A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson

E >> Ernest Dowson et al >> The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson




Though it was not until many years had passed that I heard that little
criticism, the purchase of my fiddle was destined very shortly to bring
my life in contact with its author. Those were the days when a certain
restraint grew up between Ninette and myself. Ninette, it must be
confessed, was jealous of the fiddle. Perhaps she knew instinctively that
music was with me a single and absorbing passion, from which she was
excluded. She was no genius, little Ninette, and her organ was nothing more
to her than the means of making a livelihood; she felt not the smallest
_tendresse_ for it, and could not understand why a dead and inanimate
fiddle, made of mere wood and catgut, should be any more to me than that.
How could she know that to me it was never a dead thing, that even when it
hung hopelessly out of my reach, in the window of M. Boudinot, before ever
it had given out wild, impassioned music beneath my hands, it was always a
live thing to me, alive and with a human, throbbing heart, vibrating with
hope and passion.

So Ninette was jealous of the fiddle, and being proud in her way, she
became more and more quiet and reticent, and drew herself aloof from me,
although, wrapped up as I was in the double egoism of art and boyhood,
I failed to notice this. I have been sorry since that any shadow of
misunderstanding should have clouded the closing days of our partnership.
It is late to regret now, however. When my fiddle was added to our
belongings, we took to going out separately. It was more profitable, and,
besides, Ninette, I think, saw that I was growing a little ashamed of
her organ. On one of these occasions, as I played before a house in the
Faubourg St. Germain, the turning point of my life befell me. The house,
outside which I had taken my station was a large, white one, with a balcony
on the first floor. This balcony was unoccupied, but the window looking to
it was open, and through the lace curtains I could distinguish the sound
of voices. I began to play; at first, one of the airs that Maddalena had
taught me; but before it was finished, I had glided off, as usual, into an
improvisation.

When I was playing like that, I threw all my soul into my fingers, and I
had neither ears nor eyes for anything round me. I did not therefore notice
until I had finished playing that a lady and a young man had come out into
the balcony, and were beckoning to me.

'Bravo!' cried the lady enthusiastically, but she did not throw me the
reward I had expected. She turned and said something to her companion, who
smiled and disappeared. I waited expectantly, thinking perhaps she had sent
him for her purse. Presently the door opened, and the young man issued from
it. He came to me and touched me on the shoulder.

'You are to come with me,' he said, authoritatively, speaking in French,
but with an English accent. I followed him, my heart beating with
excitement, through the big door, into a large, handsome hall and up a
broad staircase, thinking that in all my life I had never seen such a
beautiful house.

He led me into a large and luxurious _salon_, which seemed to my astonished
eyes like a wonderful museum. The walls were crowded with pictures, a
charming composition by Gustave Moreau was lying on the grand piano,
waiting until a nook could be found for it to hang. Renaissance bronzes
and the work of eighteenth century silversmiths jostled one another on
brackets, and on a table lay a handsome violin-case. The pale blinds were
drawn down, and there was a delicious smell of flowers diffused everywhere.
A lady was lying on a sofa near the window, a handsome woman of about
thirty, whose dress was a miracle of lace and flimsiness.

The young man led me towards her, and she placed two delicate, jewelled
hands on my shoulders, looking me steadily in the face.

'Where did you learn to play like that, my boy?' she asked.

'I cannot remember when I could not fiddle, Madame,' I answered, and that
was true.

'The boy is a born musician, Felix,' said Lady Greville. 'Look at his
hands.'

And she held up mine to the young man's notice; he glanced at them
carelessly.

'Yes, Miladi,' said the young man, 'they are real violin hands. What were
you playing just now, my lad?'

'I don't know, sir,' I said. 'I play just what comes into my head.'

Lady Greville looked at her nephew with a glance of triumph.

'What did I tell you?' she cried. 'The boy is a genius, Felix. I shall have
him educated.'

'All your geese are swans, Auntie,' said the young man in English.

Lady Greville, however, ignored this thrust.

'Will you play for me now, my dear,' she said, 'as you did before--just
what comes into your head?'

I nodded, and was getting my fiddle to my chin, when she stopped me.

'Not that thing,' bestowing a glance of contempt at my instrument. 'Felix,
the Stradivarius.'

The young man went to the other side of the room, and returned with the
case which I had noticed. He put it in my hand, with the injunction to
handle it gently. I had never heard of Cremona violins, nor of my namesake
Stradivarius; but at the sight of the dark seasoned wood, reposing on its
blue velvet, I could not restrain a cry of admiration.

I have that same instrument in my room now, and I would not trust it in the
hands of another for a million.

I lifted the violin tenderly from its case, and ran my bow up the gamut.

I felt almost intoxicated at the mellow sounds it uttered. I could have
kissed the dark wood, that looked to me stained through and through with
melody.

I began to play. My improvisation was a song of triumph and delight; the
music, at first rapid and joyous, became slower and more solemn, as the
inspiration seized on me, until at last, in spite of myself, it grew into
a wild and indescribable dirge, fading away in a long wail of unutterable
sadness and regret. When it was over I felt exhausted and unstrung, as
though virtue had gone out from me. I had played as I had never played
before. The young man had turned away, and was looking out of the window.
The lady on the sofa was transfigured. The languor had altogether left her,
and the tears were streaming down her face, to the great detriment of the
powder and enamel which composed her complexion.

She pulled me towards her, and kissed me.

'It is beautiful, terrible!' she said; 'I have never heard such strange
music in my life. You must stay with me now and have masters. If you can
play like that now, without culture and education, in time, when you have
been taught, you will be the greatest violinist that ever lived.'

I will say of Lady Greville that, in spite of her frivolity and
affectations, she does love music at the bottom of her soul, with the
absorbing passion that in my eyes would absolve a person for committing all
the sins in the Decalogue. If her heart could be taken out and examined
I can fancy it as a shield, divided into equal fields. Perhaps, as her
friends declare, one of these might bear the device 'Modes et Confections';
but I am sure that you would see on the other, even more deeply graven, the
divine word 'Music.'

She is one of the few persons whose praise of any of my compositions gives
me real satisfaction; and almost alone, when everybody is running, in true
goose fashion, to hear my piano recitals, she knows and tells me to stick
to my true vocation--the violin.

'My dear Baron,' she said, 'why waste your time playing on an instrument
which is not suited to you, when you have Stradivarius waiting at home for
the magic touch?'

She was right, though it is the fashion to speak of me now as a second
Rubenstein. There are two or three finer pianists than I, even here
in England. But I am quite sure, yes, and you are sure, too, oh my
Stradivarius, that in the whole world there is nobody who can make such
music out of you as I can, no one to whom you tell such stories as you tell
to me. Any one, who knows, could see by merely looking at my hands that
they are violin and not piano hands.

'Will you come and live with me, Anton?' said Lady Greville, more calmly.
'I am rich, and childless; you shall live just as if you were my child. The
best masters in Europe shall teach you. Tell me where to find your parents,
Anton, and I will see them to-night.'

'I have no parents,' I said, 'only Ninette. I cannot leave Ninette.'

'Shade of Musset, who is Ninette?' asked Felix, turning round from the
window.

I told him.

'What is to be done?' cried Lady Greville in perplexity. 'I cannot have the
girl here as well, and I will not let my Phoenix go.'

'Send her to the Soeurs de la Misericorde,' said the young man carelessly;
'you have a nomination.'

'Have I?' said Lady Greville, with a laugh. 'I am sure I did not know it.
It is an excellent idea; but do you think he will come without the other? I
suppose they were like brother and sister?'

'Look at him now,' said Felix, pointing to where I stood caressing the
precious wood; 'he would sell his soul for that fiddle.'

Lady Greville took the hint. 'Here, Anton,' said she, 'I cannot have
Ninette here--you understand, once and for all. But I will see that she
is sent to a kind home, where she will want for nothing and be trained up
as a servant. You need not bother about her. You will live with me and be
taught, and some day, if you are good and behave, you shall go and see
Ninette.'

I was irresolute, but I only said doggedly, feeling what would be the end,
'I do not want to come, if Ninette may not.'

Then Lady Greville played her trump card.

'Look, Anton,' she said, 'you see that violin. I have no need, I see, to
tell you its value. If you will come with me and make no scene, you shall
have it for your very own. Ninette will be perfectly happy. Do you agree?'

I looked at my old fiddle, lying on the floor. How yellow and trashy it
looked beside the grand old Cremona, bedded in its blue velvet.

'I will do what you like, Madame,' I said.

'Human nature is pretty much the same in geniuses and dullards,' said
Felix. 'I congratulate you, Auntie.'

And so the bargain was struck, and the new life entered upon that very
day. Lady Greville sought out Ninette at once, though I was not allowed to
accompany her.

I never saw Ninette again. She made no opposition to Lady Greville's
scheme. She let herself be taken to the Orphanage, and she never asked, so
they said, to see me again.

'She's a stupid little thing,' said Lady Greville to her nephew, on her
return, 'and as plain as possible; but I suppose she was kind to the boy.
They will forget each other now I hope. It is not as if they were related.'

'In that case they would already be hating each other. However, I am quite
sure your protégé will forget soon enough; and, after all, you have nothing
to do with the girl.'

I suppose I did not think very much of Ninette then; but what would you
have? It was such a change from the old vagrant days, that there is a good
deal to excuse me. I was absorbed too in the new and wonderful symmetry
which music began to assume, as taught me by the master Lady Greville
procured for me. When the news was broken to me, with great gentleness,
that my little companion had run away from the sisters with whom she had
been placed--run away, and left no traces behind her, I hardly realised
how completely she would have passed away from me. I thought of her for a
little while with some regret; then I remembered Stradivarius, and I could
not be sorry long. So by degrees I ceased to think of her.

I lived on in Lady Greville's house, going with her, wherever she
stayed--London, Paris, and Nice--until I was thirteen. Then she sent me
away to study music at a small German capital, in the house of one of the
few surviving pupils of Weber. We parted as we had lived together, without
affection.

Personally Lady Greville did not like me; if anything, she felt an actual
repugnance towards me. All the care she lavished on me was for the
sake of my talent, not for myself. She took a great deal of trouble in
superintending, not only my musical education, but my general culture. She
designed little mediæval costumes for me, and was indefatigable in her
endeavours to impart to my manners that finish which a gutter education had
denied me.

There is a charming portrait of me, by a well-known English artist, that
hangs now in her ladyship's drawing-room. A pale boy of twelve, clad in an
old-fashioned suit of ruby velvet; a boy with huge, black eyes, and long
curls of the same colour, is standing by an oak music-stand, holding before
him a Cremona violin, whose rich colouring is relieved admirably by the
beautiful old point lace with which the boy's doublet is slashed. It is a
charming picture. The famous artist who painted it considers it his best
portrait, and Lady Greville is proud of it.

But her pride is of the same quality as that which made her value my
presence. I was in her eyes merely the complement of her famous fiddle.

I heard her one day express a certain feeling of relief at my approaching
departure.

'You regret having taken him up?' asked her nephew curiously.

'No,' she said, 'that would be folly. He repays all one's trouble, as soon
as he touches his fiddle--but I don't like him.'

'He can play like the great Pan,' says Felix.

'Yes, and like Pan he is half a beast.'

'You may make a musician out of him,' answered the young man, examining
his pink nails with a certain admiration, 'but you will never make him a
gentleman.'

'Perhaps not,' said Lady Greville carelessly. 'Still, Felix, he is very
refined.'

_Dame!_ I think he would own himself mistaken now. Mr. Felix Leominster
himself is not a greater social success than the Baron Antonio Antonelli,
of the Legion of Honour. I am as sensitive as any one to the smallest spot
on my linen, and Duchesses rave about my charming manners.

For the rest my souvenirs are not very numerous. I lived in Germany until I
made my _début_, and I never heard anything more of Ninette.

The history of my life is very much the history of my art: and that you
know. I have always been an art-concentrated man--self-concentrated, my
friend Felix Leominster tells me frankly--and since I was a boy nothing has
ever troubled the serene repose of my egoism.

It is strange considering the way people rant about the 'passionate
sympathy' of my playing, the 'enormous potentiality of suffering' revealed
in my music, how singularly free from passion and disturbance my life has
been.

I have never let myself be troubled by what is commonly called 'love.'
To be frank with you, I do not much believe in it. Of the two principal
elements of which it is composed, vanity and egoism, I have too little
of the former, too much of the latter, too much coldness withal in my
character to suffer from it. My life has been notoriously irreproachable.
I figure in polemical literature as an instance of a man who has lived in
contact with the demoralising influence of the stage, and will yet go to
Heaven. _A la bonne heure!_

I am coming to the end of my souvenirs and of my cigar at the same time. I
must convey a coin somehow to that dreary person outside, who is grinding
now half-way down the street.

On consideration, I decide emphatically against opening the window and
presenting it that way. If the fog once gets in, it will utterly spoil me
for any work this evening. I feel myself in travail also of two charming
little _Lieder_ that all this thinking about Ninette has suggested. How
would 'Chansons de Gamine' do for a title? I think it best, on second
thoughts, to ring for Giacomo, my man, and send him out with the half-crown
I propose to sacrifice on the altar of sentiment. Doubtless the musician is
a country-woman of his, and if he pockets the coin, that is his look out.

Now if I was writing a romance, what a chance I have got. I should tell you
how my organ-grinder turned out to be no other than Ninette. Of course she
would not be spoilt or changed by the years--just the same Ninette. Then
what scope for a pathetic scene of reconciliation and forgiveness--the
whole to conclude with a peal of marriage bells, two people living together
'happy ever after.' But I am not writing a romance, and I am a musician,
not a poet.

Sometimes, however, it strikes me that I should like to see Ninette again,
and I find myself seeking traces of her in childish faces in the street.

The absurdity of such an expectation strikes me very forcibly afterwards,
when I look at my reflection in the glass, and tell myself that I must be
careful in the disposition of my parting.

Ninette, too, was my contemporary. Still I cannot conceive of her as a
woman. To me she is always a child. Ninette grown up, with a draggled dress
and squalling babies, is an incongruous thing that shocks my sense of
artistic fitness. My fiddle is my only mistress, and while I can summon its
consolation at command, I may not be troubled by the pettiness of a merely
human love. But once when I was down with Roman fever, and tossed on a
hotel bed, all the long, hot night, while Giacomo drowsed in a corner over
'Il Diavolo Rosa,' I seemed to miss Ninette.

Remembering that time, I sometimes fancy that when the inevitable hour
strikes, and this hand is too weak to raise the soul of melody out of
Stradivarius--when, my brief dream of life and music over, I go down into
the dark land, where there is no more music, and no Ninette, into the sleep
from which there comes no awaking, I should like to see her again, not the
woman but the child. I should like to look into the wonderful eyes of the
old Ninette, to feel the soft cheek laid against mine, to hold the little
brown hands, as in the old _gamin_ days.

It is a foolish thought, because I am not forty yet, and with the moderate
life I lead I may live to play Stradivarius for another thirty years.

There is always the hope, too, that it, when it comes, may seize me
suddenly. To see it coming, that is the horrible part. I should like to be
struck by lightning, with you in my arms, Stradivarius, oh, my beloved--to
die playing.

The literary gentleman over my head is stamping viciously about his
room. What would his language be if he knew how I have rewarded his
tormentress--he whose principles are so strict that he would bear the
agony for hours, sooner than give a barrel-organ sixpence to go to another
street. He would be capable of giving Giacomo a sovereign to pocket my
coin, if he only knew. Yet I owe that unmusical old organ a charming
evening, tinged with the faint _soupçon_ of melancholy which is necessary
to and enhances the highest pleasure. Over the memories it has excited I
have smoked a pleasant cigar--peace to its ashes!




THE STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS


During five years of an almost daily association with Michael Garth, in a
solitude of Chili, which threw us, men of common speech, though scarcely of
common interests, largely on each other's tolerance, I had grown, if not
into an intimacy with him, at least into a certain familiarity, through
which the salient feature of his history, his character reached me. It
was a singular character, and an history rich in instruction. So much I
gathered from hints, which he let drop long before I had heard the end
of it. Unsympathetic as the man was to me, it was impossible not to be
interested by it. As our acquaintance advanced, it took (his character I
mean) more and more the aspect of a difficult problem in psychology, that
I was passionately interested in solving: to study it was my recreation,
after watching the fluctuating course of nitrates. So that when I had
achieved fortune, and might have started home immediately, my interest
induced me to wait more than three months, and return in the same ship with
him. It was through this delay that I am enabled to transcribe the issue of
my impressions: I found them edifying, if only for their singular irony.

From his own mouth indeed I gleaned but little; although during our
voyage home, in those long nights when we paced the deck together under
the Southern Cross, his reticence occasionally gave way, and I obtained
glimpses of a more intimate knowledge of him than the whole of our
juxtaposition on the station had ever afforded me. I guessed more, however,
than he told me; and what was lacking I pieced together later, from the
talk of the girl to whom I broke the news of his death. He named her to
me, for the first time, a day or two before that happened: a piece of
confidence so unprecedented, that I must have been blind, indeed, not
to have foreseen what it prefaced. I had seen her face the first time I
entered his house, where her photograph hung on a conspicuous wall: the
charming, oval face of a young girl, little more than a child, with great
eyes, that one guessed, one knew not why, to be the colour of violets,
looking out with singular wistfulness from a waving cloud of dark hair.
Afterwards, he told me that it was the picture of his _fiancée_: but,
before that, signs had not been wanting by which I had read a woman in his
life.

Iquique is not Paris; it is not even Valparaiso; but it is a city of
civilisation; and but two days' ride from the pestilential stew, where
we nursed our lives doggedly on quinine and hope, the ultimate hope of
evasion. The lives of most Englishmen yonder, who superintend works in the
interior, are held on the same tenure: you know them by a certain savage,
hungry look in their eyes. In the meantime, while they wait for their luck,
most of them are glad enough when business calls them down for a day or
two to Iquique. There are shops and streets, lit streets through which
blackeyed Senoritas pass in their lace mantilas; there are _cafés_ too; and
faro for those who reck of it; and bull fights, and newspapers younger
than six weeks; and in the harbour, taking in their fill of nitrates, many
ships, not to be considered without envy, because they are coming, within
a limit of days to England. But Iquique had no charm for Michael Garth,
and when one of us must go, it was usually I, his subordinate, who being
delegated, congratulated myself on his indifference. Hard-earned dollars
melted at Iquique; and to Garth, life in Chili had long been solely a
matter of amassing them. So he stayed on, in the prickly heat of Agnas
Blancas, and grimly counted the days, and the money (although his nature, I
believe, was fundamentally generous, in his set concentration of purpose,
he had grown morbidly avaricious) which should restore him to his beautiful
mistress. Morose, reticent, unsociable as he had become, he had still, I
discovered by degrees, a leaning towards the humanities, a nice taste,
such as could only be the result of much knowledge, in the fine things of
literature. His infinitesimal library, a few French novels, an Horace,
and some well thumbed volumes of the modern English poets in the familiar
edition of Tauchnitz, he put at my disposal, in return for a collection,
somewhat similar, although a little larger, of my own. In his rare moments
of amiability, he could talk on such matters with _verve_ and originality:
more usually he preferred to pursue with the bitterest animosity an
abstract fetish which he called his "luck." He was by temperament an
enraged pessimist; and I could believe, that he seriously attributed to
Providence, some quality inconceivably malignant, directed in all things
personally against himself. His immense bitterness and his careful avarice,
alike, I could explain, and in a measure justify, when I came to understand
that he had felt the sharpest stings of poverty, and, moreover, was
passionately in love, in love _comme on ne l'est plus_. As to what his
previous resources had been, I knew nothing, nor why they had failed him;
but I gathered that the crisis had come, just when his life was complicated
by the sudden blossoming of an old friendship into love, in his case, at
least, to be complete and final. The girl too was poor; they were poorer
than most poor persons: how could he refuse the post, which, through
the good offices of a friend, was just then unexpectedly offered him?
Certainly, it was abroad; it implied five years' solitude in Equatorial
America. Separation and change were to be accounted; perhaps, diseases and
death, and certainly his 'luck,' which seemed to include all these. But it
also promised, when the term of his exile was up, and there were means of
shortening it, a certain competence, and very likely wealth; escaping those
other contingencies, marriage. There seemed no other way. The girl was
very young: there was no question of an early marriage; there was not even
a definite engagement. Garth would take no promise from her: only for
himself, he was her bound lover while he breathed; would keep himself
free to claim her, when he came back in five years, or ten, or twenty, if
she had not chosen better. He would not bind her; but I can imagine how
impressive his dark, bitter face must have made this renunciation to the
little girl with the violet eyes; how tenderly she repudiated her freedom.
She went out as a governess, and sat down to wait. And absence only
rivetted faster the chain of her affection: it set Garth more securely on
the pedestal of her idea; for in love it is most usually the reverse of
that social maxim, _les absents ont toujours tort_, which is true.

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.