When the night came, she said to herself that she was calm, that she would be able to concentrate herself on her acting and act just as usual. But, as she stood in the wings, waiting for her moment to appear, her eyes went straight to the eyes of the other woman, the Italian model, the organ-grinder's girl, who sat, smiling contentedly, in the front of a box, turning her head sometimes to speak to some one behind her, hidden by the curtain. She was dressed in black, with a rose in her hair: you could have taken her for a lady; she was triumphantly beautiful. Esther shuddered as if she had been struck; the blood rushed into her forehead and swelled and beat against her eyes. Then, with an immense effort, she cleared her mind of everything but the task before her. Every nerve in her body lived with a separate life as she opened the door at the back of the stage, and stood, waiting for the applause to subside, motionless under the eyes of the audience. There was something in the manner of her entrance that seemed to strike the fatal note of the play. She had never been more restrained, more effortless; she seemed scarcely to be acting; only, a magnetic current seemed to have been set in motion between her and those who were watching her. They held their breaths, as if they were assisting at a real tragedy; as if, at any moment, this acting might give place to some horrible, naked passion of mere nature. The curtain rose and rose again at the end of the first act; and she stood there, bowing gravely, in what seemed a deliberate continuation, into that interval, of the sentiment of the piece. Her dresses were taken off her and put on her, for each act, as if she had been a lay-figure. Once, in the second act, she looked up at the box; the Italian woman was smiling emptily, but Haygarth, taking no notice of her, was leaning forward with his eyes fixed on the stage. After the third act he sent to Esther's dressing-room a fervent note, begging to be allowed to see her. She had made his play, he said, and she had made herself a great actress. She crumpled the note fiercely, put it carefully into her jewel-box, and refused to see him. In the last act she had to die, after the manner of the Lady of the Camellias, waiting for the lover who, in this case, never came. The pathos of her acting was almost unbearable, and, still, it seemed not like acting at all. The curtain went down on a great actress.
Esther went home stunned, only partly realising what she had done, or how she had done it. She read over the note from Haygarth, unforgivingly; and the long letter that came from him in the morning. As reflection returned, through all the confused suffering and excitement, to her deliberate, automatic nature, in which a great shock had brought about a kind of release, she realised that all she had wanted, during most of her life, had at last come about. The note had been struck, she had responded to it, as she responded to every suggestion, faultlessly; she knew that she could repeat the note, whenever she wished, now that she had once found it. There would be no variation to allow for, the actress was made at last. She might take back her lover, or never see him again, it would make no difference. It would make no difference, she repeated, over and over again, weeping uncontrollable tears.
CHRISTIAN TREVALGA.
He had never known what it was to feel the earth solid under his feet. And now, while he waited for the doctor who was to decide whether he might still keep his place in the world, and make what he could of all that remained to him of his life, the past began to come back to him, blurred a little in his memory, and with whole spaces blotted out of it, but in a steady return upon himself, as the past, it is said, comes back to a drowning man at the instant before death. There was that next step to take, the step that frightened him; was it into another, more painful, kind of oblivion? He was still an artist, his fingers were still his own; but had the man all gone out of him, the power to live for himself, when his fingers were no longer on the keyboard? That was to be decided; and the past was trying to make its own comment on the situation.
Christian Trevalga was born in a little sea-coast village in Cornwall, and the earliest thing he remembered was the sharp, creaking voice of the sea-gulls, as they swept past him at the edge of the cliff, high up over the sea. He was conscious of it, because it hurt him, sooner than he was conscious of the many voices of the sea, which, all through his childhood, sang out of the midst of all his dreams. Pain always meant more to him than pleasure, though, indeed, he was not always sure if the things that hurt him were not the things he cared for most.
He was thirty-six now, and he had never gone back to the village since he left it, at the age of sixteen, to come to London and try to win a scholarship at the College. His father was a gentleman, who had come down in the world; drink, gambling, and a low kind of debauchery brought him down; and when he came back from Spain in a certain year, sobered, something of a wreck, and married to a slow-witted Spanish woman whom he had found no one knew where, he had only an old-fashioned, untidy, but large and rambling, house on a cliff to live in, on the outskirts of a village, most of which had once belonged to him. Debts and mortgages left just enough to live on uncomfortably; he was not exacting now, and the place was good for an idle, helpless man, who was tired of what he called living, and had taken a late fancy to the open air, and, as soon as the child was old enough, to the companionship of his child. His wife sat indoors all day, crouching over the fire, except when the summer heat was extreme, and then she lay on the grass, under an umbrella. When they sat at table her fingers were always crumbling the bread into tiny crumbs, and often, at tea-time especially, she would take a large slice of bread and mould it into little figures, little nude figures exquisitely proportioned, with all the modelling of the limbs and shoulder-blades. Sometimes she would do more than a single figure, a little well, for instance, and a woman kneeling at the brink, and leaning over it, with her arms outstretched. She loved the little figures, and talked about them very seriously, criticising their defects, not content with the lines that she had got, seeing them with subtler curves than any she had been able to get. She would like to have kept some of them, but, though she soaked them in milk, they would always crumble away as soon as the bread dried. Christian stared at her when her fingers were busy; he was puzzled, not exactly happy; he generally ran away and left her for his father, who was not so queer, half-absorbed, and busy about nothing.
His father had a great fondness for music, but he could not play any instrument, only whistle. He whistled elaborate tunes, with really a kind of skill. There was a good old Broadwood piano in the house, and, from as long ago as he could remember, Christian had been put on the music-stool, and told to play what his father whistled. The first time he was put there he picked out every note correctly, with one finger. The father caught him up in his exuberant way: 'You will be a great musician, my boy!' he said. The mother nodded over the fire, and looked down at her tiny fingers, which could pick out form as the child, it seemed, could pick out sound.
Christian lived at the piano, playing all the music that he could find in the house, and making up a strange, formless music of his own when there was nothing else to play. His ear, from the first, was faultless; if a poker fell in the fireplace he could tell you the pitch of the note which it sounded. He was always listening, and sounds, with him, often became visible, or at least reflected themselves upon his brain in contours and patterns. The wind at night, when it flapped at the windows with the sound of a sail flapping, seemed to surround the house with realisable forms of sound. The music which he played on the piano made lines, whenever he thought of it; never pictures. His mother, who did not seem to herself to know or care anything about music, sometimes described a little scene which the music he had been playing called up to her, but he could never see things in that way. When he played the first ballad of Chopin, for instance, she saw two lovers, sheltering under trees in a wood, out of the rain which was falling around them, and she followed their emotions, as the music interpreted them to her. But he did not understand music like that; what was mathematical in it he saw as pattern, but the emotion came to him in an almost equally abstract way, as musical emotion, beginning and ending in the music itself, and not needing to have any of one's own feelings put into it. It was the music itself that cried and wept, and tore one; the passions of abstract sound.
For, he knew from the beginning, the soul of music is something more than the soul of humanity expressing itself in melody, and the life of music something more than an audible dramatisation of human life. Beethoven, let us say, is angry with the world, Schumann dreams about the roots of a flower; and they sit down to make music under that impulse. Well, the anger will be there, and the flower coming up out of the earth, but the music itself will have forgotten both the dream and the feeling, the moment it begins to speak articulately in sound. It will have its own message, as well as its own language, and you will not be able to write down that message in words, any more than your words can be translated into that language.
And so Christian, with his divination of what music really means, was never able to attach any expressible meaning to the pieces he played, and became tongue-tied if any one asked him questions about them. The emotion of the music, the idea, the feeling there, that was what moved him; and his own personal feelings, apart from some form of music which might translate them into a region where he could recognise them with interest, came to mean less and less to him, until he seemed hardly to have any personal feelings at all. It was natural to him to be kind, people liked him and often imagined that he responded to their liking; but, at many periods of his life, accused him of gross unkindness, or even treachery, and he had not been conscious of the affection or of its betrayal.