In spite of the taxi, in spite of the gobbled dinner, they were late.
The concert had begun.
“Never mind,” said Gumbril. “We shall get in in time for the minuetto.
It’s then that the fun really begins.”
“Sour grapes,” said Emily, putting her ear to the door. “It sounds to me
simply too lovely.”
They stood outside, like beggars waiting abjectly at the doors of a
banqueting-hall—stood and listened to the snatches of music that came
out tantalizingly from within. A rattle of clapping announced at last
that the first movement was over; the doors were thrown open. Hungrily
they rushed in. The Sclopis Quartet and a subsidiary viola were bowing
from the platform. There was a chirrup of tuning, then preliminary
silence. Sclopis nodded and moved his bow. The minuetto of Mozart’s G
minor Quintet broke out, phrase after phrase, short and decisive, with
every now and then a violent sforzando chord, startling in its harsh and
sudden emphasis.
Minuetto—all civilization, Mr. Mercaptan would have said, was implied in
the delicious word, the delicate, pretty thing. Ladies and precious
gentlemen, fresh from the wit and gallantry of Crebillon-haunted sofas,
stepping gracefully to a pattern of airy notes. To this passion of one
who cries out, to this obscure and angry argument with fate how would
they, Gumbril wondered, how would they have tripped it?
How pure the passion, how unaffected, clear and without clot or
pretension the unhappiness of that slow movement which followed! Blessed
are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Pure and unsullied; pure
and unmixed, unadulterated. “Not passionate, thank God; only sensual and
sentimental.” In the name of earwig. Amen. Pure, pure. Worshippers have
tried to rape the statues of the gods; the statuaries who made the
images were generally to blame. And how deliciously, too, an artist can
suffer! and, in the face of the whole Albert Hall, with what an
effective gesture and grimace! But blessed are the pure in heart, for
they shall see God. The instruments come together and part again. Long
silver threads hang aerially over a murmur of waters; in the midst of
muffled sobbing a cry. The fountains blow their architecture of slender
pillars, and from basin to basin the waters fall; from basin to basin,
and every fall makes somehow possible a higher leaping of the jet, and
at the last fall the mounting column springs up into the sunlight, and
from water the music has modulated up into a rainbow. Blessed are the
pure in heart, for they shall see God; they shall make God visible, too,
to other eyes.
Blood beats in the ears. Beat, beat, beat. A slow drum in the darkness,
beating in the ears of one who lies wakeful with fever, with the
sickness of too much misery. It beats unceasingly, in the ears, in the
mind itself. Body and mind are indivisible, and in the spirit blood
painfully throbs. Sad thoughts droop through the mind. A small, pure
light comes swaying down through the darkness, comes to rest, resigning
itself to the obscurity of its misfortune. There is resignation, but
blood still beats in the ears. Blood still painfully beats, though the
mind has acquiesced. And then, suddenly, the mind exerts itself, throws
off the fever of too much suffering and laughing, commands the body to
dance. The introduction to the last movement comes to its suspended,
throbbing close. There is an instant of expectation, and then, with a
series of mounting trochees and a downward hurrying, step after tiny
step, in triple time, the dance begins. Irrelevant, irreverent, out of
key with all that has gone before. But man’s greatest strength lies in
his capacity for irrelevance. In the midst of pestilences, wars and
famines, he builds cathedrals; and a slave, he can think the irrelevant
and unsuitable thoughts of a free man. The spirit is slave to fever and
beating blood, at the mercy of an obscure and tyrannous misfortune. But
irrelevantly, it elects to dance in triple measure—a mounting skip, a
patter of descending feet.
The G minor Quintet is at an end; the applause rattles out loudly.
Enthusiasts stand up and cry bravo. And the five men on the platform
rise and bow their acknowledgments. Great Sclopis himself receives his
share of the plaudits with a weary condescension; weary are his poached
eyes, weary his disillusioned smile. It is only his due, he knows; but
he has had so much clapping, so many lovely women. He has a Roman nose,
a colossal brow and, though the tawny musical mane does much to conceal
the fact, no back to his head. Garofalo, the second fiddle, is black,
beady-eyed and pot-bellied. The convex reflections of the electroliers
slide back and forth over his polished bald head, as he bends, again,
again, in little military salutes. Peperkoek, two metres high, bows with
a sinuous politeness. His face, his hair are all of the same greyish
buff colour; he does not smile, his appearance is monolithic and grim.
Not so exuberant Knoedler, who sweats and smiles and embraces his ’cello
send lays his hand to his heart and bows almost to the ground as though
all this hullabaloo were directed only at him. As for poor little Mr.
Jenkins, the subsidiary viola, he has slid away into the background, and
feeling that this is really the Sclopis’s show and that he, a mere
intruder, has no right to any of these demonstrations, he hardly bows at
all, but only smiles, vaguely and nervously, and from time to time makes
a little spasmodic twitch to show that he isn’t really ungrateful or
haughty, as you might think, but that he feels in the circumstances—the
position is a little embarrassing—it is hard to explain....
“Strange,” said Gumbril, “to think that those ridiculous creatures could
have produced what we’ve just been hearing.”
The poached eye of Sclopis lighted on Emily, flushed and ardently
applauding. He gave her, all to herself, a weary smile. He would have a
letter, he guessed, to-morrow morning signed ‘Your little Admirer in the
Third Row.’ She looked a choice little piece. He smiled again to
encourage her. Emily, alas! had not even noticed. She was applauding the
music.
“Did you enjoy it?” he asked, as they stepped out into a deserted Bond
Street.
“Did I...?” Emily laughed expressively. “No, I didn’t enjoy,” she said.
“Enjoy isn’t the word. You enjoy eating ices. It made me happy. It’s
unhappy music, but it made me happy.”
Gumbril hailed a cab and gave the address of his rooms in Great Russell
Street. “Happy,” he repeated, as they sat there side by side in the
darkness. He, too, was happy.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“To my rooms,” said Gumbril, “we shall be quiet there.” He was afraid
she might object to going there—after yesterday. But she made no
comment.
“Some people think that it’s only possible to be happy if one makes a
noise,” she said, after a pause. “I find it’s too delicate and
melancholy for noise. Being happy is rather melancholy—like the most
beautiful landscape, like those trees and the grass and the clouds and
the sunshine to-day.”
“From the outside,” said Gumbril, “it even looks rather dull.” They
stumbled up the dark staircase to his rooms. Gumbril lit a pair of
candles and put the kettle on the gas ring. They sat together on the
divan sipping tea. In the rich, soft light of the candles she looked
different, more beautiful. The silk of her dress seemed wonderfully rich
and glossy, like the petals of a tulip, and on her face, on her bare
arms and neck the light seemed to spread an impalpable bright bloom. On
the wall behind them, their shadows ran up towards the ceiling, enormous
and profoundly black.
“How unreal it is,” Gumbril whispered. “Not true. This remote secret
room. These lights and shadows out of another time. And you out of
nowhere and I, out of a past utterly remote from yours, sitting together
here, together—and being happy. That’s the strangest thing of all. Being
quite senselessly happy. It’s unreal, unreal.”
“But why,” said Emily, “why? It’s here and happening now. It _is_ real.”
“It all might vanish, at any moment,” he said.
Emily smiled rather sadly. “It’ll vanish in due time,” she said. “Quite
naturally, not by magic; it’ll vanish the way everything else vanishes
and changes. But it’s here now.”
They gave themselves up to the enchantment. The candles burned, two
shining eyes of flame, without a wink, minute after minute. But for them
there were no longer any minutes. Emily leaned against him, her body
held in the crook of his arm, her head resting on his shoulder. He
caressed his cheek against her hair; sometimes, very gently, he kissed
her forehead or her closed eyes.
“If I had known you years ago ...” she sighed. “But I was a silly little
idiot then. I shouldn’t have noticed any difference between you and
anybody else.”
“I shall be very jealous,” Emily spoke again after another timeless
silence. “There must never be anybody else, never the shadow of anybody
else.”
“There never will be anybody else,” said Gumbril.
Emily smiled and opened her eyes, looked up at him. “Ah, not here,” she
said, “not in this real unreal room. Not during this eternity. But there
will be other rooms just as real as this.”
“Not so real, not so real.” He bent his face towards hers. She closed
her eyes again, and the lids fluttered with a sudden tremulous movement
at the touch of his light kiss.
For them there were no more minutes. But time passed, time passed
flowing in a dark stream, stanchlessly, as though from some profound
mysterious wound in the world’s side, bleeding, bleeding for ever. One
of the candles had burned down to the socket and the long, smoky flame
wavered unsteadily. The flickering light troubled their eyes; the
shadows twitched and stirred uneasily. Emily looked up at him.
“What’s the time?” she said.
Gumbril looked at his watch. It was nearly one o’clock. “Too late for
you to get back,” he said.
“Too late?” Emily sat-up. Ah, the enchantment was breaking, was giving
way, like a film of ice beneath a weight, like a web before a thrust of
the wind. They looked at one another. “What shall I do?” she asked.
“You could sleep here,” Gumbril answered in a voice that came from a
long way away.
She sat for a long time in silence, looking through half-closed eyes at
the expiring candle flame. Gumbril watched her in an agony of suspense.
Was the ice to be broken, the web-work finally and for ever torn? The
enchantment could still be prolonged, the eternity renewed. He felt his
heart beating in his breast; he held his breath. It would be terrible if
she were to go now, it would be a kind of death. The flame of the candle
flickered more violently, leaping up in a thin, long, smoky flare,
sinking again almost to darkness. Emily got up and blew out the candle.
The other still burned calmly and steadily.
“May I stay?” she asked. “Will you allow me?”
He understood the meaning of her question, and nodded. “Of course,” he
said.
“Of course? Is it as much of course as all that?”
“When I say so.” He smiled at her. The eternity had been renewed, the
enchantment prolonged. There was no need to think of anything now but
the moment. The past was forgotten, the future abolished. There was only
this secret room and the candlelight and the unreal, impossible
happiness of being two. Now that this peril of a disenchantment had been
averted, it would last for ever. He got up from the couch, crossed the
room, he took her hands and kissed them.
“Shall we sleep now?” she asked.
Gumbril nodded.
“Do you mind if I blow out the light?” And without waiting for his
answer, Emily turned, gave a puff, and the room was in darkness. He
heard the rustling of her undressing. Hastily he stripped off his own
clothes, pulled back the coverlet from the divan. The bed was made and
ready; he opened it and slipped between the sheets. A dim greenish light
from the gas lamp in the street below came up between the parted
curtains illuminating faintly the farther end of the room. Against this
tempered darkness he could see her, silhouetted, standing quite still,
as if hesitating on some invisible brink.
“Emily,” he whispered.
“I’m coming,” Emily answered. She stood there, unmoving, a few seconds
longer, then overstepped the brink. She came silently across the room,
and sat down on the edge of the low couch. Gumbril lay perfectly still,
without speaking, waiting in the enchanted timeless darkness. Emily
lifted her knees, slid her feet in under the sheet, then stretched
herself out beside him, her body, in the narrow bed, touching his.
Gumbril felt that she was trembling; trembling, a sharp involuntary
start, a little shudder, another start.
“You’re cold,” he said, and slipping one arm beneath her shoulders he
drew her, limp and unresisting, towards him. She lay there, pressed
against him. Gradually the trembling ceased. Quite still, quite still in
the calm of the enchantment. The past is forgotten, the future
abolished; there is only this dark and everlasting moment. A drugged and
intoxicated stupor of happiness possessed his spirit; a numbness, warm
and delicious, lay upon him. And yet through the stupor he knew with a
dreadful anxious certainty that the end would soon be there. Like a man
on the night before his execution, he looked forward through the endless
present; he foresaw the end of his eternity. And after? Everything was
uncertain and unsafe.
Very gently, he began caressing her shoulder, her long slender arm,
drawing his finger-tips lightly and slowly over her smooth skin; slowly
from her neck, over her shoulder, lingeringly round the elbow to her
hand. Again, again; he was learning her arm. The form of it was part of
the knowledge, now, of his finger-tips; his fingers knew it as they knew
a piece of music, as they knew Mozart’s Twelfth Sonata, for example. And
the themes that crowd so quickly one after another at the beginning of
the first movement played themselves serially, glitteringly in his mind;
they became a part of the enchantment.
Through the silk of her shift he learned her curving side, her smooth
straight back and the ridge of her spine. He stretched down, touched her
feet, her knees. Under the smock he learned her warm body, lightly,
slowly caressing. He knew her, his fingers, he felt, could build her up,
a warm and curving statue in the darkness. He did not desire her; to
desire would have been to break the enchantment. He let himself sink
deeper and deeper into his dark stupor of happiness. She was asleep in
his arms; and soon he too was asleep.