Asbein Part 15

Opposite Lensky, the short-armed, fat piano virtuoso of the troupe, a very solid father of a family, who tried to sleep, and from time to time looked round angrily at the disturbers of his rest; and near Lensky, wrapped in furs to the tip of her nose, sat a new prima donna, Signora Zingarelli, of whom Morinsky promised himself the highest success, a beautiful, red-haired Belgian, with long, narrow sphinx eyes. She had tried to enter into conversation with Lensky, but he had turned from her, monosyllabic and coa.r.s.e.

The train sighed and groaned. Fiery clouds flew by the window in the black night. The close atmosphere in the coup, the odor of paint, musk, fat meat, hot fur and coal, maddened Lensky; he wished to open one of the windows--the singers protested, Morinsky awoke, settled the dispute:--the window remained closed.

A terrible longing for his love, for his beautiful, poetic home, came over Lensky. He thought of his last night journey, with wife and child, quite alone in a coup. He saw the charming serpentine lines which the slender, supple figure of his young wife described on the cushions. She slept. Her little head rested on a red silk cushion which she took about with her on all her travels. How tender and delicate her profile stood out from that colored ground! She coughed in her sleep; he stood up to draw the fur mantle which covered her closer up around her shoulders. Drunk with sleep, she opened her eyes and with half unconscious tenderness rubbed her smooth, cool cheeks against her hand.

The sweet fragrance of violets which exhaled from her person smote his face. Then--a jolt!--He started up--he must have slept. In any case he had dreamed. His travelling companions all slept now; their heads on their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, only the pretty red-haired head of the Zingarelli lay on Lensky's shoulder. She opened her long, narrow eyes, smiled at him--a shrill whistle--the train stopped.

"Amiens!" cried the conductor. "Amiens!" All got out.

While his colleagues plundered the restaurant, Lensky, smoking a cigarette, wandered around the platform alone. The others had all taken their places again, when Morinsky, who had gotten out to look for him, and saw him wandering to another coup, called after him: "Here, Monsieur Lensky, here!"

But Lensky only stamped his foot impatiently: "Leave me in peace, I am not obliged to make the whole journey in the same cage with your menagerie!" he said.

Six weeks later not a trace of his homesickness remained. At the artist banquet, which usually followed the concerts, symposiums which began with bad witticisms and ended with an orgy, he was the most unrestrained, the wantonest of all.

He was like one who, suddenly relieved from the pressure of iron fetters, at first, unaccustomed to every free movement, can scarcely move his limbs, but afterward cannot weary of stretching them, and moving them in unlimited freedom.

He broke every bond, indulged every humor. He no longer thought of Natalie and the children, he did not wish to think of them. Remembrance was ashamed to follow him on the way he now went.

It was hard for him to write to his wife, but it was still harder for him to read her letters. And yet she wrote so charmingly, so lovingly!

She did not say much of herself, but so much the more of the children, especially of Kolia. With what shining eyes he listened, when she read the reports of the triumphs of his father to him, she wrote, and how he seized every newspaper that he saw, and then asked her: "Is there anything in it about papa?" and how, with his little playmates--she pa.s.sed the winter with her mother, in Cannes--he boasted importantly of the homage which fell share to his father, and how she did not have the heart to reprove him for it. How he drew ships incessantly, and how she made use of the interest which he took in his father's journey to give him his first lessons in geography, and many other such tender trifles.

These letters vexed him; when he had read them, he despised himself and his surroundings, and for two, three days, remained melancholy and unsociable.

At last he no longer read them, at most only glanced over them, convinced himself hastily that "all was as usual," and then folded them up and laid them aside.

Then came the time when he told himself it was foolish to have such scruples. He was what he always had been, an exceptional man, a t.i.tanic nature. He could not be judged like the others, he could not have exercised his compelling charm over the ma.s.ses without the fiery violence of his temperament. His success was wonderful. Since they had celebrated the reception of Jenny Lind with discharge of cannon in New York or Boston--history differs as to which, is always careless in relation to prima donnas--no artist had received more homage than Boris Lensky. The women especially seemed as if bewitched by him.

He did not take the situation sentimentally, but rather cynically; still he accustomed himself to the horrible noise of the public, which followed his performances, to the cries of the crowd which accompanied him without, when he left the concert hall, to the illuminated streets in which every window was filled with gazers when he drove home.

When the excitement was once over, a kind of shame overpowered him.

What signified these virtuoso triumphs? People always applauded the stupidest piece the loudest. He attained no such effect with a sonata of Beethoven, or Schumann, as with a mad tarentella which he had composed long ago for his wonderful fingers, and of which he was now ashamed.

In Boston, he omitted this tarentella, which had become a nightmare to him, from the programme.

The people remained lukewarm, and so much already did his over-excited nerves desire the shrill storm of applause, that he voluntarily added the trivial and wearying piece of artifice--he, who had formerly so despised his virtuoso triumphs!

The lilies stand straight and slender, with golden hearts in their deep, white calices, right and left of the door of the little Hermitage, into which Natalie has again moved when the first roses bloom.

It is July. Lensky has fixed his return for the fifteenth. "Afternoon, with the first train that I can catch; but do not worry if I should be late," said his letter.

Not at the station, no, only to the hedge which incloses the park, will Natalie go to meet him.

Kolia quivers with impatience. Natalie counts the hours, draws out her watch--it has stopped. She hurries in the dining-room to consult the clock on the mantel, and discovers Kolia, who, kneeling on a chair, moves the hands.

"What are you doing?" says she, laughing.

The boy sighs impatiently. "I am fixing the clock, mamma. I am sure it must be sick, it goes too slowly to-day."

How she kisses him for it! How pleased she will be to tell Boris of it!

"Hark!"

A shrill sound of a bell, a penetrating whistle; the train has come.

She fetches her little daughter, who has had a charming little white dress put on her, in honor of her father's arrival.

With the little one on her arm, and Kolia at her hand, she steps out under the lindens, which are in full bloom, and throw a sunlit shadowy carpet over the path. Oh, how her poor heart beats! She kisses the tiny hands of her little daughter from excitement, looks scrutinizingly at the little child. Will he think her pretty?

She stands at the hedge of the park, looks out on the street, gazes, waits, sees the people return from the railroad. Now he must come! but no, the white, dusty street is empty; a scornfully whispering breeze blows away the footprints of the last pa.s.ser-by, a couple of white linden-blossoms fall from the tree-tops--he has not come!

And with slow steps, as one wearily drags himself along after a great disappointment, she turns toward the house. Kolia gives a deep sigh. "I don't understand it, mamma," says he.

"Papa will come with the next train; he has missed this one," his mother consoles him.

For a while he trips silently beside her, then suddenly raising his head and looking at her with his earnest, thoughtful child's eyes, he says:

"We would not have missed the train, would we, mamma?"

And once more the bell sounds in the solemn quiet, and Natalie's heart beats loudly--and he comes not.

Ever sadder, she wanders through the empty rooms, into which the sunlight presses through a shady, cool, perfumed curtain of foliage.

"How can one stay an hour longer than one must in the sultry, dusty, sunny, wearying Paris?" she asks herself.

Meanwhile Lensky sits with his colleagues in the _Trois Frres_ at a breakfast which began at one o'clock, and now at five o'clock has not yet ended. A breakfast at which all laugh and make jokes--only he broods silently.

He is satiated with this rope-dancer's existence--heartily satiated--he longs for his home, for his dear, incomparable wife, but he delays the moment of meeting as long as he can. A kind of shame contracts his throat at the thought of meeting her eyes. He knows she will ask him no questions, but still----

Once more the railway bell has in vain startled Natalie and her little son. Evening has come. The excellent little dinner which was prepared in honor of the return has been served and taken away quite untouched.

Kolia incessantly pulls his mother's sleeve and asks ever more importunately: "Why does not father come? Why does he not come?"

Maschenka has long been divested of her white muslin finery, and lies in her cradle. Kolia obstinately refuses to go to bed until his father has returned. Weary and tearful he wanders from one corner of the drawing-room to the other and will not play.

Now, with little head on his arm, he has fallen asleep over his picture books at a low child's table.

The roses which Natalie arranged so carefully in the vases wither. The white draperies of her dress are limp and tumbled.

Once again the bell rings. It is the last train to-day. She does not wake Kolia. Why should he uselessly vex himself this time also?

Softly she steps on the porch. The moon stands in the heavens; the trees are black. A gray, transparent mist arises from the earth which obliterates all contours. The flowers smell unusually sweet, and, in luxuriant melancholy, confess so much to the pale, cold moon that they have shamefacedly been silent about to the sun.