Asbeïn: From the Life of a Virtuoso. Ossip Schubin

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      "Perhaps."

      "Say positively, I beg you, and throw the traditional soldo in the fountain."

      "With the best of intentions, I cannot do that; I have none with me," he laughed, now involuntarily.

      She was charming. She wore a brown velvet bonnet that was fastened under the chin with broad ribbons. She had pushed back her veil, and the transparent brown gauze shining in the sun formed a golden background for her pretty, pale face. It was cold, although the beginning of March, and therefore her tall figure was wrapped to the feet in a sable-trimmed velvet cloak, beneath which a scarcely visible silk dress rustled very melodramatically. A delicate perfume of amber and fresh violets exhaled from her.

      "You have no soldo?" said she; "then I will lend you one." She earnestly sought in her portemonnaie, whereupon she handed him the coin. He threw it in the basin of the noisy, rippling Fontana di Trevi. The water sparkled golden for a moment, when the coin sank, and tried to form circles, but the spouting gayety of the cascade obliterated them.

      "You will come!" said Natalie, laughing gayly.

      "Yes, I will come," said he, not gayly as she, but gloomily, even grumbling. "But if you are not there," he added, "or----"

      She had already turned to go, and without replying anything to his last words, she called to him over her shoulder:

      "Via Giulia Palazzo Morsini!"

      He looked after her for a long time. The fashionable dress at that time was very ugly. This little scene took place in the fifties, when the Empress Eugenie had again brought into favor the hoop-skirt which had disappeared quite a half-century before. But still Natalie Alexandrovna was charming. How peculiar her walk was, so light and still a little dragging, dreamily gliding, withal not weary, but with a peculiar certain characteristic rhythm. He thoughtfully hummed a melody to it.

      Yes, he would come back. Whether he would have come back if the glance of the officer of the guard had not angered him? He must see, must teach this dandy!

      * * * * * *

      "You speak just as if you were a true man of the world," the princess had replied to his--as he angrily told himself--highly unsuitable and tasteless advice. Now it might perhaps be small; yes, certainly it was small, but sometimes, sometimes he would secretly have preferred to be a true man of the world instead of being--a celebrity.

      "She ran after me!" he said to himself again. "Why did she run after me? It was charming in her she would not have done it for any one else! Bah! She is still only like all the others!" And the great artist, whose life resembled a continual triumphal procession, of whom already a finger-thick biography with glaringly false dates had appeared, and concerning whom the papers every day reported something remarkable, suddenly felt a kind of envy of Count Konstantin Paulovitch Pachotin, a St. Petersburg dandy, whose name had never been in the papers, and whom he despised for his narrow-mindedness.

      He was a great genius, but, like many other great geniuses, he was of quite obscure parentage. Some asserted he came from that horrible citadel of the poor in Moscow where misery intrenches itself against progress, in filth, stupidity, and vice; others said he had been found, a scarcely week-old child, wrapped in rags, before the door of the Conservatory in St. Petersburg. There were really all kinds of accounts in the papers. This one said that he was the son of a princess of the blood and a gypsy; that one, that he descended from an old princely family of the Czechs, and many other such romantic inventions. He shrugged his shoulders scornfully at all such improvisations, without refuting them by accurate personal accounts. How did the cold, hungry, maltreated sadness of his first youth concern the world? Now he was Boris Lensky, one of the first musicians of his time. Everything else could be indifferent to the man. It was indifferent to them; it was quite indifferent to them all, only not to him. The wounds which the tormenting martyrdom of his childhood had torn in his heart had never quite healed; therefore he showed a sensitiveness and irritability which even the most sympathetic person could scarcely comprehend.

      But now he fared very well in the world. No one was so pampered, so caressed as he.

      His playing exercised such a penetrating, sense-ensnaring charm that his listeners, transported in a kind of musical intoxication, lost their capability of judging, and even the most well-bred women crowded around him with allegiance so exaggerated that it tore down the boundary of every customary demeanor.

      Another would have enjoyed this allegiance without thinking further of it; but for Lensky, on the contrary, it had a repellent effect. Child of the people to the finger-tips, totally unused to the customs of fashionable circles, his feeling of propriety was as wounded by what he plainly called insolent shamelessness as that of a peasant who for the first time sees a woman with bare shoulders.

      Besides his sense of propriety, there was another that was wounded by the lack of reserve which great ladies showed him, and that was his pride. Not only gifted with musical genius, but with a very clear head, he soon perceived that if the ladies of the great world permitted themselves freer manners with him than did women of a more modest sphere of life, they still took liberties with him of which they would have been ashamed in association with companions of their own rank. "Mon dieu, avec un virtuose, cela ne tire pas à consequence," he once heard an elegant little St. Petersburg woman say. He never forgot the words, and in consequence received all the feminine allegiance of good society with hostile distrust.

      He usually excused the tactless exuberance of a poorly cared for, badly brought up woman of the Conservatory. In society of this kind, of saddened womanly existence, incessantly touched with pity, he showed kindness to the sad enthusiasts wherever he could, and laughed at their tasteless animation. But for the great ladies, who should have known better, who thought that they alone held the monopoly of good form, and who still pursued a man like wild beasts--for these he had no consideration. His roughness in intercourse with them had become almost as proverbial as the success which he attained with them.

      Still, in his home he quite unconsciously accustomed himself to an aristocratic atmosphere, and, with the refined sense of a true artist nature, susceptible to all beauty and distinction, in association with great ladies he felt a mixture of irritation and pleasure, while pleasure gradually won the upper hand; and in foreign countries, where he was received only exceptionally and with official solemnity, and really had intimate access to salons of the second rank only, he renounced intercourse with that refined world which he abused, like so many others, without being able to escape its perfidious charm, and felt, every time that he met one of his despised pretty St. Petersburg or Moscow enthusiasts, an unmistakable joy.

      Two weeks after his meeting with Natalie at the Fontana di Trevi, Lensky appeared for the first time in the Palazzo Morsini. From a very large staircase, whose beauties he must admire by the light of the wax matches which he had brought in his pocket, he stumbled into a large vestibule, from which the servant conducted him through a heavy portière, painted with coats of arms as high as a man, into an immense drawing-room with soiled and faded yellow damask hangings and furniture.

      "Monsieur Lensky!" announced the servant.

      The virtuoso was accustomed to a universal exclamation following the announcement of his name, and the looks of the whole assembly should be directed to him.

      Nothing of the sort this time. Natalie sat near an old French lady, Marquise de C., whose knitting she kindly helped to arrange, and as the young Russian introduced the virtuoso to her, she raised her lorgnette and said: "Monsieur Lensky--ah! vraiment, that is very interesting!" whereupon, without further troubling herself about him, she continued to speak to Natalie of all kinds of social affairs, the marriage of Marie X., the debts of Alexander T., the trousseau of Aurelie СКАЧАТЬ