Part 1

Produced by Charles Bowen, from page scans provided by the Web Archive.

Transcriber's Note:

1. Page scan source: http://www.archive.org/details/asbeinfromlifeof00schuiala

ASBEIN

FROM THE LIFE OF A VIRTUOSO

BY OSSIP SCHUBIN

_TRANSLATED BY ELISE L. LATHROP_

NEW YORK WORTHINGTON CO., 747 BROADWAY 1890

Copyright, 1890, by WORTHINGTON CO.

Press of J.J. Little & Co., Astor Place, New York.

ASBEIN.[1]

FIRST BOOK.

"But--do you really not recognize me?" With these words, and with friendly, outstretched hands, a young lady hastened toward a man who, with gloomily contracted brow, wrapped in thought, went on his way without noticing either her or his surroundings. He was foolish, for his surroundings were picturesque--Rome, near the Fontana di Trevi, on a bright March afternoon. And the young lady--she was charming.

Although she had called to him in French, something about her--one could scarcely have told what--betrayed the Russian; everything, the pampered woman from the highest circles of society.

The young man whose attention she had sought to attract in such a violent and unconventional manner was just as evidently a Russian, but of quite a different condition. One could hardly decide to what fixed sphere of society he belonged, but one perceived immediately that his manners had never been improved, polished, softened by society discipline, that he was no man of the world. He was, evidently, a man who was apart from the rank and file, a man who stood far out from the conventional frame, a man whom no one could pass without twice looking after him. His form was large and somewhat heavy; his face, framed by dark, half-curled hair, in spite of the blunt profile, reminded one of Napoleon Bonaparte, but Bonaparte in the first romantic period of his life, before he had become fat and accustomed to pose for the classic head of Caesar.

She was the Princess Natalie Alexandrovna Assanow; he the feted violin virtuoso and well-known composer, Boris Lensky.

She had run herself quite out of breath to catch up with him; twice she had called to him before he heard her; then he looked around and lifted his hat.

"Boris Nikolaivitch, do you not really recognize me?" said she, now in Russian, laughing and breathless.

"You here, Princess! Since when? Why have you given me no sign of your existence?" and he took both the slender girlish hands, still outstretched to him, in his.

"We only arrived here yesterday from Naples."

"Ah! and I go there to-day." His long-drawn words betrayed very significantly a certain vexation.

"Yes, to give three concerts there. I know; it was in the newspapers," she nodded earnestly, and sighed.

"Hm!" he began; "then--" he hesitated.

"Then you do not understand why I did not wait for the concerts?" said she, gayly; "it was impossible."

"Impossible?" said he with a short, defiant motion of the head, the motion of a too-tightly checked race-horse who impatiently jerks at the bridle. "How so impossible? What word is that from the mouth of a young lady who has nothing else in the world to do but amuse herself?"

"As if I were independent!" she sighed, with comic despair. "First, mamma could not leave Naples--hm--for family reasons. My sister is married there, you know. Then--then--"

"Do not trouble yourself with polite excuses," he interrupted her. "I see that you are no longer interested in my music;" and, half-jesting, half-vexed, shrugging his shoulders, he added, "What of it? One must put up with one's destiny!"

"I am no longer interested in your music!" said she, angrily; "and you venture to say that to me, even after I have run after you--yes, really run after you, which is not proper--only to----"

She stopped, her face wore a vexed, indignant expression. "Why did you do it?" said he, roughly; "it is not becoming."

Instead of losing her self-possession, she laughed heartily. "But, Boris Nikolaivitch," said she, "you speak as if you were a true man of the world. However, as you please, I thank you for the lecture. Adieu!"

And nodding her head quite arrogantly, she was about to turn on her heel, when her look met his. She saw that she had vexed him, remained standing, blushed, and lowered her eyes.

The waters of the Acqua Nigo foamed and sparkled gayly between the edges of the stone basin which Nicolo Salvi had made for them; the noonday church-bells mingled their deep, solemn voices with the caressing rippling of the waves; the sun shone full from the deep-blue, ice-cold heaven, a glaring, unpleasant March sun, which was light without warming, like the condescending smile of a great man, and Natalie's maid who, grumbling and bored, stood a step behind her young mistress, opened a round, green fan to shield her eyes, and at the same time stamped her feet from the cold. Around, the Roman life went on in its usual lazy way. Before a small, loaded cart stood a mule with a number of red and blue tassels about its ears and on its forehead hung a brass image of the Virgin. In the door of a vegetable shop, from which came a strong smell of herbs, crouched a black-eyed, white Spitz dog, that twitched its right ear uneasily. A fat, smooth-headed Capuchin passed by, then came two shabbily dressed young people. The Capuchin stopped to scratch the mule's head, the young people nudged each other, and said in an undertone, while they pointed to the virtuoso: "_E Borisso Lensky_."

"There you have it," said the princess, shaking off her vexation with a charming, pleasant smile, and her head bent one side. "Great man that you are, and still you take it amiss in me." She said nothing more, only raised her great blue eyes and gave him a look, a never-to-be-forgotten look, behind whose roguishness a riddle was concealed.

"I take nothing amiss in you," said he, earnestly.

"Really nothing? Now, then, I can tell you how much, oh! how much, I have longed to hear you play again, that I, _coute qu'il coute_, seized the opportunity to ask you to stop in Rome on your return from Naples only to--" She hesitated, as if she were suddenly afraid of being indiscreet.

"Only to play something for the Princess Natalie Alexandrovna Assanow," he completed her sentence, laughing. "Good. I will come, Natalie Alexandrovna; in two weeks I am there. But if you are then in Florence or Nice----"

She was about to make a very positive assertion, when a slender, fashionably dressed man, with a very high hat and faultless gloves, passed by them, greeted the princess respectfully, and, with a slight squint, measured Lensky from head to foot. Lensky recognized in him an officer of the guard, Count Konstantin Paulovitch Pachotin, and remembered last winter, during the season in St. Petersburg, he paid court to Natalie. The scrutinizing look of the young man vexed him beyond bounds; everything looked red before him. "Ah! he here?" he asked the young princess with mocking emphasis. "May one congratulate you?"

She frowned and turned away her head. "No!" murmured she. Then raising her wonderful eyes to him again: "So, farewell for two weeks!"

"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 a 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 portiere, 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 Z., and the boldness of that parvenu A.

For the present he could not approach the hostess. She warded him off with a nod from the distance, for she was engaged in a very exciting occupation. Although the universal interest for spiritualistic table-tapping and moving was already quite over, the repetition of this experiment, which strangely enough often succeeded in the Palazzo Morsini, was one of the favorite pastimes of Natalie's mother, the Princess Irina Dimitrievna Assanow. She now sat at a table in the middle of the drawing-room between many others, most of them old Russians, men and women; opposite her a thin, very young man with long, straight, blond hair, a well-known magnetizer.

It seemed to Lensky as if he had never seen anything more laughable than these half-dozen almost exclusively gray-haired people who sat with solemn bearing and attentive faces around a table whose edge they could just surround with hands stretched out as far as possible.

Those present who did not directly participate in the attempt to bewitch the table, stood around observing the interesting round surface.

But the table continued in a state of desperately exciting passivity.

Lensky, usually specially invited to soirees, of which he formed the centre of attraction, felt humiliated by the four-legged wooden rival, who, to-day, took all the attention away from him.

At last the old French woman turned to the observation of the table, which permitted the young girl to devote herself a little to Lensky, rapidly becoming more gloomy; then the door opened and the butler announced Count Pachotin. The virtuoso felt not at all pleasantly toward the young dandy when he asked him unusually kindly and sympathetically whether he was contented with the result of his last concert tour.

After Pachotin had fulfilled the condescension, which as a finely cultivated nobleman he thought he owed to an artistic star he turned to Natalie and from then ignored Lensky as completely as the Marquise de C. had done. Lensky meanwhile morosely pulled long horse-hairs from the holes in the thread-bare arms of the damask chair. He was very helpless in spite of his already great renown. His actions in society were solely confined to playing and permitting the ladies to rave over him. He did not understand how to take an inconspicuous part in the conversation, and to cross the room for any other purpose than to take up his violin made him quite giddy.

The table meanwhile still refused to move. The excitement became general.

"_Voyons_, M. Lensky," called the Marquise de C., suddenly turning to the young artist, lorgnette at her eyes; "if you should give us a little music perhaps it would act upon the legs of this stiff-necked table."

A man quick at repartee would have answered the silly remark with a gay jest. But Lensky grew deathly pale, sprang up; in that moment the resisting sacrifice of magnetism began to totter and tremble.

Even Pachotin left his place near Natalie in order to watch closely the interesting spectacle. The magnetizers rose and, with earnest, triumphant faces, accompanied the table, which now seemed to have entered into the spirit of the affair and took the most remarkable steps with its wooden legs.

"_Vous partez deja_?" asked Natalie, coming up to the virtuoso.

"I am no longer needed," said Lensky, with a glance at the table, and bowed without touching the outstretched hand of the young girl.

Without, in the vestibule just as he was about to put his arms in the overcoat which the servant held out to him, he saw the princess, who had hastened after him.

"I cannot let you go away angry," said she. "Come to-morrow to lunch. We never receive in the morning, but you will be welcome."

This time he took her hand in his, and looked in her eyes with a peculiar mixture of anger and tenderness.

"You know I do everything that you wish," murmured he; "but----"

"Well?" She smiled pleasantly and encouragingly. He turned away his head and went.

"Perhaps in reality she is only like the others, but still she is bewitching!" he murmured, as he stumbled down the old marble steps of the palace in the darkness.

* * * * *

Yes, she was bewitching. Many still remember how charming she was at that time. She was from Moscow, and a true Moscow woman; that is to say, deeper, more polished, more intellectual, than the average St. Petersburg woman, whom a pert Frenchman has described as "_Parisiennes a la sauce tartare_." Lensky had met her the former year at her relatives' in Petersburg, where they had sent her for the ball season, perhaps with the idea that she would make a good match.

Her domestic circumstances were quite disturbed. Her mother, a former beauty, and who in her youth had been much admired at the court of Alexander I., could not adapt herself to her poverty--that is to say, she absolutely could not exist on the very moderate remains of a splendid property which her husband had squandered. She never complained; she only never kept within her means. She was always planning new reforms, but her most saving plans always proved costly when carried out.

When she summoned Natalie home from St. Petersburg the former May she had just formed a quite special resolution: she would travel to a foreign country, in order, as she expressed it, to be unconstrainedly shabby and economical. Her unconstrained shabbiness in Rome consisted in living in a very picturesque _palazzo_ with two maids brought with her from Russia, a male factotum, and a number of Italian assistants; by day, clad in a faded sky-blue _peignoir_, stretched on a lounge, alternately reading French novels and playing patience; in the evening, receiving an amusing assembly of _gens du monde_ and celebrities, among whom the already mentioned magnetizer enjoyed her especial sympathy, at dinner or tea. Her economy culminated in locking up the most trifling articles with great punctiliousness and never being able to find the keys; for which reason the locksmith must be frequently summoned.

The Russian maids naturally never moved their hands, the Italian assistants wiped the dust from one piece of furniture to another, and so the household would really have made quite an impression of having come down in the world if the butler, whom they had brought with them had not saved it by his aristocratic prestige. A Frenchman and valet of the deceased prince, Monsieur Baptiste was not only outwardly decorative, but of a useful nature. His principal occupation consisted in sitting in the vestibule, with finely-shaved upper lip and imposing side-whiskers, intrenched behind a newspaper, and overpowering the creditors if they ventured to present their unpaid bills.

* * * * *

Lensky had resolved to leave Rome the next day, and to ignore the invitation of the princess. Returned to the hotel, he immediately set about packing; that is to say, he in all haste wrapped and squeezed his effects together in any manner and threw them in his trunk as one throws potatoes in a sack. Then he ordered his bill from the waiter and a carriage for the next morning. When the waiter at the appointed hour presented the bill and announced the carriage he showed him out. From ten o'clock on he drew out his chronometer every quarter of an hour; at twelve he appeared in the Palazzo Morsini.

"You are punctual," said the princess, stretching out her hand to him; "that is nice of you. I was terribly afraid that you would not come. We are quite among ourselves; only mamma and we two. Does that suit you?"

Again she bent her head to one side and looked at him with that peculiar glance, behind whose roguishness a riddle was concealed. What was it? Something sweet, perhaps something tender, earnest--or only a gay triumph or planned conquest?