Melomaniacs Part 2

"I was the artistic mate to this little Pole who allowed that old man-woman to deceive him--George Sand, of course. Ah! the old rascal, how she hated me. She forbade me to enter their hotel in the Cour d'Orleans, but I did--Chopin would have died without me, the delicate little vampire! I was his nurse, his mother, his big brother. I fought his fight with the publishers, with the creditors. I wrote his polonaises, all--all I tell you--except those sickly things in the keys of C sharp minor, F minor and B flat minor. Pouf! don't tell me anything about Chopin. He write a polonaise? He write the scherzi, the ballades, the etudes?--you make me enraged. I, I made them all and he will get the credit for all time, and I am glad of it, for I loved him as a father."

The voice of Minkiewicz became strident as he repeated his old story.

Some of the clients of The Fallen Angels stopped talking for a moment; it was only that crazy Pole again with his thrice-told tale.

Minkiewicz drank another absinthe.

"And were you then a poet as well as a composer?" timidly asked young Louis.

"I was the greatest poet Poland ever had. Ask of Chopin's friends, or of his living pupils. Go ask Georges Mathias, the old professor of the Conservatoire, if Minkiewicz did not inspire Chopin. Who gave him the theme for his Revolutionary etude--the one in C minor?" Minkiewicz ran his left hand with velocity across the table. His disciples followed those marvellously agile fingers with the eyes of the hypnotic....

"I was with Frederic at Stuttgart. I first heard the news of the capture of Warsaw. Pale and with beating heart I ran to the hotel and told him all. He had an attack of hysteria; then I rushed to the piano and by chance struck out a phrase. It was in C sharp minor, and was almost identical with the theme of the C minor study. At once Chopin ceased his moaning and weeping and came over to the instrument. 'That's very pretty,' he said, and began making a running ba.s.s accompaniment. He was a born inventor of finger tricks; he took up the theme and gradually we fas.h.i.+oned the study as it now stands. But it was first written in C sharp minor. Frederic suggested that it was too difficult for wealthy amateurs in that key, and changed it to C minor. More copies would be sold, he said. But he spoke no more of Warsaw after that. Why? Ah! don't ask me--the true artist, I suppose. Once that his grief is objectified, once that his sorrow is translated into tone, the first cause is quite forgotten,--Art is so selfish, so beautiful, you know!

"I never left Frederic but once; the odious Sand woman, who smoked a pipe and swore like a cab driver, smuggled the poor devil away to Majorca. He came back a sick man; no wonder! You remember the de Musset episode. The poet's mother even implored the old dragon to take Alfred to Italy. He, too, was coughing--all her friends coughed except Liszt, who sneered at her blandishments--and Italy was good for consumptives.

De Musset went away ailing; he returned a mere shadow. What happened?

Ah! I cannot say. Possibly his eyes were opened by the things he saw--you remember the young Italian physician--I think his name was Pagello? It was the same with Chopin. Without me he could not thrive.

Sand knew it and hated me. I was the st.u.r.dy oak, Frederic the tender ivy. I poured out my heart's blood for him, poured it into his music. He was a mere girl, I tell you--a sensitive, slender, shrinking, peevish girl, a born prudish spinster, and would s.h.i.+ver if any one looked at him. Liszt always frightened him and he hated Mendelssohn. He called Beethoven a sour old Dutchman, and swore that he did not write piano music. For the man who first brought his name before the public, the big-hearted German, Robert Schumann--here's to his memory--Chopin had an intense dislike. He confessed to me that Schumann was no composer, a talented improviser only. I think he was a bit jealous of the man's genius. But Freddie loved Mozart, loved his music so madly that it was my turn to become jealous.

"And fastidious! Bon Dieu! I tell you that he could not drink, and once Balzac told us a piquant story and Frederic fainted. I remember well how Balzac stared and said in that great voice of his: 'Guard well thy little damsel, my good Minkiewicz, else he may yet be abducted by a tom-cat,' and then he laughed until the window-panes rattled. What a brute!...

"I gave my brain to Chopin. When he returned to me from that mad trip to the Balearic Islands I had not the heart to scold. He was pallid and even coughed in a whisper. He had no money; Sand was angry with him and went off to Nohant alone. I had no means, but I took twenty-four little piano preludes that I had made while Frederic was away and sold them for ready money. You know them, all the world knows them. They say now that he wrote them whilst at Majorca, and tell fables about the rain-drop prelude in D flat. A pack of lies! I wrote them and at my old piano without strings, the same that I still have in the Rue Puteaux. But I sha'n't complain. I love him yet. What was mine was his--is his, even my music."

The group became uneasy. It was late. The rain had stopped, and through the open doors of The Fallen Angels could be seen the soft-starred sky, and melting in the distance were the lights of the Gare Saint-Lazare. It was close by the Quarter of Europe, and the women who walked the boulevard darted swift glances into the heated rooms of the bra.s.serie.

Minkiewicz drank another absinthe--his last. There was no more money.

The disciples had spent their all for the master whom they loved as they hated the name of Wagner. His slanting eyes--the eyes of the Calmuck--were bloodshot; his face was yellow-white. His long, white hair hung on his shoulders and there were bubbles about his lips.

"But I often despair. I loved Chopin's reputation too much ever to write a line of music after his death. Besides who would have believed me?

Which one of you believes in his secret heart of hearts one word I have spoken to-night? It is difficult to make the world acknowledge that you are not an idiot; very difficult to shake its belief that Chopin was not a G.o.d. Alas! there are no more G.o.ds. You say I am a poet, yet how may a man be a poet if G.o.dless? I know that there is no G.o.d, yet I am unhappy longing after Him. I awake at the dawn and cry for G.o.d as children cry for their mother. Curse reason! curse the knowledge that has made a mockery of my old faiths! Frederic died, and dying saw Christ. I look at the roaring river of azure overhead and see the cruel sky--nothing more. I tell you, my children, it has killed the poet in me, and it will kill the G.o.ds themselves when comes the crack of doom.

"I dream often of that time--that time John, the poet of Patmos, foretold in his Revelations: The time when the Sixth Seal was opened.

Alas! when the Son of Man cometh out of the clouds and round about the throne are the four-winged beasts, what will he see?

"Nothing--nothing, I tell you.

"Unbelief will have killed the very soul of creation itself. And where once burned the eye of the Cosmos will be naught but a hideous emptiness.

"Helas! mes enfants, I could drink one more absinthe; my soul grieves for my lost faith, my lost music, my lost Frederic, my lost life." ...

But they went away. It was past the hour of closing and the host was not in a humor for parleying.

"Ah! the old pig, the old blasphemer!" he said, shaking his head as he locked the doors.

They watched him until he turned the corner of the Rue Puteaux and was lost to them.

He moved slowly, painfully, one leg striking the pavement in syncopation, for it was sadly crippled by disease. He did not twist his thin head as he went along the Batignolles. Then the band pa.s.sed once more up to the warmer lights of the Clichy Quarter and argued art far into the night.

They one and all hated Wagner, adoring Chopin's magic music.

THE PIPER OF DREAMS

The desert of my soul is peopled with black G.o.ds, Huge blocks of wood; Brave with gilded horns and s.h.i.+ning gems, The black and silent G.o.ds Tower in the naked desert of my soul.

With eyes of wolves they watch me in the night; With eyes like moons.

My G.o.ds are they; in each the evil grows, The grandiose evil darkens over each And each black G.o.d, silent Under the iron skies, dreams Of his omnipotence--the taciturn black G.o.ds!

And my flesh and my brain are underneath their feet; I am the victim, and I perish Under the weight of these nocturnal G.o.ds And in the iron winds of their unceasing wrath.

--LINGWOOD EVANS.

I

It was opera night, and the lights burned with an official brilliancy that challenged the radiance of the Cafe Monferino across the asphalt.

There, all was decorous gaiety; and the doubles of Pilsner never vanished from the little round metal tables that overflowed into the juncture of the streets Gluck and Halevy. Among the bra.s.series in Paris this the most desirable to lovers of the Bohemian brew. The cooking, Neapolitan and Viennese, perhaps explained the presence, one June evening in the year 1930, of tall, blond, blue-eyed Illowski, the notorious Russian symphonist. With several admirers he sat sipping bocks and watched the motley waves of the boulevard wash back strange men and women--and again women.

Lenyard spoke first. Young and from New England he was studying music in Paris.

"Master, why don't you compose a music drama?" Illowski, gazing into the soft blur of light and mist over the Place de l'Opera, did not answer.

Scheff burst into laughter. The one who had put the question became angry. "Confound it! What have I said, Mr. Dutchman, that seems so funny to you?" Illowski put out a long, thin hand,--a veritable flag of truce: "Children, cease! I have written something better than a music drama. I told Scheff about it before he left St. Petersburg last spring. Don't be jealous, Lenyard. There is nothing in the work that warrants publicity--yet. It is merely a venture into an unfamiliar region, nothing more. But how useless to write for a public that still listens to Meyerbeer in the musical catacombs across the street!"

Lenyard's lean, dark features relaxed. He gazed smilingly at the fat and careless Scheff. Then Illowski arose. It was late, he said, and his head ached. He had been scoring all day--sufficient reason for early retirement. The others demurred, though meekly. If their sun set so early, how could they be expected to pa.s.s the night with any degree of pleasure? The composer saw all this; but he was sensibly selfish, and b.u.t.toning the long frock-coat which hung loosely on his attenuated frame shook hands with his disciples, called a carriage and drove away.

Lenyard and Scheff stared after him and then faced the situation. There were many tell-tale porcelain tallies on the table to be settled, and neither had much money; so the manuvring was an agreeable sight for the cynical waiter. Finally Lenyard, his national pride rising at the spectacle of the Austrian's penuriousness, paid the entire bill with a ten-franc piece.

Scheff sank back in his chair and grinningly inquired, "Say, my boy, I wonder if Illowski has enough money for his coachman when he reaches the mysterious, old dream-barn he calls home?" Lenyard slowly emptied his gla.s.s: "I don't know, you don't know, and, strictly speaking, we don't care. But I'd dearly like to see the score of his new work."

Scheff blinked with surprise. He, too, was thinking of the same dread matter. "What, in G.o.d's name, do you mean? Speak out. I've been frightened long enough. This Illowski is a terrible man, Scheff. Do you suspect the stories are true, after all--?" Then both men stood up, shook hands and said: "Neshevna will tell us. She knows." ...

II

Pavel Illowski was a man for whom the visible world had never existed.

Born a Malo-Russ, nursed on Little-Russian legends, a dreamer of soft dreams until more than a lad, he was given a musical education in Moscow, the White City--itself a dream of old Alexander Nevsky's days.

Within sight of the Kremlin the slim and delicate youth fed upon the fatalistic writers of the nineteenth century. He knew Schopenhauer before he learned to p.r.o.nounce German correctly; and the works of Bakounin, Herzen, Kropotkin became part of his cerebral tissue.

Proudhon, Marx, and Ferdinand La.s.salle taught him to hate wealth, property, power; and then he came across an old volume of Nietzsche in his uncle's library. The bent of the boy's genius was settled. He would be a composer--had he not, as a bare-headed child, run sobbing after Tschakowsky's coffin almost to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in 1893--but a composer who would mould the destinies of his nation, perhaps the destinies of all the world, a second Svarog. He early saw the power--insidious, subtle, dangerous power--that lurked in great art, saw that the art of the twentieth century, his century, was music. Only thirteen when the greatest of all musical Russians died, he read Nietzsche a year later; and these men were the two compelling forces of his life until the destructive poetry of the mad, red-haired Australian poet, Lingwood Evans, appeared. Illowski's philosophy of anarchy was now complete, his belief in a social, aesthetic, ethical regeneration of the world, fixed. Yet he was no militant reformer; he would bear no polemical banners, wave no red flags. A composer of music, he endeavored to impart to his work articulate, emotion-breeding and formidably dangerous qualities.

Deserting the vague and fugitive experimentings of Berlioz, Wagner, Liszt and Richard Strauss, Illowski modelled himself upon Tschakowsky.

He read everything musical and poetical in type, and his first attempt, when nearly thirty, was a symphonic setting of a poem by a half-forgotten English poet, Robert Browning, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," and the music aroused hostile German criticism. Here is a young Russian, declared the critics, who ventures beyond Tschakowsky and Strauss in his attempts to make music say something. Was not the cla.s.sic Richard Wagner a warning to all who endeavored to wring from music a message it possessed not? When Wagner saw that Beethoven--Ah, the sublime Beethoven!--could not do without the aid of the human voice in his Ninth Symphony, he fas.h.i.+oned his music drama accordingly. With the co-operation of pantomime, costume, color, lights, scenery, he invented a new art--patched and tinkered one, said his enemies, who thought him old-fas.h.i.+oned--and so "Der Ring," "Tristan und Isolde," "Die Meistersinger" and "Parsifal" were born. True cla.s.sics in their devotion to form and freedom from the feverishness of the later men headed by Richard Strauss--why should any one seek to better them, to supplant them? Wagner had been the Mozart of his century. Down with the musical Tartars of the East who spiritually invaded Europe to rob her of peace, religion, aye, and morals!

Much censure of this kind was aimed at Illowski, who continued calmly.

Admiring Richard Strauss, he saw that the man did not dare enough, that his effort to paint in tone the poetic heroes of the past century, himself included, was laudable; but Don Juan, Macbeth, quaint Till Eulenspiegel, fantastic Don Quixote were, after all, chiefly concerned with a moribund aestheticism. Illowski best liked the Strauss setting of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" because it approached his own darling project, though it neither touched the stars nor reached the earth. Besides, this music was too complicated. A new art must be evolved, not a synthesis of the old arts dreamed by Wagner, but an art consisting of music alone: an art for the twentieth century, a democratic art in which poet and tramp alike could revel. To the profoundest science must be united a clearness of exposition that only Raphael has. Even a peasant enjoys Velasquez.

The Greeks fathomed this mystery: all Athens wors.h.i.+pped its marbles, and Phidias was crowned King of Emotions. Music alone lagged in the race, music, part speech, part painting, with a surging undertow of pa.s.sion, music had been too long in the laboratories of the wise men. To free it from its Egyptian bondage, to make it the tongue of all life, the interpreter of the world's desire--Illowski dreamed the dreams of madmen.

Chopin, who divined this truth, went first to the people, later to Paris, and thenceforward he became the victim of the artificial.

Beethoven was born too soon in a world grown gray under scholars'

shackles. The symphony, like the Old Man of the Sea, weighed upon his mighty shoulders; music, he believed, must be formal to be understood.