Jules had been away from school for a day or two with a bad headache,
which had made him look very pale and given him an air of sadness;
but he was a little better now and, feeling bored in his own room, he
went downstairs to the empty drawing-room and sat at the piano. Papa
was at work in his study, but it would not interfere with Papa if
he played. Dolf spoilt him, seeing in his son something that was
wanting in himself and therefore attracted him, even as possibly it
had formerly attracted him in his wife also: Jules could do no wrong
in his eyes; and, if the boy had only been willing, Dolf would have
spared no expense to give him a careful musical education. But Jules
violently opposed himself to anything resembling lessons and besides
maintained that it was not worth while. He had no ambition; his vanity
was not tickled by his father's hopes of him or his appreciation of
his playing: he played only for himself, to express himself in the
vague language of musical sounds. At this moment he felt alone and
abandoned in the great house, though he knew that Papa was at work
two rooms off and that when he pleased he could take refuge on Papa's
great couch; at this moment he had within himself an almost physical
feeling of dread at his loneliness, which caused something to reel
about him, an immense sense of utter desolation.
He was fourteen years old, but he felt himself neither child nor
boy: a certain feebleness, an almost feminine need of dependency,
of devotion to some one who would be everything to him had already,
in his earliest childhood, struck at his virility; and he shivered
in his dread of this inner loneliness, as if he were afraid of
himself. He suffered greatly from vague moods in which that strange
something oppressed and stifled him; then, not knowing where to hide
his inner being, he would go to play, so that he might lose himself in
the great sound-soul of music. His thin, nervous fingers would grope
hesitatingly over the keys; he himself would suffer from the false
chords which he struck in his search; then he would let himself go,
find a single, very short motive, of plaintive, minor melancholy, and
caress that motive in his joy at possessing it, at having found it,
caress it until it returned each moment as a monotony of sorrow. He
would think the motive so beautiful that he could not part with it;
those four or five notes expressed so well everything that he felt that
he would play them over and over again, until Suzette burst into the
room and made him stop, saying that otherwise she would be driven mad.
Thus he sat playing now. And it was pitiful at first: he hardly
recognized the notes; cacophonous discords wailed and cut into his poor
brain, still smarting from the headache. He moaned as if he were in
pain afresh; but his fingers were hypnotized, they could not desist,
they still sought on; and the notes became purer: a short phrase
released itself with a cry, a cry which returned continually on the
same note, suddenly high after the dull bass of the prelude. And
this note came as a surprise to Jules; that fair cry of sorrow
frightened him; and he was glad to have found it, glad to have so
sweet a sorrow. Then he was no longer himself; he played on until
he felt that it was not he who was playing but another, within him,
who compelled him; he found the full, pure chords as by intuition;
through the sobbing of the sounds ran the same musical figure,
higher and higher, with silver feet of purity, following the curve
of crystal rainbows lightly spanned on high; reaching the topmost
point of the arch it struck a cry, this time in very drunkenness,
out into the major, throwing up wide arms in gladness to heavens of
intangible blue. Then it was like souls of men, which first live and
suffer and utter their complaint and then die, to glitter in forms of
light whose long wings spring from their pure shoulders in sheets of
silver radiance; they trip one behind the other over the rainbows,
over the bridges of glass, blue and rose and yellow; and there come
more and more, kindreds and nations of souls; they hurry their silver
feet, they press across the rainbow, they laugh and sing and push one
another; in their jostling their wings clash together, scattering
silver down. Now they stand all on the top of the arc and look up,
with the great wondering of their laughing child-eyes; and they dare
not, they dare not; but others press on behind them, innumerous,
more and more and yet more; they crowd upwards to the topmost height,
their wings straight in the air, close together. And now, now they
must; they may hesitate no longer. One of them, taking deep breaths,
spreads his flight and with one shock springs out of the thick throng
into the ether. Soon many follow, one after another, till their shapes
swoon in the blue; all is gleam about them. Now, far below, thin as a
thin thread, the rainbow arches itself, but they do not look at it;
rays fall towards them: these are souls, which they embrace; they
go with them in locked embraces. And then the light: light beaming
over all; all things liquid in everlasting light; nothing but light:
the sounds sing the light, the sounds are the light, there is nothing
now but the light everlasting....
"Jules!"
He looked up vacantly.
"Jules! Jules!"
He smiled now, as if awakened from a dream-sleep; he rose, went to
her, to Cecile. She stood in the doorway; she had remained standing
there while he played; it had seemed to her that he was playing a
part of herself.
"What were you playing, Jules?" she asked.
He was quite awake now and distressed, fearing that he must have made
a terrible noise in the house....
"I don't know, Auntie," he said.
She hugged him, suddenly, violently, in gratitude.... To him she owed
it, the great mystery, since the day when he had broken out in anger
against her....