Kitabı oku: «Villa Rubein, and Other Stories», sayfa 4

VIII

Harz walked away along the road. A dog was howling. The sound seemed too appropriate. He put his fingers to his ears, but the lugubrious noise passed those barriers, and made its way into his heart. Was there nothing that would put an end to this emotion? It was no better in the old house on the wall; he spent the night tramping up and down.

Just before daybreak he slipped out with a knapsack, taking the road towards Meran.

He had not quite passed through Gries when he overtook a man walking in the middle of the road and leaving a trail of cigar smoke behind him.

“Ah! my friend,” the smoker said, “you walk early; are you going my way?”

It was Count Sarelli. The raw light had imparted a grey tinge to his pale face, the growth of his beard showed black already beneath the skin; his thumbs were hooked in the pockets of a closely buttoned coat, he gesticulated with his fingers.

“You are making a journey?” he said, nodding at the knapsack. “You are early – I am late; our friend has admirable kummel – I have drunk too much. You have not been to bed, I think? If there is no sleep in one’s bed it is no good going to look for it. You find that? It is better to drink kummel…! Pardon! You are doing the right thing: get away! Get away as fast as possible! Don’t wait, and let it catch you!”

Harz stared at him amazed.

“Pardon!” Sarelli said again, raising his hat, “that girl – the white girl – I saw. You do well to get away!” he swayed a little as he walked. “That old fellow – what is his name-Trrreffr-ry! What ideas of honour!” He mumbled: “Honour is an abstraction! If a man is not true to an abstraction, he is a low type; but wait a minute!”

He put his hand to his side as though in pain.

The hedges were brightening with a faint pinky glow; there was no sound on the long, deserted road, but that of their footsteps; suddenly a bird commenced to chirp, another answered – the world seemed full of these little voices.

Sarelli stopped.

“That white girl,” he said, speaking with rapidity. “Yes! You do well! get away! Don’t let it catch you! I waited, it caught me – what happened? Everything horrible – and now – kummel!” Laughing a thick laugh, he gave a twirl to his moustache, and swaggered on.

“I was a fine fellow – nothing too big for Mario Sarelli; the regiment looked to me. Then she came – with her eyes and her white dress, always white, like this one; the little mole on her chin, her hands for ever moving – their touch as warm as sunbeams. Then, no longer Sarelli this, and that! The little house close to the ramparts! Two arms, two eyes, and nothing here,” he tapped his breast, “but flames that made ashes quickly – in her, like this ash – !” he flicked the white flake off his cigar. “It’s droll! You agree, hein? Some day I shall go back and kill her. In the meantime – kummel!”

He stopped at a house close to the road, and stood still, his teeth bared in a grin.

“But I bore you,” he said. His cigar, flung down, sputtered forth its sparks on the road in front of Harz. “I live here – good-morning! You are a man for work – your honour is your Art! I know, and you are young! The man who loves flesh better than his honour is a low type – I am a low type. I! Mario Sarelli, a low type! I love flesh better than my honour!”

He remained swaying at the gate with the grin fixed on his face; then staggered up the steps, and banged the door. But before Harz had walked on, he again appeared, beckoning, in the doorway. Obeying an impulse, Harz went in.

“We will make a night of it,” said Sarelli; “wine, brandy, kummel? I am virtuous – kummel it must be for me!”

He sat down at a piano, and began to touch the keys. Harz poured out some wine. Sarelli nodded.

“You begin with that? Allegro – piu – presto!

“Wine – brandy – kummel!” he quickened the time of the tune: “it is not too long a passage, and this” – he took his hands off the keys – “comes after.”

Harz smiled.

“Some men do not kill themselves,” he said.

Sarelli, who was bending and swaying to the music of a tarantella, broke off, and letting his eyes rest on the painter, began playing Schumann’s Kinderscenen. Harz leaped to his feet.

“Stop that!” he cried.

“It pricks you?” said Sarelli suavely; “what do you think of this?” he played again, crouching over the piano, and making the notes sound like the crying of a wounded animal.

“For me!” he said, swinging round, and rising.

“Your health! And so you don’t believe in suicide, but in murder? The custom is the other way; but you don’t believe in customs? Customs are only for Society?” He drank a glass of kummel. “You do not love Society?”

Harz looked at him intently; he did not want to quarrel.

“I am not too fond of other people’s thoughts,” he said at last; “I prefer to think my own.

“And is Society never right? That poor Society!”

“Society! What is Society – a few men in good coats? What has it done for me?”

Sarelli bit the end off a cigar.

“Ah!” he said; “now we are coming to it. It is good to be an artist, a fine bantam of an artist; where other men have their dis-ci-pline, he has his, what shall we say – his mound of roses?”

The painter started to his feet.

“Yes,” said Sarelli, with a hiccough, “you are a fine fellow!”

“And you are drunk!” cried Harz.

“A little drunk – not much, not enough to matter!”

Harz broke into laughter. It was crazy to stay there listening to this mad fellow. What had brought him in? He moved towards the door.

“Ah!” said Sarelli, “but it is no good going to bed – let us talk. I have a lot to say – it is pleasant to talk to anarchists at times.”

Full daylight was already coming through the chinks of the shutters.

“You are all anarchists, you painters, you writing fellows. You live by playing ball with facts. Images – nothing solid – hein? You’re all for new things too, to tickle your nerves. No discipline! True anarchists, every one of you!”

Harz poured out another glass of wine and drank it off. The man’s feverish excitement was catching.

“Only fools,” he replied, “take things for granted. As for discipline, what do you aristocrats, or bourgeois know of discipline? Have you ever been hungry? Have you ever had your soul down on its back?”

“Soul on its back? That is good!”

“A man’s no use,” cried Harz, “if he’s always thinking of what others think; he must stand on his own legs.”

“He must not then consider other people?”

“Not from cowardice anyway.”

Sarelli drank.

“What would you do,” he said, striking his chest, “if you had a devil-here? Would you go to bed?”

A sort of pity seized on Harz. He wanted to say something that would be consoling but could find no words; and suddenly he felt disgusted. What link was there between him and this man; between his love and this man’s love?

“Harz!” muttered Sarelli; “Harz means ‘tar,’ hein? Your family is not an old one?”

Harz glared, and said: “My father is a peasant.”

Sarelli lifted the kummel bottle and emptied it into his glass, with a steady hand.

“You’re honest – and we both have devils. I forgot; I brought you in to see a picture!”

He threw wide the shutters; the windows were already open, and a rush of air came in.

“Ah!” he said, sniffing, “smells of the earth, nicht wahr, Herr Artist? You should know – it belongs to your father… Come, here’s my picture; a Correggio! What do you think of it?”

“It is a copy.”

“You think?”

“I know.”

“Then you have given me the lie, Signor,” and drawing out his handkerchief Sarelli flicked it in the painter’s face.

Harz turned white.

“Duelling is a good custom!” said Sarelli. “I shall have the honour to teach you just this one, unless you are afraid. Here are pistols – this room is twenty feet across at least, twenty feet is no bad distance.”

And pulling out a drawer he took two pistols from a case, and put them on the table.

“The light is good – but perhaps you are afraid.”

“Give me one!” shouted the infuriated painter; “and go to the devil for a fool.”

“One moment!” Sarelli murmured: “I will load them, they are more useful loaded.”

Harz leaned out of the window; his head was in a whirl. ‘What on earth is happening?’ he thought. ‘He’s mad – or I am! Confound him! I’m not going to be killed!’ He turned and went towards the table. Sarelli’s head was sunk on his arms, he was asleep. Harz methodically took up the pistols, and put them back into the drawer. A sound made him turn his head; there stood a tall, strong young woman in a loose gown caught together on her chest. Her grey eyes glanced from the painter to the bottles, from the bottles to the pistol-case. A simple reasoning, which struck Harz as comic.

“It is often like this,” she said in the country patois; “der Herr must not be frightened.”

Lifting the motionless Sarelli as if he were a baby, she laid him on a couch.

“Ah!” she said, sitting down and resting her elbow on the table; “he will not wake!”

Harz bowed to her; her patient figure, in spite of its youth and strength, seemed to him pathetic. Taking up his knapsack, he went out.

The smoke of cottages rose straight; wisps of mist were wandering about the valley, and the songs of birds dropping like blessings. All over the grass the spiders had spun a sea of threads that bent and quivered to the pressure of the air, like fairy tight-ropes.

All that day he tramped.

Blacksmiths, tall stout men with knotted muscles, sleepy eyes, and great fair beards, came out of their forges to stretch and wipe their brows, and stare at him.

Teams of white oxen, waiting to be harnessed, lashed their tails against their flanks, moving their heads slowly from side to side in the heat. Old women at chalet doors blinked and knitted.

The white houses, with gaping caves of storage under the roofs, the red church spire, the clinking of hammers in the forges, the slow stamping of oxen-all spoke of sleepy toil, without ideas or ambition. Harz knew it all too well; like the earth’s odour, it belonged to him, as Sarelli had said.

Towards sunset coming to a copse of larches, he sat down to rest. It was very still, but for the tinkle of cowbells, and, from somewhere in the distance, the sound of dropping logs.

Two barefooted little boys came from the wood, marching earnestly along, and looking at Harz as if he were a monster. Once past him, they began to run.

‘At their age,’ he thought, ‘I should have done the same.’ A hundred memories rushed into his mind.

He looked down at the village straggling below – white houses with russet tiles and crowns of smoke, vineyards where the young leaves were beginning to unfold, the red-capped spire, a thread of bubbling stream, an old stone cross. He had been fourteen years struggling up from all this; and now just as he had breathing space, and the time to give himself wholly to his work – this weakness was upon him! Better, a thousand times, to give her up!

In a house or two lights began to wink; the scent of wood smoke reached him, the distant chimes of bells, the burring of a stream.

IX

Next day his one thought was to get back to work. He arrived at the studio in the afternoon, and, laying in provisions, barricaded the lower door. For three days he did not go out; on the fourth day he went to Villa Rubein…

Schloss Runkelstein – grey, blind, strengthless – still keeps the valley. The windows which once, like eyes, watched men and horses creeping through the snow, braved the splutter of guns and the gleam of torches, are now holes for the birds to nest in. Tangled creepers have spread to the very summits of the walls. In the keep, instead of grim men in armour, there is a wooden board recording the history of the castle and instructing visitors on the subject of refreshments. Only at night, when the cold moon blanches everything, the castle stands like the grim ghost of its old self, high above the river.

After a long morning’s sitting the girls had started forth with Harz and Dawney to spend the afternoon at the ruin; Miss Naylor, kept at home by headache, watched them depart with words of caution against sunstroke, stinging nettles, and strange dogs.

Since the painter’s return Christian and he had hardly spoken to each other. Below the battlement on which they sat, in a railed gallery with little tables, Dawney and Greta were playing dominoes, two soldiers drinking beer, and at the top of a flight of stairs the Custodian’s wife sewing at a garment. Christian said suddenly: “I thought we were friends.”

“Well, Fraulein Christian, aren’t we?”

“You went away without a word; friends don’t do that.”

Harz bit his lips.

“I don’t think you care,” she went on with a sort of desperate haste, “whether you hurt people or not. You have been here all this time without even going to see your father and mother.”

“Do you think they would want to see me?”

Christian looked up.

“It’s all been so soft for you,” he said bitterly; “you don’t understand.”

He turned his head away, and then burst out: “I’m proud to come straight from the soil – I wouldn’t have it otherwise; but they are of ‘the people,’ everything is narrow with them – they only understand what they can see and touch.”

“I’m sorry I spoke like that,” said Christian softly; “you’ve never told me about yourself.”

There was something just a little cruel in the way the painter looked at her, then seeming to feel compunction, he said quickly: “I always hated – the peasant life – I wanted to get away into the world; I had a feeling in here – I wanted – I don’t know what I wanted! I did run away at last to a house-painter at Meran. The priest wrote me a letter from my father – they threw me off; that’s all.”

Christian’s eyes were very bright, her lips moved, like the lips of a child listening to a story.

“Go on,” she said.

“I stayed at Meran two years, till I’d learnt all I could there, then a brother of my mother’s helped me to get to Vienna; I was lucky enough to find work with a man who used to decorate churches. We went about the country together. Once when he was ill I painted the roof of a church entirely by myself; I lay on my back on the scaffold boards all day for a week – I was proud of that roof.” He paused.

“When did you begin painting pictures?”

“A friend asked me why I didn’t try for the Academie. That started me going to the night schools; I worked every minute – I had to get my living as well, of course, so I worked at night.

“Then when the examination came, I thought I could do nothing – it was just as if I had never had a brush or pencil in my hand. But the second day a professor in passing me said, ‘Good! Quite good!’ That gave me courage. I was sure I had failed though; but I was second out of sixty.”

Christian nodded.

“To work in the schools after that I had to give up my business, of course. There was only one teacher who ever taught me anything; the others all seemed fools. This man would come and rub out what you’d done with his sleeve. I used to cry with rage – but I told him I could only learn from him, and he was so astonished that he got me into his class.”

“But how did you live without money?” asked Christian.

His face burned with a dark flush. “I don’t know how I lived; you must have been through these things to know, you would never understand.”

“But I want to understand, please.”

“What do you want me to tell you? How I went twice a week to eat free dinners! How I took charity! How I was hungry! There was a rich cousin of my mother’s – I used to go to him. I didn’t like it. But if you’re starving in the winter.”

Christian put out her hand.

“I used to borrow apronsful of coals from other students who were as poor – but I never went to the rich students.”

The flush had died out of his face.

“That sort of thing makes you hate the world! You work till you stagger; you’re cold and hungry; you see rich people in their carriages, wrapped in furs, and all the time you want to do something great. You pray for a chance, any chance; nothing comes to the poor! It makes you hate the world.”

Christian’s eyes filled with tears. He went on:

“But I wasn’t the only one in that condition; we used to meet. Garin, a Russian with a brown beard and patches of cheek showing through, and yellow teeth, who always looked hungry. Paunitz, who came from sympathy! He had fat cheeks and little eyes, and a big gold chain – the swine! And little Misek. It was in his room we met, with the paper peeling off the walls, and two doors with cracks in them, so that there was always a draught. We used to sit on his bed, and pull the dirty blankets over us for warmth; and smoke – tobacco was the last thing we ever went without. Over the bed was a Virgin and Child – Misek was a very devout Catholic; but one day when he had had no dinner and a dealer had kept his picture without paying him, he took the image and threw it on the floor before our eyes; it broke, and he trampled on the bits. Lendorf was another, a heavy fellow who was always puffing out his white cheeks and smiting himself, and saying: ‘Cursed society!’ And Schonborn, an aristocrat who had quarrelled with his family. He was the poorest of us all; but only he and I would ever have dared to do anything – they all knew that!”

Christian listened with awe. “Do you mean?” she said, “do you mean, that you – ?”

“You see! you’re afraid of me at once. It’s impossible even for you to understand. It only makes you afraid. A hungry man living on charity, sick with rage and shame, is a wolf even to you!”

Christian looked straight into his eyes.

“That’s not true. If I can’t understand, I can feel. Would you be the same now if it were to come again?”

“Yes, it drives me mad even now to think of people fatted with prosperity, sneering and holding up their hands at poor devils who have suffered ten times more than the most those soft animals could bear. I’m older; I’ve lived – I know things can’t be put right by violence – nothing will put things right, but that doesn’t stop my feeling.”

“Did you do anything? You must tell me all now.”

“We talked – we were always talking.”

“No, tell me everything!”

Unconsciously she claimed, and he seemed unconsciously to admit her right to this knowledge.

“There’s not much to tell. One day we began talking in low voices – Garin began it; he had been in some affair in Russia. We took an oath; after that we never raised our voices. We had a plan. It was all new to me, and I hated the whole thing – but I was always hungry, or sick from taking charity, and I would have done anything. They knew that; they used to look at me and Schonborn; we knew that no one else had any courage. He and I were great friends, but we never talked of that; we tried to keep our minds away from the thought of it. If we had a good day and were not so hungry, it seemed unnatural; but when the day had not been good – then it seemed natural enough. I wasn’t afraid, but I used to wake up in the night; I hated the oath we had taken, I hated every one of those fellows; the thing was not what I was made for, it wasn’t my work, it wasn’t my nature, it was forced on me – I hated it, but sometimes I was like a madman.”

“Yes, yes,” she murmured.

“All this time I was working at the Academie, and learning all I could… One evening that we met, Paunitz was not there. Misek was telling us how the thing had been arranged. Schonborn and I looked at each other – it was warm – perhaps we were not hungry – it was springtime, too, and in the Spring it’s different. There is something.”

Christian nodded.

“While we were talking there came a knock at the door. Lendorf put his eye to the keyhole, and made a sign. The police were there. Nobody said anything, but Misek crawled under the bed; we all followed; and the knocking grew louder and louder. In the wall at the back of the bed was a little door into an empty cellar. We crept through. There was a trap-door behind some cases, where they used to roll barrels in. We crawled through that into the back street. We went different ways.”

He paused, and Christian gasped.

“I thought I would get my money, but there was a policeman before my door. They had us finely. It was Paunitz; if I met him even now I should wring his neck. I swore I wouldn’t be caught, but I had no idea where to go. Then I thought of a little Italian barber who used to shave me when I had money for a shave; I knew he would help. He belonged to some Italian Society; he often talked to me, under his breath, of course. I went to him. He was shaving himself before going to a ball. I told him what had happened; it was funny to see him put his back against the door. He was very frightened, understanding this sort of thing better than I did – for I was only twenty then. He shaved my head and moustache and put me on a fair wig. Then he brought me macaroni, and some meat, to eat. He gave me a big fair moustache, and a cap, and hid the moustache in the lining. He brought me a cloak of his own, and four gulden. All the time he was extremely frightened, and kept listening, and saying: ‘Eat!’

“When I had done, he just said: ‘Go away, I refuse to know anything more of you.’

“I thanked him and went out. I walked about all that night; for I couldn’t think of anything to do or anywhere to go. In the morning I slept on a seat in one of the squares. Then I thought I would go to the Gallerien; and I spent the whole day looking at the pictures. When the Galleries were shut I was very tired, so I went into a cafe, and had some beer. When I came out I sat on the same seat in the Square. I meant to wait till dark and then walk out of the city and take the train at some little station, but while I was sitting there I went to sleep. A policeman woke me. He had my wig in his hand.

“‘Why do you wear a wig?’ he said.

“I answered: ‘Because I am bald.’

“‘No,’ he said, ‘you’re not bald, you’ve been shaved. I can feel the hair coming.’

“He put his finger on my head. I felt reckless and laughed.

“‘Ah!’ he said, ‘you’ll come with me and explain all this; your nose and eyes are looked for.’

“I went with him quietly to the police-station…”

Harz seemed carried away by his story. His quick dark face worked, his steel-grey eyes stared as though he were again passing through all these long-past emotions.

The hot sun struck down; Christian drew herself together, sitting with her hands clasped round her knees.