Boris Lensky Part 39

"Still, he should begin," says Madame Spatzig.

"He has surely not become ill?" meanwhile, a few seats away, whispers Mascha to her brother. "Suppose you go and see."

Then Lensky steps on the stage. His face is flushed, he stumbles over a chair, collects himself, and bows. Spatzig looks at him attentively.

"H-m! He is nervous as a conservatorist," murmurs he.

He takes up his violin. His programme begins with Beethoven's C minor sonata dedicated to Emperor Alexander.

How wonderfully he played it formerly, with what n.o.ble comprehension of the magnificent earnestness of the composition. Now----

A mocking smile appears ever more plainly on Frau Zingarelli Spatzig's face. The critic whispers to Countess Lowenskiold. "One has seldom heard such poor playing in a public concert," he remarks. One scarcely recognizes the sonata. Quite without taking breath, he springs from one movement to the next. The _scherzo_--formerly it was a masterpiece of grace and poetry. Now--is that really Lensky who chases the bow over the strings with this stumbling, musical insolence?

Mascha's cheeks burn with shame; she looks to the right and left, shyly and anxiously, expecting something terrible. She would like to hold the people's ears, or call to them: "Wait, have patience with him, he will surely come to himself." Before they know it, he has finished the sonata.

A moderate applause accompanies his exit. One shows him the consideration due to a celebrity. Mascha breathes freely, as after a danger pa.s.sed through. All at once the hushed hand-clapping breaks forth afresh, becomes importunate, immoderate, supported by loud cries of "Bravo!" The couple of hundred young Russians present, students, painters, or archaeologists, pay homage, in their uncomprehending, mistaken national enthusiasm, to their great man.

At first the Romans put up with it. Lensky has appeared upon the stage; he bows solemnly, benevolently. He does not know that he has played badly, and is pleased at the enthusiasm.

Spatzig still whispers to the Countess Lowenskiold and holds his sides with laughter. The Russians are wild. It is too bad; Madame Spatzig makes a little attempt--only from petulance--behind her fan, so that no one perceives it; she begins to hiss. Then around her through the whole room, louder and louder, resounds the cutting, scornful sound, louder, ever louder.

Lensky stands as if rooted to the ground; then, mechanically raising his hands, he makes the old, proud gesture with which he used to repel too violent applause. But the hissing increases, loud insults are mingled therewith. The horrid noise with which an Italian audience expresses its displeasure and scorn resounds through the sober, cold hall.

Then Perfection springs up. "Silenzio!" he thunders to the excited public--and all is hushed.

Lensky has withdrawn from the stage. A strange feeling prevails. One feels that something terrible has happened. A brilliant fame has been wiped out. A great man has been insulted.

Several people leave the hall. The entertainment is over, why wait? It is not possible that the concert should proceed. Mascha and Nikolai rise to go to him; then a murmur goes through the ranks, some one is coming; one expects a manager, any one, who will announce to the audience that Lensky is ill. Or is the pianist to play his number? No; it is Lensky himself who comes on the stage. He holds himself stiffly, looks neither to the right nor the left; no hand moves to greet him.

They really do not understand what he wishes, but they remain seated.

They look at him with attention, respect, and remorse. How miserable he looks, and how n.o.ble and magnificent! His eyes s.h.i.+ne with a supernatural light from his face, which is pale and sunken like that of a corpse.

Already after the first stroke of the bow a touched consideration spreads through the hall. What is he playing? n.o.body knows, but no one remains unmoved who hears him, and no one will forget these tones--a melody which no one knows, and which carries all away with it, sublime, wonderful, compa.s.sionate, and elevating. It is the great word in art which he has sought in vain during his whole life, and which he has found at last, now--no one has yet ever heard the violin played thus.

Every thought of strings and bow vanishes. It is an angel's voice which sings. A shudder creeps over those who listen, a kind of sacred terror, as if something supernatural, spiritual, drew near. Then--all at once he stops. Has a string snapped?

The hand with the bow has sunk down; he bends his head forward--listens. To what does he listen?

His face takes on a glorified, ecstatic expression. He gives a short cry, then stretching out both arms, he falls to the floor. He had grown young again, the dead had arisen for him. He no longer felt the weight of his body, the great soul was set free.

He had indeed known that something wonderful must come in Rome.

They brought him to the hotel, the physician came--two physicians. One did what one could. All attempts at reanimation were in vain. The doctors p.r.o.nounced it heart failure. At two o'clock in the morning the two children of the deceased remained alone with the corpse.

XL.

On the third day after his death the burial took place, with great pomp and an immense crowd.

Only when one misses a dead man can one fully recognize his greatness, and to the artist world which a.s.sembled round Lensky's coffin in Rome it grew plain that they had buried a giant. At first the Russians would not consent that the body of their great man, who had so unspeakably loved his fatherland, should be confided to strange earth, but his children knew that he had wished to be buried near his wife in the strangers' cemetery at the foot of the Aventine, and they respected his last wishes.

Mascha's inner self was wholly shattered. Not only her husband, but also her mother-in-law, had come from Venice to be present at the funeral solemnities, to support, to console the broken young woman. She repelled every consolation.

In spite of her great physical exhaustion, she would not be prevented from accompanying the corpse to the edge of the grave. They were afraid that she would swoon when the body was lowered into the grave, but she stood up erect.

When the mourners returned from the burial to the hotel, the table was laid for them in the drawing-room. Sonia, who had been present in these sad times, and like a warm, mild sunbeam had a.s.sisted benevolently and un.o.btrusively, stood near the samovar. With loathing, Mascha turned away, and hurried to her room, where she shut herself in. She who had borne so much sadness and trouble without complaining, this time knew no bounds to her grief. Barenburg, Nikolai, her mother-in-law--one after the other knocked at her door to say something loving to her, to console her. She admitted no one.

Stiff and erect, she sat there in the first chair she could find, deathly pale and tearless.

"Console!" said she to herself, bitterly. "Whom will they console?"

They, none of whom understand what she has buried with the great, stormy heart that rests at the foot of the Aventine. She has lost the only person who fully understood her, whom she could wholly confide in.

The man who has petted and indulged her, and cared for her like a little child who has hurt itself--had wrapped her warmly and securely in his protecting tenderness when the rest of the world turned from her. It seemed to her that life has paused around her. All is hard and cold.

Her husband at last won admittance to her. His flat words of consolation, his attempts to calm her with caresses, excited her almost to madness. She, who had formerly always tolerated him near her with the same even friendliness, repulsed him, no longer mistress of herself, this time with a furious roughness at which a deeper-thinking man would have been frightened. But he explained this violence by overstrained nerves, and withdrew with a last mild, kind word on his lips.

When the door had closed behind him, an indescribably painful feeling overpowered her. Never before had she felt his triteness so plainly as in this moment when her agony tore down, with its tyrannical ruthlessness, all her carefully piled-up deceptions. For the first time she realized the whole irremediable flatness and dryness in which her future must drag on--her future with this man who was a stranger to all her deeper thoughts and feelings.

Her last prop had fallen with her father. For love of him she had at least tried to appear happy; but now, for what purpose--why? She could no longer bear her existence. It was impossible to live longer.

Then she heard the steps of insecure little feet approaching her door; then the soft knocking of two tiny little fists, which wounded themselves on the hard wood; an indistinguishable tender word lisped by soft child's lips.

She started up and opened the door. Without stood Natascha and her nurse. The nurse drew back. The child stared at her mother, whose pale face and long mourning dress seemed strange to her; then she nestled in her dress and began to stroke and caress the black folds violently. The young wife raised the child in her arms. Natascha did not cease to embrace and kiss her mother with the touching, helpless tenderness of a little being in whom love has awakened before intellect, who suspects a pain which it does not yet understand, and would fain console before it can yet speak.

For the first time Mascha's pain dissolved in tears. Sobbing, she pressed the little girl to her breast. "Bear your cross patiently," she murmured, thinking of the words with which her father in that fearful night in Venice had calmed her heart, rebelling against its oppressive lot. "Bear your cross!"

She kissed the child again and again, and the grief for the dead met in her heart the love for this sweet young life.

And Nikolai?

He bore the great loss calmly, so calmly that Mascha, who suspected nothing of his feelings and who was without the key to them, ascribed utter indifference to him.

Really, his father had died to him before. He had lost him on that hot June day in Paris. He had only buried him in Rome.

While he watched by the coffin through the two mild spring nights, he had sought his pain and could not find it.

But now, after the restlessness which is always bound up with the last solemnities is over, after the dead one has been carried away, and he can fully measure the great chasm which the death of his father has rent in his existence, a sadness increasing with every hour overwhelms him. Weary from watching as he was, he nevertheless did not close his eyes in the night which followed the burial. His thoughts were constantly occupied with the dead as with a great riddle.

He saw the strange, great man before him in all his phases. He saw him as a young man, with his proud bearing, his dark, attractive, expressive face, his quick, energetic earnestness full of fire, and that irresistible gentleness and tenderness of very violent men, who are continually afraid of paining their loved ones by a rough word, a thoughtless wildness. He saw the change which slowly took place in the attractive face, and how it grew coa.r.s.er, and still something of the old charm remained--yes, with advancing years became more evident--a charm which summarized an expression of unspeakably sad kindness.

There was something fairly startling about this kindness, this rich, unwearying compa.s.sion. It was as if destiny had punished him for all that he had done in his wild violence of life, by condemning him to forever bear about with him this great, warm, restless, sympathetic heart.

Nikolai would have so willingly grieved for his father from his whole heart, and thought of only the great and n.o.ble in him. He could not.

The old, hateful story still tormented him, tormented him so much the more as he reproached himself with thinking of it now, and it seemed to him small and repulsive in every respect to remember any fault of his father after his death.