The hush that had fallen was like the hush that falls on Alpine watchers
in the moment before sunrise, and, with the great musician's slow
emerging from below, it was as if the sun had risen.
She came, with her indolent step, the thunder of hands and voices
greeting her; and those who gazed at her from the platform saw the
pearl-wreathed hair and opulent white shoulders, and those who gazed at
her from beneath saw the strange and musing face. Then she stood before
them and her dark eyes dwelt, impassive and melancholy, upon the sea of
faces, tumultuous and blurred with clapping hands. The sound was like
the roaring of the sea and she stood as a goddess might have stood at
the brink of the ocean, indifferent and unaware, absorbed in dreams of
ancient sorrow. The ovation was so prolonged and she stood there for so
long--hardly less the indifferent goddess because, from time to time,
she bowed her own famous bow, stately, old-fashioned, formally and
sublimely submissive,--that every eye in the great audience could feast
upon her in a rapturous assurance of leisure.
She was a woman of forty-eight, of an ample though still beautiful
figure. Her flowing dress of white brocade made no attempt to compress,
to sustain or to attenuate. No one could say that a woman who stood as
she did, with the port of a goddess--the small head majestically poised
over such shoulders and such a breast--was getting fat; yet no one could
deny that there was redundancy. She was not redundant as other women
were; she was not elegant as other women were; she seemed in nothing
like others. Her dress was strange; it had folds and amplitudes and dim
disks of silver broideries at breast and knee that made it like the
dress of some Venetian lady, drawn at random from an ancestral marriage
coffer and put on dreamily with no thought of aptness. Her hair was
strange; no other woman's hair was massed and folded as was hers, hair
dark as night and intertwined and looped with twisted strands of pearl
and diamond. Her face was strange, that crowning face, known to all the
world. Disparate racial elements mingled in the long Southern oval and
the Slavonic modelling of brow and cheek-bone. The lips, serene and
passionate, deeply sunken at the corners and shadowed with a pencilling
of down, were the lips of Spain; all the mystery of the South was in the
grave and tragic eyes. Yet the eyes were cold; and touches of wild
ancestral suffering, like the sudden clash of spurs in the languors of a
Polonaise, marked the wide nostrils and the heavy eyelids and the broad,
black crooked eyebrows that seemed to stammer a little in the perfect
sentence of her face.
She subjugated and she appealed. Her adorers were divided between the
longing to lie down under her feet and to fold her protectingly in their
arms. Calf-love is an undying element in human-nature, a shame-faced
derogatory name for the romantic, self-immolating emotion woven from
fancy, yearning and the infection of other's ardour. Love of this foam
and flame quality, too tender to be mere æsthetic absorption in a
beautiful object, too selfless to be sensual, too intense to be only
absurd, rose up towards Madame Okraska and encompassed her from hundreds
of hearts and eyes. The whole audience was for her one vast heart of
adoration, one fixed face of half-hypnotized tenderness. And there she
stood before them;--Madame Okraska whom crowned heads delighted to
honour; Madame Okraska who got a thousand pounds a night; Madame Okraska
who played as no one in the world could play; looking down over them,
looking up and around at them, as if, now, a little troubled by the
prolonged adulation, patient yet weary, like a mistress assaulted, after
long absence, by the violent joy of a great Newfoundland dog; smiling a
little, though buffeted, and unwilling to chill the ardent heart by a
reprimand. And more than all she was like a great white rose that,
fading in the soft, thick, scented air of a hot-house, droops languidly
with loosened petals.
They let her go at last and she took her place at the piano. Her hands
fell softly on a group of dreamy ascending chords. Her face, then, in a
long pause, took on a rapt expectancy and power. She was the priestess
waiting before her altar for the descent of the god, glorious and
dreadful. And it was as if with the chill and shudder of a possession
that, breathing deeply, drawing her shoulders a little together, she
lifted her hands and played. She became the possessed and articulate
priestess, her soul, her mind, her passion lent to the message spoken
through her. The tumult and insatiable outcry of the Appassionata spread
like a river over her listeners. And as she played her face grew more
rapt in its brooding concentration, the eyes half-closed, the nostrils
wide, the jaw dropping and giving to the mouth an expression at once
relaxed and vigilant.
To criticize with the spell of Madame Okraska's personality upon one was
hardly possible. Emerged from the glamour, there were those, pretending
to professional discriminations, who suggested that she lacked the
masculine and classic disciplines of interpretation; that her rendering,
though breathed through with noble dignities, was coloured by a
capricious and passionate personality; that it was the feeling rather
than the thought of the music that she excelled in expressing, its
suffering rather than its serenity. Only a rare listener, here and there
among her world-wide audiences, was aware of deeper deficiencies and of
the slow changes that time had wrought in her art. For it was
inspiration no longer; it was the memory of inspiration. The Nemesis of
the artist who expresses, not what he feels, but what he is expected to
feel, what he has undertaken to feel, had fallen upon the great woman.
Her art, too, showed the fragrant taint of an artificial atmosphere. She
had played ten times when she should have played once. She lived on her
capital of experience, no longer renewing her life, and her renderings
had lost that quality of the greatest, the living communication with the
experience embodied in the music. It was on the stereotyped memories of
such communication that she depended, on the half hypnotic possession by
the past; filling in vacancies with temperamental caprice or an emotion
no longer the music's but her own.
But to the enchanted ear of the multitude, professional and
unprofessional, the essential vitality was there, the vitality embodied
to the enchanted eye by the white figure with its drooping,
pearl-wreathed head and face sunken in sombre ecstasy. She gave them all
they craved:--passion, stormy struggle, the tears of hopeless love, the
chill smile of lassitude in accepted defeat, the unappeasable longing
for the past. They listened, and their hearts lapsed back from the
hallucinated unity of enthusiasm each to its own identity, an identity
isolated, intensified, tortured exquisitely by the expression of dim
yearnings. All that had been beautiful in the pain and joy that through
long ages had gone to the building up of each human consciousness,
re-entered and possessed it; the fragrance of blossoming trees, the
farewell gaze of dying eyes, the speechless smile of lovers, ancestral
memories of Spring-times, loves, and partings, evoked by this poignant
lure from dim realms of sub-consciousness, like subterranean rivers
rising through creaks and crannies towards the lifted wand of the
diviner. It seemed the quintessence of human experience, the ecstasy of
perfect and enfranchising sorrow, distilled from the shackling,
smirching half-sorrows of actual life. Some of the listening faces
smiled; some were sodden, stupefied rather than enlightened; some showed
a sensual rudimentary gratification; some, lapped in the tide, yet
unaware of its significance, were merely silly. But no Orpheus, wildly
harping through the woods, ever led more enthralled and subjugated
listeners.
Gregory Jardine's face was neither sodden nor silly nor sensual; but it
did not wear the enchanted look of the true votary. Instinctively this
young man, though it was emotion that he found in music, resisted any
too obvious assault upon his feelings, taking refuge in irony from their
force when roused. For the form of music, and its intellectual content,
he had little appreciation, and he was thus the more exposed to its
emotional appeal; but his intuition of the source and significance of
the appeal remained singularly just and accurate. He could not now have
analysed his sense of protest and dissatisfaction; yet, while the charm
grasped and encircled him, making him, as he said to himself,
idiotically grovel or inanely soar, he repelled the poignant sweetness
and the thrills that went through him were thrills of a half-unwilling
joy.
He sat straightly, his arms folded, his head bent as he twisted the end
of his moustache, his eye fixed on the great musician; and he wondered
what was the matter with him, or with her. It was as if he couldn't get
at the music. Something interfered, something exquisite yet ambiguous,
alluring yet never satisfying.
His glance fell presently from the pianist's drooping head to the face
of the _protégée_, and the contrast between what was expressed by this
young person's gaze and attitude and what he was himself feeling again
drew his attention to her. No grovelling and no soaring was here, but an
elation almost stern, a brooding concentration almost maternal, a
dedicated power. Madame Okraska, he reflected, must be an extraordinary
person if she really deserved that gaze. He didn't believe that she
quite did. His dissatisfaction with the music extended itself to the
musician and, looking from her face to the girl's, he remembered with
scepticism Betty's account of their relation.
A group of Chopin Preludes and a Brahms Rhapsodie Hongroise brought the
first half of the concert to a close, and Gregory watched with
amusement, during the ensuing scene, the vagaries of the intoxicated
crowd. People rose to their feet, clapping, shouting, bellowing,
screaming. He saw on the platform the face of the massive lady, haggard,
fierce, devouring; the face of the shy lady, suffused, the eyes half
dazed with adoration like those of a saint in rapture. Old Mrs.
Forrester, with her juvenile auburn head, laughed irrepressibly while
she clapped, like a happy child. The old poet was nearly moved to tears.
Only the _protégée_ remained, as it were, outside the infection. She
smiled slightly and steadily, as if in a proud contentment, and clapped
now and then quite softly, and she turned once and scanned the audience
with eyes accustomed to ovations and appraising the significance of this
one.
Madame Okraska was recalled six times, but she could not be prevailed
upon to give an encore, though for a long time a voice bayed
intermittently:--"The Berceuse! Chopin's Berceuse!" The vast harmonies
of entreaty and delight died down to sporadic solos, taken up more and
more faint-heartedly by weary yet still hopeful hands.
Still smiling slightly, with a preoccupied air, the young girl looked
about her, or leaned forward to listen to some kindly bantering
addressed to her by Sir Alliston. She hardly spoke, but Gregory
perceived that she was by no means shy. She so pleasantly engaged his
attention that when Sir Alliston got up from his seat next hers there
was another motive than the mere wish to speak to his old friend in his
intention of joining Mrs. Forrester for a few moments. The project was
not definite and he abandoned it when his relative, Miss Eleanor
Scrotton, tense, significant and wearing the sacramental expression
customary with her on such occasions, hurried to the empty seat and
dropped into it. Eleanor's enthusiasms oppressed him and Betty had told
him that Madame Okraska was become the most absorbing of them. His
mother and Eleanor's had been cousins. Her father, the late Sir Jonas
Scrotton, heavily distinguished in the world of literature and politics,
had died only the year before. Gregory remembered him as a vindictive
and portentous old man presiding at Miss Scrotton's tea-parties in a
black silk skull-cap, and one could but admire in Miss Scrotton the
reverence and devotion that had not only borne with but gloried in him.
If the amplitude of his mantle had not descended upon her one might
metaphorically say that the black skull-cap had. Gregory felt that he
might have liked Eleanor better if she hadn't been so unintermittently
and unilluminatingly intelligent. She wrote scholarly articles in the
graver reviews--articles that he invariably skipped--she was always
armed with an appreciation and she had the air of thinking the
intellectual reputation of London very much her responsibility. Above
all she was dowered with an overwhelming power of enthusiasm. Eleanor
dressed well and had a handsome, commanding profile with small,
compressed lips and large, prominent, melancholy eyes that wickedly
reminded Gregory of the eyes of a beetle. Beneath the black feather boa
that was thrown round her neck, her thin shoulder-blades, while she
talked to Mrs. Forrester and sketched with pouncing fingers the phrasing
of certain passages, jerked and vibrated oddly. Mrs. Forrester nodded,
smiled, acquiesced. She was rather fond of Eleanor. Their talk was for
each other. Miss Woodruff, unheeded, but with nothing of the air of one
consciously insignificant, sat looking before her. Beside Eleanor's
vehemence and Mrs. Forrester's vivacity she made Gregory think of a
tranquil landscape seen at dawn.
He was thus thinking, and looking at her, when, as though
sub-consciously aware of his gaze, she suddenly turned her head and
looked round at him.
Her eyes, in the long moment while their glances were interchanged, were
so clear and deliberate, so unmoved by anything but a certain surprise,
that he felt no impulse to pretend politely that he had not been caught
staring. They scrutinized each other, gravely, serenely, intently, until
a thunder of applause, like a tidal wave surging over the hall, seemed
to engulf their gaze. Madame Okraska was once more emerging. Miss
Scrotton, catching up her boa, her programme and her fan, scuttled back
to her seat with an air of desperate gravity; Sir Alliston returned to
his; Mrs. Forrester welcomed him with a smile and a finger at her lips;
and as the pianist seated herself and cast a long glance over the still
disarranged and cautiously rustling audience, Gregory saw that Miss
Woodruff had no further thought for him.