Читать книгу Time's Door - Esther Meynell - Страница 6

From that time onwards Gerda’s daily life and happiness were wound round her little son, for Luigi, her husband, was a wandering comet, whose appearances, sometimes productive of storm, sometimes of beneficent gaiety, were never to be expected till he was there. He delighted in and spoilt his child in the days of its infancy, and when he discovered that the small Giovanni was enthralled by his playing, produced a violin to match the size of his fingers and proceeded to instil into him the first principles of his beloved art. He knew that to make a violinist training must begin early.

But Cavatini’s teaching of his son, always spasmodic, owing to his musical engagements and his excitable and wandering temperament, had entirely ceased when the boy was ten years old. Cavatini had not died, he had retired into a darkness. His brilliant brain had climbed to dangerous heights and then toppled down into childishness where he sat with a fiddle on his knee, plucking at the strings with his fingers as though it were a guitar and weeping because his violin was dead. For nearly a twelve-month before this break-down he had dragged his wife and his child through a series of nervous tornadoes, doing and saying things that at first seemed only a little exaggeration of his usual excitability, and falling in between into piteous tears and melancholy. For painful periods his sleep deserted him—and he burned his life so fast that he needed sleep more than most human beings. Gerda’s tears fell faster than his as she looked at his ravaged face, or stroked the dark head abandoned to her lap, fears, strange dreadful fears, rising within her mind. She tried to persuade herself that these violent alternations of mood were due to the Italian temperament. But doubts came creeping, shadowy and terrifying. Could even the wildest Italian temperament be quite so mad?—ah, that word, that word which she was trying to push out of sight! Those eyes of her husband that stared and did not see, those sudden sobbing cries, those footsteps that paced in restless misery up and down. And then there were days when he was so gay, so tender, and the sun came out from behind the cloud that was darkening all her horizon. Fear fled away, and trembling hope returned.

But the end came suddenly, and music broughtFACE OF PAGANINI it, and the greatest player who ever held a fiddle. Giovanni was in it too. Gerda had kept all she could from him—though it was not possible to do so completely. But this she could not keep. It was to be so great an occasion, so happy, so memorable. For the first time Giovanni was to hear Nicolo Paganini play, and after the concert was to speak with him. For years that prince of violinists had been held before the boy—his father had told him all that he knew of Paganini’s strange romantic history, of his magnetism, of his playing which hardly seemed of this earth. The face of Paganini fascinated all Giovanni’s waking dreams, and it was his deep secret ambition that one day he might be privileged to have lessons from him. His father laughed at this when once, inadvertently, he let the secret escape him: “You expect the great, the supreme, Paganini to teach an insect like you? Ah, well, ambition is good, my little son, but you have gone a little beyond yourself in this matter!”

So indeed it might well seem, had not destiny taken a hand in the affair.

The night of the concert came. It was a mist of bliss to Giovanni. His father, with eyes alight, with smiling countenance, all his strange frightening looks gone away; his mother, so pretty and excited, with a little string of pearls looped in her hair, and wearing her best dress of rich blue satin, striped with silver. The night, when he stepped out into it with his parents on either hand, was all blue and silver too—an immense dome of dark blue above him in which silver stars trembled.

“Look,” said his father, pointing upwards with a hand that shook a little, “All the stars are crowding round to hear Maestro Paganini!”

“Ah, my Luigi, my foolish one!” whispered Gerda, and leaned across the boy’s head to kiss her husband’s hair.

Giovanni felt as if his heart would burst with the ecstasy of it all. And then the great theatre, with the stars come much closer and shining in golden clusters at the top of wax candles, and the crowds of people packed together, whispering and murmuring and waving airy fans. But they were all forgotten when the “Pale Musician” stood before Giovanni’s eyes—so tall, so shadow thin, his long-tailed coat buttoned tight across his chest, wrinkled because it covered nothing save bones, the black locks waving above the death-white face, the hooked nose, the extraordinary eyes: a being from another and stranger world he seemed. A being of unearthly powers he was known to be when the raised bow fell on the strings of the Josef Guarnerius and all the beauty and the pain of life cried out with a bewitching and heart-shaking voice. Giovanni felt himself swept out of his small body—his spirit ceased to be that of a child and spread wings that are ageless. He knew that existence would be for ever changed for him from this day on which he had first heard Paganini. He had beheld perfection. In his state of high excitement he walked outside himself—a thing that was to happen to him at intervals throughout his life—and saw all that followed as though he were suspended in air at his own shoulder level. He saw himself taken to the artist’s room, standing dumb before Paganini, saw Paganini’s hand rest on his head for a moment, heard some uncomprehended words, saw his father, with tears streaming down his face, take Paganini’s hand and kiss it with a sort of burning humility and despair.

Then they went home. Gerda, looking at her sonDESPAIR in the light of the lamp, was so startled by his expression that she forgot to pay much attention to her husband, and was occupied with thoughts of warm goat’s milk and bed for Giovanni. In the midst of her maternal preparations there came a sudden violent splintering sound and wild cries of grief and rage. Gerda and Giovanni ran to the adjoining room and checked upon the threshold, clutching at each other, at the sight before them. Luigi, the Amati in his hand which was the most cherished of his set of fiddles, was crashing it down repeatedly upon the heavily carven corner of a chestnut wood coffer, shattering the delicate back and belly, the ebony tail-piece dangling helplessly at the end of the swinging strings. As his wife and son entered, the body of the violin was severed from the scroll and finger-board, which he flung savagely across the room, then surveyed the broken fragments at his feet and flung himself down upon them with a cry and such despair that a sharp splinter of wood tore a gash in his hand from which the blood flowed upon the floor. His wife ran to him and gathered him in her arms. But Giovanni fled across the room to the broken fiddlehead, picked it up and cuddled it to his breast. “Oh, the poor fiddle!” he said, and began to cry.