Seven Gothic Tales (47 page)

“All the same, my powders had worked a change in her. She had done with death. Dead tired, she had risen, in a way, from the dead. On that afternoon, for the first time, she wanted me to talk to her.

“I told her then how, after the long hours of the previous night, just before daybreak, a nightingale had taken to singing, wildly, exuberantly, as if she meant to overtake time, outside my window, and how, listening, I had thought of a ballet which was to take its theme from all the things that had befallen us. Pellegrina listened to this attentively, and in the course of the next day came back to the idea of my ballet, and asked me about the scenario and tunes of it. I told her that I meant it to be called Philomela, and explained to her how the scenes and dances were to follow one another. While we were talking about it she took my hand and played with my fingers. This was the first time since her fall that she had touched any human being.

“A couple of days later she sent for me very early in the morning, before sunrise. I was surprised to find her in the pergola outside her house, up and dressed in a negligee.

“It was a beautiful morning. The acacias and the grass of the garden spread a delicate, fresh, and lovely scent in the clear, somber blue air.

“She looked as she had before her misfortune. Her flower-like face was white in the dim light. But when she began to speak to me her voice was very low, as if she were afraid of waking somebody.

“ ‘I have sent for you so early, Marcus,’ she said, so that we should have all the day to talk together, if it be necessary.’ She took my arm and made me walk up and down with her. As we came to the end of the pergola she stopped and looked, before turning, out over the landscape. The air was very fresh. ‘I have much to say to you,’ she said. But she did not go on. Only as we
came back once more to the same spot, she said the same thing again: ‘I have much to say to you, Marcus.’

“At last we sat down on a seat in the pergola. She did not release my arm, so we sat there side by side, as in a carriage.

“ ‘You think, Marcus,’ she said, ‘that I have not thought of anything all these days, but you are mistaken. Only it is not easy to tell you of it, for these little thoughts of mine, I have fetched them from far, far away. Be patient, we have all the day.

“ ‘You see, Marcus,’ she went on, still speaking very softly, ‘I have come to see, now, that I have been very selfish. I have always thought of Pellegrina, Pellegrina. What has happened to her, that has seemed to me terribly important, the most important thing in all the world. The people who loved Pellegrina, those only, I thought, were the kind, good people of the world, and it seemed to me that the only sensible thing that any wise person could do was to go and hear Pellegrina Leoni sing.’ Again she sat silent, pressing my arm a little.

“ ‘Even this disaster of mine,’ she said suddenly, ‘had it happened to someone else—say now, Marcus, to a soprano of China, of the Imperial Opera of China, a hundred years ago—we might have heard of it, and not have thought much about it, or wept many tears over it. Still, it would have been as sad and as terrible. But because it happened to Pellegrina, it seemed to us too cruel to bear. This, my Marcus, it need not be, and it shall not be so for us again.

“ ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I shall explain everything better to you. “ ‘Pellegrina is dead,’ she said. ‘Was she not a great singer, a star? You remember the song:

“ ‘It was so with her; her death was a great sorrow to the world. Oh, sad, sad. You must now help me to tell the world of her death; you must make the grave of Pellegrina, and have a monument
erected upon it. Do not put up a very splendid statue, such as we should have chosen had I died and never lost my voice, but still a marble plate, to give the name and the dates of her birth and her death. Put a short inscription upon it as well. Put this, Marcus:
By the grace of God
. Yes,
By the grace of God
, Marcus.’

“ ‘Pellegrina is dead,’ she said once more. ‘Nobody, nobody must ever be Pellegrina again. To have her once more upon the stage of life, of this hard world, and to have such awful things happen to her as do happen to people on the earth—no, that must not be thought of. No human being could stand the thought. Now, you will promise me that, first of all?’ she asked me.

“I said that I would do as she wished.

“She rose again, and went to the end of the pergola. It was getting lighter now; the last pale stars had gone; all the world around us was wet with dew, and the grass, which had been dark until now, was shining like silver with it. There was a great clarity in the air, as if the sky were lifting itself high above the earth. Pellegrina stood close to me. Her clothes were moist with dew. She played with her long dark tresses, drawing one of them along between her lips, and she shivered a little in the morning air. From this end of the pergola the ground sloped down; a great landscape lay far beneath us; now we could distinguish the roads, the fields, and the trees within it. Below us, on the road, we saw some workmen and women going out into the fields.

“ ‘Look,’ she said. ‘I have waited for them, to explain things to you. It is easier for you to understand when you can see. See, there is a woman going out to her work in the fields. Perhaps she is a peasant’s wife; perhaps her name is Maria. She is happy this morning, because her husband is good to her and has given her a coral necklace. Or perhaps she is unhappy, because he worries her with his jealousy. Well, what do we think of that, Marcus, you and I? A woman named Maria is unhappy, we think. There will always be such women here and there around us, and we do not think very much of it. Look, there is another, going the other
way. She is taking vegetables and fruit to Milan, on her donkey, and she is annoyed because that donkey is so old, and can walk only very slowly, so that she will be late at the market. Nor of that do we think much, Marcus. Oh, I will be that now. The time has come for me to be that: a woman called one name or another. And if she is unhappy we shall not think a great deal about it.’

“We stood there in silence, and I tried to follow her thoughts.

“ ‘And if,’ she said, ‘I come to think very much of what happens to that one woman, why I shall go away, at once, and be someone else: a woman who makes lace in the town, or who teaches children to read, or a lady traveling to Jerusalem to pray at the Holy Sepulcher. There are many that I can be. If they are happy or unhappy, or if they are fools or wise people, those women, I shall not think a great deal about that. Neither will you, if you hear about it. I will not be one person again, Marcus, I will be always many persons from now. Never again will I have my heart and my whole life bound up with one woman, to suffer so much. It is terrible to me to think of it even. That, you see, I have done long enough. I cannot be asked to do it any more. It is all over.’

“ ‘And you, Marcus,’ she said, ‘you have given me many things; now I shall give you this good advice. Be many people. Give up this game of being one and of being always Marcus Cocoza. You have worried too much about Marcus Cocoza, so that you have been really his slave and his prisoner. You have not done anything without first considering how it would affect Marcus Cocoza’s happiness and prestige. You were always much afraid that Marcus might do a stupid thing, or be bored. What would it really have mattered? All over the world people are doing stupid things, and many people are bored, and we have always known about it. Give up being Marcus Cocoza now; then what difference does it make to the world if one more person, one old Jew, does a stupid thing, or is bored for a day or two? I should like you to be easy, your little heart to be light again. You must, from now, be more than one, many people, as many as you can
think of. I feel, Marcus—I am sure—that all people in the world ought to be, each of them, more than one, and they would all, yes, all of them, be more easy at heart. They would have a little fun. Is it not strange that no philosopher has thought of this, and that I should hit upon it?’

“I thought over what she said, and wondered whether it would be likely to do me any good. But I knew that it would not be possible for me to follow this advice of hers while she was still alive. Were she dead I might find refuge in her whim. The moon must follow the earth, but if the earth were to split and evaporate, it might perhaps swing itself free of its dependency, and be, in an unfettered flight in the ether, for a short time the moon of Jupiter, and for another, that of Venus. I do not know enough about astronomy to tell. I leave it to you, who may have more insight into the science.

“ ‘What a lovely morning,’ said Pellegrina. ‘One thinks that it is dark still, but really the air is as filled with light as a glassful of wine. How wet everything is. But soon all the world will be dry again, and it will be hot on the roads. It does not matter to us. We shall be here together all day.’

“ ‘And what do you want me to do?’ I asked her.

“She sat for a very long time in deep silence.

“ ‘Yes, Marcus,’ she said, ‘we must part. Tonight I am going away.’

“ ‘Shall we not meet again?’ I asked.

“She put her finger on her lips. ‘You must never speak to me,’ she said, ‘if we ever happen to meet. You once knew Pellegrina, you know.’

“ ‘Let me,’ I said, ‘follow you, and be near you, so that you can send for me if ever you want a friend to help you.’

“ ‘Yes, do that,’ she said. ‘Be near me, Marcus, so that if ever anyone should mistake me for Pellegrina Leoni, I can get hold of you, and you can help me to get away. Be never far off, so that you can always keep the name of Pellegrina away from me. But
speak to me you must never, Marcus. I could not hear your voice without remembering the divine voice of Pellegrina, and her great triumphs, and this house, where we stand now, and the garden.’ She looked around at the house as if it were a thing which no longer existed.

“ ‘Oh, the currents of life are cold, Pellegrina,’ I said.

“She laughed a little in the morning air, then became again very still. The swallows are cruising about now,’ she said. ‘What,’ she said after a moment, ‘do you think of this paradise that they talk about? Is it anywhere, really? There we two shall walk again into this house, and the paradise-winds shall lift the curtains a little. There it is spring, and the swallows are back, and everything is forgiven.’

“She went away,” said the old Jew, “as she had said, upon the evening of that day.

“I have never spoken to her since,” he said, “but she has written to me from time to time, to make me help her when she wanted to get away and to change from one thing into another. In Rome, if you had not”—he turned to me—“told her that your father was an enthusiast for the Italian opera, she would have gone with you to England. But only for a year or two. She would have left you again. She would never let herself become tied up in any of her rôles.”

Thus the old man finished his tale. He looked around at us, then quieted down again, rested his chin upon the golden button of his walking stick, and sank into deep thought, always watching the face of the dying woman on the stretcher.

We three, who had been listening to him, sat on in silence, feeling, I should say, a little sheepish, all of us.

Lincoln himself, here, fell into a reverie, and for some time said nothing.

And I ought to tell you here, now, Mira, that afterward in life my friend Pilot took the advice of Pellegrina Leoni.

It is like this: I do not now quite remember whether, many years later, I met, at the Cape of Good Hope, an elderly German clergyman, by the name of Pastor Rosenquist, who, while we were discussing the strangeness of human nature, recounted to me this tale of my friend, or whether I amused myself, many years later, by imagining that I had met, at the Cape of Good Hope, a German clergyman who told me all this about him.

But there it is, in any case. Pilot followed her advice, and took to being more than one person. From time to time he withdrew from the hard and hopeless task of being Friederich Hohenemser and took on the existence of a small landowner in a far district, by the name of Fridolin Emser. He surrounded this second existence of his with the greatest secrecy, and let nobody know what he was doing. He felt, when he got away, as if he were running for his life, and he cuddled up in Fridolin’s little house, outside a village, like an animal safe in his den. Had anyone become suspicious of him and followed up the track which he took such pains to cover, to find out what, in the end, he did in his concealment, he would have found that Pilot as Emser did absolutely nothing. He looked after his little place with care, collected day by day a little money for Fridolin, and sat of an evening in the arbor of his garden, beneath a blackbird in a cage, smoking his long pipe; or sometimes he would go and drink beer in the inn, and discuss politics with friendly people. Here he was happy. For since he himself, from the beginning, knew Fridolin to be nonexistent, he was never worried by efforts to make him exist. The one thing which troubled him was that he dared not remain too long in his holiday existence for fear that it might put on too much weight, and tilt him over. He had to return to the country place of the Hohenemsers. But even Friederich Hohenemser was happier after he had begun to follow the plan of Pellegrina, for a secret in his life was an asset to him as well as to Fridolin.

I do not know if, in any of his existences, he married. The marriage
of Friederich Hohenemser would have been bound to be miserably unhappy, and I would have pitied the woman who had to drag him along with her in it; but Fridolin might well have married and given his wife a peaceful and pleasant time. For he would not have been occupied all the time in proving to her that he really existed, which is the curse of many wives, but might have quietly enjoyed seeing her existing. I do not know why it should be so, but whenever I think of Pilot now, I picture him under an umbrella—he who was so exposed, once, to all weathers. Beneath this shelter the sun shall not smite him by day, nor the moon by night.