The Woman Who Loved Chopin

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Title:     The Woman Who Loved Chopin
Author: James Huneker [More Titles by Huneker]

I

When Marco Davos left Ischl on the midday train, that picturesque, huddled Austrian watering-place was stuffy. He was surprised then most pleasantly by the coolness of Aussee, further down the line in the direction of Vienna. Ischl is not a bad place, but it lies, as the natives say, smothered in a kettle. He rode over from the station to the stadt park, where the band was playing. There he dismounted, for he was going further--Aussee is not very interesting, but it principally serves as a good starting-point for trips to many of the charming lakes with which Styria is dotted. After asking his way, Davos passed the swimming baths, and keeping on the left bank of a tiny stream, he presently found himself walking through an earthly paradise. Since his advent in Ischl, where he drank the waters and endeavoured to quiet his overtaxed nerves, he had made up his mind to visit Alt-Aussee; several Viennese friends had assured him that this hamlet, beneath a terrific precipice and on the borders of a fairy-like lake, would be well worth the while.

It was a relief to breathe the thinner mountain air, and the young artist inhaled it with satisfaction, his big hat in hand, his long curly black hair flowing in the gentle breeze. He found himself in tunnels of verdure, the sunlight shut off by the heavy leafage; then the path debouched into the open and, skirting closely the rocky wall, it widened into an island of green where a shady pagoda invited. He sat down for a few minutes and congratulated himself that he had escaped the intimate discomforts of the omnibus he discerned on the opposite bank, packed with stout people. This was the third week of his vacation, one enforced by a nerve specialist in the Austrian capital, and for the first time Davos felt almost cheerful. Perhaps the absolute hush of the country and the purity of the atmosphere, with its suggestion of recent rain,--the skies weep at least once a day in the Salzkammergut region,--proved a welcome foil to fashionable Ischl, with its crowds, its stiffness, its court ceremonial--for the emperor enjoys his villegiatura there. And Davos was sick and irritable after a prolonged musical season. He had studied the pianoforte with Rosenthal, and his success, from his debut, had been so unequivocal that he played too much in public. There was a fiery particle in his interpretations of Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt that proclaimed the temperament, if not the actual possession, of genius. Still in his early manhood--he was only twenty--the maturity of his musical intelligence and the poetry of his style created havoc in impressionable hearts. With his mixed blood, Hungarian and Italian, Marco Davos' performance of romantic composers was irresistible; in it there was something of Pachmann's wayward grace and Paderewski's plangency, but with an added infusion of gypsy wildness which evoked for old concert-goers memories of Liszt the brilliant rhapsodist.

But he soon overpaid the score presented by the goddess Fortune--his nerves were sadly jangled. A horror of the human face obsessed his waking and sleeping hours; he dreamed of colossal countenances with threatening eyes, a vast composite of the audiences he nightly faced. As his popularity increased the waning of his self-respect told him that he must go into retreat, anywhere out of the musical world--else would his art suffer. It did suffer. The nervous diffidence, called stage-fright, which had never assailed his supreme self-balance, intruded its unwelcome presence. Marco, several months after he had discovered all these mischievous symptoms, the maladies of artistic adolescence, was not assured when the critics hinted of them--the public would surely follow suit in a few weeks. Then came the visit to the learned Viennese doctor and the trip to Ischl. A few more months of this appalling absorption in his own personality, this morbid marriage of man to his own image, and he suspected that his brain would be irretrievably injured.

He was a curious student of matters psychologic as well as musical. A friendly laboratory had inducted him into many biologic mysteries. Particularly fascinating to him was the tactile sense, that sense of touch wherewith man acquaints himself with this earth-clot swimming in space. Davos contemplated the tips of his fingers as he sat in the grateful cool, his ten voices as he named them. With them he sang, thundered, and thought upon the keyboard of his grand piano-forte. A miracle, indeed, these slender cushions of fat, ramified by a network of nerves, sinews, and bones as exquisite in their mechanism as the motion of the planets. If hearing is a miracle, so is touch; the ear is not a resonator, as has been so long maintained, but an apparatus which records variations of pressure. This makes it subservient to the laws of sensation; touch and hearing are akin. It aroused the pride of Davos after he had read the revolutionary theories of Pierre Bounier regarding the touch. So subtle could the art of touch be cultivated, the pianist believed, that the blind could feel colour on the canvas of the painter. He spent weeks experimenting with a sensitive manometer, gauging all the scale of dynamics. No doubt these fumblings on the edge of a new science temporarily hurt his play. With a dangerous joy he pressed the keys of his instrument, endeavouring to achieve more delicate shadings. He quarrelled with the piano manufacturers for their obstinate adherence to the old-fashioned clumsy action; everything had been improved but the keyboard--that alone was as coldly unresponsive and inelastic as a half-century ago. He had fugitive dreams of wires that would vibrate like a violin. The sounding-board of a pianoforte is too far from the pianist, while the violinist presses his strings as one kisses the beloved. Little wonder it is the musical monarch. A new pianoforte, with passionately coloured overtones, that could sob like a violoncello, sing like a violin, and resound with the brazen clangours of the orchestra--Liszt had conceived this synthesis, had by the sheer force of his audacious genius compelled from his instrument ravishing tones that were never heard before or--alas!--since.

Even the antique harpsichord had its compensations; not so powerful in its tonal capacity, it nevertheless gave forth a pleading, human quality like the still small angelic voice. Davos pondered these problems, pondered Chopin's celestial touch and the weaving magic of his many-hued poems; Chopin--Keats, Shelley, and Heine battling within the walls of a frail tender soul.

The sound of footsteps and voices aroused him. He shivered with disgust. More people! Two men, well advanced in life, followed by two women, barely attracted his notice, until he saw that the little creature who waddled at the rear of the party was a Japanese in European clothes. Notwithstanding her western garb, she resembled a print of Utamaro. Beside her walked a tall, grave girl, with dark hair and gray eyes, attired in the quaint garb of some early nineteenth-century epoch--1840 or thereabouts. As old-fashioned as she looked, a delicate girlish beauty was hers, and when she indifferently gazed at Davos, straightway he heard humming in his head the "glance motive" from Tristan and Isolde. They passed on, but not leaving him as he was before; a voice whispered in the secret recesses of his being: "You love! Follow! Seek her!" And under the sudden impulsion of this passion he arose and made a few steps toward the curve of the path around which the girl and her companions had disappeared. The absurdity of this hasty translation into action of his desire halted him. Yes, his nerves must be in a bad way if a casual encounter with a pretty woman--but was she pretty? He did not return to his seat. He continued his stroll leisurely. Pretty! Not exactly pretty--distinguished! Noble! Lovely! Beautiful! He smiled. Here he was playing the praises of the unknown in double octaves. He did not overtake her. She had vanished on the other side of the bridge, and in a few minutes he found himself entering Alt-Aussee. It wore a bright appearance, with its various-coloured villas on the lake shores, and its church and inn for a core. The garden of this hotel he found to be larger than he had imagined; it stretched along the bank and only stopped as if stone and mortar had been too lazy to go farther.

Again he hesitated. The garden, the restauration--full of people: women knitting, children bawling, men reading; and all sipping coffee to a background of gossip. He remembered that it was the sacred hour of Kaffeeklatsch, and he would have escaped by a flight of steps that led down to the beach, but he was hailed. A company of a half-dozen sat at a large table under the trees, and the host was an orchestral conductor well known to Davos. There was no alternative. He took a chair. He was introduced as the celebrated pianoforte-virtuoso to men and women he had never seen before, and hoped--so rancorous was his mood--never to see again. A red-headed girl from Brooklyn, who confessed that she thought Maeterlinck the name of some new Parisian wickedness, further bothered him with questions about piano teachers. No, he didn't give lessons! He never would! She dropped out of the conversation. Finally by an effort he swore that his head was splitting, that he must return to Ischl. He broke away. When he discovered that the crowd was also bound for the same place, he abruptly disappeared. It took him just two hours to traverse the irregular curves of the lake on the Franz Carl Promenade, and he ate his dinner in peace at the inn upon a balcony that projected over the icy waters.

Davos decided, as he smoked a mild cigarette, that he would remain at Alt-Aussee for the night. The peace of the landscape purified his soul of its irritability, though he wished that the Dachstein would not dominate so persistently the sky-line--it was difficult to avoid the view of this solitary and egotistic peak, the highest in Styria. He was assigned a comfortable chamber, but the night was too fine for bed. He did not feel sleepy, and he went along the road he had come by; the church was an opaque mass, the spire alone showing in the violet twilight, like some supernatural spar on a ship far out at sea. He attempted to conjure to his tired brain the features, the expression, of the girl. They would not reappear; his memory was traitorous.

The murmur of faint music, piano music, made his ears wince--how he hated music! But afar as were these tonal silhouettes, traced against the evening air, his practised hearing told him that they were made by an artist. He languidly followed the clue, and soon he was at the gate of a villa, almost buried in the bosk, and listening with all his critical attention to a thrilling performance--yes, thrilling was the word--of Chopin's music. What! The last movement of the B flat minor sonata, the funeral march sonata, but no more like the interpretation he had heard from others--from himself--than--than....

But, good heavens! Who was playing! The unison passages that mount and recede were iridescent columns of mist painted by the moonlight and swaying rhythmically in the breeze. Here was something rare. No longer conscious of the technical side of the playing, so spiritualized was it, so crystalline the touch, Davos forgot his manners and slipped through the gateway, through the dark garden, toward an open window in which burned a solitary candle. The mystery of this window and the quicksilver dartings of the music--gods, what a touch, what gossamer delicacy!--set his heart throbbing. He forgot his sick nerves. When the trumpet blows, the war-horse lusts for action--and this was not a trumpet, but a horn of elf-land. He moved as closely as he dared to the window, and the music ceased--naturally enough, the movement had concluded. His ears burned with the silence. She came to the window. Arrested by the vision--the casement framed her in a delicious manner--he did not stir. She could not help seeing this intruder, the light struck him full in the face. She spoke:--

"Dear Mr. Davos, won't you come into the house? My father and my uncle will be most happy to receive you."

* * * * *

She knew him! Stunned by his overstrung emotions, he could only bow his head.

II

He received the welcome of a king. The two men he had seen earlier in the day advanced ceremoniously and informed him that the honour of his presence was something they had never hoped for; that--as news flies swiftly in villages--they had heard he was at Alt-Aussee; they had recognized the great Marco Davos on the road. These statements were delivered with exaggerated courtesy, though possibly sincere. The elder of the pair was white-whiskered, very tall and spare, his expression a sadly vague one. It was her father. The other an antique person, a roly-poly fellow who chuckled and quavered, was her uncle. Davos sat in a drawing-room containing a grand pianoforte, a few chairs, and couches. The floor was stained, and when a cluster of lights was brought by the uncle, he noticed that only Chopin portraits hung on the walls. He apologized for his intrusion--the music had lured him from the highroad.

"We are very musical," said the father.

"I should say so," reiterated his brother-in-law.

"Musical!" echoed Davos. "Do you call it by such an everyday phrase? I heard the playing of a marvellous poet a moment ago." The two men looked shyly at each other. She entered. He was formally presented.

"Monsieur Davos, this is Constantia Grabowska, my daughter. My name is Joseph Grabowski; my late wife's brother, Monsieur Pelletier." Davos was puzzled by the name, Constantia Grabowska! She sat before him, dressed in black silk with crinoline; two dainty curls hung over her ears; her profile, her colouring, were slightly Oriental, and in her nebulous gray eyes with their greenish light there was eternal youth. Constantia! Polish. And how she played Chopin--ah! it came to him before he had finished his apologies.

"You are named after Chopin's first love," he ejaculated. "Pardon the liberty." She answered him in her grave, measured contralto.

"Constantia Gladowska was my grandmother." The playing, the portraits, were now explained. A lover of the Polish composer, Davos knew every incident of his biography.

"I am the son of that Joseph Grabowski, the Warsaw merchant who married the soprano singer, Constantia Gladowska, in 1832," said the father, smilingly. "My father became blind."

"Chopin's Ideal!" exclaimed Marco. He was under the spell of the girl's beauty and music. He almost stared at her, for the knowledge that she was a great artiste, perhaps greater than himself, rather dampened his passion. She was adorable as she returned without coquetry his ardent gaze; but she was--he had to admit it--a rival. This composite feeling he inwardly wrestled with as the conversation placidly proceeded. They only spoke of Poland, of Chopin. Once the name of Emilia Plater, the Polish Joan of Arc, was mentioned--she, too, was a distant connection. The young pianist hinted that more music would be agreeable, but there was no response. He was quite alone with Constantia, and they talked of Poland's tone-poet. She knew much more of Chopin than he did, and she recited Mickiewicz's patriotic poems with incomparable verve.

"Do you believe in heredity?" he cried, as the father entered with the tea. "Do you believe that your love of Chopin is inherited? Chopin composed that wonderful slow movement of the F minor concerto because of his love for your grandmother. How I wish I could have seen her, heard her."

The girl, without answering him, detached from her neck a large brooch and chain. Davos took it and amazedly compared the portrait with the living woman.

"You are Constantia Gladowska." She smiled.

"Her love of Chopin--she must have loved her youthful adorer--has been transmitted to you. Oh, please play me that movement again, the one Rubinstein called 'the night wind sweeping over the churchyard graves.'" Constantia blushed so deeply that he knew he had offended her. She had for him something of the pathos of old dance music--its stately sweetness, its measured rhythms. After drinking a cup of tea he drifted to the instrument--flies do not hanker after honey as strongly as do pianists in the presence of an open keyboard. A tactful silence ensued. He began playing, and, as if exasperated at the challenge implied by her refusal, he played in his old form. Then he took the theme of Chopin's E flat minor Scherzo, and he juggled with it, spun it into fine fibres of tone, dashed it down yawning and serried harmonic abysses. He was magnificent as he put forth all the varied resources of his art. Constantia, her cheeks ablaze, her lips parted, interposed a fan between her eyes and the light. There was something dangerous and passionate in her regard. In all the fury of his play he knew that he had touched her. Once, during a pause, he heard her sigh. As he finished in a thunderous crash he saw in the doorway the figure of the Japanese maid--an ugly, gnarled idol with slitted eyes. She withdrew when he arose to receive the unaffected homage of his hosts. He was curious. Monsieur Pelletier, who looked like a Brazilian parrot in beak and hue, cackled:--

"That's Cilli, our Japanese. She was born in Germany, and is my niece's governess. Quite musical, too, I should say so. Just look at my two Maltese cats! I call them Tristan and Isolde because they make noises in the night. Don't you loathe Wagner?"

It was time to go. Enamoured, Davos took his leave, promising to call the next forenoon before he went back to Ischl. He held her fingers for a brief moment and longed to examine their tips,--the artist still struggled to subdue the man,--but the pressure he received was so unmistakable that he hurried away, fearing to betray his emotion. He hovered in the vicinity of the house, longing for more music. He was disappointed. For a full hour he wandered through the dusty lanes in the faded light of an old moon. When he reached his chamber, it was long past one o'clock; undaunted, his romantic fervour forced him to the window, and he watched the shining lake. He fell asleep thinking of Constantia. But he dreamed of Cilli, the Japanese maid with the hideous eyes.

III

Not only that morning, but every morning for two weeks, did Marco Davos visit Alt-Aussee. He came down from Ischl on the earliest train, and some nights he stopped at the hotel near his new friends. After a few visits he saw little of the father and uncle, and he was not sorry--they were old bores with their archaic anecdotes of dead pianists. Two maniacs on the subject of music, Davos wished them to the devil after he had known them twenty-four hours. His passion had reached the acute key. He could not eat or drink in normal fashion, and no sooner had he left the girl than the sky became sombre, his pulse weakened, and he longed to return to her side to tell her something he had forgotten. He did this several times, and hesitated in his speech, reddened, and left her, stumbling over the grass like a lame man. Never such a crazy wooer, never a calmer maiden. She looked unutterable sentiment, but spoke it not.

When he teased her about her music, she became a statue. She was too timid to play before artists; her only master had been her father. Once more he had heard the piano as he returned unexpectedly, and almost caught her; he saw her at the instrument, but some instinct must have warned her that she was being spied upon. She stopped in the middle of a phrase from a Mendelssohn song, and even to his prejudiced ears her touch had seemed commonplace. Yet he loved her all the more despite her flat refusal to play. The temptation to his excited artistic temperament was removed. He played, often, gloriously. His nerves were steel. This was a cure his doctor had not foreseen. What did it matter, anyhow?--he was near Constantia daily, and the sunshine was royal. Only--why did her relatives absent themselves so obstinately! She told him, with her secret smile, that she had scolded them for talking so much; but when he played they were never far away, she assured him. Nor was the Japanese woman, Cilli--what a name! A nickname given by Constantia in her babyhood. Cilli was a good soul. He hoped so--her goodness was not apparent. She had a sneering expression as he played. He never looked up from the keyboard that he did not encounter her ironical gaze. She was undoubtedly interested. Her intensity of pose proved it; but there was no sympathy in her eyes. And she had a habit of suddenly appearing in door or window, and always behind her mistress. She ended by seriously annoying him, though he did not complain. It was too trivial.

One afternoon he unfolded his novel views on touch. If the action of the modern pianoforte could be made as sensitive in its response as the fingerboard of a fiddle.... Constantia listened with her habitual gravity, but he knew that she was bored. Then he shifted to the subject of fingers. He begged to be allowed the privilege of examining hers. At first she held back, burying her hand in the old Mechlin lace flounce of her sleeves. He coaxed. He did not attempt to conceal his chagrin when he finally saw her fingers. They were pudgy, good-humoured, fit to lift a knife and fork, or to mend linen. They did not match her cameo-like face, and above all they did not reveal the musical soul he knew her to possess. For the first time since he met her she gave evidence of ill humour. She sharply withdrew her hand from his, and as she did so a barbaric croon was heard, a sort of triumphant wailing, and Constantia, without making an excuse, hurriedly left the room. The singing stopped.

"It's that devil of a Japanese woman," he muttered testily. He waited for nearly an hour, and in a vile temper took up his hat and stick and went away. Decidedly this was his unlucky day, he grumbled, as he reached the water. He saw Grabowski and Pelletier, arm in arm, trudging toward the villa, but contrived to evade them. In ten minutes he found himself spying on the house he had quitted. He skirted a little private way back of the villa, and to his amazement father, uncle, and Constantia came out and hailed the omnibus which travelled hourly to Aussee. Davos was furious. He did not risk following them, for he realized he had been treated shabbily. His wrath softened as he reflected; perhaps Constantia, agitated by his rudeness,--had he been rude?--persuaded her family to follow him to Ischl. The sky cleared. That was the solution--Marco Davos straightened himself--his pride was no longer up in arms. Poor child--she was so easily wounded! How he loved her!

His body trembled. He could not believe he was awake. Incredible music was issuing from behind the closed blinds of the villa. Music! And the music he had overheard that first night. But Constantia had just gone away; he had seen her. There must be some mistake, some joke. No, no, by another path she had managed to get back to the house. Ay! but what playing. Again came that purling rush of notes, those unison passages, as if one gigantic hand grasped them--so perfect was the tonal accord. He did not hesitate. At a bound he was in the corridor and pushed open the door of the drawing-room....

At first the twilighted room blinded him. Then to his disgust and terror he saw the apelike features of the squat Japanese governess. She sat at the piano, her bilious skin flushed by the exertion of playing.

"You--you!" he barely managed to stammer. She did not reply, but preserved the immobility of a carved idol.

"You are a wonderful artiste," he blurted, going to her. She stolidly answered:--

"The Japanese have the finest sense of touch in the world. I was once a pupil of Karl Tausig." Involuntarily he bowed his head to the revered name of the one man he had longed to hear. Then his feelings almost strangled him; his master passion asserted itself.

"Your fingers, your fingers--let me see them," he hoarsely demanded. With a malicious grin she extended her hands--he groaned enviously. Yes, they were miracles of sculpture, miracles of colour and delicacy, the slender tips well-nigh prehensile in their cunning power. And the fingers of Constantia, of his love, of the woman who loved Chopin--that Chopin whose first passion was for her grandmother, the opera singer Constantia Gladowska!

The knowledge of her cruel deception crept into his consciousness. He was chilled for several seconds. Grief at his lost love, implacable anger at her trickery, crowded into his unhappy brain. But he only bowed to Cilli, and summoning all his will he politely said:--

"It is quite true that when the Japanese choose to play the piano, we Europeans must shut up shop." He hurried out to the road and walked desperately....

The next morning, as he nervously paced the platform of the Ischl railway station, he encountered his old friend Alfred Bruenfeld, the jovial Viennese pianist.

"Hullo!"

"Hullo!"

"Not going back to Vienna?"

"Yes--I'm tired of the country."

"But, man, you are pale and tired. Have you been studying up here after your doctor bade you rest?" The concern in Bruenfeld's voice touched Davos. He shook his head, then bethought himself of something.

"Alfred, you are acquainted with everybody in Europe. How is it you never told me about that strange Grabowski crowd--you know, the granddaughter of Chopin's first love?" Bruenfeld looked at him with instant curiosity.

"You also?" he said. The young man blushed. After that he could never forgive! The other continued:--

"Granddaughter, fiddlesticks! They are not Poles, those Grabowskis, but impostors. Their real name is--is--" Davos started.

"What, you have met them?"

"Yes, the stupid father, the odious uncle, the fair Constantia--what a meek saint!--and that diabolical Japanese, who plays the piano like a house on fire." Tears came to the eyes of Marco Davos.

"Did they--I mean, did she take you in, too?"

"Here, at Ischl, last summer," was the grim reply.

[The end]
James Huneker's short story: Woman Who Loved Chopin

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