VERONIKA PATHZUOL was my betrothed. I must give some account of the circumstances under which she and I first met each other, so that my tale may be clear and complete from the beginning.
For a long while, without knowing why, I had been restless—hungry, without knowing for what I hungered. Teaching music to support myself, I employed all of the day that was not thus occupied in practicing on my own behalf. My life consequently was a solitary one, numbering but few acquaintances and not any friends. In my short intervals of leisure I was generally too tired to seek out society; I was too obscure and unimportant to be sought out in turn. Yet, young and of an ardent temperament, doubtless it was natural that I should have been dimly conscious of something wanting; and, not prone to selfanalysis, doubtless it was also natural that I should have had no distinct conception of what the wanting something was. Besides, it would soon be summer. The soft air and bright sunshine of spring awoke a myriad vague desires in my heart. I strove in vain to understand them. They were all the more poignant because they had no definite object. Twenty times a day I would catch myself heaving a mighty sigh; but asking, “What are you sighing for?” I had to answer, “Who can tell?” My thoughts got into the habit of wandering away would fly off to cloud-land at the most inopportune moments. While my pupils were blundering through their exercises their master would fall to thinking of other things—afterward impossible to remember what. From morning to night I went about with a feeling of expectancy—an event was impending—presently a change would come over the tenor of my life. I waited anxiously, on the alert for its first premonitory symptom.
I had taken to strolling through the streets at evening. One delicious night in May, I found myself leaning over the terrace at the eastern extremity of Fifty-first street. The moon had just risen, a huge red disk, out of the mist and smoke across the river, and was turning the waves to burnished copper. Through the open windows of the neighborhood escaped the sounds of quiet talk, of laughter, of piano playing. Now and then a low dark shape, with a single bright light gleaming like a jewel at its side, and spars and masts sharply outlined against the sky, slipped silently past upon the water. The atmosphere was quick with the warmth and the scent of spring. I stood there motionless, penetrated by the unspeakable beauty of the scene. The moon climbed higher and higher, and gradually exchanged its ruddy tint for its ordinary metallic blue. By and by somebody with a sweet soprano voice, in one of the nearest houses, began to sing the Ave Maria of Gounod. The impassioned music seemed made for the time and place. It caught the soul of the moment and gave it voice. I could feel my heart swelling with the crescendo: and then how it leaped and thrilled when the singer reached that glorious climax of the song, “Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae!” At that instant, as if released from a spell, I drew a long breath and looked around. Then for the first time I saw Veronika Pathzuol. Her eyes and mine met for the first time.
“A lady, young, tall, beautiful, strange, and sad”—and pale. Her face was pale, like an angel’s. The wealth of black hair above it and the dark eyes that gazed sadly out of it rendered the pallor more intense. But it was not the pallor of ill-health; it was the pallor of a luminous white soul. As I beheld her standing there in the moonlight scarcely a yard away from me, I knew all at once what it was my heart had craved for so long a while. I knew at once, by the sudden pain that pierced it, that my heart had been waiting for this lady all its life. I did not stop to reflect and determine. Had I done so, most likely—nay, most certain-ly—I should never have had to tell this story. The words flew to my tongue and were spoken as soon as thought.—“Oh, how beautiful, how beautiful!” I exclaimed, meaning her.
“Very beautiful,” I heard her voice, clear and soft, respond. “It is almost a pain, the feeling such intense beauty gives,”—meaning the scene before us.
“And yet this is every-day, hum-drum, commercial New York,” added another voice, one that jarred upon my hearing like the scraping of a contre-bass after a cadenza by the flute. She was leaning on the arm of a man. I was at the verge of being straightway jealous, when I observed that his hair and beard were snowy and that his face was wrinkled.
We got into conversation without ceremony. Nature had introduced us. Our common appreciation of the loveliness round about broke the ice and provided a topic for speech. After her first impulsive utterance, Veronika said little. But the old man was voluble, evidently glad of the opportunity to express his ideas to a new person. And I was more than glad to listen, because while doing so I could gaze upon her face to my heart’s content.
Something that I had said, in reply to a remark of his upon the singing of the Ave, caused him to ask, “Ah, you understand music? You are a musician—yes?”
“I play the violin,” I answered.
“Do you hear, Veronika?” he cried. “Our friend plays the violin! My dear sir, you must do us the favor of playing for us before we part. Do not be surprised—pay no heed to the formalities. Is not music a free-masonry? Come, you shall try your skill upon an Amati. Such an evening as this must have an appropriate ending. Come.”
Without allowing me time to protest, had I been disposed to do so, he grasped my arm and started off. He kept on talking as we marched along. I had no attention for what he said. My mind was divided between delight at my good-fortune, and query as to what its upshot would be. We had not far to go. A few doors to the west of First avenue he turned up a stoop. It was a modest apartment-house. We climbed to the topmost story and stood still in the dark while he fumbled for a match. Then he lighted the gas and said, “Sit down.” The room was bare and cheerless. A chromo or two sufficed to decorate the walls. The furniture—a few chairs and a center-table—was stiff and shabby. The carpet was threadbare.
But a piano occupied a corner; and the floor, the table, and the chairs were littered thick with music. So I felt at home. As I look back at that meager little parlor now, it is transformed into a sanctuary. There the deepest moments of two lives were spent. Yet to-day strangers dwell in it; come and go, laugh and chatter, eat, drink, and make merry between its walls, all unconcernedly, never pausing to bestow a thought upon the sad, sweet lady whose presence once hallowed the place, whose tears more than once watered the floor over which they tread with indifferent footsteps.
The old man lighted the gas and said, “Sit down,” making obedience possible by clearing a chair of the music it held. Then scrutinizing my face: “You are a Jew, are you not?” he inquired, in his quick, nervous way.
“Yes,” I said, “by birth.”
“And by faith?”
“Well, I am not orthodox, not a zealot.”
“Your name?”
“Neuman—Ernest Neuman.”
“And mine, Tikulski—Baruch. You see we are of one race—the race—the chosen race! Neither am I orthodox. I keep Yom Kippur, to be sure, but I have no conscientious scruples against shell-fish, and indeed the ‘succulent oyster’ is especially congenial to my palate. This,” with a wave of the hand toward Veronika, “this is my niece, Miss Pathzuol—P-a-t-h-z-u-o-1—pronounced Patchuol—Hungarian name. Her mother was my sister.”
Veronika dropped a courtesy. Her eyes seemed to plead, “Do not laugh at my uncle. He is eccentric; but be charitable.”
“Now, Veronika, show Mr. Neuman your music and find something that you can play together. I will go fetch the violin.”
The old man left the room.
“What will you play?” asked Veronika. Her voice quavered. She was timid, as indeed it was natural she should be.
“I don’t know,” I said, my own voice not as firm as I could have wished. “What have you got?”
We commenced at the top of a big pile of music and had settled upon the prize song from the Meistersinger—not then as hackneyed as it is at present, not then the victim of every passable amateur—when Mr. Tikulski came back. It was in truth an Amati that he brought. The discolored, half obliterated label within said so—but the label might have lied. The strong, tense, ringing tone that it emitted in response to the A which Veronika gave me said so also—and that did not lie. I played as best I could. Rather, the music played itself. With a violin under my chin, I lapse into semi-consciousness, lose my identity. Another spirit impels my arm, pouring itself out through the voice of my instrument. Not until silence is restored do I realize that I have been the performer. While the music is going on my personality is annihilated. With the final note I seem to “come, to,” as one does from a trance.
When I came to this time it was to be embraced by my host with an effusiveness that overwhelmed me. “Ah, you are a true musician,” he cried, releasing me from his arms. “You have the inspiration. Veronika, speak, tell him how nobly he has played.”
“I can’t speak, I can’t tell him,” answered Veronika, “it has taken away all power of speech.” But she gave me a glance, allowed her eyes to stay with mine for a long moment. A fire had been smoldering in my breast from the first; at these words, at this glance, it burst into flame. A great light inundated my soul. I felt the arteries tingling to my very finger tips. I started tuning up, to hide my emotion. Then we played the march from Raff’s Lenore.
I am afraid my agitation marred the effect of Raffs diamatic composition. At any rate, the plaudits were faint when I had done. After a breathing spell Mr. Tikulski told Veronika to sing. She played her own accompaniment while I stood by to turn.
It would be useless for me to try to qualify her singing. Whatever critical faculty I had was stricken dumb. I can only say that she sang a song in French (an old, old romance, till then unfamiliar to me; so old that the composer’s name has been forgotten) in a splendid contralto voice, and that it seemed as if she was playing upon the inmost tissue of my life, so keenly I felt each note. I quite forgot to turn the page at the proper place, and Veronika had to prompt me. It was a little thing, and yet I remember as vividly as if from yesterday the nod of the head and the inflection with which she said, “Turn, please.”
“‘Le temps fait passer l’amour,’.rdquo; repeated Mr. Tikulski: it was the last line of the song. “Veronika, bring some wine. Le vin fait passer le temps,” and he chuckled at his joke. Another small thing that I remember vividly is how Tikulski, as she left the room, posed his forefinger upon his Adam’s-apple and said, “She carries a ‘cello here.”
He went on to this effect:—Veronika, as I already knew, was his niece. He also was a violinist: more than that, he was a composer, though as yet unpublished. With the self-conceit too characteristic of musical people, he told me how he was engaged upon “an epoch-making symphony”—had been engaged upon it for the last dozen years, would be engaged upon it for the dozen years to come. Then the world should have it, and he, not having lived in vain, would die content. Veronika was now one-and-twenty. During her childhood he had played in an orchestra and arranged dance-music and done other hackwork to earn money for her maintenance and education. She had received the best musical training, instrumental and vocal, that could be had in New York. Now he had turned the tables. Now he did nothing but compose—reserved all his time and strength for his masterpiece. Veronika had become the breadwinner. She taught on an average seven hours a day. She sang regularly in church and synagogue, and at concerts and musicals whenever she got a chance.—Veronika reentered the room bearing cakes and wine. She sat down near to us, and I forgot every thing in the contemplation of her beautiful, sad, strange face. Her eyes were bottomless. Far, far in their liquid depths the spirit shone like a star. All the history of Israel was in her glance.
Every touch of constraint had vanished from her bearing. She spoke with me as with one whom she knew well. I could scarcely believe that only an hour ago we had been ignorant of each other’s existence. We discussed music and found that our tastes were in accord. We compared notes on teaching and exchanged anecdotes about our respective pupils. She said among other things that more than half the money she earned her uncle sent to Germany for the relief of his widowed sister and her offspring, who were extremely poor! Her every syllable clove my heart like an arrow. I grew hot with indignation to think of this frail, delicate maiden slaving her life away in order that her relations might fatten in idleness and her fanatic of an uncle work at his impossible symphony. My fists clenched convulsively as I fancied her exposed to the ups and downs, the hardships, the humiliations, of a music-teacher’s career. I took no pains to regulate my manner: and, if she had possessed the least trace of sophistication, she would have guessed that I loved her from every modulation of my voice. Love her I did. I had already loved her for an eternity—from the moment my eyes had first encountered hers in the moonlight by the terrace.—But it was getting late. It would not do for me to wear my welcome out.
“Nay, stay,” interposed Mr. Tikulski, “you have not heard me play yet.”
“Oh, yes, you must hear my uncle play,” said Veronika. “The Adagio of Handel? she asked of him.
“No, child,” he answered, with a tinge of impatience, “the minuet—from my own symphony,” aiming the last words at me.
Veronika returned to the piano. They began.
Indeed, the old man played superbly. His selection was a marvelous finger-exercise—but of true music it contained none save that which he informed it with by the fervor of his performance. He was a perfect executant. His tone was equal to Wilhelm’s. It was a pity, a great pity, that he should fritter himself away in the endeavor to compose. Veronika and I said as much as this to each other with our eyes when finally his bow had reached a standstill.
“Well, if you will insist on going,” he said, “you must at least agree to come as soon as possible again. This is Wednesday. We are always at home on Wednesday evening. The other nights of the week Veronika is engaged: Monday and Tuesday, lessons; Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, rehearsals and services at church and synagogue. The church is in Hoboken: she doesn’t get home till eleven o’clock. So on Wednesday we will see you without fail—yes?”
As I looked forward, Wednesday seemed a million years away. “What an old brute you are to make that child track over to Hoboken two nights a week!” I thought; and said, “Thank you. You are very kind. Good-by.”
Veronika gave me her hand. The long slim fingers clasped mine cordially and sent an electric thrill into my heart.