Olga Crawford fiercely divorced herself from all expression as she
maltreated her violin at the Symphony Moving Picture Theater. In
its average moments of vivacity her face was a dissembling friar
who brightly listened to her sensual lips, but as she played, her
face became an emptiness profaned by the wail of her instrument. Her
arms desecrated their errands and her head sloped into an unwilling
counterfeit of wakefulness. On the screen above her men and women
frantically guarded their hallucination of life and a decrepit
plot vaguely imitated love and bravery. Rows of faces stolidly
massacred the gloom of the theater and stood like a regiment waiting,
without thought, for some command. But when one looked closer three
expressions broke from the stolidity, as three major harmonies might
charm the mind of a composer. The first was a somnolent elation--the
mien of a hungry person dozing over some crumbs he is almost too
tired to eat. Shop-girls, with pertly robbed faces, became victims
of this expression, although an occasional man with lips like
determined fiascoes also attained it. The second was a tightly laced
impatience--the enmity of one whose feelings have been openly censored.
Fat women with flabbily throttled faces and glistening men with bodies
like bulky scandals received this expression. The third was a seraphic
stupor--the demeanour of one whose formless delights have benignly
exiled thought.
To Olga these people gathered into a blanched duplicate of life--a
remote comedy that made the monotone of her evening self-conscious.
If they had excoriated her she could have forgotten them, but their
weighty indifference raped her attention. The dryly sinuous smell of
their clothes pelted her like a sandstorm: the little, desperate
perfumes they used scarcely survived. Their eyes were scores of tinily
inviting bulls-eyes never reached by her hurried arrows.
She finished her playing; the people shuffled out like an apologetic
delusion. Ferenz, the pianist, a cowed Toreador of a man, gave his
browns and blacks a ponderous recreation.
“Nother grind passed,” he said in a thick voice corrupted by pity.
“Hand over them sheets, Joe.”
Joe, fat as a gourmand’s revery, handed him the sheets. The features on
Joe’s face were as abject as crumbs on a shallow plate. The Symphony
Theater orchestra flaunted its yawning moroseness a little while longer
and filed through a low exit.
Olga’s feet tamely saluted the crowded street-pavements. To her the
crowd was an approach to the theater audience--a brisk indifference
that made her eyes neglected spendthrifts. Its motion alone gave it
a flickering mastery: if it had paused, for an hour, it would have
become inane. The choked tirade of rolling street-cars and automobiles
would have ended in a dismal curtain of silence--the chariots would
have changed to mere hardware puzzled by the moonlight. A tall woman,
encouraging the gorgeous tumult of her dresses, would have stood like
a cluttered farce. The little pagan symmetries of her face, gaudily
tantalizing when merely glimpsed, would have met in a kittenish
argument. A tall man, blondly governing his polished discrepancies,
would have changed to a stagnant buffoon. An old man, chiding his
corpulent effulgence with endearments of motion, would have altered to
a maudlin exaggeration.
Olga reached her room and summoned the meaningless stare of an electric
light. Upon her short body plumpness and slenderness bargained with
each other, and the result was a suave arbitration. Her dark green
skirt and white waist made a subdued affirmation: their coloured lines
did not emphasise the lurking essences of her body. Surrounded by black
disturbances of hair the sardonic parts of her face were molested by
sentimental inconsistencies. Her nose was a salient inquisition but her
full mouth had a negroid flash; her chin was coldly bellicose but her
cheeks were softly turned. Beneath her moderate brow her blue and white
eyes were related to glaciers.
She sat at an upright piano and trifled with the keys, almost
inaudibly. It was midnight and an acrimonious man in the next
room often remonstrated with the wall when her piano conversed
too impulsively. Since she was an unknown composer the moment is
appropriate for an attack upon her obscurity. Her music was the
compact Sunday of her life. There she deserted the trite miserliness
of narrative and definite concepts and designed a spacious holiday.
Her notes loafed and romped into inquisitive patterns and were only
intent upon shifting their positions. Thought and emotion presided
over the experimental revels of their servants but issued no narrow
commands and became broadly festive guidances. In her music the rules
of harmony were neither neglected nor worshipped. When they felt an
immense friendliness for the romping of her notes they made a natural
background: otherwise, they did not intrude. Her music did not strive
to suggest or interpret concepts and pictures nor did it salaam to
emotions. All three were seconds rising and dying as her sounds changed
their places. The first few notes of each composition were repeated
above as the title, not because they dominated the piece, but merely as
a means of identification.
In her wanly nondescript room which she did not own, from midnight
to dawn, this woman whose face was a bewilderment of contrasts, sat
furnishing the momentum for a reveling deluge of music. But an evening
decided to interrupt this performance.
Olga stood in the shop of a neighborhood cobbler. He was a frayed
apologia, with a scant distraction of gray hair and a dustily crushed
face.
“When you play violin in theater I have heard,” he said. “Maybe you
would like to hear my boy. He is only eleven but he play almost so good
as you. Maybe you will tell him how he can play better.”
Olga followed him to the rear of his shop, with a surface purchase of
pity. He trotted out his son, a comedy in light browns relieved by the
smothered fixity of gray eyes. With whining precision the boy twisted
his way through Massenet’s Elegy, defending each sliding note with
his arms and his head. The syrupy embrace of a world stirred upon his
acceptant face; the whites of his eyes hovered against Olga’s face,
like a writhing request. In the midst of his playing she turned and
fled, terror-stricken, down the street.