“And how bored I am with this room and all these beastly pictures!” exclaimed Mrs. Viveash as she entered. She took off her hat and, standing in front of the mirror above the mantelpiece, smoothed her coppery hair.
“You should take a cottage in the country,” said Gumbril, “buy a pony and a governess cart and drive along the twiddly lanes looking for flowers. After tea you open the cottage piano,” and suiting his action to the words, Gumbril sat down at the long-tailed Blüthner, “and you play, you play.” Very slowly and with parodied expressiveness he played the opening theme of the Arietta. “You wouldn’t be bored then,” he said, turning round to her, when he had finished.
“Ah, wouldn’t I!” said Mrs. Viveash. “And with whom do you propose that I should share my cottage?”
“Any one you like,” said Gumbril. His fingers hung, as though meditating over the keys.
“But I don’t like any one,” cried Mrs. Viveash with a terrible vehemence from her death-bed.... Ah, now it had been said, the truth. It sounded like a joke. Tony had been dead five years now. Those bright blue eyes—ah, never again. All rotted away to nothing.
“Then you should try,” said Gumbril, whose hands had begun to creep softly forward into the Twelfth Sonata. “You should try.”
“But I do try,” said Mrs. Viveash. Her elbows propped on the mantelpiece, her chin resting on her clasped hands, she was looking fixedly at her own image in the glass. Pale eyes looked unwaveringly into pale eyes. The red mouth and its reflection exchanged their smiles of pain. She had tried; it revolted her now to think how often she had tried; she had tried to like some one, any one, as much as Tony. She had tried to recapture, to re-evoke, to revivify. And there had never been anything, really, but a disgust. “I haven’t succeeded,” she added, after a pause.
The music had shifted from F major to D minor; it mounted in leaping anapæsts to a suspended chord, ran down again, mounted once more, modulating to C minor, then, through a passage of trembling notes to A flat major, to the dominant of D flat, to the dominant of C, to C minor, and at last, to a new clear theme in the major.
“Then I’m sorry for you,” said Gumbril, allowing his fingers to play on by themselves. He felt sorry, too, for the subjects of Mrs. Viveash’s desperate experiments. She mightn’t have succeeded in liking them—for their part, poor devils, they in general only too agonizingly liked her.... Only too.... He remembered the cold, damp spots on his pillow, in the darkness. Those hopeless, angry tears. “You nearly killed me once,” he said.
“Only time kills,” said Mrs. Viveash, still looking into her own pale eyes. “I have never made any one happy,” she added, after a pause. “Never any one,” she thought, except Tony, and Tony they had killed, shot him through the head. Even the bright eyes had rotted, like any other carrion. She too had been happy then. Never again.