Chapter 17

In Brantome's living room the book shelves rose to the ceiling; between them the spaces on the walls were covered with the mementoes of a long life. On the tables stood bowls of flowers, stacks of musical scores, trays of wineglasses, cigarette boxes that had once been jewel cases, half-empty teacups, and the gold purses or jet handbags of women who reclined in the deep chairs with their faces turned toward the piano.

Men leaned smoking in the heavily curtained embrasures of the windows, their foreheads lowered, their eyebrows casting over their eyes the shadows as if of a profound fatigue. Beside the hall door loomed the white mane of Brantome, who turned, at an inflow of artificial light, to greet the small Italian woman that had recently become a prima donna.

And presently this song bird warbled for her comrades of the arts, as she would have done in no other company. The air shook from her agile cadenzas. A last, long trill, high and pure, died away vibrating in the vases of iridescent glass.

Then some one persuaded Brantome to play a piece of Schumann's. And once more Lilla heard _Vienna Carnival_.

When he had finished playing, Brantome sat down beside her.

"So it is as magical as ever, a bit of music?" he inquired, in his rumbling, hoarse voice.

"You were playing that at the moment when I first saw my husband," she said.

He contemplated her with his haggard old eyes. Patting her hand, he declared:

"All these emotions that you, a beautiful young woman, have felt, I believe that I, an ugly, worn-out old man, have felt, also. I, too, have felt in my time that the world was at an end. I have suffered from the same inability to return into life. Well, will you think me cruel--shall I appear to you as the thief of an inestimable treasure--if I tell you something? In time, sooner or later, one recovers. I don't mean that one forgets. It is always there; and a chance sound or perfume brings it back to one. But at last it returns so gently! One feels then, instead of pain, almost a gentle, melancholy pleasure. Then you will learn that there may be certain subtle joys in grief."

She lowered her gaze, flinching inwardly, as one sometimes does when credited with a feeling that one no longer fully deserves. A dismal perplexity came to her, a little pang of treason, as she asked him:

"How can I hasten that day?"

He suggested:

"You might perhaps find some engrossing interest?"

Near the piano a group were discussing women's failures in music. One heard the names of Chaminade, Augusta Holmes, Ethel Smyth. Why had there been no female Beethovens, Liszts, or even Chopins? The reason, asserted a middle-aged man, was that women's emotions were too thoroughly instinctive to be projected in the form of first-class music, which was, in fine, emotion analyzed, compressed within the limits of fixed rules, expressed by series of arbitrary signs. In the midst of his conclusion, however, he lost his self-satisfied smile: he had caught sight of Lilla, who was looking at him blankly as though he had slammed a transparent door in her face.

She heard Brantome benevolently murmuring the platitude:

"It is often in making others forget their sorrows that one diminishes one's own, and in doing good to others that one finds good for oneself."

She showed him a bitter smile.

"Yes, charity. The usual prescription. I have already tried it." She added, "Of course those poor people in their poverty and illnesses merely appeared to me as a means for my own relief. In helping them I didn't think of their troubles, but of forgetting my own. Sometimes when I've written a check I almost expect it to buy me a less gloomy day. At such moments I should be absurd if I weren't contemptible."

"Bah! you are unjust to yourself."

It was true. Lilla, who had suffered so much from her exceptional temperament, could not bear to see others suffer; and in the grip of her own weaknesses she had always felt compassion for the weak.

"But I ought not to come here," she said.

She explained that in this place she "felt her worthlessness." It would be better, she thought, to remain in the Brassfield state of mind: thus one might find an anodyne for this sense of insignificance. For, to those others, of course, wealth and social position were the important things in life, magnificently making up for the lack of other qualities. If they had artistic enthusiasms, it was because they regarded the arts as did the Roman conquerors--as elements created for no other reason than to enhance their triumphs. Debussy, she suggested, had been born to give them a cause for displaying their jewels at the opera, just as Titian had existed in order that their acquisition of a painting by his hand might be cabled round the world. In that region of inverted values one took on the egotism of the fabled frog in the well, who laughed to scorn the frog that came to tell him of the ocean.

"But the well is so prettily gilded," Lilla remarked. "And it's lined with so many nice little mirrors in Louis XVI frames, that you can hardly blame the frog if he imagines that his importance, like his reflections, extends to the ends of the earth, in that multiplied glitter of gilt."

Brantome began to laugh, then turned serious.

"You must be desperate," he commented.

"That is your fault. I've always had a longing for what I find in these rooms; but that longing isn't backed up by any capacity. When one of these friends of yours has suffered a loss, his art still remains. And maybe it becomes a richer art because of his loss."

She sighed, her pale brown cheek resting against her black-gloved hand, her black fur collar framing her neck on which the strand of pearls was less lustrous than the teeth between her parted lips.

His leonine old visage grew soft as he looked at her, and under his white mustaches of a Viking there appeared a sad smile, as if he were thinking that things might have been different with him, had she, with this beauty and these predilections, been young when he had been young.

"Oh, no, you must not stop coming here," he protested gently. "It's only right that these poor fellows should have their glimpses of a composite of all the beautiful muses--who, as you'll remember, were not themselves practitioners in the arts, but the inspirers of artists. Isn't there, for women, besides the joys of personal accomplishment, another satisfaction, which one might call vicarious?"

She gave him again her bitter, listless smile.

"You believe that stuff about women's inspiration?"

"But why not, good heavens! When it is a fact of life----"

He bade her consider the great music written by men. Almost invariably one found in its depths a longing for synthesis with some ideal beauty, produced by thoughts of some idealized woman. Or else, by woman in the abstract--that obsession which, ever since the days of Dante and the troubadours, had attained a nearly religious quality, against whose pressure even the modern materialist struggled in vain. Yes, ever since that fatal twelfth century it was woman, the goddess, the Beatrice-form beckoning on the staircase of Paradise, who attracted upward the dazzled gaze of man, and who seemed, by an unearthly smile--with which man himself had possibly endowed her--to promise a mystical salvation and a sort of celestial bliss.

"But at times, as I say," he concluded, with a shrug, "some lucky artist is suddenly confronted by all that in bodily form--by a Beatrice in a sable coat from Fifth Avenue and a little black hat from Paris."

But in her silvery voice there was a cadence of irony, when she demanded:

"Whom shall I inspire? Show me the one by whose aid I can pretend that the woman is responsible for the masterpieces, as no doubt Vittoria Colonna sometimes pretended to herself in the case of Michael Angelo. But remember that it must be an affair like that one, romantically platonic--_à la manière de Provence_."

Brantome nodded benignantly. But old pangs had revived in his heart.

How well he understood this restlessness of hers, this sense of impotency, this secret rancor at contemplation of congenial forms of success! He, by some minute fault, some tiny slip of fate, had long ago been doomed to these same sensations. In the morning of youth, when gazing toward the future, he had seen the world at his feet, unaware of that little flaw in the foundations of his Castle in Spain, unwarned of the trick that destiny was going to play on him. All these years it had been here in the bottom of his heart, the sensation of inferiority, the gnawing chagrin. He had masked it well: one discerned it only in some rare look when he was off his guard. And now and then, for a while, he even vanquished it, when some fresh voice rose in the world of music, and he championed the cause of that new genius so generously, hotly, and triumphantly that the consequent renown seemed nearly to be his own, since he had helped by his enthusiasm to establish it.

"Yes, certainly, _à la manière de Provence_--since music is so very impersonal an art," he muttered, with an absentminded, haggard smile.

But Lilla was watching a man and woman who sat in a shadowy alcove, and who, as some one began to play a nocturne, let their fingers twine together.