CHAPTER II
VALENTINE SINGS
When Valentine heard of the scene in Marylebone Road he smiled.
"How extraordinary women are," he said. "A man might give his life to them, I suppose, yet never understand them."
"It would be rather jolly—making that gift, I mean," said Julian.
"You think so? Since last night."
"I want to talk to you about that, Valentine, d'you blame me?"
"Not a bit."
"Only wonder at me?"
"I don't even say that."
"No; but of course you must wonder at me."
Julian spoke almost wistfully, and as if he wanted Valentine to sweep away the suggestion. Last night they had been comrades. To-day, in the light and in the calm of afternoon, Valentine seemed much more remote, and Julian felt for the first time a sense of degradation. He was uneasily conscious that he might have fallen in Valentine's esteem. But Valentine reassured him.
"I don't wonder at you, either, Julian; I simply envy you, and metaphorically sit at your feet."
"That's absurd."
"Not quite; and I may not always be sitting there, for I believe I have really got a little bit of your soul. Last night I seemed to feel it stirring within me, and I liked its personality."
"You did seem different last night," Julian said, looking at Valentine with a keen interest. "Can it be possible that those sittings of ours have really had any effect?"
"On me they have; not on you. You haven't caught my coldness, but I have gained something of your warmth. Doesn't that perhaps show that mine was, after all, the wrong nature?"
"I don't know," Julian said doubtfully; "you look the same."
"Do I? Exactly?"
Valentine spoke with a sort of whimsical defiance, as if almost daring Julian to answer, Yes. And Julian, too, seemed suddenly doubtful whether he had stated what was the fact. He looked closely at Valentine.
"Do you think your face has changed? Do you mean to say that?" he asked.
"I only fancied there might be a little more humanity in it, that was all."
"Once or twice I have thought I noticed something," Julian said, still doubtfully; "but I believe it's imagination. It doesn't stay."
"When it does, I suppose I shall be able thoroughly to appreciate all your temptations. Don't you begin to think now it's good to have them."
"I don't know," Julian said. But he was conscious that there had come a change in his attitude of mind towards temptation. Some men glory in resisting temptation, others in yielding to it. Hitherto Julian had not been able to range himself in either of these two opposed camps. He had merely hated his faculty for being tempted. Did he entirely hate it now? He could not say so to himself, whatever he might say to others, but something kept him from making confession of the truth to Valentine. So he professed ignorance of his own exact state of feeling; really, had he analyzed his reticence, it sprang from a fine desire to give forth no breath that might tarnish the clear mirror of Valentine's nature. He would not admit a change that might make his friend again fall into the absurd dissatisfaction which he had combated on the night of their first sitting in the tent-room. While they talked the afternoon had fallen into a creeping twilight. In the twilight the front door bell rang.
"Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door," Valentine said, quoting Poe. "It must be the doctor."
Julian reddened suddenly.
"I hope not," he said.
"What?" Valentine cried. "You don't want our little doctor?"
"Somehow not—to-day."
The door opened and Doctor Levillier entered. Valentine greeted him warmly. They had not met since the night of the affray with the mastiffs. In Julian's manner there was a touch of awkwardness as he shook hands with the doctor. Levillier did not seem to notice it. He looked very tired and rather depressed.
"Cresswell," he said, "I have come to you for a tonic."
"Doctor coming to patient!"
"Doctors take medicine oftener than you may suppose. I'm in bad spirits to-day. I've been trying to cure too many people lately. It's hard work."
"It must be. Sit down and forget. Imagine the world beautifully incurable and your occupation consequently gone."
The doctor sat down, saying:
"My imagination stops short at that feat."
He kept silence for a moment, then he said:
"You know what I want."
"No," Valentine answered. "But I'll do anything. You know that."
"I want your music."
Valentine suddenly became unresponsive. He didn't speak at first, and both Julian and the doctor glanced at him in some surprise.
"Oh, you want me to be David to your Saul," he said at length.
"Yes."
"Do, Val," said Julian. "I should like it too."
Valentine, who was sitting near the doctor, looked down thoughtfully on the carpet.
"I'm not in the mood to-day," he said slowly.
"You are always in the mood enough to cheer and rest me," Levillier said.
He had driven all the way from Harley Street for his medicine, and it was obvious that he meant to have it. But Valentine still hesitated, and a certain slight confusion became noticeable in his manner. Moving the toe of his right boot to and fro, following the pattern of the carpet, he glanced sideways at the doctor, and an odd smile curved his lips.
"Doctor," he said, "d'you believe that talents can die in us while we ourselves live?"
"That's a strange question."
"It's waiting an answer."
"Well, my answer is, No; not wholly, unless through the approach of old age, or the development of madness."
"I'm neither old nor mad."
Levillier and Julian both looked at Valentine with some amazement.
"Are you talking about yourself?" the doctor asked.
"Certainly."
"Why? What talent is dead in you?"
"My talent for music. Do you know that for the last few days I've been able neither to sing nor play?"
"Val, you're joking," exclaimed Julian.
"I am certainly not," he answered, and quite gravely. "I am simply stating a fact."
Doctor Levillier seemed unable to appreciate that he was speaking seriously.
"I have come all this way to hear you sing," he said. "I have never asked you in vain yet."
"Is it my fault if you ask me in vain now?"
Valentine looked him in the face and spoke with a complete sincerity. The doctor returned the glance, as he sometimes returned the glance of a patient, very directly, with a clear and simple gravity. Having done this he felt completely puzzled.
"The talent for music has died in you?" he asked.
"Entirely. I can do nothing with my piano. I have even locked it."
As he spoke he went over to it and pulled at the lid to show them that he was speaking the truth.
"Where's the key?" asked the doctor.
"Here," said Valentine, producing it from his pocket.
"Give it to me," said the doctor.
Valentine did so and the doctor quietly opened the piano, drew up the music-stool, and signed to Valentine to sit down.
"If you mean what you say, the explanation must simply be that you are suffering from some form of hysteria," he said, rather authoritatively. "Now sing me something. No; I won't let you off."
Valentine, sitting on the stool, extended his hands and laid the tips of his long fingers upon the keys, but without sounding them.
"You insist on my trying to sing?" he asked.
"I do."
"I warn you, doctor, you will be sorry if I do. My voice is quite out of order."
"No matter."
"Go on, Val," cried Julian, from his arm-chair. "Anybody would think you were a young lady."
Valentine bent his head, with a quick gesture of abnegation.
"As you will," he said.
He struck his hand down upon the keys as he spoke. That was the strangest prelude ever heard. In their different ways Doctor Levillier and Julian were both intensely fond of music, both quickly stirred by it when it was good, not merely classical, but extravagant, violent, and in any way interesting. Each of them had heard Valentine play, not once only, but a hundred times. They knew not simply his large répertoire of pieces and songs through and through, but also the peculiar and characteristic progressions of his improvisations, the ornaments he most delighted in, the wildness of his melancholy, the phantasy of his gaieties; and they knew every tone of his voice, which expressed with an exquisite realism the temperament of his soul. But now, as Valentine's hands powerfully struck the keys, they both started and exchanged an involuntary glance of keen surprise. The first few bars gave the lie to Valentine's assertion that he could no longer play. A cataract of notes streamed from beneath his fingers, and of notes so curiously combined, or following each other in such a fantastic array, that they seemed arranged in the musical pattern by an intelligence of the strangest order. It is often easy for a cultivated ear to detect whether a given composition has sprung from the brain of a Frenchman, a German, a Hungarian, a Russian. The wildness of Bohemia, too, may be identified, or the vague sorrow of that northern melody which seems an echo of voices heard amid the fiords or in pale valleys near the farthest cape of Europe. And then there is that large and lofty music of the stars and the spheres, of the mightiest passions and of the deepest imaginings, that is of no definite country, but seems to be of its own power and beauty, and not of the brain and heart of any one man. It exists for eternity, and its creator can only wonder and worship before it, far from conceit as God was when He said, "Let there be light." Such music, too, is recognized on the instant by the men who have loved and studied the secrets of the most divine of the arts, for profound genius can utter itself as easily in five notes as in fifty. But the prelude now played by Valentine was neither the great music that is of all time and of all countries, nor the music that is of any one country. It was not even distinctively northern or southern in character, impregnated with the mystery of the tuneless, wonderful East, or with the peculiar homeliness that stirs Western hearts. Both the doctor and Julian felt, as they listened, that it was music without an earthly home, without location, devoid of that sense of relation to humanity which links the greatness of the arts to the smallness of those who follow them. Eccentric the music was, but the eccentricity of it seemed almost inhuman, so unmannerly as to be beyond the range of the most uncouth man, in advance of the invention of any mind, however coarse and criminal. That was the atmosphere of this prelude, excessive, unutterable, crude, sombre vulgarity of a detached and remote kind. As Levillier listened to it amazed, he found that he did not instinctively connect the vulgarity with any human traits, or translate the notes into acts within his experience. He was simply conscious of being brought to the verge of some sphere in which the sordidness attained by our race would be sneered at as delicacy, in which our lowest grovellings of the pigsty would be as lofty flights through the skies. And the hideous eccentricity of the music, its wanton desolation, deepened until both Levillier and Julian were pale under its spell, shrank from its ardent, its merciless and lambent sarcasm against all things refined or beautiful. The prelude was as fire and sword, as plague and famine, as plunder and war, as all instruments that lay waste and that wound, a destroying angel before whose breath the first-born withered and the very sun shrivelled into a heap of grey ashes.
As Doctor Levillier leaned forward, moved by an irresistible impulse, and stretched out his hand to enforce silence from this blare of deplorable melody, Valentine looked up at him, into his eyes, and began to sing. The doctor's movement was arrested, his hand dropped to his side, he remained tense, frigid, his eyes fastened on Valentine's like a man mesmerised. At first he knew that he was wondering whether his brain was playing him a trick, whether his sense of hearing had, by some means, become impaired, so that he heard a voice, not dimly, as is the case with the partially deaf, but wrongly, as may be the case with the mad, or with those who have suffered under a blow or through an injury to the brain. For this voice was not Valentine's at all, but the voice of a stranger, powerful, harsh, and malignant. It rang through the room noisily. A thick hoarseness dressed it as in disease, and at moments broke it and crushed it down. Then it would emerge as in a sigh or wail, pushing its way up with all the mechanical power of the voice of a wild animal, and mounting to a desperate climax, sinister and alarming. So unlike ordinary singing was the performance of this voice that, after the first paralysis of surprise and disgust had passed away from the doctor and Julian, they both felt the immediate necessity of putting a period to this deadly song, to which no words gave the faintest touch of humanity. They knew that it must attract and rivet the attention of others in the mansions, even possibly of passers-by in the street. The doctor withdrew his gaze from Valentine's at length, and turned hastily to Julian, whom he found regarding him with a glance almost of horror.
"Stop him," Julian murmured.
"You!" answered Levillier.
And then each knew that the other was in some nervous crisis that rendered action almost an impossibility. And while they thus hesitated there came a loud, repeated, and unsteady knock at the door. Julian opened it. Valentine's man was standing outside, pale and anxious.
"Good God, sir," he ejaculated. "What is it? What on earth is the matter?"
The man's exclamation broke through Julian's frost of inaction. He whispered to Wade:
"It's all right," pushed him out and shut the door. Then he went straight up to the piano, seized Valentine's hands and dragged them from the keyboard.
The silence was like a sweet blow.
"I said my voice was out of order," Valentine said, simply and with a smile.
"You did not say you had another voice, the voice of—of a devil," Julian said, almost falteringly, for he was still shaken by his distress of the senses, into a mental condition that was almost anger.
Dr. Levillier said nothing. More sensitive to musical sounds than Julian, he dared not speak, lest he should say something that might stand like a fixed gulf to eternally separate him from Valentine. He knew the future that stretches out like a spear beyond one word. So he sat quietly with his eyes on the ground. His lips were set firmly together. Valentine turned to observe him.
"Doctor, you're not angry?" he asked.
The doctor made no reply.
"You know I warned you," Valentine went on. "You brought this thing on yourself."
"Yes," said Levillier.
But Julian interposed.
"No Valentine," he exclaimed. "For, of course, it is all a trick of yours. You didn't want to sing. We made you. This is your revenge, eh? I didn't know you had it in you to be so—so beastly and cantankerous."
Valentine shook his head.
"It's no trick. It's simply as I said. My talent for music is dead. You have been listening to the voice of its corpse."
Dr. Levillier looked up at length.
"You really mean that?" he said, and there was an awakening within him of his normal ready interest in all things.
"I mean it absolutely."
"That is the only event in which I can forgive the torture you have been inflicting upon me."
"That is the true event."
"But it's not possible," Julian said. "It's not conceivable. Surely, doctor, you would not say—"
The doctor interrupted him.
"I cannot believe that Cresswell would deliberately commit an outrage upon me," he said. "And it would be an outrage to sing like that to a tired man. Weeks of work would not fatigue me as I am fatigued by Cresswell's music."
Julian was silent and looked uneasy. Valentine repeated again:
"I couldn't help it. I am sorry."
Doctor Levillier ignored the remark. His professional interest was beginning to be aroused. For the first time he felt convinced that some very peculiar and bizarre change was dawning over the youth he knew so well. He wanted to watch it grow or fade, to analyze it, to study it, to be aware of its exact nature. But he did not want to put either Valentine or Julian upon the alert. So he spoke lightly as he said:
"But I shall soon get the better of my fatigue, even without the usual medicine. Cresswell, take my advice, give your music a rest. Lock your piano again for a while. It will be better."
Valentine shut down the lid on the instant, and turned the little key in the lock.
"Adieu to my companion of many lonely hours!" he said with a half whimsical pensiveness. Then, as if in joke, he held out his hand with the key in it, to the doctor.
"Will you take charge of this hostage?" he asked.
"Yes," the doctor replied.
Quite gravely he took the key and put it into his pocket.
And so it was that silence fell round the Saint of Victoria Street.