Visionaries Part 24

"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 cla.s.ses 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 G.o.d, man, are you joking?" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed 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 preelected 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 Moa 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 G.o.d, 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d," 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 d.a.m.nable old Bonze died in the odour of sanct.i.ty 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 pa.s.s 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 j.a.panese. The Chinese were too sage. They allowed the Christians to exterminate the j.a.panese; 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 G.o.d, a new religion. At last they, too, had succ.u.mbed 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 att.i.tude 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 bra.s.s. 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 mult.i.tudes awakened from their long sleep that _He_, not other G.o.ds, was the true, the only G.o.d. 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 s.h.i.+ning face of Him, the Son of Man! Where our Buddha? Alas! the last Pope spake truth.

I, Moa the Bonze, tell you this ere it be too late to repent your sins and forswear your false G.o.ds. 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 princ.i.p.ally serves as a good starting-point for trips to many of the charming lakes with which Styria is dotted. After asking his way, Davos pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sured 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 leaf.a.ge; then the path debouched into the open and, skirting closely the rocky wall, it widened into an island of green where a shady paG.o.da 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 fas.h.i.+onable 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 debut, 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 G.o.ddess 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 a.s.sailed 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 a.s.sured 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 cus.h.i.+ons 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 pa.s.sionately 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 ravis.h.i.+ng 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, Sh.e.l.ley, and Heine battling within the walls of a frail tender soul.

The sound of footsteps and voices aroused him. He s.h.i.+vered 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 j.a.panese 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sion 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! n.o.ble! 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 sh.o.r.es, 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 a.s.signed 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 ma.s.s, the spire alone showing in the violet twilight, like some supernatural spar on a s.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sages 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--G.o.ds, what a touch, what gossamer delicacy!--set his heart throbbing. He forgot his sick nerves. When the trumpet blows, the war-horse l.u.s.ts 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 cas.e.m.e.nt 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."