The Music-Lover had come to his favourite seat. It was in the front
row of the balcony, just where the curve reaches its outermost point,
and, like a rounded headland, meets the unbroken flow of the
long-rolling, invisible waves of rhythmical sound.
The value of that chosen place did not seem to be known to the world,
else there would have been a higher price demanded for the privilege
of occupying it. People were willing to pay far more to get into the
boxes, or even to have a chair reserved on the crowded level of the
parquet.
But the Music-Lover cared little for fashion, and had long ago ceased
to reckon the worth of things by the prices asked for them in the
market.
He knew that his coign of vantage, by some secret confluence of
architectural lines, gave him the very best of the delight of hearing
that the vast concert-hall contained. It was for that delight that he
was thirsting, and he surrendered himself to it confidently and
entirely.
He had arrived at an oasis in the day. Since morning he had been
toiling through the Sahara of the city's noise: arid, senseless,
inhospitable noise: roaring of wheels, clanging of bells, shrieking of
whistles, clatter of machinery, squawking of horns, raucous and
strident voices: confused, bewildering, exhausting noise, a desolate
and unfriendly desert of heard ugliness.
Now all that waste, howling wilderness was shut out by the massive
walls of the concert-hall, and he found himself in a haven of refuge.
But silence alone would not have healed and restored his spirit. It
needed something more than the absence of harsh and brutal and
meaningless noise to satisfy him. It needed the presence of music:
tones measured, ordered, and restrained; varied and blended not by
chance, but by feeling and reason; sound expressive of the secret life
and the rhythmical emotion of the human heart. And this he found
flowing all around him, entering deeply into him, filling all the
parched and empty channels of his being, as he listened to
Beethoven's great Symphony in C Minor.
I
There was nothing between him and the orchestra. He looked over the
railing of the gallery, which shaded his eyes from the lights of the
boxes below, straight across the gulf in which the mass of the
audience, diminutive and indistinguishable, seemed to be submerged, to
the brilliant island of the stage.
The conductor stood in the foreground. There was no touch of carefully
considered eccentricity in hair or costume, no pose of self-conscious
Bohemianism about him. His face, with its clear brow, firmly moulded
chin, and brown moustache, was that of a man who understood himself as
well as music. His figure, in its faultless evening dress, had the
tranquil poise and force of one who obeys the customs of society in
order to be free to give his mind to other things. With slight
motions, easy and graceful as if they came without thought and
required no effort, his right hand, with the little baton, gave the
time and rhythm, commanding swift obedience; while his left hand
lightly beckoned here and there with magical persuasion, drawing forth
louder or softer notes, stirring the groups of instruments to
passionate expression, or hushing them to delicate and ethereal
strains.
There was no labour, no dramatic display in that leadership; nothing
to distract the attention, or to break the spell of the music. All the
toil of art, the consideration of effects, the sharp and vehement
assertion of authority, lay behind him in the rehearsals.
Now the finished work, the noble interpretation of the composer's
musical idea, flowed forth at the leader's touch, as if each motive
and phrase, each period and melody, were waiting somewhere in the air
to reveal itself at his slight signal. And through all the movement of
the _Allegro con brio_, with its momentous struggle between Fate and
the Human Soul, the orchestra answered to the leader's will as if it
were a single instrument upon which he played.
[Illustration: The Music-Lover.]
And so, for a time, it seemed to the Music-Lover as he looked down
upon it from his lofty place. With what precision the bows of the
violins moved up and down together; how accurately the wood-winds came
in with their gentler notes; how regularly the brazen keys of the
trumpets rose and fell, and the long, shining tubes of the trombone
slid out and in. Such varied motions, yet all so limited, so orderly,
so certain and obedient, looked like the sure interplay of the parts
of a wonderful machine.
He watched them as if in a dream, fascinated by their regularity,
their simplicity in detail, their complexity in the mass--watched them
with his eyes, while his heart was carried along with the flood of
music. More and more the impression of a marvellous unity, a
mechanical certainty of action, grew upon that half of his mind which
was occupied with sight, and gave him a singular satisfaction and
comfort.
It was good to be free, for a little while at least, from the
everlasting personal equation, the perplexing interest in human
individuals, the mysterious and disturbing sympathies awakened by
contact with other lives, and to give one's self to the pure enjoyment
of an impersonal work of art, rendered by the greatest of all
instruments--a full orchestra under control of a master.