"I don't know what he's on. Hear the Dean's been giving him a dose of
kill-or-cure. That's all." He pounded out the heartbreaking chords,
with the deep bass note that sounded like a drum. "Ever see a fellow
named Thorne Carstairs?"
"Seen him, yes. Don't know him. Yale chap, isn't he?"
"Was." The drumbeat struck sorrow to the soul. "Kicked out. Hanging
round Tad till he gets him kicked out too. Lives at Tuxedo. Stacks of
dough, just like Tad himself." There was some personal injury in Guy's
tone, as he added, "Like to give him the toe of my boot."
It was perhaps this feat of energy that sent him into the martial
phrases of the Chopin polonaise in A major, making the room ring with
joyous bravery.
Having dropped into Mrs. Ansley's corner of the gilded canapé, Tom
found Hildred silently slipping into a seat beside him.
"No, don't get up." She put her hand on his arm in a way she had never
done before. "I can only stay a few minutes. There's something I want
to say."
Guy was passing to the D major movement. His back was turned to them.
They sat gazing at each other. They sat gazing at each other in a
new kind of avowal. All the things he dared not say and she dared not
listen to were poured from the one to the other through their eyes. She
spoke hurriedly, breathlessly.
"I want you to know that if we enter the war, and you're sent over
there, I'll find a way to go too."
He began some kind of protest, but she silenced him.
"I know how I could do it. There's a woman in Paris who'd take me on to
work with her. You see, I'm used to Europe. You're not. I can't bear to
think of you--with no family--so far away from everyone--and all alone.
I'll go."
Before he could seize anything like the full import of what she
was telling him she had slipped away again. Guy was still playing,
martially and majestically.
Tom sat wrapt in a sudden amazed tranquillity. Now that she had told
him, told him more, far more, than was in her words, he was not
surprised; he was only reassured. He realized that it was what he had
expected. He had not expected it in the mind, nor precisely with the
heart. If the heart has reasons which the reason doesn't know, it was
something beyond even these. The nearest he could come to it, now that
he tried to express it by the processes of thought, was that between
him and her there existed a community of life which they had only to
take for granted. She was taking it for granted. To find out if she
loved him he would never have to ask her; she would never have to ask
him. _They knew!_ He wondered if the knowledge brought to her the
peace it brought to him. He felt that he knew that too.
Having ended his polonaise, Guy let his fingers run restlessly up and
down the keys. He had not turned round; he had heard nothing; he hadn't
guessed that Hildred had come and gone. That was their secret. They
would keep it as a secret. One of them at least had no wish to make it
known.
He had no wish that it should go farther, even between him and her,
till the future had so shaped itself that he could be justified. That
it should remain as it was, unspoken but understood, would for a long,
long time to come be joy and peace for them both.
Suddenly Guy broke into a strain enraptured and exultant. It flung
itself up on the air as easily as a bird's note. It was lyric gladness,
welling from a heart that couldn't tire.
Caught by his own jubilance, Guy took up the melody in a tenor growing
liquid and strong after the years of cracked girlishness.
"Guy, for heaven's sake, what's that?"
The singer cut into his song long enough to call back over his shoulder:
"Schumann! 'To the Beloved'!"
He began singing again, his head thrown back, his big body swaying. All
the longing for love of a fellow on the edge of twenty, but for him
made shamefaced by his fat, found voice in that joyousness.
Tom had not supposed that in the whole round of the universe there was
such expression for his nameless ecstasies. It was not Guy whom he
heard, nor the piano; it was the morning stars singing together; it
was the sons of God shouting for joy; it was all the larks and all the
thrushes and all the nightingales that in all the ages had ever trilled
to the sun and moon.
"Don't stop," he shouted, when the song had mounted to its close.
"Let's have it all over again."
So they had it all over again, the one in his wordless, mumbled tenor,
and the other singing in his heart.