Читать книгу The Son of Clemenceau - Александр Дюма-сын - Страница 6

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By listening to others and observing them, man obtains the material for self-preservation. Evidently this star of the minor stage was a woman to be avoided; a rising light which might scar the sight and burn the fingers of too venturesome an admirer. Claudius had a premonition that he ought to go out and kill the few minutes in strolling the streets, before keeping the appointment, even at the risk of being questioned by the police. But he overcame the impulsion, and waited to face what might be a danger the more.

All the hall, by instinct and from the stories circulating—perhaps circulated by the agents of the management—divined that no common attraction was to be presented. Besides, to displace La Belle Stamboulane worthily on the stage, that chosen arena where the female gladiator carries the day, a miracle of beauty, wit and skill was requisite. Elsewhere, ability, practice, art, artifice, many gifts and accomplishments may triumph, but the fifth element as indispensable as the others, air, water, fire and earth—it is love, which legitimately monopolizes the theatre for its exhibition and glorification. Men and women come to such places of amusement to hear love songs, see love scenes, and share in the fictitious joys and sorrows of love, which they long to enact in reality. Nothing is above love; nothing equals it. He reigns as a master in a temple, with woman as the high-priestess, and man the victim or the chosen reward.

Preceding the novelty, a bass-singer roared a drinking-song, in which he likened human life to a brewer's house, in which some quenched their thirst quickly and departed; others stayed to quaff, jest, tell stories to cronies, before staggering out "full;" the oldest went to sleep there. Though rich-voiced and liked, this time he retired in silence, for the audience was tormented with impatience.

The orchestra struck up a fashionable waltz, and, as the door, at the back of a drawing-room scene, was opened in both flaps by the liveried servants, a young lady entered, so fresh, delightful and easy that for a moment it seemed as if it were a member of the "highest life" who had blundered off the street into this strange world.

From her glistening hair of gold to the tip of her white satin slippers, with preposterously high heels, this was the new incarnation of the woman who ends the Nineteenth Century. She was indisputably beautiful, and Claudius, who had thought that the Jewess was incomparable, feared that the apple would have to be halved, since neither could have borne it entire away. But the Jewess's loveliness exalted the beholder; this one's was of the strange, irritating sort, resisted with difficulty and alluring a man into those byways which end in the gaming hell, the saturnalian halls, and the suicide's grave. Love had never chosen a more appetizing form to be the pivot on which human folly—perhaps human genius—was to spin idly and uselessly, like a beetle on a pin in a naturalist's cabinet.

Kaiserina von Vieradlers was the modern Venus, a creation of the modiste rather than of the sculptor; though hips and bosom were developed extravagantly, the long waist was absurdly small; but no token of ill health from the tight lacing appeared in the irreproachable shape, the well-turned arms and the countenance which was unmarred in a single lineament; the movements were not strictly ladylike, they were too unfettered in spite of the smooth gloves and the stylish unwrinkled ball dress, rather short in front to parade the slippers mentioned and silk stockings so nicely moulded to the trim ankle as to show the dimple. She was more fair in her eighteenth year—if she were so old—than a Danish baby in the cradle. The yellow hair had a clear golden tint not tawny, and the fineness was remarkable of the stray threads that serpentined out of the artistic braid and drooping ringlets. The blue eyes had a multitude of expressions and gleams; now hard as the blue diamond's ray, now soft as the lapis lazuli's glow of azure; the expression was at present one of longing, tender, cajoling and coaxing—like a gentle child's, never refused a thing for which it silently pleaded.

The costume was a trifle exaggerated, as is allowable on the minor stage, but what was that in our topsy-turvy age, when the disreputable woman in a mixed ball is conspicuous among her spotless sisters by the quiet correctness of her toilet?

Kaiserina came down to the flaring footlights, after a little trepidation, which the inexorable demon of stage-fright exacted from her, with the swing and confident step of one sure that—while man may be unjust, cruel and oppressive to her sex off the stage—here she would reign and finally triumph. She bowed her head, but it was to acknowledge her gracious acceptance of the tribute of applause; she moistened her fiery-coal lips with a serpent's active tongue; she surveyed her dominion with eyes that assumed a passing emerald tint. There was a depth to those apparently superficial glances. It seemed to Claudius that one had singled him out, and he fancied, as his eyes became fastened on this vision of concentrated worldly bliss, that it was for him that she stretched her plump neck, waved her arms in long gloves, undulated her waist and murmured—though to others she was but repeating her song during the orchestral prelude:

"You talk of plunging into the strife; you are ready to endure privations, you would study and toil till you vanquish. Nonsense; you had far better repose, recruit after the humdrum, exhaustive life of college; enjoy life a little. Hear a love-song, not a professor's lecture—see a dance of the ballet, not the procession of the deans and proctors; come to me for I am immediate sensation—the pleasure for all times—eternal intoxication—certain oblivion—the ideal bliss of the Hindoo! I am the grandest proof of Life—I am Love embodied!"

What did she sing to the strains of the voluptuous-waltz made vocal? The words mattered not; in Esquimaux they would have been as intelligible from the intonation with which she imbued every note, and the restricted but perfectly comprehensible gestures with which she emphasized the phrases of double meaning—one for the literary censors who had "passed" this corruption, the other for even the more obtuse of the common herd.

The rival whom, without having seen her, she had dethroned, was obliterated. It was not a transfer of allegiance—it was Semiramis; trampling an overthrown empress among the charred ruins of her palace, acclaimed without one dissentient shout, in her stead, and as the initial of a new line of sovereigns. She enchanted, interested and amused, while Rebecca had awed, ravished and strove apparently in vain to lift to a level where the élite alone soar without dread of a fall.

A witty cardinal has said that if a fly were seen in the drinking-cup by an Italian, a Frenchman and a German, respectively, the first would send it away, the second fish out the insect before he drank, while the German would gulp liquor and fly, without demur.

The good audience of Freyers' Harmonista swallowed the so-called Fraulein von Vieradlers, flies and all! Claudius saw no more clearly than they; not only was the girl an unsurpassable idol, but to its very feet it was pure gold and immaculate ivory. An insane idea seized him not only to win her—a hundred around him shared that desire—but to keep her spotless, as he thought her, whatever the gossips had said. After all, slander had no opening to attack one whose youth was manifest; who owed no complexion to the wax-mask, the bismuth powder, and the carmine; whose hair was real and fine and of a shade which no dye could imitate; and whose movements, though in a society dance far removed from the wild whirl of the monads seen on this same stage, had the freedom of the bacchantes.

After all, the unworthiness of the object no more changes the quality of love than that of the glass alters the banquet of wine.

Oh, to withdraw her from this turbulent career, for which surely she was not inextricably destined, and let her be the bright but flawless ornament of a happy home and a choice circle—if not the lady of fashion, in case the student realized one of his fantastic dreams of aimless ambition. The quiet learner felt an immense flame usurp the place of his blood; he seemed gifted with the powers of the athletic Duke of Munich, Christopher the Leaper, whose statue adorned the proscenium, and like him, clearing the orchestra with a bound of twelve feet, he would have grasped the girl wasting her graces of voice and person on these boors, and carried her off to a more congenial sphere.

Obliged to repeat her song and the dance which filled the gap between two verses, the charmer held the spectators in a spell even more firm than that she had first imposed.

No one was conscious at the first that down the central aisle had come a little party odd enough in its components and awe-inspiring in what might be called its rear-guard to break even enchantment more potent.

An old woman, wearing over sordid garments an old furred Polish pelisse, was the guide—the herald, so to say, to a gentleman in gold spectacles and a black suit and silk hat, an inspector of police, a sergeant of the watch, while behind this formidable official nucleus marched a serried body of civil and of military police. After them all, wringing his fat hands, trotted the proprietor, with a terrified expression too great not to be assumed. Waiters completed the retinue, wearing faces much whiter than the napkins slung on their arms.

As the orchestra faced the audience, they perceived this inroad before the latter and, as by a signal, ceased playing. The startled dancer, for all her aristocratic self-command, stopped immediately for explanation, and, riveting her glances on the female head of the intruders, whom she recognized—that was clear—stood stupor-stricken.

Claudius, following her hint, turned to the center and had no difficulty in recognizing in the woman arrayed in the Polish pelisse, the chief of the beggars, Baboushka. He recalled the remark of the Jew, that she befriended this debutante, and he was averse to believing it. That delicious creature and this hideous one in ties of communion! ridiculous, monstrous!

Spite of his concern for himself, Claudius noticed that twenty or thirty of the spectators, apparently perplexed at the rare conjunction of their leader and the authorities in friendly communication, would not wait for the elucidation but began to make a rush for the outlets.

The voice of the town inspector, rotund and sonorous, froze them with terror, although not personal.

"Gentlemen—(the ladies were apparently here only on sufferance, and the stage-performer was of no consideration in the authorities' eyes)—Gentlemen, a murder has been committed and we seek the culprit here in your midst!"

"Murder!" and the audience rose to their feet like one man.

"Stand up here," said the functionary, pointing to a place on a bench which a timid spectator had vacated, and pushing Baboushka roughly, "and point out the man who has made away with the honorable Major von Sendlingen."

"Major von Sendlingen!" repeated the audience, shocked, as the officer had been seen but the night previously among them in lusty life, and death is a spectre most terrible in a saloon of mirth and carousal.

After that general exclamation, a silence ensued; one that meant acquiescence in the proceedings of the police.

"I must have killed him," thought the student. "This is a black prospect! I had better have quitted the hall and profited by the invitation of refuge which Herr Daniels offered me."

For the moment, he could take no part, though he could not doubt that Baboushka would denounce him—a stranger, and the principal in the duel with canes. His cloak would help toward the identification and unless the hag's crew had abstracted it, it would be forthcoming, he doubted not.

Indeed, elevated on her perch, able to see the faces of all around her, the hag's aged but brilliant eyes rapidly scanned those nearest her in wider and wider circles. All at once they became fixed upon Claudius, and by instinct, the neighbors fell away from him so that he was isolated. She extended her arm with an unnatural vigor, and in a voice also unexpectedly strong with malice, cried:

"That is he! there you have the slayer of poor Major von Sendlingen!"

At that very moment, a shrill, ear-splitting whistle sounded; and the gas-jets all over the hall went out too simultaneously for the act not to be that of a hand at the inlet from the street-main. Claudius heard the soldiers and policemen buffeting the people to scramble over the benches toward him. He had but a single road to a possible escape: by the little door in the wall through which Rebecca Daniels had ushered him into the auditorium. He stooped as he turned, to elude any outstretched hands, drove himself like a wedge through the compacted mass of frightened spectators and, spite of the gloom, the deeper because of the glare preceding it, he reached the egress. The uninitiated would never have suspected its existence, for the actors and staff of the establishment alone had the right and knowledge to use it.

"Lights, lights!" the functionaries were shouting.

By the time matches were struck and lanterns brought into the scene of confusion, Claudius had opened the panel, leaped through and closed it. He did not dally in the passage, but hastened to follow the walled-in road as well as he might by which he had penetrated the theatrical region.

At the dividing-line, where the path parted to the men's and to the ladies' dressing-rooms, he perceived a ghostly figure in the obscurity which also prevailed here from the general extinction of the illuminant. He was about shrinking back and fleeing in another direction when eyes blazed in the dark like a cat's, and the sweet, unmistakable voice of the singer, who had enthralled him, ejaculated:

"As God lives, it is you!"

"Suppose it is I!" he returned, impatiently. "Stand aside, or—"

"You must not pass here!" she returned, laying her hands on his lifted arm.

"Must not? We shall see about that!" and he repulsed her violently.

"No, no; you are too hasty! I mean that would be a fatal course. Here, here!" seizing him again and dragging him with her. "You were right to kill that ruffian! to cane him to death—like the Russian grand-dukes, he was not born to die by the sword. To abduct one woman while paying court to another, the traitor! But, never heed that! He is punished, and you must be saved. Here is an outlet: pursue the passage to the end and leave the town!"

"But I—"

"How can you repay me? Bah! repay me in the other world—below, with a drop of cold water when I parch!" And with a dulcet yet demoniacal laugh, the singular creature pushed him into a lightless lobby, slammed a door and seemed to run away, singing the refrain of the waltz which was to haunt him forever-more.