Read Ebook: Asbeïn: From the Life of a Virtuoso by Schubin Ossip Lathrop Elise Translator

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Ebook has 770 lines and 46129 words, and 16 pages

She shook her head. "You wish to be good to me, but you pain me," murmured she. And she added, flatteringly, "Can you really not work when I am with you?"

"Would you like it if I could?" he asked, and looked at her with a quite new, penetrating expression in his eyes.

He drew his brows together humorously; he was now kneeling before her, and held both her hands in his. "You are not only a charming little woman, Natalie," said he, "but, what very few such beautiful and seductive women are, of a good heart. But still I have noticed one thing in you, namely, that you do not like to be second anywhere. And, do you see, everywhere else you are not only the first, but the only one in the world for me; but here, Natalie, here it must please you that I should forget you for my art!"

"My plaything!" he interrupted her, very reproachfully. "Oh, Natalie! my sanctuary!"

"Well, then, as far as I am concerned, your sanctuary. That, looked at in one light, is also only a plaything, even if of the most distinguished kind." She laughed somewhat constrainedly. "It is certainly immoderate," she continued, and hesitated a little, "horribly immoderate, but still it is so--I--I do not want to be only your plaything, but also your friend--do not be horrified at this audacity--yes, your friend, your confidante. I wish to be the first to share your newly arising thoughts. Lately, it has often hurt me that you busy yourself so much with all kinds of trifles only to give me pleasure. I know it is my fault; at first I was afraid of your genius, which soared heavenward, and wished to accustom you to the earth, and chain you close to me. But then--then I was ashamed of my smallness--ah, so ashamed. You shall not stoop down to me; let me try to rise to you. Spread out your mighty wings, and fly up to the stars, but take me with you!"

He could not speak--only kisses burned on his lips. He pressed them on her wonderful eyes, whose holy light humiliated him. Then, after a while, he murmured, softly: "You are nearer the stars than I, Natalie. Show me the way, show me the way!"

From then, she daily passed a couple of hours in his study. How happy she felt in the great, airy room, which was almost as empty as a shed. In here she had not ventured with her soft, seductive, decorative arts. All had remained as sober and plain as he had always been accustomed to have his surroundings while at work. High shelves almost breaking under their weight of music, a piano, a couple of stringed instruments, the arm-chair in which he had established her, and two or three cane-bottomed chairs constituted the whole furniture. On the writing-table stood a picture of Natalie, painted in water-colors by a young French artist in Rome. The room could show no other ornament. Still, there in the darkest corner hung a single laurel-wreath. No large one, such as one lays to-day at the feet of great artists, but poor and small, and in the middle of the wreath, in a common wooden frame, drawn with a hard lead-pencil, the face of a woman, with a white cloth on her head, from beneath which fine, curly hair fell over the forehead. Without being beautiful, the face was strangely attractive, and Natalie would have liked to ask the history of the laurel-wreath and the picture. But she did not venture to. She never, by a single question, touched upon Lensky's past.

He only continued to remain in solitude during the hours which he devoted to technical practice. At other times he quietly let her stay. She sat behind him, quite soberly and still, in the large, worn-out patriarchal chair, and did not breathe a word. She never even took a book in her hand, for fear of irritating him by the rattling of turning pages, but busied herself with pretty, noiseless handiwork.

Natalie raised her head and listened--how wonderful that sounded! He had unlearned the madness, but still in his melodies always sounded the strange Arabian succession of tones, the devil's music: Asbe?n!

She became, as she had wished, the confidante of his work. When he had sketched on paper the plan of a composition, he played it to her, now on his violin, which he passionately loved, now on the piano, which he did not love; for its short tone, incapable of development, repulsed him, but which he respected and made use of as the most complete of all instruments. Although he played the piano, not with virtuosity, but with the helplessness of the composer, he could still bring out something of the "warm tone" which made his violin irresistible.

How eagerly she listened to his compositions! How much she rejoiced in them, and how severe she was to him! She would not let him pass over a single musical flaw. That she rejoiced and wept over the beauties in his compositions, that she boldly placed his genius near Beethoven and Schumann, that is to say, near what she ranked highest in the world, that was another thing! For that reason she was so severe. He laughed at her sometimes for her tender delusion. Then she took his head between her hands, and said, triumphantly: "That is all very well; only wait a little while, then the whole world will say that you have been the last musical poet: the others are only bunglers."

In the beginning of March he made a short artist tour through the interior of Russia. Naturally, he could not drag her around with him, for she could not endure the exhausting fatigues of his quick journeys, especially at that time. But how horrible, how unbearable the parting seemed to him! He wrote her every day. His writing was ugly and irregular, his orthography as deficient in French as in Russian; but what tenderness, what passion and poetry spoke from every uncultured, stormily written line. No one could better impress his whole heart in a short, insignificant letter than he; and what rapture, what wild, almost painful rapture at seeing her again! She had missed him much less than he had missed her. He reproached her for it, complained that the new love which now began to fill her whole existence left no place for the old. But then she measured him with such a tender, and, at the same time, a so deeply hurt look, that he was ashamed.

"You must not take it so," he whispered to her, appeasingly. "It is an old story that if two hearts hasten forward together in a race of love, one will naturally outdo the other, and still will be vexed that it is so. But it is quite natural and in order that I should cling more to you than you to me."

She smiled quite sadly. "We will see who will win the race in the end," murmured she.

Natalie no longer went into society. Her health was much impaired. She passed the entire month of April stretched on her lounge, in loose wrappers. She now reproached herself with having been foolish not to have spared herself before. The time of tormenting fancy approached for the young wife, the time of concealed anxiety for them both. In spite of the consoling assurances of the physician, Lensky was no longer himself, from anxiety and despair. But he did not let her notice it. When he was with her he had always a gay smile on his lips and a droll story for her diversion. He cared for her like a mother.

Then, toward the end of May, came the most tormenting hour he had ever lived through, until at last--when he already believed that all hope was lost--a little, thin, shrill sound smote his ear. It startled him, his heart beat loudly; still he did not venture to move, but listened, until at last the doctor came out of the adjoining room, and called to him: "All is over."

He misunderstood the words. "She is dead!" he gasped.

"No, no! Boris Nikolaivitch; everything is as well as possible. Come!"

He felt as would a man buried alive, if one should raise the lid from his coffin.

At the door of the bedroom a fat old woman, with a large cap, came toward him. "A son, a very fine young one!" said she, triumphantly, while she laid something tiny and rosy, wrapped in white cloth and lace, in his arms.

Tears fell from his eyes, and his hands trembled so that the nurse was horrified and took the child away from him.

He went up to Natalie, who, deathly pale and exhausted, but with a lovely, indescribable expression on her face, at once of tenderness and of a certain solemn pride, lay among the high-piled pillows. Quite softly, with a kind of timidity which his violent love had hitherto never known, he pressed her pale hand to his lips.

"Are you content?" she whispered, dreamily and scarcely audibly. "Are you content?"

She recovered rapidly. Her beauty had lost none of its charm, but had rather won an earnest--one might almost say consecrated--loveliness.

Her face reflected her happiness. That also had become a shade deeper, nobler. In spite of all her pampered habits, she insisted upon caring for the child herself. He let her have her way.

The former dressing-room was changed to a nursery. Sometimes, in the long, transparent twilight of the spring, he entered the room in which, in winter, he had passed so many charming hours by candle-light, and where now everything was so changed. A cradle stood in the place which formerly the toilet-table had occupied--ah, what a cradle--a dream of a cradle! A basket with a canopy of green silk, hung with a long, transparent lace veil, a costly nest for a young bird whose little eyes must be shielded, by all kinds of tender devices, from the bright light, which perhaps later would pain him so!

The air, quite filled with a pleasant, mild, damp vapor, was permeated by a weak perfume of iris and warming linen, and, besides that, with something quite strange, quite peculiarly sweet, stirring--the breath of a healthy, fresh, carefully cared-for little child.

And there, where the cheval-glass had formerly reflected to him the lovely form of a proud queen of beauty, now sat in the same large arm-chair, a tender young mother, her child on her breast. The lines of her neck, from which the loose, white dress had slipped down a little so that the outline of the shoulders was visible, was charming; but what was it, to the lovely, attentive expression with which she looked down at the child?

Everything about her expressed tenderness: her look, her smile, the hands with which she held the child to her. It was just these small, white hands which Lensky could not cease to observe. How helpless they had formerly been--and now! She would scarcely let the nurse touch baby. He was never weary of watching how untiringly she touched the tiny, frail body of the infant, and did a thousand services for it which all resembled caresses.

"It is all very beautiful, but you have a manner of ignoring me in this little kingdom," said Lensky, jokingly, to the young mother, while he threw a look of humorous vexation at the young despot whom she just laid in the cradle.

She bent her head a little to one side, and whispered roguishly, while she came up to him and played with the lapel of his coat: "Do you see, Boris, this is my study. Everywhere else you are not only the first but the only one in the world for me; but here you must be content if I sometimes forget you for my calling."

He laughed.

"Do you know that you once said something similar to me; that time when I, for the first time, dared to enter your sanctuary?" she murmured, and repeated petulantly: "Do you know it?"

He kissed both of her hands, one after the other. "Do you then believe that I could ever forget such a thing, my angel?" whispered he. "I am no such spendthrift; oh, no! If you knew how I cherish this dear remembrance! That is pure happiness which we will keep for our old days, when the sun no longer seems to us to shine as brightly, and we must light a poor candle in order to find our path again to a suitable grave."

Natalie still thought of the poor laurel wreath in his study. But she did not venture to ask him a direct question about it.

He himself, of his own accord, at last told her the history of the pitiful relic.

He had never spoken to her of his childhood, but once a great impulse came over him to tell her the whole; to lay bare before her all the pitiableness of his past. What would she then say to it?

It was a clear summer night, out on the terrace of the country house near St. Petersburg, which they had hired for the summer, the terrace which looked out on the small but pretty and shady garden. They sat there, hand in hand; around them the dull, gray light of a day that will not die, sweet perfume of flowers, and in the tree tops the gentle rustling of the kissing leaves. She talked of gay, insignificant things; gave him a droll, laughing description of a visit to one of her friends. At first it amused him; then something, he could not have said what, irritated him against this monstrous principle of gliding so triflingly and mockingly through life without ever glancing into it more deeply.

"What would she say if she knew?" thought he. "Perhaps she would shun me!" A kind of madness overcame him. He felt the wish to risk his happiness in order to convince himself of its durability, to put his petted wife to the test. "How you butterflies, floating over flowers in the sunshine, must be horrified at the miserable worms who creep over the earth!" he began bitterly.

"What are you thinking of?" asked she, astonished.

"Nothing especial, only that I was originally just such a worm, creeping over the earth."

"Ah! that is long past!" she interrupted him hastily. She wished to keep him from long dwelling on an unpleasant thought, but he suspected that his insinuation of his humble antecedents vexed her, and that she felt the need of forgetting his derivation. He looked at her from head to foot, with an angry, wondering glance. Her richly embroidered white dress, the large diamonds in her ears,--how the diamonds sparkled in the dull evening light!

Then he began to speak of his childhood, dryly, with a smile on his lips as if it was a question of something quite indifferent and amusing.

In a large tenement at Moscow, overcrowded with all kinds of human vermin, had he grown up; in the half of a room that was divided by a sail, behind which another poor family hungered. His father he did not remember. His mother sang to the guitar in wine rooms. When he was five years old she had bought him a fiddle for four rubles, and then some one, a dissolute musician, who often came to them, had taught him to scrape on it a little. From that time he accompanied his mother when she sang in the wine rooms,--or even on the streets, as it happened.

Had he loved her? Yes, he believed so--how could it be otherwise? But the consciousness of what she really had been to him only came to him when he was no longer with her. How that happened he really did not know, but one fine day she took him in a part of the city which he had never known until then, in a handsome residence that seemed so beautiful to him that he only ventured to go around on tiptoes. At the door a fat, yellow man, with long, greasy, black hair, received him, and told his mother it was all right. Then she kissed him a last time, told him she would take him away in an hour, and went.

He was taken in a room with gay furniture, and there greeted by a fat woman with a thick gold chain over the bosom of her violet silk dress, and with rings on all her short, stumpy, wrinkled fingers, and was entertained with tea, cake, and honey. He had never before enjoyed a similar repast. He felt in an elevated frame of mind.

When the fat man--he was a mediocre musician who had married a rich merchant's daughter, who gave him none of her money, however--told him that he should always stay with him, and never go back to his mother, he was glad, and felt the consciousness of having taken a step forward in the world.

Did that surprise Natalie? He could not help it, it was still so. "Strange what roughness men show before a little bit of civilization has taught them to conceal it," he added reflectively.

Did he not feel anxiety later? Natalie wished to know. Yes, for his new life contained nothing of that which he had promised himself. That he should live in the beautiful rooms with the master and mistress and eat with them, as he had thought at first, had been an illusion. Only the two children of the fat daughter of the merchant could tumble around on the sofas, with their fiery-red, woolen, damask covering, and could help themselves from all the dishes.

He lived on charity; they told him that every day. The musician had bought him of his mother for fifty rubles, as Lensky afterward learned, as a speculation, in order to make money out of him as a prodigy. The time which he did not devote to his musical practice he must spend helping the maid in the kitchen.

He slept, with an old sofa pillow under his head, on the floor, in a gloomy little room, without window, only with dirty panes of glass in the door--a room in which the cook put all kinds of rubbish. Dampness ran down the walls, and every evening from all corners crept out a whole regiment of black beetles, and spread themselves over the boards. The food? Well, it was sparing. Sometimes he only received what the family had left on their plates.

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