It was after dinner in his private room, and he had sat very silent in
his corner until this sudden outburst. Moleson got up quietly without
a word and moved over to the piano. I saw--or was it imagination
merely?--a new expression slide upon his withered face. He meant
mischief somewhere.
From that instant--from the moment he rose and walked over the
thick carpet--he fascinated me. The atmosphere his talk and stories
had brought remained. His lean fingers ran over the keys, and at
first he played fragments from popular musical comedies that were
pleasant enough, but made no demand upon the attention. I heard them
without listening. I was thinking of another thing--his walk. For
the way he moved across those few feet of carpet had power in it. He
looked different; he seemed another man; he was changed. I saw him
curiously--as I sometimes now saw Isley too--bigger. In some manner
that was both enchanting and oppressive, his presence from that moment
drew my imagination as by an air of authority it held.
I left my seat in the far corner and dropped into a chair beside the
window, nearer to the piano. Isley, I then noticed, had also turned
to watch him. But it was George Isley not quite as he was now. I felt
rather than saw the change. Both men had subtly altered. They seemed
extended, their outlines shadowy.
Isley, alert and anxious, glanced up at the player, his mind of earlier
years--for the expression of his face was plain--following the light
music, yet with difficulty that involved effort, almost struggle.
‘Play that again, will you?’ I heard him say from time to time. He
was trying to take hold of it, to climb back to a condition where that
music had linked him to the present, to seize a mental structure that
was gone, to grip hold tightly of it--only to find that it was too far
forgotten and too fragile. It would not bear him. I am sure of it, and
I can swear I divined his mood. He fought to realise himself as he had
been, but in vain. In his dim corner opposite I watched him closely.
The big black Blüthner blocked itself between us. Above it swayed
the outline, lean and half shadowy, of Moleson as he played. A faint
whisper floated through the room. ‘You are in Egypt.’ Nowhere else
could this queer feeling of presentiment, of anticipation, have gained
a footing so easily. I was aware of intense emotion in all three of us.
The least reminder of To-day seemed ugly. I longed for some ancient
forgotten splendour that was lost.
The scene fixed my attention very steadily, for I was aware of
something deliberate and calculated on Moleson’s part. The thing
was well considered in his mind, intention only half concealed. It
was Egypt he interpreted by sound, expressing what in him was true,
then observing its effect, as he led us cleverly towards--the past.
Beginning with the present, he played persuasively, with penetration,
with insistent meaning too. He had that touch which conjured up real
atmosphere, and, at first, that atmosphere termed modern. He rendered
vividly the note of London, passing from the jingles of musical
comedy, nervous rag-times and sensuous Tango dances, into the higher
strains of concert rooms and ‘cultured’ circles. Yet not too abruptly.
Most dexterously he shifted the level, and with it our emotion. I
recognised, as in a parody, various ultra-modern thrills: the tumult
of Strauss, the pagan sweetness of primitive Debussy, the weirdness
and ecstasy of metaphysical Scriabin. The composite note of To-day in
both extremes, he brought into this private sitting-room of the desert
hotel, while George Isley, listening keenly, fidgeted in his chair.
‘“Après-midi d’un Faune,”’ said Moleson dreamily, answering the
question as to what he played. ‘Debussy’s, you know. And the thing
before it was from “Til Eulenspiegel”--Strauss, of course.’
He drawled, swaying slowly with the rhythm, and leaving pauses between
the words. His attention was not wholly on his listener, and in the
voice was a quality that increased my uneasy apprehension. I felt
distress for Isley somewhere. Something, it seemed, was coming; Moleson
brought it. Unconsciously in his walk, it now appeared consciously in
his music; and it came from what was underground in him. A charm, a
subtle change, stole oddly over the room. It stole over my heart as
well. Some power of estimating left me, as though my mind were slipping
backwards and losing familiar, common standards.
‘The true modern note in it, isn’t there?’ he drawled; ‘cleverness, I
think--intellectual--surface ingenuity--no depth or permanence--just
the sensational brilliance of To-day.’ He turned and stared at me
fixedly an instant. ‘Nothing _everlasting_,’ he added impressively. ‘It
tells everything it knows--because it’s small enough----’
And the room turned pettier as he said it; another, bigger shadow
draped its little walls. Through the open windows came a stealthy
gesture of eternity. The atmosphere stretched visibly. Moleson was
playing a marvellous fragment from Scriabin’s ‘Prometheus.’ It sounded
thin and shallow. This modern music, all of it, was out of place and
trivial. It was almost ridiculous. The scale of our emotion changed
insensibly into a deeper thing that has no name in dictionaries, being
of another age. And I glanced at the windows where stone columns framed
dim sections of great Egypt listening outside. There was no moon; only
deep draughts of stars blazed, hanging in the sky. I thought with awe
of the mysterious knowledge that vanished people had of these stars,
and of the Sun’s huge journey through the Zodiac....
And, with astonishing suddenness as of dream, there rose a pictured
image against that starlit sky. Lifted into the air, between heaven and
earth, I saw float swiftly past a panorama of the stately temples, led
by Denderah, Edfu, Abou Simbel. It paused, it hovered, it disappeared.
Leaving incalculable solemnity behind it in the air, it vanished, and
to see so vast a thing move at that easy yet unhasting speed unhinged
some sense of measurement in me. It was, of course, I assured myself,
mere memory objectified owing to something that the music summoned,
yet the apprehension rose in me that the whole of Egypt presently
would stream past in similar fashion--Egypt as she was in the zenith
of her unrecoverable past. Behind the tinkling of the modern piano
passed the rustling of a multitude, the tramping of countless feet on
sand.... It was singularly vivid. It arrested in me something that
normally went flowing.... And when I turned my head towards the room to
call attention to my strange experience, the eyes of Moleson, I saw,
were laid upon my own. He stared at me. The light in them transfixed
me, and I understood that the illusion was due in some manner to his
evocation. Isley rose at the same moment from his chair. The thing I
had vaguely been expecting had shifted closer. And the same moment the
musician abruptly changed his key.
‘You may like this better,’ he murmured, half to himself, but in tones
he somehow made echoing. ‘It’s more suited to the place.’ There was a
resonance in the voice as though it emerged from hollows underground.
‘The other seems almost sacrilegious--here.’ And his voice drawled
off in the rhythm of slower modulations that he played. It had grown
muffled. There was an impression, too, that he did not strike the
piano, but that the music issued from himself.
‘Place! What place?’ asked Isley quickly. His head turned sharply as he
spoke. His tone, in its remoteness, made me tremble.
The musician laughed to himself. ‘I meant that this hotel seems really
an impertinence,’ he murmured, leaning down upon the notes he played
upon so softly and so well; ‘and that it’s but the thinnest kind of
pretence--when you come to think of it. We are in the desert really.
The Colossi are outside, and all the emptied temples. Or ought to be,’
he added, raising his tone abruptly with a glance at me.
He straightened up and stared out into the starry sky past George
Isley’s shoulders.
‘That,’ he exclaimed with betraying vehemence, ‘is where we are and
what we play to!’ His voice suddenly increased; there was a roar in it.
‘That,’ he repeated, ‘is the thing that takes our hearts away.’ The
volume of intonation was astonishing.
For the way he uttered the monosyllable suddenly revealed the man
beneath the outer sheath of cynicism and laughter, explained his
heartlessness, his secret stream of life. He, too, was soul and body
in the past. ‘That’ revealed more than pages of descriptive phrases.
His heart lived in the temple aisles, his mind unearthed forgotten
knowledge; his soul had clothed itself anew in the seductive glory
of antiquity: he dwelt with a quickening magic of existence in the
reconstructed splendour of what most term only ruins. He and George
Isley together had revivified a power that enticed them backwards;
but whereas the latter struggled still, the former had already made
his permanent home there. The faculty in me that saw the vision of
streaming temples saw also this--remorselessly definite. Moleson
himself sat naked at that piano. I saw him clearly then. He no longer
masqueraded behind his sneers and laughter. He, too, had long ago
surrendered, lost himself, gone out, and from the place his soul now
dwelt in he watched George Isley sinking down to join him. He lived in
ancient, subterranean Egypt. This great hotel stood precariously on the
merest upper crust of desert. A thousand tombs, a hundred temples lay
outside, within reach almost of our very voices. Moleson was merged
with ‘that.’
This intuition flashed upon me like the picture in the sky; and both
were true.
And, meanwhile, this other thing he played had a surge of power in it
impossible to describe. It was sombre, huge and solemn. It conveyed the
power that his walk conveyed. There was distance in it, but a distance
not of space alone. A remoteness of time breathed through it with that
strange sadness and melancholy yearning that enormous interval brings.
It marched, but very far away; it held refrains that assumed the
rhythms of a multitude the centuries muted; it sang, but the singing
was underground in passages that fine sand muffled. Lost, wandering
winds sighed through it, booming. The contrast, after the modern,
cheaper music, was dislocating. Yet the change had been quite naturally
effected.
‘It would sound empty and monotonous elsewhere--in London, for
instance,’ I heard Moleson drawling, as he swayed to and fro, ‘but here
it is big and splendid--true. You hear what I mean,’ he added gravely.
‘You understand?’
‘What is it?’ asked Isley thickly, before I could say a word. ‘I forget
exactly. It has tears in it--more than I can bear.’ The end of his
sentence died away in his throat.
Moleson did not look at him as he answered. He looked at me.
‘You surely ought to know,’ he replied, the voice rising and falling as
though the rhythm forced it. ‘You have heard it all before--that chant
from the ritual we----’
Isley sprang up and stopped him. I did not hear the sentence
complete. An extraordinary thought blazed into me that the voices
of both men were not quite their own. I fancied--wild, impossible
as it sounds--that I heard the twin Colossi singing to each other
in the dawn. Stupendous ideas sprang past me, leaping. It seemed as
though eternal symbols of the cosmos, discovered and worshipped in
this ancient land, leaped into awful life. My consciousness became
enveloping. I had the distressing feeling that ages slipped out of
place and took me with them; they dominated me; they rushed me off my
feet like water. I was drawn backwards. I, too, was changing--being
changed.
‘I remember,’ said Isley softly, a reverence of worship in his voice.
But there was anguish in it too, and pity; he let the present go
completely from him; the last strands severed with a wrench of pain. I
imagined I heard his soul pass weeping far away--below.
‘I’ll sing it,’ murmured Moleson, ‘for the voice is necessary. The
sound and rhythm are utterly divine!’