Svengali was a bolder wooer. When he cringed, it was with a mock humility full of sardonic threats; when he was playful, it was with a terrible playfulness, like that of a cat with a mouse—a weird ungainly cat, and most unclean; a sticky, haunting, long, lean, uncanny, black spider-cat, if there is such an animal outside a bad dream.
It was a great grievance to him that she had suffered from no more pains in her eyes. She had; but preferred to endure them rather than seek relief from him.
So he would playfully try to mesmerize her with his glance, and sidle up nearer and nearer to her, making passes and counterpasses, with stern command in his eyes, till she would shake and shiver and almost sicken with fear, and all but feel the spell come over her, as in a nightmare, and rouse herself with a great effort and escape.
If Taffy were there he would interfere with a friendly “Now then, old fellow, none of that!” and a jolly slap on the back, which would make Svengali cough for an hour, and paralyze his mesmeric powers for a week.
Svengali had a stroke of good-fortune. He played at three grand concerts with Gecko, and had a well-deserved success. He even gave a concert of his own, which made a furor, and blossomed out into beautiful and costly clothes of quite original color and shape and pattern, so that people would turn round and stare at him in the street—a thing he loved. He felt his fortune was secure, and ran into debt with tailors, hatters, shoemakers, jewellers, but paid none of his old debts to his friends. His pockets were always full of printed slips—things that had been written about him in the papers—and he would read them aloud to everybody he knew, especially to Trilby, as she sat darning socks on the model-throne while the fencing and boxing were in train. And he would lay his fame and his fortune at her feet, on condition that she should share her life with him.
“Ach, himmel, Drilpy!” he would say, “you don’t know what it is to be a great pianist like me—hein! What is your Little Billee, with his stinking oil-bladders, sitting mum in his corner, his mahlstick and his palette in one hand, and his twiddling little footle pig’s-hair brush in the other! What noise does he make? When his little fool of a picture is finished he will send it to London, and they will hang it on a wall with a lot of others, all in a line, like recruits called out for inspection, and the yawning public will walk by in procession and inspect, and say ‘damn!’ Svengali will go to London himself. Ha! ha! He will be all alone on a platform, and play as nobody else can play; and hundreds of beautiful Engländerinnen will see and hear and go mad with love for him—Prinzessen, Comtessen, Serene English Altessen. They will soon lose their Serenity and their Highness when they hear Svengali! They will invite him to their palaces, and pay him a thousand francs to play for them; and after, he will loll in the best armchair, and they will sit all round him on footstools, and bring him tea and gin and küchen and marrons glacés, and lean over him and fan him—for he is tired after playing them for a thousand francs of Chopin! Ha, ha! I know all about it—hein?
“And he will not look at them, even! He will look inward, at his own dream—and his dream will be about Drilpy—to lay his talent, his glory, his thousand francs at her beautiful white feet!
“Their stupid, big, fat, towheaded, putty-nosed husbands will be mad with jealousy, and long to box him, but they will be afraid. Ach! those beautiful Anglaises! they will think it an honor to mend his shirts, to sew buttons on his pantaloons; to darn his socks, as you are doing now for that sacred imbecile of a Scotchman who is always trying to paint toreadors, or that sweating, pigheaded bullock of an Englander who is always trying to get himself dirty and then to get himself clean again!—e da capo!
“Himmel! what big socks are those! what potato-sacks!
“Look at your Taffy! what is he good for but to bang great musicians on the back with his big bear’s paw! He finds that droll, the bullock! …
“Look at your Frenchmen there—your damned conceited verfluchte pig-dogs of Frenchmen—Durien, Barizel, Bouchardy! What can a Frenchman talk of, hein? Only himself, and run down everybody else! His vanity makes me sick! He always thinks the world is talking about him, the fool! He forgets that there’s a fellow called Svengali for the world to talk about! I tell you, Drilpy, it is about me the world is talking—me and nobody else—me, me, me!
“Listen what they say in the Figaro” (reads it).
“What do you think of that, hein? What would your Durien say if people wrote of him like that?
“But you are not listening, sapperment! great big she-fool that you are—sheep’s-head! Dummkopf! Donnerwetter! you are looking at the chimney-pots when Svengali is talking! Look a little lower down between the houses, on the other side of the river! There is a little ugly gray building there, and inside are eight slanting slabs of brass, all of a row, like beds in a school dormitory, and one fine day you shall lie asleep on one of those slabs—you, Drilpy, who would not listen to Svengali, and therefore lost him! … And over the middle of you will be a little leather apron, and over your head a little brass tap, and
