I have examined maps of the city with the greatest
care, yet have never again found the Rue d’Auseil. These maps have not been
modern maps alone, for I know that names change. I have, on the contrary,
delved deeply into all the antiquities of the place, and have personally
explored every region, of whatever name, which could possibly answer to the
street I knew as the Rue d’Auseil. But despite all I have done, it remains an
humiliating fact that I cannot find the house, the street, or even the
locality, where, during the last months of my impoverished life as a student of
metaphysics at the university, I heard the music of Erich Zann.
That my memory is
broken, I do not wonder; for my health, physical and mental, was gravely
disturbed throughout the period of my residence in the Rue d’Auseil, and I
recall that I took none of my few acquaintances there. But that I cannot find
the place again is both singular and perplexing; for it was within a
half-hour’s walk of the university and was distinguished by peculiarities which
could hardly be forgotten by any one who had been there. I have never met a
person who has seen the Rue d’Auseil.
The Rue d’Auseil
lay across a dark river bordered by precipitous brick blear-windowed warehouses
and spanned by a ponderous bridge of dark stone. It was always shadowy along
that river, as if the smoke of neighboring factories shut out the sun
perpetually. The river was also odorous with evil stenches which I have never
smelled elsewhere, and which may some day help me to find it, since I should
recognize them at once. Beyond the bridge were narrow cobbled streets with
rails; and then came the ascent, at first gradual, but incredibly steep as the
Rue d’Auseil was reached.
I have never seen
another street as narrow and steep as the Rue d’Auseil. It was almost a cliff,
closed to all vehicles, consisting in several places of flights of steps, and
ending at the top in a lofty ivied wall. Its paving was irregular, sometimes
stone slabs, sometimes cobblestones, and sometimes bare earth with struggling
greenish-grey vegetation. The houses were tall, peaked-roofed, incredibly old,
and crazily leaning backward, forward, and sidewise. Occasionally an opposite
pair, both leaning forward, almost met across the street like an arch; and
certainly they kept most of the light from the ground below. There were a few
overhead bridges from house to house across the street.
The inhabitants
of that street impressed me peculiarly; At first I thought it was because they
were all silent and reticent; but later decided it was because they were all
very old. I do not know how I came to live on such a street, but I was not
myself when I moved there. I had been living in many poor places, always
evicted for want of money; until at last I came upon that tottering house in
the Rue d’Auseil kept by the paralytic Blandot. It was the third house from the
top of the street, and by far the tallest of them all.
My room was on
the fifth story; the only inhabited room there, since the house was almost
empty. On the night I arrived I heard strange music from the peaked garret
overhead, and the next day asked old Blandot about it. He told me it was an old
German viol-player, a strange dumb man who signed his name as Erich Zann, and
who played evenings in a cheap theater orchestra; adding that Zann’s desire to
play in the night after his return from the theater was the reason he had
chosen this lofty and isolated garret room, whose single gable window was the
only point on the street from which one could look over the terminating wall at
the declivity and panorama beyond.
Thereafter I
heard Zann every night, and although he kept me awake, I was haunted by the
weirdness of his music. Knowing little of the art myself, I was yet certain
that none of his harmonies had any relation to music I had heard before; and
concluded that he was a composer of highly original genius. The longer I
listened, the more I was fascinated, until after a week I resolved to make the
old man’s acquaintance.
One night as he
was returning from his work, I intercepted Zann in the hallway and told him
that I would like to know him and be with him when he played. He was a small,
lean, bent person, with shabby clothes, blue eyes, grotesque, satyrlike face,
and nearly bald head; and at my first words seemed both angered and frightened.
My obvious friendliness, however, finally melted him; and he grudgingly
motioned to me to follow him up the dark, creaking and rickety attic stairs.
His room, one of only two in the steeply pitched garret, was on the west side,
toward the high wall that formed the upper end of the street. Its size was very
great, and seemed the greater because of its extraordinary barrenness and
neglect. Of furniture there was only a narrow iron bedstead, a dingy
wash-stand, a small table, a large bookcase, an iron music-rack, and three
old-fashioned chairs. Sheets of music were piled in disorder about the floor.
The walls were of bare boards, and had probably never known plaster; whilst the
abundance of dust and cobwebs made the place seem more deserted than inhabited.
Evidently Erich Zann’s world of beauty lay in some far cosmos of the
imagination.
Motioning me to
sit down, the dumb man closed the door, turned the large wooden bolt, and
lighted a candle to augment the one he had brought with him. He now removed his
viol from its motheaten covering, and taking it, seated himself in the least
uncomfortable of the chairs. He did not employ the music-rack, but, offering no
choice and playing from memory, enchanted me for over an hour with strains I had
never heard before; strains which must have been of his own devising. To
describe their exact nature is impossible for one unversed in music. They were
a kind of fugue, with recurrent passages of the most captivating quality, but
to me were notable for the absence of any of the weird notes I had overheard
from my room below on other occasions.
Those haunting
notes I had remembered, and had often hummed and whistled inaccurately to
myself, so when the player at length laid down his bow I asked him if he would
render some of them. As I began my request the wrinkled satyrlike face lost the
bored placidity it had possessed during the playing, and seemed to show the
same curious mixture of anger and fright which I had noticed when first I
accosted the old man. For a moment I was inclined to use persuasion, regarding
rather lightly the whims of senility; and even tried to awaken my host’s
weirder mood by whistling a few of the strains to which I had listened the
night before. But I did not pursue this course for more than a moment; for when
the dumb musician recognized the whistled air his face grew suddenly distorted
with an expression wholly beyond analysis, and his long, cold, bony right hand
reached out to stop my mouth and silence the crude imitation. As he did this he
further demonstrated his eccentricity by casting a startled glance toward the
lone curtained window, as if fearful of some intruder - a glance doubly absurd,
since the garret stood high and inaccessible above all the adjacent roofs, this
window being the only point on the steep street, as the concierge had told me,
from which one could see over the wall at the summit.
The old man’s
glance brought Blandot’s remark to my mind, and with a certain capriciousness I
felt a wish to look out over the wide and dizzying panorama of moonlit roofs
and city lights beyond the hilltop, which of all the dwellers in the Rue
d’Auseil only this crabbed musician could see. I moved toward the window and
would have drawn aside the nondescript curtains, when with a frightened rage
even greater than before, the dumb lodger was upon me again; this time
motioning with his head toward the door as he nervously strove to drag me
thither with both hands. Now thoroughly disgusted with my host, I ordered him
to release me, and told him I would go at once. His clutch relaxed, and as he
saw my disgust and offense, his own anger seemed to subside. He tightened his
relaxing grip, but this time in a friendly manner, forcing me into a chair;
then with an appearance of wistfulness crossing to the littered table, where he
wrote many words with a pencil, in the labored French of a foreigner.
The note which he
finally handed me was an appeal for tolerance and forgiveness. Zann said that
he was old, lonely, and afflicted with strange fears and nervous disorders
connected with his music and with other things. He had enjoyed my listening to
his music, and wished I would come again and not mind his eccentricities. But
he could not play to another his weird harmonies, and could not bear hearing them
from another; nor could he bear having anything in his room touched by another.
He had not known until our hallway conversation that I could overhear his
playing in my room, and now asked me if I would arrange with Blandot to take a
lower room where I could not hear him in the night. He would, he wrote, defray
the difference in rent.
As I sat
deciphering the execrable French, I felt more lenient toward the old man. He
was a victim of physical and nervous suffering, as was I; and my metaphysical
studies had taught me kindness. In the silence there came a slight sound from
the window - the shutter must have rattled in the night wind, and for some
reason I started almost as violently as did Erich Zann. So when I had finished
reading, I shook my host by the hand, and departed as a friend.
The next day
Blandot gave me a more expensive room on the third floor, between the
apartments of an aged money-lender and the room of a respectable upholsterer.
There was no one on the fourth floor.
It was not long
before I found that Zann’s eagerness for my company was not as great as it had
seemed while he was persuading me to move down from the fifth story. He did not
ask me to call on him, and when I did call he appeared uneasy and played listlessly.
This was always at night - in the day he slept and would admit no one. My
liking for him did not grow, though the attic room and the weird music seemed
to hold an odd fascination for me. I had a curious desire to look out of that
window, over the wall and down the unseen slope at the glittering roofs and
spires which must lie outspread there. Once I went up to the garret during
theater hours, when Zann was away, but the door was locked.
What I did
succeed in doing was to overhear the nocturnal playing of the dumb old man. At
first I would tip-toe up to my old fifth floor, then I grew bold enough to
climb the last creaking staircase to the peaked garret. There in the narrow
hall, outside the bolted door with the covered keyhole, I often heard sounds
which filled me with an indefinable dread - the dread of vague wonder and
brooding mystery. It was not that the sounds were hideous, for they were not;
but that they held vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe of earth, and
that at certain intervals they assumed a symphonic quality which I could hardly
conceive as produced by one player. Certainly, Erich Zann was a genius of wild
power. As the weeks passed, the playing grew wilder, whilst the old musician
acquired an increasing haggardness and furtiveness pitiful to behold. He now
refused to admit me at any time, and shunned me whenever we met on the stairs.
Then one night as
I listened at the door, I heard the shrieking viol swell into a chaotic babel
of sound; a pandemonium which would have led me to doubt my own shaking sanity
had there not come from behind that barred portal a piteous proof that the
horror was real - the awful, inarticulate cry which only a mute can utter, and
which rises only in moments of the most terrible fear or anguish. I knocked
repeatedly at the door, but received no response. Afterward I waited in the
black hallway, shivering with cold and fear, till I heard the poor musician’s
feeble effort to rise from the floor by the aid of a chair. Believing him just
conscious after a fainting fit, I renewed my rapping, at the same time calling
out my name reassuringly. I heard Zann stumble to the window and close both
shutter and sash, then stumble to the door, which he falteringly unfastened to
admit me. This time his delight at having me present was real; for his
distorted face gleamed with relief while he clutched at my coat as a child
clutches at its mother’s skirts.
Shaking
pathetically, the old man forced me into a chair whilst he sank into another,
beside which his viol and bow lay carelessly on the floor. He sat for some time
inactive, nodding oddly, but having a paradoxical suggestion of intense and
frightened listening. Subsequently he seemed to be satisfied, and crossing to a
chair by the table wrote a brief note, handed it to me, and returned to the
table, where he began to write rapidly and incessantly. The note implored me in
the name of mercy, and for the sake of my own curiosity, to wait where I was
while he prepared a full account in German of all the marvels and terrors which
beset him. I waited, and the dumb man’s pencil flew.
It was perhaps an
hour later, while I still waited and while the old musician’s feverishly
written sheets still continued to pile up, that I saw Zann start as from the
hint of a horrible shock. Unmistakably he was looking at the curtained window
and listening shudderingly. Then I half fancied I heard a sound myself; though
it was not a horrible sound, but rather an exquisitely low and infinitely
distant musical note, suggesting a player in one of the neighboring houses, or
in some abode beyond the lofty wall over which I had never been able to look.
Upon Zann the effect was terrible, for, dropping his pencil, suddenly he rose,
seized his viol, and commenced to rend the night with the wildest playing I had
ever heard from his bow save when listening at the barred door.
It would be
useless to describe the playing of Erich Zann on that dreadful night. It was
more horrible than anything I had ever overheard, because I could now see the
expression of his face, and could realize that this time the motive was stark
fear. He was trying to make a noise; to ward something off or drown something
out - what, I could not imagine, awesome though I felt it must be. The playing
grew fantastic, delirious, and hysterical, yet kept to the last the qualities
of supreme genius which I knew this strange old man possessed. I recognized the
air - it was a wild Hungarian dance popular in the theaters, and I reflected
for a moment that this was the first time I had ever heard Zann play the work
of another composer.
Louder and
louder, wilder and wilder, mounted the shrieking and whining of that desperate
viol. The player was dripping with an uncanny perspiration and twisted like a
monkey, always looking frantically at the curtained window. In his frenzied
strains I could almost see shadowy satyrs and bacchanals dancing and whirling
insanely through seething abysses of clouds and smoke and lightning. And then I
thought I heard a shriller, steadier note that was not from the viol; a calm,
deliberate, purposeful, mocking note from far away in the West.
At this juncture
the shutter began to rattle in a howling night wind which had sprung up outside
as if in answer to the mad playing within. Zann’s screaming viol now outdid
itself emitting sounds I had never thought a viol could emit. The shutter
rattled more loudly, unfastened, and commenced slamming against the window.
Then the glass broke shiveringly under the persistent impacts, and the chill
wind rushed in, making the candles sputter and rustling the sheets of paper on
the table where Zann had begun to write out his horrible secret. I looked at
Zann, and saw that he was past conscious observation. His blue eyes were
bulging, glassy and sightless, and the frantic playing had become a blind, mechanical,
unrecognizable orgy that no pen could even suggest.
A sudden gust,
stronger than the others, caught up the manuscript and bore it toward the
window. I followed the flying sheets in desperation, but they were gone before
I reached the demolished panes. Then I remembered my old wish to gaze from this
window, the only window in the Rue d’Auseil from which one might see the slope
beyond the wall, and the city outspread beneath. It was very dark, but the
city’s lights always burned, and I expected to see them there amidst the rain
and wind. Yet when I looked from that highest of all gable windows, looked
while the candles sputtered and the insane viol howled with the night-wind, I
saw no city spread below, and no friendly lights gleamed from remembered streets,
but only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion
and music, and having no semblance of anything on earth. And as I stood there
looking in terror, the wind blew out both the candles in that ancient peaked
garret, leaving me in savage and impenetrable darkness with chaos and
pandemonium before me, and the demon madness of that night-baying viol behind
me.
I staggered back
in the dark, without the means of striking a light, crashing against the table,
overturning a chair, and finally groping my way to the place where the
blackness screamed with shocking music. To save myself and Erich Zann I could
at least try, whatever the powers opposed to me. Once I thought some chill
thing brushed me, and I screamed, but my scream could not be heard above that
hideous viol. Suddenly out of the blackness the madly sawing bow struck me, and
I knew I was close to the player. I felt ahead, touched the back of Zann’s
chair, and then found and shook his shoulder in an effort to bring him to his
senses.
He did not
respond, and still the viol shrieked on without slackening. I moved my hand to
his head, whose mechanical nodding I was able to stop, and shouted in his ear
that we must both flee from the unknown things of the night. But he neither answered
me nor abated the frenzy of his unutterable music, while all through the garret
strange currents of wind seemed to dance in the darkness and babel. When my
hand touched his ear I shuddered, though I knew not why - knew not why till I
felt the still face; the ice-cold, stiffened, unbreathing face whose glassy
eyes bulged uselessly into the void. And then, by some miracle, finding the
door and the large wooden bolt, I plunged wildly away from that glassy-eyed
thing in the dark, and from the ghoulish howling of that accursed viol whose
fury increased even as I plunged.
Leaping,
floating, flying down those endless stairs through the dark house; racing
mindlessly out into the narrow, steep, and ancient street of steps and
tottering houses; clattering down steps and over cobbles to the lower streets
and the putrid canyon-walled river; panting across the great dark bridge to the
broader, healthier streets and boulevards we know; all these are terrible
impressions that linger with me. And I recall that there was no wind, and that
the moon was out, and that all the lights of the city twinkled.
Despite my most
careful searches and investigations, I have never since been able to find the
Rue d’Auseil. But I am not wholly sorry; either for this or for the loss in
undreamable abysses of the closely-written sheets which alone could have
explained the music of Erich Zann.
No comments:
Post a Comment