Maurice Guest Part 5

"It's hardly a thing to joke about."

"Joke!--who is joking?" she asked, and raised her eyebrows so high that her forehead was filled with wrinkles. "Nothing was further from my thoughts."

Maurice hesitated, and stood undecided, holding the doorhandle. Then, following an impulse, he turned and sat down again. "Madeleine, tell me--I wouldn't ask anyone but you--what sort of a fellow IS this Schilsky?"

"What sort of a fellow?" She laughed sarcastically. "To be quite truthful, Maurice, the best fiddler the Con. has turned out for years."

"Now you're joking again. As if I didn't know that. Everyone says the same."

"You want his moral character? Well, I'll be equally candid. Or, at least, I'll give you my opinion of him. It's another superlative. Just as I consider him the best violinist, I also hold him to be the greatest scamp in the place--and I've no objection to use a stronger word if you like. I wouldn't take his hand, no, not if he offered it to me. The last time he was in this room, about six months ago, he--well, let us say he borrowed, without a word to me, five or six marks that were lying loose on the writing-table. Yes, it's a fact," she repeated, complacently eyeing Maurice's dismay. "Otherwise?--oh, otherwise, he was born, I think, with a silver spoon in his mouth. He has one piece of luck after another. Zeppelin discovered him ten years ago, on a concert-tour--his father is a smith in Warsaw--and brought him to Leipzig. He was a prodigy, then, and a rich Jewish banker took him up, and paid for his education; and when he washed his hands of him in disgust, Schaefele's wife--Schaefele is head of the HANDELVEREIN, you know--adopted him as a son--some people say as more than a son, for, though she was nearly forty, she was perfectly crazy over him, and behaved as foolishly as any of the dozens of silly girls who have lost their hearts to him."

"I suppose they are engaged," said Maurice after a pause, speaking out of his own thoughts.

"Do you?" she asked with mild humour. "I really never asked them.--But this is just another example of his good fortune. When he has worn out every one else's patience, through his dishonest extravagance, he picks up a rich wife, who is not averse to supporting him before marriage."

Maurice looked at her reproachfully. "I wonder you care to repeat such gossip."

"It's not gossip, Maurice. Every one knows it. Louise makes no mystery of her doings--doesn't care that much what people say. While as for him--well, it's enough to know it's Schilsky. The thing is an open secret. Listen, now, and I'll tell you how it began--just to let you judge for yourself what kind of a girl you have to deal with in Louise, and how Schilsky behaves when he wants a thing, and whether such a pair think a formal engagement necessary to their happiness. When Louise came here, a year and a half ago, Schilsky was away somewhere with Zeppelin, and didn't get back till a couple of months afterwards. As I said, I knew Louise pretty well at that time; she had got herself into trouble with--but that's neither here nor there. Well, my lord returns--he himself tells how it happened. It was a Thursday evening, and a Radius Commemoration was going on at the Con. He went in late, and stood at the back of the hall. Louise was there, too, just before him, and, from the first minute he saw her, he couldn't take his eyes off her--others who were by say, too, he seemed perfectly fascinated.

No one can stare as rudely as Schilsky, and he ended by making her so uncomfortable that she couldn't bear it any longer, and went out of the hall. He after her, and it didn't take him an hour to find out all about her. The next evening, at an ABEND, they were both there again it was just like Louise to go!--and the same thing was repeated. She left again before it was over, he followed, and this time found her in one of the side corridors; and there--mind you, without a single word having pa.s.sed between them!--he took her in his arms and kissed her, kissed her soundly, half a dozen times--though they had never once spoken to each other: he boasts of it to this day. That same evening----"

"Don't, Madeleine--please, don't say any more! I don't care to hear it," broke in Maurice. He had flushed to the roots of his hair, at some points of resemblance to his own case, then grown pale again, and now he waved his arm meaninglessly in the air. "He is a scoundrel, a--a----" But he recognised that he could not condemn one without the other, and stopped short.

"My dear boy, if I don't tell you, other people will. And at least you know I mean well by you. Besides," she went on, not without a touch of malice as she eyed him sitting there, spoiling the leaves of a book.

"Besides, I may as well show you, how you have to treat Louise, if you want to make an impression on her. You call him a scoundrel, but what of her? Believe me, Maurice," she said more seriously, "Louise is not a whit too good for him; they were made for each other. And of course he will marry her eventually, for the sake of her, money "--here she paused and looked deliberately at him--"if not for her own."

This time there was no mistaking the meaning of her words.

"Madeleine!"

He rose from his seat with such force that the table tilted.

But Madeleine did not falter. "I told you already, you know, that Louise doesn't care what is said about her. As soon as this unfortunate affair began, she threw up the rooms she was in at the time, and moved nearer the TALSTRa.s.sE--where he lives. Rumour has it also that she provided herself with an accommodating landlady, who can be blind and deaf when necessary."

"How CAN you repeat such atrocious scandal?"

He stared at her, in incredulous dismay. Her words were so many arrows, the points of which remained sticking in him.

She shrugged her shoulders. "Your not believing it doesn't affect the truth of the story, Maurice. It was the talk of the place when it happened. And you may despise rumour as you will, my experience is, a report never springs up that hasn't some basis of fact to go on--however small."

He choked back, with an effort, the eloquent words that came to his lips; of what use was it to make himself still more ridiculous in her eyes? His hat had fallen to the floor; he picked it up, and brushed it on his sleeve, without knowing what he did. "Oh, well, of course, if you think that," he said as coolly as he was able, "nothing I could say would make any difference. Every one is free to his opinions, I suppose. But, all the same, I must say, Madeleine"--he grew hot in spite of himself. "You have been her friend, you say; you have known her intimately; and yet just because she ... she cares for this fellow in such a way that she sets caring for him above being cautious--why, not one woman in a thousand would have the courage for that sort of thing! It needs courage, not to mind what people--no, what your friends imagine, and how falsely they interpret what you do. Besides, one has only to look at her to see how absurd it is. That face and--I don't know her, Madeleine; I've never spoken to her, and never may, yet I am absolutely certain that what is said about her isn't true. So certain that--But after all, if this is what you think about ... about it, then all I have to say is, we had better not discuss the subject again. It does no good, and we should never be of the same opinion."

Not without embarra.s.sment, now that he had said his say, he turned to the door. But Madeleine was not in the least angry. She gave him her hand, and said, with a smile, yet gravely, too: "Agreed, Maurice! We will not speak of Louise again."

V.

He shunned Madeleine for days after this. He was morose and unhappy, and brooded darkly over the baseness of wagging tongues. For the first time in his life he had come into touch with slander, that invisible Hydra, and straightway it seized upon the one person to whom he was not indifferent. In this mood it was a relief to him that certain three windows in the BRUDERSTRa.s.sE remained closed and shuttered; with the load of malicious gossip fresh on his mind, he chose rather not to see her; he must first accustom himself to it, as to the scar left by a wound.

He did not, of course, believe what Madeleine, with her infernal frankness, had told him; but the knowledge that such a report was abroad, depressed him unspeakably: it took colour from the sky and light from the sun. Sometimes in these days, as he sat at his piano, he had a sudden fit of discouragement, which made it seem not worth while to continue playing. It was unthinkable that she could be aware how busy scandal was with her name, and how her careless acts were spied on and misrepresented; and he turned over in his mind ways and means by which she might be induced to take more thought for herself in future.

He did not believe it; but hours of distracting uncertainty came, none the less, when small things which his memory had stored up made him go so far as to ask himself, what if it should be true?--what then? But he had not courage enough to face an answer; he put the possibility away from him, in the extreme background of his mind, refused to let his brain piece its observations together. The mere suspicion was a blasphemy, a blasphemy against her dignified reserve, against her sweet pale face, her supreme disregard of those about her. Not thus would guilt have shown itself.

Schilsky, who was the origin of all the evil, he made wide circuits to avoid. He thought of him, at this time, with what he believed to be a feeling of purely personal antipathy. In his most downcast moments, he had swift and foolish visions publicly executing vengeance on him; but if, a moment later, he saw the violinist's red hair or big hat before him in the street, he turned aside as though the other had been plague-struck. Once, however, when he was going up the steps of the Conservatorium, and Schilsky, in leaping down, pushed carelessly against him, he returned the knock so rudely and swore with such downrightness that, in spite of his hurry, Schilsky stopped and fixed him, and with equal vehemence d.a.m.ned him for a fool of an Englishman.

His despondency spread like a weed. A furious impatience overcame him, too, at the thought of the innumerable hours he would be forced to spend at the piano, day in, day out, for months to come, before the result could be compared with the achievements even of many a fellow-student. As the private lessons Schwarz gave were too expensive for him, he decided, as a compromise, to take a course of extra lessons with Furst, who prepared pupils for the master, and was quite willing to come to terms, in other words, who taught for what he could get.

Once a week, then, for the rest of the summer, Maurice climbed the steep, winding stair of the house in the BRANDVORWERKSTRa.s.sE where Furst lived with his mother. It was so dark on this stair that, in dull weather, ill-trimmed lamps burnt all day long on the different landings. To its convolutions, in its unaired corners, clung what seemed to be the stale, acc.u.mulated smells of years; and these were continually reinforced; since every day at dinnertime, the various kitchen-windows, all of which gave on the stair, were opened to let the piercing odours of cooking escape. The house, like the majority of its kind in this relatively new street, was divided into countless small lodgings; three families, with three rooms apiece, lived on each storey, and on the fifth floor, at the top of the house, the same number of rooms was let out singly. Part of the third storey was occupied by a bird-fancier; and between him and the Fursts above waged perpetual war, one of those petty, unending wars that can only arise and be kept up when, as here, such heterogeneous elements are forced to live side by side, under one roof. The fancier, although his business was nominally in the town, had enough of his wares beside him to make his house a lively, humming kind of place, and the strife dated back to a day when, the door standing temptingly ajar, Peter, the Fursts' lean cat, had sneaked stealthily in upon this, to him, enchanted ground, and, according to the fancier, had caused the death, from fright, of a delicate canary, although the culprit had done nothing more than sit before the cage, licking his lips. This had happened several years ago, but each party was still fertile in planning annoyances for the other, and the females did not bow when they met. On the fourth floor, next the Fursts, lived a pale, hara.s.sed teacher, with a family which had long since outgrown its accommodation; for the wife was perpetually in childbed, and cots and cradles were the chief furniture of the house.

As the critical moments of her career drew nigh, the "Frau Lehrer"

complained, with an aggravated bitterness, of the unceasing music that went on behind the thin part.i.tion; and this grievance, together with the racy items of gossip left behind the midwife's annual visit, like a trail of smoke, provided her and Furst's mother with infinite food for talk. They were thick friends again a few minutes after a scene so lively that blows seemed imminent, and they met every morning on the landing, where, with broom or child in hand, they stood gossiping by the hour.

When Maurice rang, Frau Furst opened the door to him herself, having first cautiously examined him through the kitchen window. Drying her hands on her ap.r.o.n, she ushered him through the tiny entry--a place of dangers, pitch-dark as it was, and lumbered with chests and presses--into Franz's room, the "best room" of the house. Here were collected a red plush suite, which was the pride of Frau Furst's heart, and all the round, yellowing family photographs; here, too, stood the well-used Bechstein, pile upon pile of music, a couple of music-stands, a bust of Schubert, a faded, framed diploma. For years, a.s.suredly, the windows had never been thrown wide open; the odours of stale coffee and forgotten dinners, of stove and warmed wood, of piano, music and beeswax: all these lay as it were in streaks in the atmosphere, and made it heavy and thought-benumbing.

A willing listener was worth more than gold to Frau Furst and here, the first time he came, while waiting for Franz, Maurice heard in detail the history of the family. The father had been an oboist in the Gewandhaus orchestra, and had died a few years previously, of a chill incurred after a performance of DIE MEISTERSINGER. At his death, it had fallen on Franz to support the family; and, thanks to Schwarz's aid and influence, Franz was able to get as many pupils as he had time to teach. It was easy to see that this, her eldest son, was the apple of Frau Furst's eye; her other children seemed to be there only to meet his needs; his lightest wish was law. Each additional pupil that sought him out, was a fresh tribute to his genius, each one that left him, no matter after how long, was unthankful and a traitor. For the nights on which his quartet met at the house, she prepared as another woman would for a personal fete; and she watched the candles grow shorter without a tinge of regret. When Franz played at an ABENDUNTERHALTUNG, the family turned out in a body. Schwarz was a G.o.d, all-powerful, on whom their welfare depended; and it was necessary to propitiate him by a quarterly visit on a Sunday morning, when, over wine and biscuits, she wept real and feigned tears of grat.i.tude.

In this hard-working, careworn woman, who was seldom to be seen but in petticoat, bed-jacket, and heelless, felt shoes; who, her whole life long, had been little better than a domestic servant; in her there existed a devotion to art which had never wavered. It would have seemed to her contrary to nature that Franz should be anything but a musician, and it was also quite in the order of things for them to be poor. Two younger boys, who were still at school, gave up all their leisure time to music--they had never in their lives tumbled round a football or swung a bat--and Franz believed that the elder would prove a skilful violinist. Of the little girls, one had a pure voice and a good ear, and was to be a singer--for before this Juggernaut, prejudice went down. Had anyone suggested to Frau Furst that her daughter should be a clerk, even a teacher, she would have flung up hands of horror; but music!--that was a different matter. It was, moreover, the single one of the arts, in which this staunch advocate of womanliness granted her s.e.x a share.

"Ask Franz," she said to Maurice. "Franz knows. He will explain. All women can do is to reproduce what some one else has thought or felt."

As an immortal example of the limits set by s.e.x, she invariably fell back on Clara Schumann, with whom she had more than once come into personal contact. In her youth, Frau Furst had had a clear soprano voice, and, to Maurice's interest, she told him how she had sometimes been sent for to the Schumann's house in the INSELSTRa.s.sE, to sing Robert's songs for him.

"Clara accompanied me," she said, relating this, the great reminiscence of her life; "and he was there, too, although I never saw him face to face. He was too shy for that. But he was behind a screen, and sometimes he would call: 'I must alter that; it is too high;' or 'Quicker, quicker!' Sometimes even 'Bravo!'"

Her motherly ambitions for Franz knew no bounds. One of the few diversions she allowed herself was a visit to the theatre--when Franz had tickets given to him; when one of her favourite operas was performed; or on the anniversary of her husband's death--and, on such occasions, she pointed out to the younger children, the links that bound and would yet bind them to the great house.

"That was your father's seat," she reminded them every time. "The second row from the end. He came in at the door to the left. And that,"

pointing to the conductor's raised chair, "is where Franz will sit some day." For she dreamed of Franz in all the glory of KAPELLMEISTER; saw him swinging the little stick that dominated the theatre-audience, singers and players alike.

And the children, hanging over the high gallery, shuffling their restless feet, thus had their path as dearly traced for them, their destiny as surely sealed, as any fate-shackled heroes of antiquity.

Late one afternoon about this time, Franz might have been found together with his friends Krafft and Schilsky, at the latter's lodging in the TALSTRa.s.sE. He was astride a chair, over the back of which he had folded his arms; and his chubby, rubicund face glistened with moisture.

In the middle of the room, at the corner of a bare deal table that was piled with loose music and ma.n.u.script, Schilsky sat improving and correcting the tails and bodies of hastily made, notes. He was still in his nights.h.i.+rt, over which he had thrown coat and trousers; and, wide open at the neck, it exposed to the waist a skin of the dead whiteness peculiar to red-haired people. His face, on the other hand, was sallow and unfresh; and the reddish rims of the eyes, and the coa.r.s.ely self-indulgent mouth, contrasted strikingly with the general youthfulness of his appearance. He had the true musician's head: round as a cannon-ball, with a vast, b.u.mpy forehead, on which the soft fluffy hair began far back, and stood out like a nimbus. His eyes were either desperately dreamy or desperately sharp, never normally attentive or at rest; his blunted nose and chin were so short as to make the face look top-heavy. A carefully tended young moustache stood straight out along his cheeks. He had large, slender hands, and quick movements.

The air of the room was like a thin grey veiling, for all three puffed hard at cigarettes. Without removing his from between his teeth, Schilsky related an adventure of the night before. He spoke in jerks, with a strong lisp, intent on what he was doing than on what he was saying.

"Do you think he'd budge?" he asked in a thick, spluttery way. "Not he.

Till nearly two. And then I couldn't get him along. He thought it wasn't eleven, and wanted to relieve himself at every corner. To irritate an imaginary bobby. He disputed with them, too. Heavens, what sport it was! At last I dragged him up here and got him on the sofa.

Off he rolls again. So I let him lie. He didn't disturb me."

Heinrich Krafft, the hero of the episode lay on the short, uncomfortable sofa, with the table-cover for a blanket. In answer to Schilsky, he said faintly, without opening his eyes: "Nothing would.

You are an ox. When I wake this morning, with a mouth like gum arabic, he sits there as if he had not stirred all night. Then to bed, and snores till midday, through all the h.e.l.lish light and noise."