Asbein Part 11

The greatest heroes like to avail themselves of a little celestial protection before a battle.

In the opera-house he found everything in the best condition, courageous, ready for battle. An hour later he mounted the director's rostrum.

Once he turned his head to the audience, and his eyes sought Natalie.

There she sat near the stage in a box in the first row, which she shared with the Countess Stolnitzky. She wore a black velvet dress, in her hair sparkled the diamond narcissi which he had given her as bridegroom; around her neck was wound a thick string of pearls which the Empress of Russia had sent him for her once when he played at court. In the whole theatre there was no woman who could compare with her in proud, beaming, and yet indescribably lovely beauty. She smiled at him constrainedly. What was not hidden in that scarcely perceptible smile! For the last time a kind of happy, proud delirium of love lay hold upon him. He knocked on the desk, raised his arm, and the violins began.

With a kind of magnificent, fiery earnestness, and with that, quite cla.s.sically severe in the musical roundness and connection of the motives, the overture sounded through the crowded hall. It was rather too long, and as the learned ones among the audience remarked, was better suited for the first movement of a symphony than the introduction of an opera. But what of that! the music was beautiful, wonderfully beautiful, full of sad sweetness and quite demon-like, ravis.h.i.+ng power. Here, also, sounded the strange Arabian succession of tones again, which was the characteristic of all his compositions, the devil's tones: Asbein.

Natalie did not hear a sound, the buzzing in her ears, the beating of her heart was too loud.

The last piercing chord resounded through the hall. What was that? An immense burst of applause, unending bravos; the overture had to be repeated.

It was with difficulty that Natalie could keep from sobbing aloud.

Again her smile sought his. A beautiful expression of n.o.ble, earnest peace was on his features, but his glance did not answer hers, he had forgotten her for his work.

The curtain rose. Natalie scarcely breathed, her hot blood crept slowly through her veins like chilling metal, her ears no longer buzzed, on the contrary her hearing was uncommonly sharp; only she could not take in the music, but listened to all kinds of other things. The rustling of a dress, the rattling of a fan, the whispering of a voice caused her such excitement that it seemed to her, each time, as if she had been shot through the heart by a pistol. The unexpected result of the overture had increased her nervous tension still further.

During the first two acts the opinion remained favorable. After the second act, the Russian amba.s.sador presented himself to Natalie to congratulate her.

While she received his congratulations, still trembling with excitement, she suddenly heard quite loud talking, in a box not far from her.

It was the box of that same Princess C., who was mentioned as particularly musical, and who had invited Lensky to a _soire_ and pa.s.sed over Natalie. Between her and another art-loving woman sat Mr.

Arnold Spatzig. Up to a certain point, he had access to the highest circles of society, that is to say, he was patronized by a couple of ladies who were bored in their "world," and who consequently liked to attract men from some "other world" to them for a short entertainment, not a long engagement, to be amused by them.

"These plebeian men at least take pains to amuse," the ladies were accustomed to remark, and Arnold Spatzig decidedly took pains to amuse.

Once he raised his opera-gla.s.s to his eyes, and stared long and boldly in Natalie's face.

The third act began with an aria by Gualnare, that is to say, with a kind of duet between her and the ocean, which was represented by the orchestra. For a concert piece the number was interesting and original, but peculiarly unsuited to the beginning of the third act of an opera.

Only the splendid vocal powers and the poetic comprehension of Madame D., for whom the aria was written, could have saved it; the powers of the beginner who sang the part of Gualnare that evening were not at all equal to her task, her voice, wearied by the exertions of the two preceding acts, sounded almost extinct, her acting was awkward.

Natalie observed the bad impression which this number made on the audience. Anxiously she looked around the theatre: the people were patient, had too much sympathy for the virtuoso Lensky to inconsiderately insult the composer.

On the stage, still continued the endless ocean duet. Still, in the same monotonous time, Gualnare advanced to the waves and retreated from them, quite as if she were dancing a _pas de deux_ with the sea. Then Natalie heard laughing; the laughing sounded from the box of Princess C.

Dr. Spatzig bent over to her, smiling, whispered something to her. She laughed--how heartily she laughed! The opera-gla.s.ses of many ladies in the boxes sought the Doctor's critical glance; Spatzig laughed, the Princess laughed, the whole theatre laughed.

The aria was at an end, the gallery applauded. "Ss--ss--ss." What was that cutting, piercing sound which killed the applause?

Natalie became white as chalk; her friend sought her hand; Natalie drew it away; no human sympathy could be of use to her.

From that moment the enthusiasm of the audience rapidly declined. The lack of dramatic action in the libretto became more and more significant. More and more difficultly the poor music dragged along amidst a succession of glaring spectacular effects, which monotonously made place for each other without ever forming an interesting contrast.

And the music was so beautiful. There was something so heavily majestic in the rhythm, here and there at once a trifle monotonous and over-laden, but in the accompaniment so wonderfully beautiful in spite of all, and furnished with a richness of melody unattainable by any of the other composers of the time, never approaching the trivial, but always remaining n.o.ble.

The audience was weary, and like every wearied audience, mocking; its musical comprehension was worn out. From the middle of the fourth act people began to leave the theatre, and when the curtain fell at the close, not a hand moved.

Countess Stolnitzky accompanied Natalie silently down the steps.

Natalie got into her carriage and directed it to the stage entrance.

She had promised to call for Lensky after the opera. More dead than alive she sat in the pretty coup and waited. The air was sharp, it was a frosty March night, the stars sparkled as if in cold mockery from the unreachable heavens, quite as if they were laughing to think that once more a child of man had tried to storm this heaven and had so pitiably failed.

A half-hour had pa.s.sed; at last Natalie sprang from the carriage and hastened up the narrow stairs. There she met Lensky. He was deathly pale, his hat was put on his head differently from usual, in a kind of enterprising and challenging manner; his walk had something negligent, swinging; there was a vagabond trace in his carriage that Natalie had never before perceived in him. He held his cigarette between his teeth and had the little singer on his arm who had to-day impersonated Gualnare in his opera. Many of the singers, as well as the members of the orchestra, came down the steps behind him, a gaudy, witty, whispering throng. For the first time, Natalie remarked a certain similarity, one might almost say a common family resemblance, between her hero and these other "artists." The men all had the same manner of wearing their hats and swaggering in their walk as he had to-day.

Although these men were more than ever repulsive to her, she greeted them with anxious politeness. "I was afraid you were ill," she said, while she glanced sadly and anxiously at Boris. "I have already waited half an hour for you."

"So! I am very sorry," replied he, and his voice sounded rougher than formerly. "I sent a messenger to you, he must have missed you. I cannot go home with you this evening, we"--he looked over his shoulder at the following crowd--"are going to have supper together. After a lost battle the commander must care for the strengthening of his troops." He laughed harshly and forcedly, and touched the hand of the singer who hung on his arm.

"A lost battle!" said Natalie. "Lost--but the first two acts were a great success!"

"'Don Juan' did not succeed at the first representation," remarked some one behind Lensky. He turned around and looked at the man with a comical, threatening gesture; then he said, with the expression of a man with a bad toothache, who yet bursts out with a witticism: "Who laughs last, laughs best!"

Natalie still stood, helpless and desperate, in the middle of the narrow stairs. Her splendid fur cloak had half slipped down from her shoulders; her simple, distinguished toilet stood out in strange relief from the glaring, tumbled, inharmonious, motley evening adornments of the singers.

"You will take cold, wrap yourself up better," said Lensky, while he came up to her and drew the fur up around her neck.

"Will you take me with you to your supper? I would come with the greatest pleasure; _je serai gentille avec tout le monde!_" she whispered, softly and supplicatingly to him.

"What an idea!" said he, repellently. "No, to-night I sup as a bachelor. You bar the pa.s.sage. Drive home quite calmly. Adieu!"

He pushed her into the carriage, and went. She put her head out of the window of the coup to look after him. She saw how he got into a fiacre with the singer; one of the men crawled in after him; then she heard some one laughing, harshly, gipsy-like, was that he? Then came a great rattling of windows, and creaking and rolling of wheels. Her way and his parted. Hurrying by a row of ghostly gas-lights, which all seemed red to her, she rolled away in a great, cold, black darkness. And ten minutes later, weary and miserable, she crept up the steps of her residence. She knew that something terrible had happened, something that not only embittered her present, but would darken the future, that for her much more had gone wrong than the result of an opera.

"Who knows, perhaps the thing will pull through; even the best operas have sometimes not immediately found approval with the public," said Lensky, with the awkward, forced smile that had not left his lips since the morning after his fiasco. The challenging, gipsy humor with which, in the beginning, he had sought to bl.u.s.ter over his disappointment, had not lasted long. Quiet, weary, and depressed, he dragged himself around as if after a severe illness. Natalie did what she could to be agreeable to him; her heart bled with pity, but she did not venture to approach him.

He avoided her, and if she spoke to him his answers sounded forced or vexed.

To-day, for the first time since the fatal evening, he turned to her with a remark in reference to his work. It was the third day after the first production of the opera, and at breakfast. Natalie had just read to him many criticisms from the newspapers which had arrived. In many, Lensky's magnificent musical gifts were praised.

"Perhaps the thing will pull through," said Lensky, and Natalie replied:

"Naturally, the opera will make a career for itself. You must yourself have forgotten how beautiful your music is, if you can doubt that."

"Is it really beautiful? I really do not know," murmured he. "One is so seldom able to believe it if others shrug their shoulders. To improvise variations on the old theme _mon sonnet est charmant_ is a tasteless occupation."

There was a ring at the door-bell; he listened.

"Do you expect anything?" asked Natalie, and then she accidentally looked at the clock. It was already very late, and the hour at which he formerly had been accustomed to sit down to work was long past. She saw very well that he only trifled with time like a man who is too tormented by inward unrest to be able to resolve on an earnest occupation.

"Yes," he replied. "I do not understand why the _Neue Zeit_ has not yet arrived."

Natalie lowered her eyes. The _Neue Zeit_ was the journal in which Dr.

Arnold Spatzig's musical criticism, or rather his musical _feuilletons_, usually appeared.

"That"--Lensky motioned to the pile of other papers "is all very pretty and pleasant, but it is not decisive. I am anxious to see what Spatzig will say."

"Do you consider Spatzig decisive?" asked Natalie, constrainedly.

"Yes."