Rudolph made a movement towards the door, hoping to escape unnoticed, but the Natzelhuber, having had enough of her last visitors, detained him with an invitation to smoke a cigarette, and drink a glass of brandy.
“Wouldn’t you like me to play you something?”
“Not to-day, thanks. Another time. It’s just breakfast time,” he said hurriedly.
She turned her back on him without another word, and opening the piano, pointed to Andromache to sit down before it. The girl’s hands shook as she removed her gloves, and Rudolph, going downstairs, could hear how unsteady and timid were the first notes that she played.
“Weber’s ‘Invitation à la Danse.’ She will surely fly into another rage when she hears that,” he thought. “But I do wish she would be kind and encouraging to the poor girl. Such pretty eyes as she has! I have never seen prettier. Just like the March violets in Rapoldenkirchen that I used to gather for my mother.”
In the meantime the frightened owner of these eyes like the March violets of Rapoldenkirchen was passing through the worst moment of her existence. Two bars of the “Invitation” served to bring down the wrath of artistic majesty on her head, and very nearly on her hands.
“What do you call that?”
“Weber’s ‘Invitation,’” died away in the girl’s throat.
“Weber’s ‘Rubbish,’ you idiot! It is as little like the ‘Invitation’ as the music of my cats is like the ‘Funeral March.’ But you have a good touch. Something may be made of you when you have learnt your scales, and know how to sit before a piano. Seat low, thumbcovered, body tranquil. Are you prepared to regard yourself as a beginner, with less knowledge than a stammering infant—or do you still cherish the opinion of ‘Everybody’ that you are very clever?”
“I know very well that I am quite ignorant, and it is because I want to learn that I have come to you,” Andromache said, with a simple dignity that mollified the artist.
“Well, I see you are not a fool like your respectable mother,” she said. “Now go home and practice as many scales as you can for three or four or even more hours a day, and come to me at the end of a week. Hard work and slow results, remember.”
Among the many curious customs of the modern Athenians—at least those unprovided with permanent tents—is their habit of changing residence every first of September. When they go into each new house, they have at last found their earthly paradise, which they at once begin to maltreat in every possible way, until, by summer-time there is hardly a clean spot left on any of the walls, a door left with a handle, a cupboard with a lock, or a window with a fastening entire in its panes. Then the earthly paradise, is described in terms as exaggeratedly expressive of the reverse of comfort; the family look around for the next September move, and a new home or flat is found with the same fate awaiting it. The only rational way of accounting for this startling custom, which would greatly disturb any reasonable person compelled to follow it, is by supposing that the natives find something exciting and morally or mentally beneficial in their annual migrations.
In compliance with the law, Andromache’s mother, the previous September, had moved from a flat on the second floor in Solon Stettore, a ground floor flat withplenty of underground accommodation, in one of the many yet unnamed streets that break from the foot of Lycabettus like concentric rays to drop into the straight line of Solon Street, and proceed on a wider and recognised course down among the larger thoroughfares. These baby passages are rarely traversed by any but those who enjoy the qualified happiness of living in them. There is always a river of flowing water edging their entrance like a barrier, which a lady with dainty boots would doubtless view with disapprobation if she were asked to ford it upon an afternoon call. Children by the hundred play about these streets—variously coloured children, ragged, ugly, showing every condition but that of cleanliness and beauty, with little twisted mouths and sharp black eyes that always seem to be measuring in the spectator a possible foe; with coarse matted hair, or shaven heads looking like nothing more than the skin of a mouse worn as a skull cap, or dirty straw, bleached nearly white, hanging about them in unapproachable wisps and understood to be fair hair. As well as the householders, the infants, and running water, the streets offer, as further attraction, the cries of the itinerant merchants, who draw their carts up the dusty, unpaved little hills, and yell out the contents of their store in a way only to be heard in burning cities, where yelling, public and domestic, becomes an art, cultivated with zeal, and heard with joy—by all but the nervous traveller. All day long these vendors come and go, and the aforementioned happy householders need only appear on their thresholds to buy stuffs, soap, candles, sponges, carpets, etc.
In the sweet spot Kyria Karapolos had pitched hertent with her family, consisting of two sons, the eldest a dashing captain of the Artillery, known in town as Captain Miltiades, understood to have no relations, and to sleep on horseback, dine on gallantry and the recital of his own prowess, and enjoy relaxation from equine exercise in the ball-room. The second son, Themistocles, a dapper little fellow, had a position in the Corinthian Bank, not very remunerative, but enabling him to dress with what he considered Parisian taste, and walk Stadion Street with two or three other fashionable youths, all equally gloved, caned—and killing. He had a violin too, and disliking his family, when constrained to remain at home, spent the time in his own room, which looked out upon the sloping gardens of the French School, and tortured the silence by irritating this poor instrument, deluded into a fond belief that he was playing Gounod’s “Ave Maria” and Schubert’s “Serenade.”
He cherished a hopeless passion for a young lady in the next street who had no fortune; neither had he, nor, what is worse in an aspiring husband, any prospect of making one.
A girl came next, Julia, of abnormal plainness of feature, considerably heightened by a pimpled, sallow complexion and a furtive, untrustworthy expression. Unlike the rest of her family, she had no special qualification, but while the others enjoyed every kind of discomfort, her fortune was pleasantly counted into the Corinthian Bank, to be taken out the day a husband should present himself for her and for it, especially for it. In this land of dowered maidens young gentlemen of expensive tastes and empty purses find itfeasible and honourable to incur debts on the understanding that they will be paid out of somebody’s dowry by and by. Personal looks or qualities are secondary questions, so the absence of attractions in Julia did not weigh in the eyes of her brother and mother in their anxiety to marry her.
The youngest was Andromache, as pretty as Julia was plain, resembling her brother, the redoubtable Captain Miltiades; a sweet girl, too, if suggestive of the unvarying sweetness which is another word for feebleness of character—fond of music, and showing some ability in that direction, never taking part in the family quarrels which were always raging at the table and elsewhere between the rest. But she had the tastes of the woman of warm latitudes. In the house she was rarely fit to be seen,—and she had a passion for powder, unguents and strong perfumes. She was a tolerably efficient housekeeper, and generally spent her mornings in the kitchen, superintending and helping Maria, the maid of all work, who had enough in all conscience to do to keep Captain Miltiades in clean shirts.
Captain Miltiades was not only the hero of his domestic circle, but the hero of all Greece—or so he believed, which comes to the same thing; the boldest soldier, the mightiest captain, the best horseman and dancer, and, crown in romantic imaginations, the most impecunious ornament of Athenian society. His fierce and military moustache and bronzed cheek awed beholders, and his noble brow merging into a bald crown gently fringed with short black hair, which made a thin line above his black military coat and crimson velvet collar, seemed to hold the concentratedwisdom of ages. But gallant and youthful was the spirit of Captain Miltiades—amatory, too, as behoves a son of Mars. “One may be bald and not old for that,” said his flashing dark-blue eye whenever a maiden’s thoughtful glance rested on the discrowned region. His French left much to be desired, and of other European languages he knew nothing. But then scientific was his knowledge of the gay cotillon, entrancing his movement in the waltz and mazurka; at least the young ladies of Athens thought so. However, be it known to all who care to learn noteworthy facts, Captain Miltiades was an authority on these important subjects; a kind of dancing Master of Ceremonies at the Palace, where he danced with royal partners and was amazingly in demand. But, sad to relate, nobody dreamed of falling in love with him, in spite of his military prowess and carpet-pirouetting. The ladies regarded him as a kind of amiable harlequin, and his presence and warm declarations only excited a smile on the lips of the weakest. Of course he sighed and dangled after everydot, but sighed in vain, for neither his fierce moustache nor his dark blue eyes have brought him somebody’s one figure and countless noughts of francs.
It was twelve o’clock, and Captain Miltiades might be heard galloping up the unpaved street, looking as if nothing short of a miracle could bring horse or rider to stop before they reached the overhanging point of Lycabettus. The miracle was accomplished without flinging the gallant Captain headforemost into the dust or into the nearest flowing stream, and the Captain’s military servant, Theodore, emerged from the side entrance to carry off the panting war-horse, and refreshits foaming flanks with the stable brush, while the warrior, with stern brow and dissatisfied lips under the nodding red plumes of his cap—this modern Achilles always appeared in a white heat of suppressed anger in the domestic circle—rapped at the glass door which Julia opened.
“Where is Maria?” asked Captain Miltiades.
“In the kitchen, of course, cooking the breakfast.”
“Maria! Maria!”
“Yes, sir,” cried the unfortunate servant, rushing from the steamingpilafshe was preparing, and showing a spacious bosom hardly restrained within the compass of the strained and long since colourless cloth that untidily covered it, and a ragged skirt, and fuzzy black hair that she found as much difficulty in keeping out of the soup as out of her own coal-black eyes—only far greater effort was made to accomplish the latter feat.
“Maria, the balls are commencing, and I shall be going out regularly; you must have two clean shirts for me every day. Do you hear?”
“And how on earth do you think, Captain, I am to get through my work? Two shirts a day indeed! And the same for Mr. Themistocles, I suppose. Four bedrooms to see to, cooking, washing for five persons: and one poor girl to do it all for twenty-five francs a month. You may look for another servant.”
“Get away, or I’ll wring your ear, Maria. You have Theodore to help you in the kitchen, and you know that both my mother and Andromache help you in the housework.”
“Wonderful, indeed! It only wants every one in thehouse to sit down and do nothing, and the young ladies to ask me to starch them two white petticoats apiece every day. Ah, animals, pigs, the whole of you,” she added as she retired to the kitchen, and the gallant Captain to his chamber.
Another masculine entrance, and this time the thin piping voice of little Themistocles was heard, calling on the unhappy maid of all work.
“What does this fool want now?” roared the infuriated Maria, appearing in the corridor with a large spoon which she brandished menacingly.
“I am going out this evening, Maria, and I want a second clean shirt,” said Themistocles, thrusting his head out of his room.
“A second clean shirt! Oh, of course. What else? Don’t you think, sir, you might find something more for me to do? I have so very little to do that it would really be a kindness to keep an idle girl in work. Clean shirts for Miltiades, clean shirts for Themistocles. ’Pon my word, it is poor Maria herself who wants clean shirts—and she has not even time to wash her face!”
“Really, it is absurd the trouble you men give in a house,” cried Julia over her embroidery in the hall. “You seem to think there are no limits to what a servant is to be asked to do.”
“Hold your tongue, Julia, and speak more respectfully of your brothers,” retorted little Themistocles.
“What do you mean by quarrelling with your sister, you whipper-snapper?” cried Miltiades, combing his moustache, as he came out of his room to join in the fray. “Another impertinent word to Julia, and itwould not take much to make me kick you out into the street.”
One word from the head of the house, as Captain Miltiades was called, full twenty years his senior, was enough to silence Themistocles, who retired into his room, and proceeded to make a careful study of the libretto of “La Princesse des Canaries.”
The third tap that morning at the glass door of the street, announcing the return of Andromache and her mother, was the cheerful herald of breakfast. Everybody was seated at table, wearing a more or less bellicose air, while Theodore, looking as correct and rigid as an ill-fitting military undress would permit, served out thepilafwhen Andromache and Kyria Karapolos entered the dining-room.
Andromache took her seat in silence beside Julia, and slowly unfolded her napkin with an absent air, and her mother at the head of the table began to puff and pant and violently fan herself.
“Pooh! pooh! pooh! what a woman! I thought she would eat poor Andromache.”
“The music-woman,” remarked Captain Miltiades, indistinctly, through a mouthful ofpilaf.
“A savage, Miltiades. She has a servant just like herself, who received us as if we were beggars, and told us to go upstairs and look for the Natzelhuber ourselves. And when we went up, there was a nice-looking young gentleman with her, a foreigner, fair, I should say an Englishman or a Russian—what country do you think he comes from, Andromache?”
“Who, mamma?” asked Andromache, coming down from the clouds.
“That fair young man we saw at Natzelhuber’s.”
“I don’t know, I did not pay much attention to him,” Andromache replied; and turned her eyes to the dish of roast meat Theodore was placing on the table.
“Well, this young man, as I said, was with her, and when we entered the room, I assure you she all but ordered us out again.”
“And why did you not go away?” demanded the Captain, hotly. “You are always getting yourself insulted for want of proper spirit.”
“You are just like your father, ever ready to fly into a rage for nothing,” protested Kyria Karapolos, sulkily. “If one followed your advice, there would be nothing but quarrelling in the world. By acting civilly I have been able to beat down the Natzelhuber’s terms very much below my expectations. When I asked her what she charged a lesson, I nearly fainted at her answer. Thirty francs! However, when I expressed our position, and how absolutely impossible it would be for us to pay more than ten, she consented to receive Andromache as a pupil on those terms. But whenever I spoke she snubbed me in the most violent manner,—called me an old fool.”
“Perhaps you gave her cause,” sneered Themistocles, who felt bitter towards his mother, regarding her as his natural enemy since she had warned the mother of the young lady in the next street of his pennilessness, a warning which served to close the doors of that paradise forever to him.
“How dare you, sir, speak in such a way to your mother?” thundered the irate Captain, always readyto pounce on the small bank-clerk, whom he despised very cordially. “I told you to-day that it would not take much to make me kick you into the street. Another offensive word, and see!”
This ebullition quenched all further family expansion round the breakfast-table. The girls hurried through the meal in silence, keeping their eyes resolutely fixed on their plate. One man glowered, and the other sulked in offended dignity, rising hurriedly the instant Theodore appeared with two small cups of Turkish coffee for Kyria Karapolos and the Captain. In another instant the street door was heard to bang behind Themistocles, who, with his slim cane, his yellow gloves, and minute waist, had gone down to indulge in a clerkly saunter as far as Constitution Place, and unbosom his harassed and manly soul to two other minute confidants previous to turning into the Corinthian Bank.
After his coffee, the Captain went back to his barracks beyond the Palace, and Andromache sat down to practice her scales on a cracked piano in the little salon, with a view of the rugged steepness of Lycabettus and the trellised gardens of the French School through the long window. It was a pretty little room, with some excellent specimens of Greek art and Byzantine embroidery, foolish Byzantine saints, in gilt frames, with an artificial vacuity of gaze, the artistic achievements of the rival Athenian photographers, Romaïdes and Moraïtes, views of the Parthenon and the Temple of Jupiter, a bomb that had exploded at the very feet of Captain Miltiades in the late outbreak at Larissa, upon which memorable occasion he had gallantly mangledthe bodies of five thousand Turks and scattered their armies in shame. This valuable piece of historic information I insert for the special benefit of those who may presume to question the direct succession of this mighty Captain from the much admired warriors of Homer. In olden days Captain Miltiades’ glory would have quite outshone that of his puny namesake; as a complete hero, upon his own description, he would have occupied the niche of fame with Hercules and Theseus.
Necessarily there was the sofa, the Greek seat of honour, upon which all distinguished visitors are at once installed, this law, like that of the Medes and Persians, knowing no change. Also sundry tables decorated with albums and the school prizes of the young ladies, the bank-clerk, and the Captain of the Artillery. All the chairs were covered with white dimity, and the floor was polished with bees’ wax, which gave the room an aspect of chill neatness.
Andromache was interrupted in a conscientious study of scales by the entrance of her mother and Julia, and the former’s irrelevant question:
“Don’t you think that young man was English, Andromache?”
“I don’t know, mother, possibly,” was Andromache’s impatient answer, for, though it grieves me to unveil the secret workings of a maiden’s mind, I must perforce confess that the student was thinking just then of Rudolph’s kind and sympathetic glance.
“Can’t you stop that horrible noise and describe him?” said Julia. “You know I always want to hear about foreigners.”
“He was fair and tall and handsome, with very kind blue eyes, light, not dark like those of Miltiades—there, that’s all I can say about him,” said Andromache, rising, and standing at the window to stare across at the gardens of the French School.
The illustrious Dr. Galenides had just seated himself at his desk to write a note to his no less illustrious colleague, Dr. Melanos, while his hat and gloves on the study table and his carriage outside were testimony of a contemplated professional drive. The study door was suddenly opened with what Dr. Galenides regarded as undue familiarity, and looking up sharply, prepared to administer the deserved rebuke, the learned physician recognised in the intruder an old friend and brother in profession. The new-comer, a rough, provincial-looking Hercules, was Dr. Selaka of Tenos, a member of his Majesty’s parliament, called for some unaccountable reason, “The King of Tenos.” Instead of a rebuke, Dr. Galenides administered an effusive embrace, and clasped this insular majesty to his capacious bosom.
“What a splendid surprise, my dear Constantine!” he cried, when he had kissed both Selaka’s bronzed cheeks. “When did you come to Athens?”
“Last night. I have come to oppose two new measures of the Minister. Have you read his speech on the Budget?”
“Of course. I thought it displayed greatmoderation and sagacity. There’s a statesman if you will, Constantine.”
“May the devil sit upon his moustache for an English humbug! England here, England there! Ouf! But wait until he has me to tackle him.”
“You’ll lead him a dance, I’ve no doubt,” laughed Galenides. “But how are all the family?”
“Very well. My niece Inarime is growing more beautiful every day. All the islanders are in love with her. A queer old dog is Pericles. He has brought that girl up in the maddest fashion. Nothing but ancient Greek and that sort of thing, and he has made up his mind she will marry a foreign archæologist, or die an old maid.”
“Yes, I always thought him unpractical and foolish, but I tremendously respect his learning. Why doesn’t he bring the girl to Athens, if he won’t marry her to a Teniote?”
“Well, he talks vaguely of some such intention. You are going out, I see.”
“Yes, and that reminds me, Selaka. I was just writing a line to Melanos, but you’ll do just as well. There is a foreigner sick in the Hôtel de la Grande Bretagne who has sent for me. Could you go round and look at him? I haven’t a spare moment to-day. If I am absolutely wanted for a consultation, of course, I’ll endeavour to attend.”
Selaka consented with alacrity, and the friends parted with cordiality at the door, one to seat himself in a comfortable carriage, and be rolled swiftly to the Queen’s Hospital in the new quarter of Athens, the Teniote to walk to the Hôtel de la Grande Bretagne, alittle above Constitution Square, overlooking the orange trees and fountains in front of the Royal Palace. He was delighted with the prospect of meeting a distinguished foreigner, distinction proclaimed in the choice of hotel, and he would profit by the occasion to discuss the politics of Bismarck with this M. Reineke.
The waiters favoured him with that insolent reception usually bestowed by waiters of distinguished hotels upon foot and provincial-looking arrivals. But the mention of the illustrious Dr. Galenides cleared the haughty brow of Demosthenes; and when Selaka furthermore stated that that great personage had sent him to feel the pulse of the sick foreigner, Demosthenes condescended to call to Socrates, a lesser luminary among the hotel officials, and signified to his satellite that Dr. Selaka might be conducted to M. Reineke’s chamber.
Selaka found his patient, a young man of about twenty-eight, lying on a sofa, wrapped in a silk dressing-gown, with an elegant travelling rug thrown across his feet. Selaka’s keen glance rested in amazement on a delicate Eastern head, long grave eyes of the unfathomable and colourless shade of water flowing over dark tones, with a very noble and intense look in them, a high smooth brow that strengthened this expression of nobility, and finely-cut lips seen through the waves of dark beard and moustache as benign as a sage’s. It was a thoughtful, spiritual face, serene in its strength, unimpassioned in its kindliness—the face of a student and a gentleman.
“I should never take you to be a German, M. Reineke,” said Selaka, after their first greeting, seatinghimself beside the sofa, and taking the sick man’s supple fingers into his.
“No one does,” said Reineke, in such pure French as to put to shame Selaka’s grotesque accent. His voice was musical and low, with a softness of tone in harmony with his peculiar beauty, and fever gave it a ring of weariness.
“Are you going to order me quinine, doctor?”
“Why, naturally. How else would you break a fever?”
“But I cannot take it, doctor. It disagrees with me.”
“That is a pity. Four doses taken in four hours cut the worst fever, and set a man on his feet in a day.”
“Some constitutions can bear it, I suppose. But I nearly died after quinine treatment in Egypt. My head has not ceased going round ever since.”
“Your temperature is over a hundred, and you refuse to take quinine! Then there is nothing for you but to linger on in this state. Low diet and repose—that is all I can prescribe.”
Left alone, the sick man closed his eyes wearily and turned to sleep, out of which he was shaken by a knock at the door, and the head of an Englishman thrust itself inside.
“Can I come in, Mr. Reineke?”
“Pray do, Mr. Warren,” said Reineke, smiling agreeably. “It is kind of you to find time to visit a sick wretch amid all yourfêtesand sight-seeing.”
“Oh, that is a real pleasure. Only I am so sorry to see you cut up like this and losing all the fun. It was awfully jolly at the Von Hohenfels’ last week. Therewas an outrageous lioness there. For the life of me I could not catch her name. The governor wants to secure her for London. By Jove! what a tartar! She nearly ate the French viscount up in a bite.”
“Yes, I heard about it, but she is a very distinguished artist, I believe. You’ve been to Sunium since?”
“Came back to-day for the Jaroviskys’ ball. What a jolly people these Greeks are! The entire country seems at our disposal. Special trains, special boats and guides. Oh, we had an awfully good time, I tell you: inspected the Laurion mines, and looked awfully wise about them and everything else. But surely you’ll be able to go to the Jaroviskys’ to-morrow? What did the doctor say?”
“Nothing wise—a doctor never does.”
“Look here, old fellow, we can’t leave you here while we are dancing and flirting with the pretty Athenians.”
“If the pretty Athenians guessed my nationality, they would not be very eager to have me dance and flirt with them.”
“Then the governor was right? You are not a German?”
“No, I am a Turk. I have lived a good deal in Germany, so I adopted a Teuton name upon coming to Greece to avoid disagreeable associations for the natives. It is very comfortable. I was bored in Paris by the way people stared at me, and whispered openly about me when they heard my Turkish name, so I mean not to resume it. If I played the piano, the ladies fell into ecstatic wonder.”
“Well, we are accustomed to the old-fashioned Turk, cross-legged, on a pile of cushions, in flowing garb and turban, smoking a narghile, with a lovely Fatima or two by his side, and exclaiming frequently in sepulchral tones, ‘Allah be praised!’ It will doubtless take us some time to grow used to the newer picture presented by you.”
“Is it not aggravating to be kept here in a darkened room, while near me are ruined porticoes and columns, where once my people built their Moslem forts and turrets, and the voice of the muezzin broke the lone silence after the Pagan days? There is not even a glimpse from my window of that mass of broken pillars that stood out so plainly against the sky when we entered the Piraeus. I feel like a child waiting for the play, when suddenly comes a hitch which keeps the curtain down. I want to walk with the poets and philosophers, read Plato in the groves of the Academe, stand with Œdipus and Antigone at Colonneus, and look towards the towers and temples of Athens, walk with Pericles and Phidias through the marbles of the Acropolis, with none but the voices of glorious spirits to break the silence of the universe,—those spirits who have burned into history the clear gold of their unapproachable intellects, seeing with eyes that have served for centuries, feeling with hearts that have beaten for all time, speaking with lips upon which the noblest words are everlastingly carven.”
“Gad, I see you are an enthusiast like our friend, Miss Winters, who goes into fits when we inform her of some fresh rascality on the part of the modernGreeks,” cried young Warren, marvelling to hear a Turk talk in this fashion.
“She is a charming old lady, and you youngsters downstairs should not quiz her as you do. She engaged, if I were better, to carry me with her on Sunday to read Paul’s sermon to the men of Athens on the hill of Mars aloud. I have since been informed that it is customary for the Athenians to take their Sunday airing along the foot of the hill of Mars. Fancy the sensation we should have created, standing in a respectful attitude beside the little American lady, piously reading aloud the words of St. Paul.”
Reineke laughed softly, while young Warren exploded in a burst of loud merriment.
“Do you know, when she discovered that the ruffian of a head-waiter is called Demosthenes, she looked so horribly like embracing him, that, seriously alarmed, I exclaimed, ‘Madam, I beseech you, pause in your rash career.’ I don’t think she quite realised the extent of my service, for she very nearly quarrelled with me when I mentioned that Demosthenes is in the habit of defrauding our poor Jehus of at least half their profits.”
“Amiable enthusiast! But don’t class me with her. I have no illusions about the modern Greeks. I have seen in the East how they take advantage of our good-nature and our dislike to trade. I know them to cheat and bargain and deceive, and grow fat upon the kindness of those who trust them. But what have they in common with the ancients? They have not the intellect, the unerring taste, the exquisite restraint of language and bearing, the sunny gravity of temperament,the simplicity and keen love of the beautiful. If they were really the descendants of the old race, there would be some signs whereby we should recognise their glorious heritage.”
“I don’t know. Perhaps, if we knew the opinion held by the Persians and the barbarians of the old Hellenes—it would be probably very different from their own.”
“We don’t need any opinion with the works they have left. Such eloquence as that is incontrovertible, and in the face of it, their representatives to-day are as much out of place here as were the Franks, the Italians and the Turks. It was a desecration to have built on these immortal shores a nation sprung from slavery and the refuse of the Middle Ages—without tradition or any right to believe in its own destiny. What do they care for? Money, trade! They have no real reverence for knowledge, except that it helps in the acquirement of wealth and power. You will find no Greek ready to consecrate his days, aye, and his nights, to the disinterested dispersion of the clouds of ignorance by as much as a rushlight of knowledge, capable of the unglorified, untrumpeted, unrecognised patience and labour of the scholar. Nor would he willingly choose poverty and obscurity that he might live the life of the spirit.”
“Well, I am afraid there are not many of us who would,” said Warren, good-naturedly. “And these people have their virtues. They are sober and moral.”
“They are indeed, and they are not cruel to their children or their wives, but they make up for the omission by horrible cruelty to animals. They frequently amuse themselves by tying a barrel of petroleum to the tails ofa couple of dogs, and firing it, for the delicate pleasure of gloating over the death agonies of the poor brutes.”
“Good heavens! What awful savages! But do you know, Mr. Reineke, it would be a just punishment for your ill opinion of them if you fell in love with a Greek. ’Pon my word, there are some very pretty girls here.”
“It is possible. But mere beauty has no attraction for me. I have seen lovely women in the East, indolent, unthinking beings, whom I couldn’t respect. I would sooner have a wicked woman who had elements of greatness in her than a virtuous one who had none. Aspasia I should have adored. It is because the women we mostly meet are so insipid that I have never thought to fill my life with the consuming excitement of love. I should feel ashamed and grieved to place my manhood under the feet of a mere household pet, or a drawing-room ornament, a fluttering, flounced marionette with the soul in her eyes gone astray, her lips twisted out of the lovely sensibility of womanhood by senseless chatter and laughter far sadder than tears. To see so many exquisite creatures meant to be worshipped by us, and only ridiculed, meant to guide and ennoble us, and preferring degradation; the purity of maidenly eyes lost in the vilest audacity of gaze, and the high post of spiritual guardians of the world bartered for unworthy conquests.”
“How cold-blooded to be able to furnish all these excellent reasons for not making a fool of yourself! Well, may we hope to see you at the Jaroviskys’?”
“I am afraid not. But pray, come and tell me how you have enjoyed yourself when you have a moment to spare.”
“And shall I give your love to Miss Winters?”
“Hardly that, but present her with my most distinguished compliments, if that is good English.”
Dr. Selaka that evening found Reineke more feverish, and although he was not anxious to lose sight of his patient, he seriously advised a sea voyage as the only adequate substitution for quinine.
He was greatly interested in this handsome stranger with the dark beard and romantic intensity of gaze, and speculated wildly on his nationality and circumstances as he walked from the hotel. He thought he might be a Spaniard, until, remembering the late Spanish Minister, who could not pay his passage back to Spain, and only got as far as Corfu by selling all the clothes and furniture he had never paid for, he decided that the Spaniards were a miserable race. The Italians, he thought, were not much better, and Reineke as little resembled a Frenchman as he did a German.
“You might go to Poros,” he said to Gustav. “It is a pretty place, and the trip would do you good.”
“Why not one of the Ægean Islands?” suggested Gustav.
“Certainly. There is Tenos. I live there myself, and I have a brother whom you could stay with for a day or two.”
Selaka coloured with a sudden astonishing thought. This stranger was rich, perhaps unmarried. He might fall in love with Inarime. Now he was bent on urging the trip to Tenos, before undreamed of. “I’ll telegraph to my brother, and you can travel in theSphacteria. The captain is my godson.”
“You are very kind, doctor, and I am ashamed toaccept such favours from you,” said Reineke, truthfully, in surprised assent.
“Oh, it is a pleasure. We Greeks love to see strangers.”
“Then I will go to-morrow. I want to get well as soon as possible, for I have much to do here,” said Reineke.
Crossing Constitution Square the king of Tenos was hilariously accosted by one of his satellites, a member of the Opposition and a lawyer of parchment exterior, whose career had been varied as it was unremunerative. Starting in life as domestic servant, he had found leisure to attend the University, and buy legal books with his perquisites. His stern profession by no means impeded the unsuccessful editorship of several newspapers—comic, political and satirical, each of which enjoyed a kind of ephemeral reputation and lasted about six months, leaving the venturous editor with a lighter pocket, and now he was Selaka’s colleague in obstruction.
“This is the best answer to my telegram, Constantine,” said Stavros. “What a day we’ll have of it in the Boulé[A]—eh?”
“Oh, ay, the Budget Speech. Leave it to me, Stavros. We’ll egg them on to an explosion. Keep to the caricatures. Collars and cuffs Minister! Ouf! Have you been pumping our friends about the Mayoralty?”
“Trust me. Our side is for you to a man. Theparty for Oïdas is strong, I admit, and wealth is in his favour, but I think we shall be able to pull you through.”
“If only! Listen Stavros, if I get in as Mayor, I’ll make you a present of a thousand francs, and I’ll secure your son the first vacant place in the University. I know your power,” he added, slyly.
The man of documents swelled with a sense of his own importance. Of that he had no doubt. The ministry depended on the state of his temper, which was uncertain, and the Lord be praised, what is a man if he has not his influence at the beck and call of his friends?
“Oïdas has spent a lot of money on the town,” he hinted.
“That is so. He is enormously rich, and takes care to advertise that fact,” Dr. Selaka replied.
“Well, we must spend money too,—in some cases we can only seem to spend it, and it will come to the same thing, my friend. But I’m hopeful, Constantine. You started on good lines. The swiftest path to celebrity is opposition, and you have never done anything else but oppose. It is a fine career, man, and gives you a decided superiority over the humble and compliant. The man who opposes need never trouble himself for reasons. His vote on the introduction of a measure is sufficient to insure him importance.”
“If obstruction be a merit, I have been obstructing these ten years, and the Mayoralty of Athens seems rather a modest claim upon such a display of superiority,” said Dr. Selaka, quite seriously.
The lawyer’s humour was profoundly tickled. The follies of the weak and foolish were a source of infiniteamusement to him. It was he who had urged the Teniote to the coming ambitious contest, not that he in the least contemplated success, but he understood that with a wiser man to lead, his part would be a much less exciting one.
“We are theParnellistoiof Greece, Constantine,” he said, with an air of ponderous assertion. “We may be beaten, but our hour of triumph is only retarded.”
He conscientiously consulted his watch, and then added, as an afterthought:
“You will need a larger house, Constantine.”
“I have thought of that, and have been inquiring about the expenses of building. I have a spot in view near the new Hospital. It will be a heavy item added to my election expenses, but my brother Pericles will come to my assistance, I make no doubt.”
“Why does he not come here himself, and establish his family? The man is insane to bury himself in Tenos.”
“With as handsome a daughter as ever the eyes of man fell upon,” interrupted the doctor, angrily.
“My faith! you must bring him to Athens. A handsome niece well dowered will be a feather in your cap. Play her off against Oïdas, and you’ll have the men on your side.”
“Pouf! Use a woman in politics! But if Pericles will let me look out for a son-in-law for him, something might be done in that way.”
“Why not? There are Mingros and Palle, both rich men. With either of them for a nephew you might aspire to be prime minister.”
“You don’t know Pericles. He is a confoundedidiot. Nothing but learning will go down with him. Death before dishonour. Modern Athens represents dishonour to him, because it presumes to prefer other things to the very respectable ancients. If he came to Athens, like Jarovisky, he would expect Inarime to fix her eyes permanently on the Acropolis, with intervals for recognition of the Theseium and minor points of antiquity. I foresee her end. He’ll marry her to some wretched twopenny-halfpenny archæologist, who will barely be able to pay the rent of a flat in some shabby street, and the wages of a maid of all work.”
“We must avert her doom, Constantine. Have her up to town, and bring her some night to the theatre when the King is expected to attend. The young men will stare at her from the stalls, and I’ll have an elegant verse upon her in the ‘New Aristophanes.’”
This proposition brought them to the Boulé in Stadion Street. The Prime Minister’s carriage was outside, and along the railing a row of loafers reclined, discussing each member as he passed in, and the space inside the gates was strewn with soldiers and civilians of every grade. The sharp swarthy faces lit up with eager recognition when Dr. Selaka and Stavros entered the gate, and familiar and jocose greetings were flung casually at them from the crowd.
“Glad to see you have a new coat, Constantine,” one urchin roared after Selaka, and sent his admirers into fits of laughter.
With the dignity of demeanour it behoved a mayor-elect to assume, Selaka coldly ignored the jibes and jokes of the loafers, touched his hat to his acquaintances and ascended the steps of the Chamber with weightyprophecy of obstruction upon his brow. The interior of the Chamber was a sight for the gods. The floor behind the president was held by corner-boys, soldiers, peasants and beggars in common with the representatives of King George’s Parliament. Deputies in fustanella and embroidered jacket showed pictorially against the less imposing apparel of civilization, and addressed the president at their ease, frequently not condescending to stand, but lounged back in their seats, and merely arrested his attention with an authoritative hand. The proceedings could be watched upstairs from a gallery of boxes, and a very amusing and lively half-hour might thus be spent. The stage below was filled with grown-up children, who fought and wrangled, exchanged amenities and breathless personalities, and foolishly imagined they were ruling the country. It is impossible to conjecture what a parliament of women would be like, but we can safely predict that it could not well surpass the average parliament of men in the futile chatter, squabbling and display of ill-temper.
Dr. Selaka took his seat in a leisurely manner, under the minister’s eye, on the front seat, and listened, with a protruded underlip and the look of sagacity on the alert. Stavros sat back, extending his arms behind the backs of his neighbors, and wore an expression of ostentatious amusement befitting the editor of a satirical newspaper.
The unlucky minister hazarded a loose statement, which gave Dr. Selaka his opportunity. He was on his legs, with two spots of excited red staining his sallow cheeks under the eyes, and opened a vehement fire of epithet and expostulation. The minister retorted,and Stavros, seated where he was, just held out a cool protesting finger, and cried: “You lie.”
The English Cabinet Minister was sitting upstairs in the box set apart for the diplomatic corps, and on this statement being translated to him, he leant forward and focussed the lawyer with his impertinent eyeglass. This was a species of parliamentary frankness with which he was not familiar, used as he was to having his veracity challenged in a variety of forms. As a novelty it was worth observing—especially the attitude of the minister thus given “the lie direct.”
The president tapped the table and called for order, which was naturally the signal for boisterous disorder. The premier sat down amidst a torrent of words, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs rose to fight his battle as chief lieutenant. The storm raged to the pitch of universal howls, and when at last there was a momentary lull in the atmosphere, exasperated by the abuse of which he had been the free recipient, Stavros jumped up, and flashing threateningly upon the Minister of Foreign Affairs, roared out:—
“It well becomes you to abuse me. You live in a fine house now, and keep your carriage, but for all that, I can remember the time when you were glad to wear my old clothes.”
Dead silence greeted this retort, and a grim smile relaxed the grave faces of the members. No personality is too gross to tickle this most democratic race, and anything that levels the proud man delights them. The Right Honourable Samuel Warren, M. P., upstairs, decided to take the light of his illustrious presence from such a shocking scene, wavered, and rememberingmythology, bethought himself of the laughter of the gods. He was abroad in the pursuit of knowledge, and this was certainly experience.
Stavros was frantically adjured to withdraw and apologise, and as frantically refused to do any such thing. His colleague and imagined leader stood up in his defence and the obstructionist became riotous to the verge of hysterics, until the Right Honourable Samuel Warren, looking down upon the spectacle from a safe distance, really believed he had been dropped into Bedlam instead of Parliament. Uproar succeeded angry protest in deafening succession; with the rapidity of thought mere speech was rejected as inadequate to the occasion. The generals, almost as numerous as soldiers, jumped upon their seats and brandished their hats terrifically. The hapless president made his escape, leaving the chair to one of the vice-presidents, and Constantine Selaka with an agile bound cleared the space intervening between the members’ seats and the tribune, installed himself therein, and shouted his intention of keeping the Chamber sitting until the demands of his party were complied with.
“And would Kyrios Selaka be good enough to state categorically the demands of his party?” the Prime Minister asked, standing to go, holding his hat in his hand, with an officially negative look.
This was a rash invitation. Selaka burst into an interminable, involved and idiotic speech, which Stavros followed from his seat with one much more involved and personal, and much less idiotic.
Evening descended, the dinner-hour passed, and still the unfortunate vice-president held the chair, andexercised his authority by a furious and inappropriate ringing of the bell, and calls for attention. Exhausted and famished deputies dropped out of representative life in search of animal food; others clamoured for cessation of the strife, and pathetically referred to the solace of the domestic circle. But Stavros and Selaka were adamant. The clamours of nature were unheeded by them; when one shouted and orated, the other sought comfort in cigarette and coffee. Night came, and found Selaka still in the tribune, gloomy, ravenous, and resolute. Meanwhile Stavros had refreshed himself with a snatch of food outside. He returned to the charge while his leader shot into the corridors, and collared excited and admiring attendants in the pursuit of food.
“We are as good as the Parnellistoi over in London,” Selaka remarked, and rubbed his hands with joy, as he and his friend walked home at the end of the protracted sitting.
“That is so, Constantine,” said Stavros, who dearly loved a row of any sort, and who since he could not fight the European powers in person, solaced himself by fighting a temporising president and a tame party. “You’ll be mayor to a certainty.”
“Mayor indeed!” ejaculated Constantine, keenly measuring his own sudden charge for notoriety. “It’s minister at least I ought to be. I have tackled them, Stavros, eh?”
His friend thought so, and went home to express his opinion in three columns of laudatory prose and twelve satirical verses describing the great Homeric fray.
[A]The Greeks call their modern Parliament by the classical name of Boulé.
Many years ago a German mechanic drifted, in the spirit of adventure, eastwards, and finding the conditions of life offered him in Athens sufficiently attractive for a man desirous of earning his bread in the easiest manner possible, and not contemptuously inclined towards the midday siesta, the excellent Teuton settled down in the city we may presume to be no longer under the special patronage of Wisdom. Not that Jacob Natzelhuber regretted that Athens’ reign was over. The mechanic was ignominiously indifferent to all great questions, and so long as his employers continued to pay him his weekly wages, conscientiously earned and conscientiously saved, the extravagances of the unfortunate King Otho and the virtues of Queen Amelia troubled him as little as did the glorious ruins on the Acropolis. He never went near the Acropolis. When his glance rested on the mass of broken pillars and temples that dominate every view of the town, he doubtless confused them with the eccentric shapes of the adjoining hills, and if asked his opinion of that point of classic memories, would tranquilly remove his pipe from his lips and remark that the other hill, his own special friend, Lycabettus, was higher. A good-humored, egoistic,phlegmatic workman, for the rest; fond of leisurely meditation on nothing, fond of smoking in his shirt-sleeves with the help of an occasional glass of mastia or brandy, and convinced that the world goes very well now as it did in olden days, and that the Greek is a composite of barbarian and child.
In a wife one naturally chooses what is most convenient, if one cannot obtain what is most suitable. Jacob chanced upon an enormous indolent maiden, dowered as Greek maids usually are, with a father whose house property was prophetic of better things to come. The girl was not handsome—nor as cleanly or learned in household matters as a Germanfrau; but some half dozen years in the makeshift of Oriental domestic life had served to deaden Jacob’s fastidious sensibilities in this department, and with the prospect of a little money and a couple of houses in the neighbourhood of Lycabettus by and by, on the death of a respectable father-in-law, he was so far demoralised as to face this unsavory future with tolerable tranquillity. They married.
The slow and philosophic Teuton found his Athenian wife and their one servant—a small barefooted child, in perpetual terror of her mistress, whose reprimands generally came upon her in the shape of tin utensils, water-jugs or stiff tugs of hair and ear—rather more noisy than a simple woman and child should be, to his thinking. But he preferred a quiet smoke on the balcony to interference in the kitchen, whence the sounds of hysterical cries, very bad language indeed, and sundry breaking articles reached him.
The lady, when not in a rage, a rare enough occurrence, was an amiable woman so long as her innocenthabits were not interfered with. Jacob was indisposed to interfere with any one—even with his own wife. So Kyria Photini peacefully smoked her three or four cigarettes, and drank her small glass of cognac of an evening, chattered in high Athenian tones with her neighbours, arrayed in a more or less soiled white morning jacket, and any kind of a skirt, with black hair all dishevelled, and sallow cheeks not indicative of an immoderate preference for cold water and soap. The little maid trembled and broke plates, went about with bare feet, short skirts and unkempt woolly hair, meeting her mistress’s vituperations with a wooden animal look, and lifting a protective arm to catch the threatened blow or object. Jacob was not happy, but he was philosopher enough to know that few people ever are, and that the highest wisdom consists in knowing how to make the best of even the worst. He was fond of his wife in his heavy German fashion, removed his pipe, and said, “come, come,” when the heat unstrung her nerves and sent her from her normal condition, bordering on hysterics, into positive madness; consoled himself by remembering that distinguished men in all ages have agreed that woman is incomprehensible, and hoped for some acceptable amelioration with the birth of the expected baby.
The baby came, a small dark girl, and the baby’s mother went to heaven, Jacob naturally supposed, and shed the customary tears of regret, though it can hardly have been happiness or comfort that he regretted. He engaged an Athenian woman to look after the child, and returned to his daily work and bachelor habits, deterred by recent experiences from making any otherventure in the search of domestic bliss. The child was called Photini, and it was greatly to be hoped that a little of the paternal temperament would go to correct the vices of the maternal, but there are relative stages in the path of moral development, and a lazy, hysterical, soulless woman is not the worst thing in feminine nature.
Photini grew up pretty much as the animals do, without any but merely natural obligations placed upon her. She ran about like a little street arab, learned neither reading, nor writing, nor catechism, nor sewing; swore like a small trooper, was more than a match for the barefooted, unkempt-headed girl, who soon learned to tremble before her as she had formerly trembled before her mother; was even too much for her quiet father, who began to be afraid of her furious explosions, and was too indifferent to the duties of paternity to trouble himself seriously about her education. Yet a pretty and striking child she was, with large topaz eyes, that in their audacity and frankness were sufficient in themselves to arrest attention, if there were no mossy black curls making an engaging network above and around the fine boyish brow; with the absurdest and sauciest nose and a wide, pale mouth that had a way of twisting itself into every imaginable grimace without losing a certain disreputable charm of curve and expression. A face full of precocious evil, but withal exquisitely candid—what the French would call araggedface, warning you and yet claiming a sort of indefinable admiration from its absolute courage and truthfulness. She took to the streets as kindly as if she had been born in them, rolling about in mud and dust in the full enjoyment of unfettered childhood, dealingblows, expletives, kisses and ugly names with generous indifference. With every one she quarrelled, not as children do, but as savages quarrel, fiercely and murderously; but even in this innocent age she displayed a frank preference for the male sex. Girls filled her with unlimited contempt, and she was never really happy unless surrounded by a group of noisy, quarrelling boys. Then her pretty teeth would gleam in wild laughter, and she would talk more nonsense in five minutes than any six ordinary girls in an hour.
The father saw the lamentable condition of his child, but being a philosopher and caring only for abstract meditations and his ease, he preferred that she should be kept out of his sight as much as possible, than that he should be asked to mend matters. What can a man be expected to do with a motherless baby girl? Not teach it the alphabet, surely? Nor walk it about the barren slopes of Lycabettus of a Sunday, nor initiate it into the mysteries of the Catechism? Clearly there was nothing else for a hard-working and good-tempered German to do but let nature work her will on such unpromising and unmanageable material, and continued to smoke his pipe and drink his mastic at his favourite coffee-house fronting Lycabettus. If nature failed, it was far from likely that he should succeed, and it was too much to expect him to devote his rare leisure hours to his unruly child. The neighbours did not, however, regard it in this light; but then neighbours never are disposed to regard the concerns of others from a reasonable point of view. So many improvements they could bring into the management of your family matters which they fail to bring into their own. No, no; leave aphilosopher to find the easiest road of life and to discover a way out of all domestic responsibilities. Socrates was an admirable example in this high path, and if he could discourse in public on the immortality of the soul and other subjects, while his much calumniated wife and child wanted bread at home, a more modest individual like Jacob Natzelhuber might certainly sip his mastic in the Greek sunshine, and cherish a poor opinion of the policy of Metternich, while his little daughter was running about the narrow Athenian streets.
But there was one saving and remarkable grace about Photini. Not only did she display a nascent passion for music, but even as an infant she had shown an amazing taste for thrumming imaginary tunes on every object with which her fingers came in contact. When not fighting with a dozen amiable little beggars, or rolling delightedly in mud and dust, she was always to be seen playing this imaginary music of hers, and on the few occasions when her father took her to hear the German band on the Patissia Road, the sight of the King and Queen on horseback was nothing to her in comparison with the joy of sound.
This growing passion was becoming too prominent and imperious to be long overlooked; besides, Jacob had a German’s reverence for true musical proclivities, so he purchased the cheapest piano to be had, engaged the services of a Bavarian music master who had come to Athens in the hope of making his fortune under his compatriot king, and for so many hours in the day, at least, Photini was guaranteed from mischief. Her progress was something more than astonishing, and caused the Bavarian to give his spectacles an extra polish beforeannouncing gravely to Jacob that Liszt himself could not ask for a more promising pupil. This naturally made Jacob very thoughtful, and sent his aimless meditations into quite a new channel. It is a negative condition of mind to feel that one has a poor opinion of Metternich, but to learn that one has a genius in one’s daughter leads to disagreeably positive reflections.
Now Jacob was a quiet man, we know, and the idea of an exceptional child frightened him. It was not an enviable responsibility in his estimation. Far from it, a distinctly painful one. An ordinary girl who would have grown just a little better-looking than her mother, learned to sew and housekeep in the usual way, and terminated an uneventful girlhood by marriage into something better than mechanics, thanks to his industry and economy—this was his ideal of a daughter’s career. Evidently here Nature thought differently.
As soon, however, as he had given a conscientious attention to Photini’s talent, greatly injured by the modest instrument on which she played, he came to the conclusion that this was not a case in which man can interfere, and that he was before a vocation claiming its legitimate right of sovereignty and refusing to be shifted off into the shallow byways of existence.
“I am of your opinion,” he said to the Bavarian master. “It is no common talent, that of my girl, but for my part I would far rather she did not know a major from a minor scale. It is not a woman’s business. However, I can do nothing now. I leave the matter in your hands. I am a poor man, but whatever you propose, as far as it is honourably necessary,I will make an effort to meet your proposal,” he added, with a slow, grave look.
“There is nothing for it but Germany, Natzelhuber,” said the Bavarian, promptly. “I should fancy we might manage, with the help of your father-in-law, a little influence I possess, and the girl’s own genius, to get her three or four years’ study in Leipzig. Once that much assured, she need only keep her head above water, and the waves will surely carry her——”
The Bavarian flung out his hands in an attitude suggestive of infinity.
“Well, well, so long as they do not carry her into evil,” said Jacob, shaking his head mournfully. “I am mistrustful of a public career for a woman.”
“You cannot deny that it is better than marriage with a man of your own class.”
“I am not so sure about that. But I am afraid Photini will turn out one of those women who had best avoid marriage with any one. She does not look likely to make any man happy, or herself either. A perverse, passionate, uneducated girl, with more ugly names in her head than any two ordinary street boys, and not a single good or amiable instinct in her that I can see.”
Jacob, excellent man, quite forgot to take into consideration that he himself was far from innocent of these disastrous results, and that his paternal indifference had had far more to do with her ill condition than any predisposition of the child’s.
“That is quite another matter and one that concerns me not at all,” rejoined the Bavarian, indifferently. “Art, my dear sir, Art! Fraulein Photini represents an abstract idea to me. The problem of her destiny as awoman has no attraction for me. She may marry, or she may not—she is not a pretty girl, but I have seen men make idiots of themselves about uglier. It all depends on the spectacles you use. But I am of opinion that a woman of genius has no business with marriage. Goethe, you may remember, wisely calls it the grave of her genius.”
“Probably, but there is time enough to think of that.”
Photini’s grandfather, when consulted, was only too glad to contribute towards the speculation of winging this hybrid fledgling from the parent nest. The Greeks have a naïve respect for fame, of which there was promise in Photini’s talent, so her relatives willingly abstracted a portion from the family funds for her use.
One October morning, Photini, a stripling rather than a girl, of fifteen, with big keen yellow eyes and soft dark curls breaking away from the eyebrows in petulant confusion over and round her head like a boy’s, escorted by a faintly disapproving and anxious father, left the Piræus on an Austrian liner bound for Trieste. Not at all a pretty or attractive girl, most people would decide; of a vulgar indefiniteness of type and a coarseness of expression hardly excused by the charming hair and strange eyes. But she had the virtue of extreme youth on her side, as shown in the slender and supple frame, in the freshness and surprise of her glance, and in the rounded olive cheek melting into a full throat like a bird’s. And youth, God bless it, carries its own apology anywhere; it is the time of possibilities and vague hopes. This girl might, nay, must grow less brusque, less vulgar, less boyish with the development of womanhood; and as her features would refine, so would her heart, atpresent as safe and hard as a coral, expand and open out its hidden buds of tremulous sensibility and delicate feeling.
Her second year in Leipzig brought her the third medal, and a decided reputation, yet there were many complaints against her. She had unpardonable fits of idleness broken by explosions of temper, and language hardly less gross than what might be expected in the lowest phase of society. These shortcomings, added to a sharpness of manner and a coarseness of mind, terrified and astounded her masters, who, however, were ready enough to overlook such deficiencies when under the spell of her masterful playing. A girl of seventeen with already an unmistakable fire of inspiration and an echo of Liszt in her touch was not to be despised clearly, whatever her vices, and they, alas! were many, and promised to be more. Her companions shunned her, and her masters spoke of her as “La gamine,” no other appellation being so justly indicative of her appearance and manners.
In the fourth year she left the Conservatoire, its acknowledged star, and capable now of steering her own course in whatever direction impulse or deliberate choice might push her. One of the fortunate of this earth, standing, at twenty, apart, wrapped in the conscious cloak of genius, a majesty, alas! she was incapable of measuring, and which she was destined only to trail in the mire without reaping any benefit, pecuniary or social, from its possession. It was almost as sad a mistake on the part of Nature as if she had endowed one of the lower animals with some glorious gift which could never be to it other than a grotesqueornament. The girl understood nothing of responsibility, and yet she was proud, unapproachably proud as an artist. She felt and gloried in her superiority in a stupid senseless way; could not acquit herself of the commonest civility towards those who were desirous of helping her, had not the remotest idea of gratitude or the art of gracious acceptance, and considered inconceivable rudeness to every one who addressed her as her natural right. She ought to have been happy, and would doubtless have been so had she known ambition, or felt a moderate but healthy desire to please. But she was hardly conscious of feelings of any kind, only of blind dim instincts of which she could give no account to herself. Poor dumb, unfinished creature with but half a soul, and that run to music. It was pitiable. As she massed follies, proud stupidities, and degradations one upon the other, until the thinnest thread of common sense, of merely animal self-protection was lost to view, one could only wonder and grieve, but not excuse. Nature seemed to have been the sinner, and the extravagant creature her victim. And then there were lucid moments—wretched awakenings, stupefied contemplation of the havoc that had been made of promise, of ripe chances, and, by way of anodyne, a deeper plunge into the mire.
Her first act of independence was a concert in Leipzig which proved an abnormal success, and then upon the advice of her director she went to Vienna, furnished with letters for Liszt. The amiable and courtly king of pianists received her with an exquisite cordiality, expressed the highest satisfaction with her abilities, gave her a few finishing instructions which she received,as was her wont, ungraciously enough; used his influence in securing her success with his own special public, and recommended her to Rubinstein, who was then on his way back from England. This was the beginning of the only lasting period of lucidity in her mad career.
She left Vienna with Liszt’s portrait and his autograph, “To the Queen of Sound,” added to her meagre luggage, for it was not her way to decorate her plainness of person by any unnecessary attention to her toilet. Just as, music excepted, she was totally uneducated, illiterate even, barely able to write a letter that would shame a peasant, in Greek or German,—which languages she regarded as equally her native tongues,—so her person was left rigidly unadorned. At twenty the results of untidiness are not so deplorable as at thirty or forty, for there is always the fresh round cheek and clear gaze as a relief, and then the complete absence of vanity in a very young girl, constantly before the public in a prominent position, is something so unusual that one can afford to regard it with a smile of wonder rather than one of disdain. The striking feature of the case was that she was fond of male society—particularly of the admiring and love-making male. But heaven help the innocence of the lover who expected her to put on a bow, or brush her hair, or choose a hat with a view to please him!
Rubinstein was more than satisfied with her; paid little or no attention to any eccentricity of exterior or manner, and was ready and glad to do all in his power to advance her. After some years of hard work and occasional public appearances, it was agreed that she should spend a season at St. Petersburg.
Everybody was disposed to receive her with open arms and lift her to a permanent and glorious pedestal. But good-natured and art-loving Russian princesses and countesses had calculated without their host. This young lady had no desire to be patronised or helped. People might come to her concerts or to her as pupils, and they might stay away: it mattered little to her which they did. In either case she was pretty sure to regard them as idiots, and if they came to her they would have the advantage of hearing it,—that was the difference, which made it easier for them to stay away, as not only the Russian princesses and countesses found out, but also the princes and counts. They might invite her to their entertainments, but it was a wise precaution on their part not to feel too sure of her presence—as for expecting an answer to a polite letter or message, or civil treatment upon a morning call or at a lesson, well, all this lay without the range of probabilities for the most sanguine.