Dreamers of the Ghetto Part 41

"I will take it up."

Ere he returned, Madame descended and pa.s.sed from the sparkling suns.h.i.+ne into the gloom of the portico, with a melancholy consciousness of the symbolic. For her spirit, too, had its poetic intuitions and insights, and had been trained by friends.h.i.+p with one of the wittiest and tenderest women of her time to some more than common apprehension of the greater spirit at whose living tomb she was come to wors.h.i.+p. Hers was a fine face, wearing the triple aristocracy of beauty, birth, and letters. The complexion was of l.u.s.treless ivory, the black hair wound round and round. The stateliness of her figure completed the impression of a Roman matron.

"Monsieur Heine begs that your ladys.h.i.+p will do him the honor of mounting, and will forgive him the five stories for the sake of the view."

Her ladys.h.i.+p's sadness was tinctured by a faint smile at the message, which the footman delivered without any suspicion that the view in question meant the view of Heine himself. But then that admirable menial had not the advantage of her comprehensive familiarity with Heine's writings. She crossed the blank stony courtyard and curled up the curving five flights, her mind astir with pictures and emotions.

She had scribbled on her card a reminder of her ident.i.ty; but could he remember, after all those years, and in his grievous sickness, the little girl of eleven who had sat next to him at the Boulogne _table d'hote_? And she herself could now scarcely realize at times that the stout, good-natured, short-sighted little man with the big white brow, who had lounged with her daily at the end of the pier, telling her stories, was the most mordant wit in Europe, "the German Aristophanes"; and that those nursery tales, grotesquely compact of mermaids, water-sprites, and a funny old French fiddler with a poodle that diligently took three baths a day, were the frolicsome improvisations of perhaps the greatest lyric poet of his age. She recalled their parting: "When you go back to England, you can tell your friends that you have seen Heinrich Heine!"

To which the little girl: "And who is Heinrich Heine?"

A query which had set the blue-eyed little man roaring with laughter.

These things might be vivid still to her vision: they colored all she had read since from his magic pen--the wonderful poems interpreting with equal magic the romance of strange lands and times, or the modern soul, naked and unashamed, as if clothed in its own complexity; the humorous-tragic questionings of the universe; the delicious travel-pictures and fantasies; the lucid criticisms of art, and politics, and philosophy, informed with malicious wisdom, s.h.i.+mmering with poetry and wit. But, as for him, doubtless she and her ingenuous interrogation had long since faded from his tumultuous life.

The odors of the sick-room recalled her to the disagreeable present.

In the sombre light she stumbled against a screen covered with paper painted to look like lacquer-work, and, as the slip-shod old nurse in her _serre-tete_ motioned her forward, she had a dismal sense of a lodging-house interior, a bourgeois barrenness enhanced by two engravings after Leopold Robert, depressingly alien from that dainty boudoir atmosphere of the artist-life she knew.

But this sordid impression was swallowed up in the vast tragedy behind the screen. Upon a pile of mattresses heaped on the floor lay the poet. He had raised himself a little on his pillows, amid which showed a longish, pointed, white face with high cheek-bones, a Grecian nose, and a large pale mouth, wasted from the sensualism she recollected in it to a strange Christ-like beauty. The outlines of the shrivelled body beneath the sheet seemed those of a child of ten, and the legs looked curiously twisted. One thin little hand, as of transparent wax, delicately artistic, upheld a paralyzed eyelid, through which he peered at her.

"Lucy _Liebchen_!" he piped joyously. "So you have found out who Heinrich Heine is!"

He used the familiar German "_du_"; for him she was still his little friend. But to her the moment was too poignant for speech. The terrible pa.s.sages in the last writings of this greatest of autobiographers, which she had hoped poetically colored, were then painfully, prosaically true.

"Can it be that I still actually exist? My body is so shrunk that there is hardly anything left of me but my voice, and my bed makes me think of the melodious grave of the enchanter Merlin, which is in the forest of Broceliand in Brittany, under high oaks whose tops s.h.i.+ne like green flames to heaven. Oh, I envy thee those trees, brother Merlin, and their fresh waving. For over my mattress grave here in Paris no green leaves rustle, and early and late I hear nothing but the rattle of carriages, hammering, scolding, and the jingle of pianos. A grave without rest, death without the privileges of the departed, who have no longer any need to spend money, or to write letters, or to compose books...."

And then she thought of that ghastly comparison of himself to the ancient German singer--the poor clerk of the Chronicle of Limburg--whose sweet songs were sung and whistled from morning to night all through Germany; while the _Minnesinger_ himself, smitten with leprosy, hooded and cloaked, and carrying the lazarus-clapper, moved through the shuddering city. G.o.d's satire weighed heavily upon him, indeed. Silently she held out her hand, and he gave her his bloodless fingers; she touched the strangely satin skin, and felt the fever beneath.

"It cannot be my little Lucy," he said reproachfully. "She used to kiss me. But even Lucy's kiss cannot thrill my paralyzed lips."

She stooped and kissed his lips. His little beard felt soft and weak as the hair of a baby.

"Ah, I have made my peace with the world and with G.o.d. Now He sends me His death-angel."

She struggled with the lump in her throat. "You must be indeed a prey to illusions, if you mistake an Englishwoman for Azrael."

"_Ach_, why was I so bitter against England? I was only once in England, years ago. I knew n.o.body, and London seemed so full of fog and Englishmen. Now England has avenged herself beautifully. She sends me you. Others too mount the hundred and five steps. I am an annexe to the Paris Exhibition. Remains of Heinrich Heine. A very pilgrimage of the royal _demi-monde_! A Russian princess brings the hateful odor of her pipe," he said with scornful satisfaction, "an Italian princess babbles of _her_ aches and pains, as if in compet.i.tion with mine. But the gold medal would fall to _my_ nerves, I am convinced, if they were on view at the Exhibition. No, no, don't cry; I meant you to laugh.

Don't think of me as you see me now; pretend to me I am as you first knew me. But how fine and beautiful _you_ have grown; even to my fraction of an eye, which sees the sunlight as through black gauze.

Fancy little Lucy has a husband; a husband--and the poodle still takes three baths a day. Are you happy, darling? are you happy?"

She nodded. It seemed a sacrilege to claim happiness.

"_Das ist schon!_ Yes, you were always so merry. G.o.d be thanked! How refres.h.i.+ng to find one woman with a heart, and that her husband's.

Here the women have a metronome under their corsets, which beats time, but not music. _Himmel!_ What a whiff of my youth you bring me! Does the sea still roll green at the end of Boulogue pier, and do the sea-gulls fly? while I lie here, a Parisian Prometheus, chained to my bed-post. Ah, had I only the bliss of a rock with the sky above me!

But I must not complain; for six years before I moved here I had nothing but a ceiling to defy. Now my balcony gives sideways on the Champs-Elysees, and sometimes I dare to lie outside on a sofa and peer at beautiful, beautiful Paris, as she sends up her soul in sparkling fountains, and incarnates herself in pretty women, who trip along like dance music. Look!"

To please him she went to a window and saw, upon the narrow iron-grilled balcony, a tent of striped chintz, like the awning of a cafe, supported by a light iron framework. Her eyes were blurred by unshed tears, and she divined rather than saw the far-stretching Avenue, palpitating with the fevered life of the Great Exhibition year; the intoxicating sunlight, the horse-chestnut trees dappling with shade the leafy footways, the white fountain-spray and flaming flower-beds of the Rond Point, the flas.h.i.+ng flickering stream of carriages flowing to the Bois with their freight of beauty and wealth and insolent vice.

"The first time I looked out of that window," he said, "I seemed to myself like Dante at the end of the Divine Comedy, when once again he beheld the stars. You cannot know what I felt when after so many years I saw the world again for the first time, with half an eye, for ever so little a s.p.a.ce. I had my wife's opera-gla.s.s in my hand, and I saw with inexpressible pleasure a young vagrant vendor of pastry offering his goods to two ladies in crinolines, with a small dog. I closed the gla.s.s; I could see no more, for I envied the dog. The nurse carried me back to bed and gave me morphia. That day I looked no more. For me the Divine Comedy was far from ended. The divine humorist has even descended to a pun. Talk of Mahomet's coffin. I lie between the two Champs-Elysees, the one where warm life palpitates, and that other, where the pale ghosts flit."

Then it was not a momentary fantasy of the pen, but an abiding mood that had paid blasphemous homage to the "Aristophanes of Heaven."

Indeed, had it not always run through his work, this conception of humor in the grotesqueries of history, "the dream of an intoxicated divinity"? But his amus.e.m.e.nt thereat had been genial. "Like a mad harlequin," he had written of Byron, the man to whom he felt himself most related, "he strikes a dagger into his own heart, to sprinkle mockingly with the jetting black blood the ladies and gentlemen around.... My blood is not so splenetically black; my bitterness comes only from the gall-apples of my ink." But now, she thought, that bitter draught always at his lips had worked into his blood at last.

"Are you quite incurable?" she said gently, as she returned from the window to seat herself at his mattress graveside.

"No, I shall die some day. Gruby says very soon. But doctors are so inconsistent. Last week, after I had had a frightful attack of cramp in the throat and chest, '_Pouvez-vous siffler?_' he said. '_Non, pas meme une comedie de M. Scribe_,' I replied. So you may see how bad I was. Well, even that, he said, wouldn't hasten the end, and I should go on living indefinitely! I had to caution him not to tell my wife.

Poor Mathilde! I have been unconscionably long a-dying. And now he turns round again and bids me order my coffin. But I fear, despite his latest bulletin, I shall go on some time yet increasing my knowledge of spinal disease. I read all the books about it, as well as experiment practically. What clinical lectures I will give in heaven, demonstrating the ignorance of doctors!"

She was glad to note the more genial _nuance_ of mockery. Raillery vibrated almost in the very tones of his voice, which had become clear and penetrating under the stimulus of her presence, but it pa.s.sed away in tenderness, and the sarcastic wrinkles vanished from the corners of his mouth as he made the pathetic jest anent his wife.

"So you read as well as write," she said.

"Oh, well, De Zichlinsky, a nice young refugee, does both for me most times. My mother, poor old soul, wrote the other day to know why I only signed my letters, so I had to say my eyes pained me, which was not so untrue as the rest of the letter."

"Doesn't she know?"

"Know? G.o.d bless her, of course not. Dear old lady, dreaming so happily at the Dammthor, too old and wise to read newspapers. No, she does not know that she has a dying son, only that she has an undying!

_Nicht Wahr?_"

He looked at her with a shade of anxiety; that tragic anxiety of the veteran artist scenting from afar the sneers of the new critics at his life-work, and morbidly conscious of his hosts of enemies.

"As long as the German tongue lives."

"Dear old Germany," he said, pleased. "Yes, as I wrote to you, for _you_ are the _liebe Kleine_ of the poem,

'Nennt man die besten Namen, So wird auch der meine genannt.'"

She was flattered, but thought sadly of the sequel:

"'Nennt man die schlimmsten Schmerzen, So wird auch der meine genannt'"

as he went on:--

"That was why, though the German censors.h.i.+p forbade or mutilated my every book, which was like sticking pins into my soul, I would not become naturalized here. Paris has been my new Jerusalem, and I crossed my Jordan at the Rhine; but as a French subject I should be like those two-headed monstrosities they show at the fairs. Besides, I hate French poetry. What measured glitter! Not that German poetry has ever been to me more than a divine plaything. A laurel-wreath on my grave, place or withhold, I care not; but lay on my coffin a sword, for I was as brave a soldier as your Canning in the Liberation War of Humanity. But my Thirty Years' War is over, and I die 'with sword unbroken, and a broken heart.'" His head fell back in ineffable hopelessness. "Ah," he murmured, "it was ever my prayer, 'Lord, let me grow old in body, but let my soul stay young; let my voice quaver and falter, but never my hope.' And this is how I end."

"But your work does not end. Your fight was not vain. You are the inspirer of young Germany. And you are praised and wors.h.i.+pped by all the world. Is that no pleasure?"

"No, I am not _le bon Dieu_!" He chuckled, his spirits revived by the blasphemous _mot_." Ah, what a fate! To have the homage only of the fools, a sort of celestial Victor Cousin. One compliment from Hegel now must be sweeter than a churchful of psalms." A fearful fit of coughing interrupted further elaboration of the blasphemous fantasia.

For five minutes it rent and shook him, the nurse bending fruitlessly over him; but at its wildest he signed to his visitor not to go, and when at last it lulled he went on calmly: "Donizetti ended mad in a gala dress, but I end at least sane enough to appreciate the joke--a little long-drawn out, and not entirely original, yet replete with ingenious irony. Little Lucy looks shocked, but I sometimes think, little Lucy, the disrespect is with the goody-goody folks, who, while lauding their Deity's strength and hymning His goodness, show no recognition at all of His humor. Yet I am praised as a wit as well as a poet. If I could take up my bed and walk, I would preach a new wors.h.i.+p--the wors.h.i.+p of the Arch-Humorist. I should draw up the Ritual of the Ridiculous. Three times a day, when the _muezzin_ called from the Bourse-top, all the faithful would laugh devoutly at the gigantic joke of the cosmos. How sublime, the universal laugh! at sunrise, noon, and sunset; those who did not laugh would be persecuted; they would laugh, if only on the wrong side of the mouth. Delightful! As most people have no sense of humor, they will swallow the school catechism of the comic as stolidly as they now swallow the spiritual.

Yes, I see you will _not_ laugh. But why may I not endow my Deity--as everybody else does--with the quality which I possess or admire most?"

She felt some truth in his apology. He was mocking, not G.o.d, but the magnified man of the popular creeds; to him it was a mere intellectual counter with which his wit played, oblivious of the sacred _aura_ that clung round the concept for the bulk of the world. Even his famous picture of Jehovah dying, or his suggestion that perhaps _dieser Parvenu des Himmels_ was angry with Israel for reminding Him of his former obscure national relations--what was it but a lively rendering of what German savants said so unreadably about the evolution of the G.o.d-Idea? But she felt also it would have been finer to bear unsmiling the smileless destinies; not to affront with the tinkle of vain laughter the vast imperturbable. She answered gently, "You are talking nonsense."

"I always talked nonsense to you, little Lucy, for

'My heart is wise and witty And it bleeds within my breast.'

Will you hear its melodious drip-drip, my last poem?--My ma.n.u.script, Catherine; and then you can go take a nap. I am sure I gave you little rest last night."