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.