In Brantome's living room the book shelves rose to the ceiling; between
them the spaces on the walls were covered with the mementoes of a long
life. On the tables stood bowls of flowers, stacks of musical scores,
trays of wineglasses, cigarette boxes that had once been jewel cases,
half-empty teacups, and the gold purses or jet handbags of women who
reclined in the deep chairs with their faces turned toward the piano.
Men leaned smoking in the heavily curtained embrasures of the windows,
their foreheads lowered, their eyebrows casting over their eyes the
shadows as if of a profound fatigue. Beside the hall door loomed the
white mane of Brantome, who turned, at an inflow of artificial light,
to greet the small Italian woman that had recently become a prima donna.
And presently this song bird warbled for her comrades of the arts, as
she would have done in no other company. The air shook from her agile
cadenzas. A last, long trill, high and pure, died away vibrating in
the vases of iridescent glass.
Then some one persuaded Brantome to play a piece of Schumann's. And
once more Lilla heard _Vienna Carnival_.
When he had finished playing, Brantome sat down beside her.
"So it is as magical as ever, a bit of music?" he inquired, in his
rumbling, hoarse voice.
"You were playing that at the moment when I first saw my husband," she
said.
He contemplated her with his haggard old eyes. Patting her hand, he
declared:
"All these emotions that you, a beautiful young woman, have felt, I
believe that I, an ugly, worn-out old man, have felt, also. I, too,
have felt in my time that the world was at an end. I have suffered
from the same inability to return into life. Well, will you think me
cruel--shall I appear to you as the thief of an inestimable
treasure--if I tell you something? In time, sooner or later, one
recovers. I don't mean that one forgets. It is always there; and a
chance sound or perfume brings it back to one. But at last it returns
so gently! One feels then, instead of pain, almost a gentle,
melancholy pleasure. Then you will learn that there may be certain
subtle joys in grief."
She lowered her gaze, flinching inwardly, as one sometimes does when
credited with a feeling that one no longer fully deserves. A dismal
perplexity came to her, a little pang of treason, as she asked him:
"How can I hasten that day?"
He suggested:
"You might perhaps find some engrossing interest?"
Near the piano a group were discussing women's failures in music. One
heard the names of Chaminade, Augusta Holmes, Ethel Smyth. Why had
there been no female Beethovens, Liszts, or even Chopins? The reason,
asserted a middle-aged man, was that women's emotions were too
thoroughly instinctive to be projected in the form of first-class
music, which was, in fine, emotion analyzed, compressed within the
limits of fixed rules, expressed by series of arbitrary signs. In the
midst of his conclusion, however, he lost his self-satisfied smile: he
had caught sight of Lilla, who was looking at him blankly as though he
had slammed a transparent door in her face.
She heard Brantome benevolently murmuring the platitude:
"It is often in making others forget their sorrows that one diminishes
one's own, and in doing good to others that one finds good for oneself."
She showed him a bitter smile.
"Yes, charity. The usual prescription. I have already tried it." She
added, "Of course those poor people in their poverty and illnesses
merely appeared to me as a means for my own relief. In helping them I
didn't think of their troubles, but of forgetting my own. Sometimes
when I've written a check I almost expect it to buy me a less gloomy
day. At such moments I should be absurd if I weren't contemptible."
"Bah! you are unjust to yourself."
It was true. Lilla, who had suffered so much from her exceptional
temperament, could not bear to see others suffer; and in the grip of
her own weaknesses she had always felt compassion for the weak.
"But I ought not to come here," she said.
She explained that in this place she "felt her worthlessness." It
would be better, she thought, to remain in the Brassfield state of
mind: thus one might find an anodyne for this sense of insignificance.
For, to those others, of course, wealth and social position were the
important things in life, magnificently making up for the lack of other
qualities. If they had artistic enthusiasms, it was because they
regarded the arts as did the Roman conquerors--as elements created for
no other reason than to enhance their triumphs. Debussy, she
suggested, had been born to give them a cause for displaying their
jewels at the opera, just as Titian had existed in order that their
acquisition of a painting by his hand might be cabled round the world.
In that region of inverted values one took on the egotism of the fabled
frog in the well, who laughed to scorn the frog that came to tell him
of the ocean.
"But the well is so prettily gilded," Lilla remarked. "And it's lined
with so many nice little mirrors in Louis XVI frames, that you can
hardly blame the frog if he imagines that his importance, like his
reflections, extends to the ends of the earth, in that multiplied
glitter of gilt."
Brantome began to laugh, then turned serious.
"You must be desperate," he commented.
"That is your fault. I've always had a longing for what I find in
these rooms; but that longing isn't backed up by any capacity. When
one of these friends of yours has suffered a loss, his art still
remains. And maybe it becomes a richer art because of his loss."
She sighed, her pale brown cheek resting against her black-gloved hand,
her black fur collar framing her neck on which the strand of pearls was
less lustrous than the teeth between her parted lips.
His leonine old visage grew soft as he looked at her, and under his
white mustaches of a Viking there appeared a sad smile, as if he were
thinking that things might have been different with him, had she, with
this beauty and these predilections, been young when he had been young.
"Oh, no, you must not stop coming here," he protested gently. "It's
only right that these poor fellows should have their glimpses of a
composite of all the beautiful muses--who, as you'll remember, were not
themselves practitioners in the arts, but the inspirers of artists.
Isn't there, for women, besides the joys of personal accomplishment,
another satisfaction, which one might call vicarious?"
She gave him again her bitter, listless smile.
"You believe that stuff about women's inspiration?"
"But why not, good heavens! When it is a fact of life----"
He bade her consider the great music written by men. Almost invariably
one found in its depths a longing for synthesis with some ideal beauty,
produced by thoughts of some idealized woman. Or else, by woman in the
abstract--that obsession which, ever since the days of Dante and the
troubadours, had attained a nearly religious quality, against whose
pressure even the modern materialist struggled in vain. Yes, ever
since that fatal twelfth century it was woman, the goddess, the
Beatrice-form beckoning on the staircase of Paradise, who attracted
upward the dazzled gaze of man, and who seemed, by an unearthly
smile--with which man himself had possibly endowed her--to promise a
mystical salvation and a sort of celestial bliss.
"But at times, as I say," he concluded, with a shrug, "some lucky
artist is suddenly confronted by all that in bodily form--by a Beatrice
in a sable coat from Fifth Avenue and a little black hat from Paris."
But in her silvery voice there was a cadence of irony, when she
demanded:
"Whom shall I inspire? Show me the one by whose aid I can pretend that
the woman is responsible for the masterpieces, as no doubt Vittoria
Colonna sometimes pretended to herself in the case of Michael Angelo.
But remember that it must be an affair like that one, romantically
platonic--_à la manière de Provence_."
Brantome nodded benignantly. But old pangs had revived in his heart.
How well he understood this restlessness of hers, this sense of
impotency, this secret rancor at contemplation of congenial forms of
success! He, by some minute fault, some tiny slip of fate, had long
ago been doomed to these same sensations. In the morning of youth,
when gazing toward the future, he had seen the world at his feet,
unaware of that little flaw in the foundations of his Castle in Spain,
unwarned of the trick that destiny was going to play on him. All these
years it had been here in the bottom of his heart, the sensation of
inferiority, the gnawing chagrin. He had masked it well: one discerned
it only in some rare look when he was off his guard. And now and then,
for a while, he even vanquished it, when some fresh voice rose in the
world of music, and he championed the cause of that new genius so
generously, hotly, and triumphantly that the consequent renown seemed
nearly to be his own, since he had helped by his enthusiasm to
establish it.
"Yes, certainly, _à la manière de Provence_--since music is so very
impersonal an art," he muttered, with an absentminded, haggard smile.
But Lilla was watching a man and woman who sat in a shadowy alcove, and
who, as some one began to play a nocturne, let their fingers twine
together.