III
Who was he? What was he?
One of those riddles that heaven sends from time to time down to earth to be solved. But the earth occasionally finds the task too difficult and buries the riddle unread in her bosom.
He was born in Brussels, the son of a chorus singer in the theatre "de la Monnaie," and of one of those Hungarian Gipsy musicians, who appear now here now there in the capitals and small towns of Europe, always in bands, like troops of will-o'-the-wisps, carrying on their unwarranted and unjustifiable but bewitching musical nonsense. The mother, Margaretha von Zuylen, she was called, gave the boy the first name of his Hungarian father, who had disappeared before the child saw the light. The Flemish woman's son was named Gesa, Gesa von Zuylen. He had a dark-eyed face, framed by black curls; at the same time he was somewhat rounded in feature, and heavily built, indicating that he was a son of his flat, canal-intersected fatherland. His temperament was a strange mixture of dreamy inertness and fitful fire. The alley in which he grew up was called the Rue Ravestein, and stretched itself crooked and uneven, dirty and neglected, behind the Rue Montagne de la Cour, out toward St. Gudule. The nooks and corners of that region, albeit close to the brilliant centre of urban civilization, have an ill name, are picturesquely disreputable, and quite unrecognized by the good society of Brussels. No carriage can pass here, partly because the alleys are too narrow, partly because their original unevenness--no country in the world has a more hilly capital than flat Belgium--is increased here and there by a few rickety steps. Consequently nearly all the inhabitants extend their domestic establishments into the open air.
The active life and the dirt remind one of southern cities. Decaying vegetables, squirrel skins, paper flowers, old ball gloves, ashes, and other trash make themselves comfortable on the large irregular stones of the pavement, and through the middle slowly creep the dull and stagnant waters of the drain. Long-legged hyena-like dogs, with crooked backs and rough hides, that remind the visitor of Constantinople, belonging to nobody, snuff amongst the refuse; scissors-grinders, and other roofless vagabonds, lie, according to the time of year, in the shade or the sunshine; untidy women in dirty wrappers, with slovenly hair caught up on pins, lean out of windows and carry on endless conversations; others stand in the house doors, a puffy red fist on either hip, and look forth, blinking at time creeping by.
The houses are not alike, some are narrow and tall, some broad and low, as if crowded into the ground by their monstrous red-green roofs. In a few windows are flower pots, others are closely curtained. Small, not particularly tempting drinking shops, with dark red woodwork, on which is written in white letters, "Hier verkoopt men drank," frequently break the rows of dwellings. Any one of these alleys, in Gesa's youth, might have passed for all the rest, only the Rue Ravestein perhaps was still more disreputably picturesque than the others. With the lazy hum of its vagabond life there mingled the sound of the coffin maker's hammer and the sharp stroke of the stone mason's chisel. Against the rear wall of an ancient grey church there leaned an enormous crucifix, and from beneath the time-blackened halo around his head, the Redeemer looked sadly down on the shame and misery that he had not been able to banish from the world. Two narrow church windows mirrored themselves in the waters of the drain, that is, on days when the drain was clear enough.
In these surroundings Gesa grew up. His mother belonged among those females who stood in the house doors and blinked at time creeping by. She was a type of a handsome Fleming, tall, somewhat heavy, with powerful limbs and a red and white complexion. Her red lips parted indolently over very white teeth, a delicate pink played about her nostrils. She had the prominent eyes and the richly waving, luxuriant, tawny hair with which Rubens liked to adorn his Magdalens. When she was not engaged at the theatre, or standing in the house door, she was lounging on her straw bed in the gaunt room, reading robber stories out of old journals, that were bought from an antiquary in a rag shop near by, and circulated from hand to hand among the gossips of the Rue Ravestein.
Lazy to sleepiness, good-humored to weakness, she had ever a caress for Gesa, and a merry frolic for the big grey cat. She lived only in the moment. In the beginning of the month, she fed the boy with dainties, toward the end she ran in debt.
From his earliest youth Gesa was musical. Before he could speak, he would look up with great dark eyes to his mother, enchanted when she rocked him in her arms and sang a cradle song.
A friend of Margaretha taught the little one to play on the violin. Gesa learned extraordinarily fast. The chorus singer's financial condition growing constantly more and more unfortunate, led her to make use of her son's talent, and she actually procured him an engagement, when he was hardly nine years old, in the band of a circus that had erected its temporary booths on the "Grand Sablon," and whose company consisted of an acrobat of conspicuous beauty, a particularly unpleasant dwarf named Molaro, four monkeys and a pony, the height of whose accomplishments it was to stand on three legs, though that might have been due to infirmity rather than art.
Gesa's orchestral duties consisted in supporting, along with an old flutist, the musical disorders of a narrow-chested, long-haired youth, who hammered waltzes and polkas on a tired old spinnet, while at the same time, as he confessed to little Gesa with a sigh, he had vainly longed all his life to be entrusted with the execution of a funeral march!
The circus gave its performances from two to four in the afternoon, and was always empty. While Gesa, behind the orchestra rails, fiddled his simple part mechanically, his childish eyes peered out into the ring beyond. There he saw the acrobat, bedizened in paint and tinsel, with pink tights and green silk hose, a gold circlet on his head, throwing somersaults in the air, and contorting his limber body on a trapeze. He saw the dwarf, with his big red bristly head, and his tights, yellow on one side and blue on the other, making disgusting jokes. The dwarf was always applauded. The little monkeys tremblingly played their bits of tricks. The smell of sawdust, gas, orange peel and monkeys crept into the little fiddler's nostrils, he sneezed. Then he grew sleepy, and his bow stopped. "Allons donc!" wheezed the pianist, stamping his foot. Gesa opened his eyes, and met those of his mother, who sat blonde and phlegmatic at the edge of the ring. She smiled and nodded to him; he fiddled on. When the chorus singer was not hindered by rehearsals at the theatre, she never omitted a performance of the circus. Gesa imagined she came to hear him play.
But one fine day Gesa was rude to the dwarf Molaro, and paid for it with his place in the orchestra. Margaretha, however, still continued a regular visitor at the circus.
And then there came an April afternoon with cold showers of rain and violent blustering wind. Winter and spring waged war without. Gesa, who since he had ceased to have a regular occupation, read incessantly in the knight and robber romances of his mother, sat bent over the faded and tattered leaves of an old journal, completely lost in a tale of terror, both elbows planted on the shaky table and a finger in each ear. Margaretha entered, and came up to him.
"Your supper stands already prepared in the cupboard," she said, stammering and hesitating. "You--you need not wait for me. I shall come home late. Adieu, my treasure!"
"Adieu, mama," said he, indifferently. He was used to her coming home late and scarcely looked up from his reading. She went. Five minutes later she returned.
"Have you forgotten something, mother?" he asked.
"Yes," muttered his mother. She was flushed, and searched about aimlessly, now here, now there. At last she came and bent over the boy, kissed him once, twice, thrice, pressing his head to her breast. "God guard thee," she murmured, and went away. Gesa read on. Presently, he was obliged to brush away something bright that obscured the already indistinct print of the journal. It was a tear of his mother.
Gesa lay down that night as usual, when Margaretha was engaged at the theatre, without fastening the door. When he awoke next morning, he found his mother's bed empty. Frightened he cried "Mother! mother!" He knew she could not hear him; he cried out to relieve the oppression at his heart. Slipping into his clothes he ran down into the street. The gutter, brimming full from the melted snow, quivered in the morning wind. Slanting red sunbeams shimmered in the church windows. A few melancholy organ tones sounded through the grey walls out into the empty street. Gesa wept bitterly. "Mother!" he cried, louder and more pitifully than ever--"Mother!" She had always been kind to him.
He looked up and down. The whole world had grown empty for him. He understood that his mother had deserted him. The children in the Rue Ravestein understand so quickly! A long thin hand was laid on his shoulder. He looked up, beside him stood a gentleman whom he knew. The gentleman lived on the first floor of the house where Margaretha's garret was. He was pale as the Christ on the great Crucifix, and looked down almost as sadly. "Poor fellow!" he murmured, "she has left thee?" Gesa bit his teeth into his under lip, turned very red and shook off the stranger's hand. He felt for the first time that pity can humiliate. The strange gentleman, however, stroked him very softly on the head, and said once more, "Poor fellow! You must not blame her. Love is like that!"
"What is love?" asked Gesa, looking at him steadily.
The stranger cleared his throat. "A sickness, a fever," said he, hastily, "a fever in which one dreams beautiful things--and does hateful ones."