Seven Gothic Tales (48 page)

Shaking himself out of these reflections, Lincoln resumed his account of the old Jew’s tale:

Suddenly a violent change came over the face of the old Jew. It was as if we, to whom he had just lately recounted the story of his life, had all at once been annihilated. Lowering his stick, he bent forward, his whole being concentrated on Pellegrina’s face.

She stirred upon her couch. Her bosom heaved, and she moved her head slightly on the pillow. A tremor ran over her face; after a minute her brows lifted a little, and the fringes of her dark eyelids quivered, like the wings of a butterfly that sits on a flower. We had all got up. Again I looked at the Jew. It was obvious that he was terrified lest she should see him, in case she opened her eyes. He shrank back and took shelter behind me. The next second she slowly looked up. Her eyes seemed supernaturally large and somber.

In spite of the Jew’s move to hide himself, her gaze fell straight upon him. He stood quite still under it, deadly pale as if he feared an outburst of abhorrence. But none came. She looked at him attentively, neither smiling nor frowning. At this I heard him drawing in his breath twice, deeply, in a sort of suspense. Then he timidly approached a little.

She tried to speak two or three times, without getting a sound
out, and again closed her eyes. But once more she opened them, looking again straight at him. When she spoke it was in her ordinary low voice, a little slowly, but without any effort.

“Good evening, Marcus,” she said.

I heard him strain his throat to speak, but he said nothing.

“You are late,” she said, as if a little vexed.

“I have been delayed,” said he, and I was surprised at his voice, so perfectly calm and pleasant was it, and nobly sonorous.

“How am I looking?” asked Pellegrina.

“You are looking well,” he answered her.

At the moment when she had spoken to him, the face of the old Jew had undergone a strange and striking change. I have spoken before of his unusual pallor. While he was telling us his tale he had grown white, as if there were no blood in him. Now, as she spoke and he answered her, a deep, delicate blush, like that of a young boy, of a maiden surprised in her bath, spread all over his face.

“It was good that you came,” she said. “I am a little nervous tonight.”

“No, you have no reason to be,” he reassured her. “It has gone very well up till now.”

“Do you really mean that,” she asked, scrutinizing his face. “You do not criticize? Nothing could have been improved? I have done well, and you are pleased with it all?”

“Yes,” he answered, “I do not criticize; nothing could be improved. You have done well, and I am well content with the whole thing.”

She was silent for perhaps two or three minutes. Then her dark eyes slid from his face to ours. “Who are these gentlemen?” she asked him.

“These,” he said, “are three foreign young gentlemen, who have traveled a long way to have the honor of being introduced to you.”

“Introduce them, then,” she said. “But I am afraid that you
must be quick about it. I do not think that the
entr’act
can last much longer.”

The Jew, advancing toward us, took us by the hand, one by one, and led us nearer to the stretcher. “My noble young Sirs,” he said, “from beautiful, distant countries, I am pleased to have obtained for you an unforgettable moment in your lives. I introduce you herewith to Donna Pellegrina Leoni, the greatest singer in the world.”

With this he gave her our names, which for each of us he remembered quite correctly.

She looked at us kindly. “I am very glad to see you here tonight,” she said. “I shall sing to you now, and, I hope, to your satisfaction.” We kissed her hand with deep bows, all three. I remembered the caresses which I had demanded of that noble hand. But immediately after she turned again to the Jew.

“Nay, but I am really a little nervous tonight,” she said. “What scene is it, Marcus?”

“My little star,” said he, “be not nervous at all. It is sure to go well with you tonight. It is the second act of
Don Giovanni;
it is the letter air. It begins now with your recitative,
Crudele? Ah nò, mio bene! Troppo mi spiace allontanarti un ben che lungamente la nostr’ alma desia
.”

She drew a deep sigh and repeated his words:
“Crudele? Ah nò, mio bene! Troppo mi spiace allontanarti un ben che lungamente la nostr’ alma desia
.”

As she spoke these words of the old opera a wave of deep dark color, like that of a bride, like that in the face of the old Jew, washed over her white and bruised face. It spread from her bosom to the roots of her hair. The three of us who were lookers-on were, I believe, pale faced; but those who, looking at each other, glowed in a mute, increasing ecstasy.

Suddenly her face broke, as the night-old ice on a pool was broken up when, as a boy, I threw a stone into it. It became like a constellation of stars, quivering in the universe. A rain of tears
sprang from her eyes and bathed it all. Her whole body vibrated under her passion like the string of an instrument.

“Oh,” she cried, “look, look here! It is Pellegrina Leoni—it is she, it is she herself again—she is back. Pellegrina, the greatest singer, poor Pellegrina, she is on the stage again. To the honor of God, as before. Oh, she is here, it is she—Pellegrina, Pellegrina herself!”

It was unbelievable that, half dead as she was, she could house this storm of woe and triumph. It was, of course, her swan song.

“Come unto her, now, all, again,” she said. “Come back, my children, my friends. It is I—I forever, now.” She wept with a rapture of relief, as if she had in her a river of tears, held back long.

The old Jew was in a terrible state of pain and strain. He also swayed for a moment where he stood. His eyelids swelled and heavy tears pressed themselves out under them and ran down his face. But he kept standing, and dared not give way to his emotion, although tried to his utmost. I believe that he held out against it so strongly for fear that he might otherwise, very weak as he was, die before her, and thus fail her in her last moments.

Of a sudden he took up his little walking stick and struck three short strokes on the side of the stretcher.

“Donna Pellegrina Leoni,” he cried in a clear voice.
“En scène pour le deux
!”

Like a soldier to the call, or a war horse to the blast of the trumpet, she collected herself at his words. Within the next minute she became quiet in a gallant and deadly calm. She gave him a glance from her enormous dark eyes. In one mighty movement, like that of a billow rising and sinking, she lifted the middle of her body. A strange sound, like the distant roar of a great animal, came from her breast. Slowly the flames in her face sank, and an ashen gray covered it instead. Her body fell back, stretched itself out and lay quite still, and she was dead.

The Jew pressed his tall hat on his head,
“lisgadal rejiiskadisch schemel robo,”
he said.

We stood for a little while. Afterward we went into the refectory to sit there. Later, when it was nearly morning, it was announced to us that our two coaches had at last arrived. I went out to give orders to the coachmen. We wanted to go on as soon as it was quite light. That would be best, I thought, although I did not know at all where to go.

As I passed the long room the candles were still burning, but the daylight came in through the windows. The two were there: Pellegrina on her stretcher and the old Jew by her side, his chin resting on his stick. It seemed to me that I ought not to part from him yet. I went up to him.

“Then, Mr. Cocoza,” I said, “you are this time burying, not the great artist, whose grave you made many years ago, but the woman, whose friend you were.”

The old man looked up at me.
“Vous êtes trop bon, Monsieur,”
he said, which means: You are too good, Sir.

“This,” Lincoln said, “is my tale, Mira.”

Mira drew in his breath, blew it out again slowly, and whistled.

“I have thought,” said Lincoln, “What would have happened to this woman if she had not died then? She might have been with us here tonight. She was good company and would have fitted in well. She might have become a dancer of Mombasa, like Thusmu, that tawny-eyed old bat, the mistress of his father and grandfather, for whose arms Said is even now longing. Or she might have gone with us into the highlands, on an expedition for ivory or slaves, and have made up her mind to stay there with a war-like tribe of the highland natives, and have been honored by them as a great witch.

“In the end, I have thought, she might perhaps have decided to become a pretty little jackal, and have made herself a den on the plain, or upon the slope of a hill. I have imagined that so vividly
that on a moonlight night I have believed that I heard her voice amongst the hills. And I have seen her, then, running about, playing with her own small graceful shadow, having a little ease of heart, a little fun.”

“Ah la la,” said Mira, who, in his quality of a story-teller, was an excellent and imaginative listener, “I have heard that little jackal too. I have heard her. She barks: ‘I am not one little jackal, not one; I am many little jackals.’ And pat! in a second she really is another, barking just behind you: ‘I am not one little jackal. Now I am another.’ Wait, Lincoln, till I have heard her once more. Then I shall make you a tale about her, to go with yours.”

“Well,” said Lincoln, “this is my tale. The lesson for Said.”

“I know all your tale,” said Mira. “I have heard it before. Now I believe that I made it myself.”

“The Sultan Sabour of Khorassan was a great hero, and not that only, but a man of God, who had visions and heard voices which instructed him in the will of the Lord. So he meant to teach this to all the world, with fire and sword. But alas, he was betrayed by a woman, a dancer, just at the zenith of his orbit; it is a long story. His great army was wiped out. The sand of the desert drank their blood; the vultures fed on it. The wails of the widows and orphans rose to heaven. His harem was scattered amongst his enemies. He himself was wounded, and only dragged away and saved by a slave. For the sake of his soldiers, then, he will not show himself or let himself be known in his beggar’s state. He has become, like your woman, many persons, and gives up, like her, to be one. Sometimes he is a water carrier, again a Khadi’s servant, again a fisherman by the sea, or a holy hermit. He is very wise. He knows many things and leaves deep footprints wherever he goes. He does all people whom he meets much good and some harm; he is a king still. But he will not remain the same for long. When he gains friends and women to love him, he flees the country from them, too much afraid of being again the Sultan Sabour, or any one person at all. Only his slave knows.
This slave, I now remember, has had his nose cut off for Sabour’s sake.”

“Alas, Mira, life is full of disagreeables,” said Lincoln.

“Ah, as to me,” said Mira, “I am safe wherever I go. You yourself have it written down in your Holy Book that all things work together for good to them that love God.”

“Does that declaration of love,” asked Lincoln, “come from the heart? Or from the lips of an old court poet?”

“Nay, I speak from my heart,” said Mira. “I have been trying for a long time to understand God. Now I have made friends with him. To love him truly you must love change, and you must love a joke, these being the true inclinations of his own heart. Soon I shall take to loving a joke so well that I, who once turned the blood of all the world to ice, shall become a teller of funny tales, to make people laugh.”

“Then, according to the law of the Prophet,” said Lincoln, “you will be, with barbers and such people as kiss their wives in public, debarred from giving evidence before a court of law.”

“Yes, that is so,” Mira agreed. “I shall be debarred from giving evidence.”

“What says Said?” asked Lincoln.

Said, who had sat silent and motionless all the time, laughed a little. He looked toward land. In the moonlight a dim white strip showed, and there was a murmur, like to the vibrating of a string, in the air.

“Those,” said Said, “are the great breakers of Takaungu Creek. We shall be in Mombasa at dawn.”

“At dawn?” said Mira. “Then I will go to sleep for an hour or two.”

He crawled down on the deck, drew his cloak around him and over his head, and laid himself down to sleep, immovable as a corpse.

Lincoln sat for a little while, smoking a cigarette or two. Then he also lay down, turned himself over a couple of times, and went to sleep.

A
ROUND the name of the little town of Hirschholm, in Denmark, there is much romance.

In the early years of the eighteenth century, Queen Sophia Magdalena—the consort of that pious monarch, King Christian VI, who went to chapel with his court three times a day and had all the theaters of Copenhagen shut up—one summer evening, after a long day’s hunting, killed a stag on the bank of a tranquil lake in the midst of a forest. She was so much pleased with the spot that she resolved to have a palace built there, and she named it after the stag: Hirschholm. It was, like most teutonic architecture of the period, a pompous and finicky affair when it was finished, built up as it was in the middle of the lake, with long straight embarkments across the water, upon which the royal coaches could drive up in all their splendor, reflected, head down, in the clear surface, as had been the stag, surrounded by the Queen’s hounds. Around the lake the little town, with its employees’ houses, taverns and little modest shops grew up, red-tiled, around the huge royal stables and
manèges
. It was very quiet most of the year, but they had a great time when the magnificent court arrived for the hunting season.

Fifty years later, when Sophia Magdalena’s grandson, King Christian VII, ruled over Denmark, the tragedy of his young English Queen, Carolina Mathilda, took place, or was prepared, at Hirschholm. This pathetic pink-and-white and full-bosomed young Princess sailed over the North Sea at the age of fifteen to marry a debauched and heartless little king, not much older than herself, but already far on his way toward that royal lunacy which swallowed him up some years later, a sort of Caligula in miniature, whose portrait gives you a strange impression of an entirely lonely and disillusioned mind. After a few unhappy years that were probably both dull and bewildering to the English maiden, she, by the time when the King took to playing at horses with his Negro page, met her fate. She fell deeply, desperately, in love with the doctor who had been summoned from Germany to heal, by means of his novel cold-water cures, the sickly little Crown
Prince. This doctor was a very brilliant man who was much in advance of his time. Her great passion for him first raised her lover to the highest places in the land, where he shone surprisingly as a star of the first magnitude, a reckless revolutionary tyrant, and then ruined them both. They had their short good time at Hirschholm, where Carolina Mathilda impressed her Danish subjects by riding to hounds in men’s clothes—attire which one cannot imagine, from her portraits, to have been very becoming to her. Then the rancor of the indignant old Dowager Queen encircled the lovers and brought them down. The doctor had his head cut off for pilfering the regalia of the crown of Denmark, and the young Queen was sent in exile to a little town in Hanover, and died there. Virtue triumphed in its most dismal form, and the palace that had housed such blasphemy was itself left and finally pulled down, partly because the royal family did not like to see it, partly because it was said to be sinking, of itself, into the lake. The whole splendor disappeared, and a church, in the classical style of the dawning nineteenth century, was erected where the palace had stood, like a cross upon its grave. Many years later statues and carved and gilt furniture, with rose garlands and cupids, were to be found in the houses of the wealthy peasants around Hirschholm.