A rapid rise she was making in very truth! The worldly old women who foregathered in the ballet-dancer's little parlor, could not contain their admiration for their "little girl's" success; and even grew indignant at the father for not accepting things "as things had to be." Salvatti? Just the support she needed! An expert pilot, who knew the chart of the opera world, who would steer her straight and keep her off the rocks.
The tenor had skilfully organized a world wide publicity for his young singer. Leonora's beauty and her artistic verve conquered every public. She had contracts with the leading theatres of Europe, and though critics found defects in her singing, her beauty helped them to forget these, and one and all they contributed loyally to the deification of the young goddess. Salvatti, sheltering his old age under this prestige which he so religiously fostered, was keeping in harness to the very end, and taking leave of life under the protecting shadow of that woman, the last to believe in him and tolerate his exploitation.
Applauded by select publics, courted in her dressing-room by celebrated men and women, Leonora began to find Salvatti's tyranny unbearable. She now saw him as he really was: miserly, petulant, spoiled by praise. Every bit of her money that came into his hands disappeared, she knew not where. Eager for revenge, though really answering the lure of the elegant world she glimpsed in the distance but was not yet a part of, she began to deceive Salvatti in passing adventures, taking a diabolical pleasure in the deceit. But no; as she looked back on that part of her life with the sober eye of experience, she understood that she had really been the one deceived. Salvatti, she remembered, would always retire at the opportune moment, facilitating her infidelities. She understood now that the man had carefully prepared such adventures for her with influential men whom he himself introduced to make certain profits out of the meeting—profits that he never declared.
After three years of this sort of life, when Leonora had reached the full splendor of her beauty, she chanced to become the favorite of fashion for one whole summer at Nice. Parisian newspapers, in their "society columns" referred, in veiled language, to the passion of an aged king, a democratic monarch, who had left his throne, much as a manufacturer of London or a stockbroker of Paris would leave his office, for a vacation on the Blue Coast. This tall, robust gentleman with a patriarchal beard—the very type of the good king in fairy tales—had not hesitated to be seen in public with a beautiful artiste.
That conquest, fleeting though it had been, put the finishing touch on Leonora's eminence! "Ah! La Brunna!" people would declare enthusiastically. "The favorite of king Ernesto.... Our greatest artist." And troops of adorers began to besiege her under the keen, mercenary eyes of the tenor Salvatti.
About this time her father died in a hospital at Milan—a very sad end, as Signora Isabella, the former ballet-dancer, explained in her letters. Of what had he died?… The old lady could not say, as the physicians had differed; but her own view of the matter was that the povero signor spagnuolo had simply grown tired of living—a general collapse of that wonderful constitution, so strong, so powerful, in a way, yet strangely susceptible to moral and emotional influences. He was almost blind when admitted to the hospital. He seemed quite to have lost his mind—sunk in an unbreakable silence. Isabella had not dared to keep him in her house after he had fallen into that coma. But the strange thing was, that as death drew near, his memory of the past suddenly cleared, and the nurses would hear him groan for nights at a time, murmuring in Spanish with tenacious persistency:
"Leonora! My darling! Where are you?… Little girl, where are you?"
Leonora wept and wept, and did not leave her hotel for more than a week, to the great disgust of Salvatti, who observed, in addition, that tears were not good for her complexion.
Alone in the world!… Her own wrong-doing had killed her poor father! No one was left now except her good old aunt, who was "existing" far away in Spain, like a vegetable in a garden, her stupid mind entirely on her prayer-book. Leonora vented her anguish in a burst of hatred for Salvatti. He was responsible for her abandonment of her father! She deserted him, taking up with a certain count Selivestroff, a handsome and wealthy Russian, captain in the Imperial Guard.
So she had found her destiny! Her life would always be like that! She would pass from stage to stage, from song to song, belonging to everybody—and to nobody!
That fair Russian, so strong, so manly, so thoroughly a gentleman, had loved her truly, with a passionate humble adoration.
He would kneel submissively at her feet, like Hercules in the presence of Adriadne, resting his chin on her knees, looking up into her face with his gray, kindly, caressing eyes. Timidly, doubtfully, he would approach her every day as if he were meeting her for the first time and feared a repulse. He would kiss her softly, delicately, with hushed reserve, as if she were a fragile jewel that might break beneath his tenderest caress. Poor Selivestroff! Leonora had wept at the thought of him. In Russia and with princely Russian sumptuousness, they had lived for a year in his castle, in the country, among a population of sodden moujiks who worshipped that beautiful woman in the white and blue furs as devotedly as if she had been a Virgin stepping forth from the gilded background of an ikon.
But Leonora could not live away from stageland: the ladies of the rural aristocracy avoided her, and she needed applause and admiration. She induced Selivestroff to move to St. Petersburg, and for a whole winter she sang at the Opera there, like a grand dame turned opera singer out of love for the work.
Once more she became the reigning belle. All the young Russian aristocrats who held commissions in the Imperial Guard, or high posts in the Government, spoke enthusiastically of the great Spanish beauty; and they envied Selivestroff. The count yearned moodily for the solitude of his castle, which held so many loving memories for him. In the bustling, competitive life of the capital, he grew jealous, sad, melancholy, irritable at the necessity of defending his love. He could sense the underground warfare that was being waged against him by Leonora's countless admirers.
One morning she was rudely awakened and leapt out of bed to find the count stretched out on a divan, pale, his shirt stained with blood. A number of gentlemen dressed in black were standing around him. They had just brought him in from a carriage. He had been wounded in the chest. The evening before, on leaving the theatre, the count had gone up for a moment to his Club. He had caught an allusion to Leonora and himself in some words of a friend. There had been blows—then hasty arrangements for a duel, which had been fought at sunrise, with pistols. Selivestroff died in the arms of his mistress, smiling, seeking those delicate, powerful, pearly hands for one last time with his bleeding lips. Leonora mourned him deeply, truly. The land where she had been so happy with the first man she had really loved became intolerable to her, and abandoning most of the riches that the count had given her, she went forth into the world again, storming the great theatres in a new fever of travel and adventure.
She was then just twenty-three, but already felt herself an old woman. How she had changed!… More affairs? As she went over that period of her life in her talk with Rafael, Leonora closed her eyes with a shudder of modesty and remorse. Drunk with fame and power she had rushed about the world lavishing her beauty on anyone who interested her for the moment. The property of everybody and of nobody! She could not remember the names, even, of all the men who had loved her during that era of madness, so many had been caught in the wake of her stormy flight across the world! She had returned to Russia once, and been expelled by the Czar for compromising the prestige of the Imperial Family, through an affair with a grand duke who had wanted to marry her. In Rome she had posed in the nude for a young and unknown sculptor out of pure compassion for his silent admiration; and she herself made his "Venus" public, hoping that the world-wide scandal would bring fame to the work and to its author. In Genoa she found Salvatti again, now "retired," and living on usury from his savings. She received him with an amiable smile, lunched with him, treated him as an old comrade; and at dessert, when he had become hopelessly drunk, she seized a whip and avenged the blows she had received in her time of slavery to him, beating him with a ferocity that stained the apartment with gore and brought the police to the hotel. Another scandal! And this time her name bandied about in a criminal court! But she, a fugitive from justice, and proud of her exploit, sang in the United States, wildly acclaimed by the American public, which admired the combative Amazon even more than the artist.
There she made the acquaintance of Hans Keller, the famous orchestra conductor, and a pupil and friend of Wagner. The German maestro became her second love. With stiff, reddish hair, thick-rimmed eyeglasses, an enormous mustache that drooped over either side of his mouth and framed his chin, he was certainly not so handsome as Selivestroff. But he had one irresistible charm, the charm of Art. With the tragic Russian in her mind and on her conscience, she felt the need of burning herself in the immortal flame of the ideal; and she adored the famous musician for the artistic associations that hovered about him. For the first time, the much-courted Leonora descended from her lofty heights to seek a man's attention and came with her amorous advances to disturb the placid calm of that artist so wholly engrossed in the cult of the sublime Master.
Hans Keller noticed the smile that fell like a sunbeam upon his music scrolls. He closed them and let himself be drawn off on the by-paths of love. Leonora's life with the maestro was an absolute rupture with all her past. Her one wish was to love and be loved—to throw a cloak of mystery over her real self, ashamed as she now was of her previous wild career. Her passion enthralled the musician and she in turn felt at once stirred and transfigured by the atmosphere of artistic fervor that haloed the illustrious pupil of Wagner.
The spirit of Him, the Master, as Hans Keller called Wagner with pious adoration, flashed before the singer's eyes like the revealing glory that converted Paul on the road to Damascus. Music, as she now saw clearly for the first time, was not a means of pleasing crowds, displaying physical beauty, and attracting men. It was a religion—the mysterious power that brings the infinite within us into contact with the infinite that surrounds us. She became the sinner awakening to repentance, and yearning for the atoning peace of the cloister, a Magdalen of Art, touched on the high road of worldliness and frivolity by the mystic sublimity of the Beautiful; and she cast herself at the feet of Him, the supreme Master, as the most victorious of men, lord of the mystery that moves all souls.
"Tell me more about Him," Leonora would say. "How much I would give to have known him as you did!… I did see him once in Venice: during his last days …he was already dying."
And that meeting was, indeed, one of her most vivid and lasting memories. The declining afternoon enlivening the dark waters of the Grand Canal with its opalescent spangles; a gondola passing hers in the opposite direction; and inside, a pair of blue, imperious eyes, shining, under thick eyebrows, with the cold glint of steel—eyes that could never be mistaken for common eyes, for the divine fire of the Elect, of the demi-God, was bright within them! And they seemed to envelop her in a flash of cerulean light. It was He—ill, and about to die. His heart was wounded, bleeding, pierced, perhaps, by the shafts of mysterious melody, as hearts of the Virgin sometimes bleed on altars bristling with swords.
Leonora could still see him as if he were there in front of her. He looked smaller than he really was, dwarfed, apparently, by illness, and by the wrack of pain. His huge head, the head of a genius, was bent low over the bosom of his wife Cosima. He had removed the black felt hat so as to catch the afternoon breeze full upon his loose gray locks. His broad, high curved forehead, seemed to weigh down upon his body like an ivory chest laden full of unseen jewels. His arrogant nose, as strong as the beak of a bird of prey, seemed to be reaching across the sunken mouth toward the sensuous, powerful jaw. A gray beard ran down along the neck, that was wrinkled, wasted with age. A hasty vision it had been, to be sure; but she had seen him; and his venerable figure remained in her memory like a landscape glimpsed at the flare of a lightning-flash. She had witnessed his arrival in Venice to die in the peace of those canals, in that silence which is broken only by the stroke of the oar—where many years before he had thought himself dying as he wrote his Tristan—that hymn to the Death that is pure, to the Death that liberates! She saw him stretched out in the dark boat; and the splash of the water against the marble of the palaces echoed in her imagination like the wailing, thrilling trumpets at the burial of Siegfried—the hero of Poetry marching to the Valhalla of immortality and glory upon a shield of ebony—motionless, inert as the young hero of the Germanic legend—and followed by the lamentations of that poor prisoner of life, Humanity, that ever eagerly seeks a crack, a chink, in the wall about it, through which the inspiriting, comforting ray of beauty may penetrate.
And the singer gazed with tearful eyes at the broad boina of black velvet, the lock of gray hair, two broken, rusty steel pens—souvenirs of the Master, that Hans Keller had piously preserved in a glass case.
"You knew him—tell me how he lived. Tell me everything: talk to me about the Poet … the Hero."
And the musician, no less moved, described the Master as he had seen him in the best of health; a small man, tightly wrapped in an overcoat—with a powerful, heavy frame, however, despite his slight stature—as restless as a nervous woman, as vibrant as a steel spring, with a smile that lightly touched with bitterness his thin, colorless lips. Then came his "genialities," as people said, the caprices of his genius, that figure so largely in the Wagner legend: his smoker, a jacket of gold satin with pearl flowers for buttons; the precious cloths that rolled about like waves of light in his study, velvets and silks, of flaming reds and greens and blues, thrown across the furniture and the tables haphazard, with no reference to usefulness—for their sheer beauty only—to stimulate the eye with the goad of color, satisfy the Master's passion for brightness; and perfumes, as well, with which his garments—always of oriental splendor—were literally saturated; phials of rose emptied at random, filling the neighborhood with the fragrance of a fabulous garden, strong enough to overcome the hardiest uninitiate, but strangely exciting to that Prodigy in his struggle with the Unknown.
And then Hans Keller described the man himself, never relaxed, always quivering with mysterious thrills, incapable of sitting still, except at the piano, or at table for his meals; receiving visitors standing, pacing back and forth in his salon, his hands twitching in nervous uncertainty; changing the position of the armchairs, rearranging the furniture, suddenly stopping to hunt about his person for a snuff-box or a pair of glasses that he never found; turning his pockets inside out, pulling his velvet house-cap now down over one eye, now back over the crown of his head, or again, throwing it into the air with a shout of joy or crumpling it in his hand, as he became excited in the course of a discussion!
And Keller would close his eyes, imagining that he could still hear in the silence, the faint but commanding voice of the Master. Oh, where was he now? On some star, doubtless, eagerly following the infinite song of the spheres, a divine music that only his ears had been attuned to hear! And to choke his emotion, the musician would sit down at the piano, while Leonora, responsive to his mood, would approach him, and standing as rigid as a statue, with her hands lost in the musician's head of rough tangled hair, sing a fragment from the immortal Tetralogy.
Worship of Wagner transformed the butterfly into a new woman. Leonora adored Keller as a ray of light gone astray from the glowing star now extinguished forever; she felt the joy of humbleness, the sweetness of sacrifice, seeing in him not the man, but the chosen representative of the Divinity. Leonora could have grovelled at Keller's feet, let him trample on her—make a carpet of her beauty. She willed to become a slave to that lover who was the repository of the Master's thoughts; and who seemed to be magnified to gigantic proportions by the custody of such a treasure.
She tended him with the exquisite watchfulness of an enamored servant, following him, on his trips in the summer, the season of the great concerts, to Leipzig, Geneva, Paris; and she, the most famous living prima donna, would stay behind the scenes, with no jealousy for the applause she heard, waiting for Hans, perspiring and tired, to drop the baton amid the acclamations of the audience and come back-stage to have her dry his forehead with an almost filial caress.
And thus they traveled about Europe, spreading the light of the Master; Leonora, voluntarily in the background, like a patrician of old, dressed as a slave and following the Apostle in the name of the New Word.
The German musician let himself be adored, receiving all her caresses of enthusiasm and love with the absent-mindedness of an artist so preoccupied with sounds that at last he comes to hate words. He taught his language to Leonora that she might some day realize a dream of hers and sing in Bayreuth; and he grounded her in the principles that had guided the Master in the creation of his great characters. And so, when Leonora made her appearance on the stage one winter with the winged helmet and the lance of the Valkyrie, she attained an eminence in Wagnerian interpretation that was to follow her for the remainder of her career. Hans himself was carried away by her power, and could never recover from his astonishment at Leonora's complete assimilation of the spirit of the Master.
"If only He could hear you!" he would say with conviction. "I am sure He would be content."
And the pair traveled about the world together. Every springtime she, as spectator, would watch him directing Wagnerian choruses in the "Mystic Abyss" at Bayreuth. Winters it was he who went into ecstasies under her tremendous "Hojotoho!"—the fierce cry of a Valkyrie afraid of the austere father Wotan; or at sight of her awakening among the flames for the spirited Siegfried, the hero who feared nothing in the world, but trembled at the first glance of love!
But artists' passions are like flowers, fragrant, but quickly languishing. The rough German musician was a simple person, unstable, fickle, ready to be amused at any new plaything. Leonora admitted to Rafael that she could have lived to old age submissively at Keller's side, pampering his whims and selfish caprices. But one day Keller deserted her, as she had deserted others, to take up with a sickly, languid contralto, whose best charms could have been hardly comparable to the morbid delicacy of a hot-house flower. Leonora, mad with love and jealousy, pursued him, knocking at his door like a servant. For the first time she felt the voluptuous bitterness of being scorned, discarded, until reaction from despair brought her back to her former pride and self-control!
Love was over. She had had enough of artists; though an interesting sort of folk they were in their way. Far preferable were the ordinary, normal men she had known before Keller's time! The foolisher—the more commonplace—the better! She would never fall in love again!
Wearied, broken in spirit, disillusioned, she went back into her old world. But now the legend of her past beset her. Again men came, passionately besieging her, offering her wealth in return for a little love. They talked of killing themselves if she resisted, as if it were her duty to surrender, as if refusal on her part were treachery. The gloomy Macchia committed suicide in Naples. Why? Because she did not capitulate to his melancholy sonnets! In Vienna there had been a duel, in which one of her admirers was slain. An eccentric Englishman followed her about, looming in her pathway everywhere like the shadow of a fatal Destiny, vowing to kill anybody she should prefer to him.... She had had enough at last! She was wearied of such a life, disgusted at the male voracity that dogged her every step. She longed to fall out of sight, disappear, find rest and quiet in a complete surrender to some boundless dream. And the thought—a comforting, soothing thought, it had been—of the distant land of her childhood came back to her, the thought of her simple, pious aunt, the sole survivor of her family, who wrote to her twice every year, urging her to reconcile her soul with God—to which end the good old Doña Pepa was herself aiding with prayer!
She felt, too, somehow, without knowing just why, that a visit to her native soil would soften the painful memory of the ingratitude that had cost her father's life. She would care for the poor old woman! Her presence would bring a note of cheer into that gray, monotonous existence that had gone on without the slightest change, ever. And suddenly, one night, after an "Isolde" in Florence, she ordered Beppa, the loyal and silent companion of her wandering life, to pack her things!
Home! Home! Off for her native land! And might she find there something to keep her ever from returning to the troubled stirring world she was leaving!
She was the princess of the fairy tales longing to become a shepherdess. There she meant to stay, in the shade of her orange-trees, now and then fondling a memory of her old life, perhaps, but wishing eternally to enjoy that tranquillity, fiercely repelling Rafael, therefore, because he had tried to awaken her, as Siegfried rouses Brunhilde, braving the flames to reach her side.
No; friends, friends, nothing else! She wanted no more of love. She already knew what that was. Besides, he had come too late....
And Rafael tossed sleeplessly in his bed, rehearsing in the darkness the story he had been told. He felt dwarfed, annihilated, by the grandeur of the men who had preceded him in their adoration of that woman. A king, great artists, handsome and aristocratic paladins, Russian counts, potentates with vast wealth at their command! And he, a humble country boy, an obscure junior deputy, as submissive as a child to his mother's despotic ways, forced to beg for the money for his personal expenses even—he was trying to succeed them!
He laughed with bitter irony at his own presumptuousness. Now he understood Leonora's mocking tone, and the violence she had used in repulsing all boorish liberties he had tried to take. But despite the contempt he began to feel for himself, he lacked the strength to withdraw now. He had been caught up in the wake of seduction, the maelstrom of love that followed the actress everywhere, enslaving men, casting them, broken in spirit and in will, to earth, like so many slaves of Beauty.