up. Little cold fingers touched his, a small girl in a white cap and large blue ap.r.o.n stood beside him, and said--"Monsieur, they are closing the garden."

The Angelus was tinkling through the air as Gesa descended. Damp odors pervaded the slippery hill; great ragged streaks of fog settled slowly down on the wretchedness of Montmartre.

Once more in his apartment, Gesa made a light, and looked around him, s.h.i.+vering a little at the comfortless room. In the grey marble chimney-place, stood an iron stove. The orange and blue flowers of the carpet had long taken on a uniform covering of dirt. Two offensive terra-cotta images stood on the mantelpiece. The tenor who was well acquainted in the Rue Steinkerque, and had mounted to the lodging with Gesa before, had explained that these were the work of a certain Vaudreuil, a second Michael Angelo, whose genius was broken in pieces against the hard stupidity of the public.

"Genius!" How the misuse of the word angered him! "Genius! The man has no trace even of talent," Gesa had cried, looking at the disgusting figures.

"Si! Si!" rejoined the tenor. "He spent all his means in trying to convert the world to 'high art,' chiseled and ecce h.o.m.o--but what will you have? Marble is dear--he grew melancholy, took to drink--and then--_il a fini par faire cela_."

Whereat Gesa asked shuddering, "What became of him, did he kill himself?"

"No, but he works no longer--his daughter supports him, _vous savez!

Les filles d'artistes! cela a quelquechose dans le sang_. At one time he cursed her and turned her out of doors. But he does not remember that any more, he doesn't remember anything any more. So long as he has his warm room, his game of billiards and his gla.s.s of absynthe, he is contented. He lives in the Hotel de Nancy, here on the corner. You can make his acquaintance to-morrow if you like. The young artists treat him sometimes, to hear him spout about art,--it is very funny!"

The Michael Angelo of the Hotel de Nancy was the first thing that occurred to Gesa when he returned to his miserable room. His look sought the two terra-cotta statuettes. He examined them with a morbid curiosity. He took one of them and held it close to his dimly burning lamp in order to see it more distinctly. His artist eye recognized in the figure the traces of very great powers gone astray.

A terrible sob unmanned him, the figure shook in his trembling hand. He let it fall and it broke into a thousand pieces. But they did not charge it in his weekly reckoning. It had no value for any one.

He drank no longer. A nameless dread clutched his heart; red clouds floated before his vision, a fearful la.s.situde enervated him--but he drank no more and he worked.

And at first it seemed as if the completion of his opera would be accomplished with perfect ease. He covered piles of music paper with great celerity, and when his power of invention suddenly ceased it did not frighten him, for he remembered that, even in his best days, the inspiration had suffered such moments. He proposed while waiting for a fresh impulse, to polish that which was already written; but when he came to examine it, it was a chaos, which even he himself could not understand. Whole bars were wanting, the accompaniment was perfectly incoherent. Here and there certainly, were places of striking beauty, quite isolated however, like splendid ruins in heaps of rubbish.

Another thing disquieted him. Many of the technical signs of orchestration had escaped him, he could no longer write a regular score. He spent the whole night in looking over a work on composition.

Next morning he began his work anew.

To carry out with perfect clearness one miserable little phrase caused him the most painful effort. The faculty of concentration seemed lost to him. But he s.h.i.+rked no pains, no fatigue--"Patience! Patience! It will all come!" he said to himself, and at the same time his tears fell on the paper.

He imposed the most fearful privations upon himself in order to eke out his means to the farthest possible extent. He moved from the orange-yellow room to an attic--he ate once a day.

He grew grey, his hands trembled and he stammered in his speech. The children on the hill, whither he crept, of an afternoon, for air, all knew him and tripped in a friendly way up to the bench where he cowered, muttering to himself, a note-book on his knees, a pencil in his hand, and wished him good-day. He stroked their cheeks, took them on his lap and rejoiced that they were not afraid of him. He would gladly have told them stories--but the words would not come.

One day he brought his violin up to the b.u.t.tes Montmartre. Anxious to please the children's taste, he played them little dances. His fingers had grown stiff since he had so suddenly renounced the inspiring indulgence of drink. The bow wavered in his trembling hand. He was ashamed before the children. But for them his playing was exactly right. Soon a large audience had a.s.sembled around him. Some of the little people gazed at him with earnest attention, their heads slightly thrown back, their hands clasped behind them--others danced gaily with one another.

This pleased him. He held up his head before the children. He felt as if he would like to improvise; then it seemed to him as if the tune that sprung from under his fingers was strangely familiar--it was the same which he had played nearly thirty years before in the circus on the "Sablon."

And now every day he shuffled with his violin up to the shabby garden.

The poor children's applause had become a necessity.