The Chapel-master kept from the previous year the remembrance of a great happiness, and he spoke of it enthusiastically. He had been chosen by the Cardinal Archbishop to go to Madrid, to be one of a board of examiners for organists.
"That was the best time I ever had in my life, Gabriel. One evening I listened to Wagner, dressed in the clothes of a friend of mine, a violinist, who plays here in Toledo at the great festivals. I heard the Walkyria in the pit of the Real Theatre, another night I went to a concert; but the greatest night of all was the one on which I heard the Ninth Symphony of that ugly old fellow, of that deaf, bad-tempered genius who is listening to us."
And with one bound the musician rushed to the bust, kissing it with childish humility, just as a child would caress a stern and domineering father.
"You know the Ninth Symphony; true, Gabriel? And what did you feel as you listened to it? When I listen to music strange things happen to me. I close my eyes and I see unknown countries and strange faces, and whenever I hear the same works the same visions are repeated. If I speak about this with any of the people down below they say I am mad, but I know that you feel as I do, and I am not afraid that you will laugh at me. There are musical passages that make me see the sea, blue and boundless, with silvery waves, and this, though I have never seen the ocean; other works bring before me woods and castles, or groups of shepherds with white flocks; with Schubert I always see two lovers sighing at the foot of a linden tree, and certain French composers bring before my mind's eye beautiful women walking among beds of roses, dressed in violet, always violet. And you, Gabriel, do not you see these things?"
The anarchist assented—yes, music awoke in him also a world of fantastic visions, far more beautiful than reality.
"I remember," went on the priest, "what the Ninth Symphony made me see. I see it still if I only hum some of its passages. Oh! that graceful Scherzo with its strange tremolos! I thought, hearing it, that God and his court of saints had left the heavens to take a walk, leaving the little angels masters of the house, full liberty! Universal gambols! The heavenly children, without any restraint, sported from cloud to cloud, amusing themselves by scattering on the earth the garlands of flowers that the saints had left behind them; one let loose the rain and made it fall on the earth; another seized the key of the thunder and touched it, fearful peals which frightened all the revellers and made them fly. But they returned again to continue their graceful play, beginning afresh their noisy games that the thunder had disturbed. And the Adagio! What do you say about that? Do you know anything softer, more loving or so divinely peaceful? Human beings will never speak like this again, however much progress they make. Hearing it, I thought of those fresco-painted ceilings with mythological figures—gods and goddesses with pink flesh and flowing curves, Apollo and Venus reclining on a mountain of pink and gold clouds, like a lovely dawn."
"Chaplain, what has come to you?" said Gabriel; "this is not very
Christian."
"No, but it is artistic," said the musician simply. "I do not trouble myself much about religion, I believe what I was taught, and I have never taken the trouble to inquire any further. Music alone occupies me, of which someone has said 'that it will be the religion of the future,' the purest manifestation of the ideal. Everything that is beautiful delights me, and I believe in it as a work of God. 'I believe in God and in Beethoven,' as his pupil said—and besides, how much religion the grandeur of music contains! Do you know the last quartet that Beethoven wrote? He felt he was dying, and he wrote on the edge of the score this terrible question: 'Must it be?' and lower down he added, 'Yes, it must be, it must be.' It was necessary to die, even for such a genius to leave life, while he still carried in his mind such glorious things, to pay the tribute of human renovation; and then he wrote that lament, that farewell to life, whose greatness cannot be equalled by any song, or by any words of religion."
The musician sat down to the harmonium, and for a long while played that last lament of the genius, his sorrowful complaint on crossing the threshold, not despairing and trembling through fear of the unknown, but with a brave melancholy, sinking into the eternal shadow, confident that nothing could obscure his genius.
These evenings of artistic communion in that corner of the sleepy Cathedral drew the two men together with an ever increasing affection. The musician talked, turning over his scores, or playing his harmonium; the revolutionist listened silently, only interrupting his friend by his painful cough. They were evenings of sweet sadness that these two men spent together, one dreaming of leaving the stone prison of the Cathedral to see the world, the other returning from life wounded and breathless, content with the obscure repose of the beautiful church, and guarding with prudent silence the secret of his past. Art shone for them like the rays of the sun in the grey and monotonous atmosphere of the Cathedral.