The audience preserved a respectful silence, bestowing a minute attention on the hang of the player's skirt, the fit of her bodice, the crimped waves of her light brown hair, her over-plump hands, and the bulging patent-leather shoes, which she pressed nervously up and down on the pedals.
Something seemed to break and clear away in Jean-Pierre's head, like fumes drifting away from a shattered retort. So this was a school-girl, this solid, unformed lump of human flesh, neither child nor woman, who had lost a child's poetry and had not yet come to woman's seductiveness. He looked coolly at the girl (his mother whispered her name, the younger sister of a lycée friend of his), dissecting her with his eyes, immeasurably relieved. Was it for an amorphous creature like this, too old to kiss on the cheek, too young to kiss on the mouth, that he had suffered? Why, it was nothing; a mere morbid whim of his ignorant boyhood. How right Maman had been in making Papa send him away from it! He had grown to be a man without realizing it, a man of the world, in no danger of losing his head over chits.
The Prelude was finished. The player got to her feet, and bowed self-consciously to the muted thuddings of gloved palms on gloved palms which greeted the cessation of her activities. She got herself off the stage, walking heavily in her too-tight slippers. Jean-Pierre, who sat at one side could see a little behind the scenes and observed that as soon as she thought she was out of sight of the audience, she gave way to childish relief that the ordeal was over, and skipped forward, running. He suppressed a supercilious smile of æsthetic scorn. Her body, as large and heavy as a woman's, no longer expressed the impulses of the child she still was. She skipped clumsily, with an inelastic energy of gesture like a cow capering in a spring-time pasture. Jean-Pierre felt the keenest pleasure in his ruthless perception of her lack of grace. This was emancipation!
"She plays very nicely," murmured his mother, on the general chance that some member of her family might be sitting within earshot.
"Yes, very agreeably," he concurred.
Neither of them had heard a note of the music.
They continued to sit in decorous silence, looking with vacant faces straight before them, till the next performer appeared. This was Elise Fortier, whom they were both prepared to detest because of her father and mother and brother. They did detest her, everything about her from her thin, dry hair, frizzed out to imitate abundance, to her shifty eyes exactly like her mother's, from her stooping shoulders, to her long bony hands, which clattered out loudly the Schubert Marche Militaire. When she had finished, "Really quite a talent," observed Mme. Garnier taking pains to be audible; and, "Remarkable for her age," agreed Jean-Pierre.
He was relaxing morally, in an inexpressible ease at finding his head clear, his heart at rest. To own yourself, to look at life from behind a stout wall of critical cynicism—it was to be in safety at last! He barely glanced at the next player, a nondescript, precocious child, who murdered a Moment Musical, her short thin legs dangling from the stool. And the next, the one who played the Liebestraum, a tall young lady with the self-admiring graces and manners of an opera singer on the concert platform. He looked at his watch again and wondered how long it would be before the stupid school performance would be over, and he could get away for an apéritif at the Café du Grand Bouleau on the Place d'Armes and an evening with——
He saw that another player was coming forward, a slim tall girl with thick shining dark hair held back by a white ribbon like the others. She stood for an instant to bow to the audience before sitting down at the piano, and he could look up full into her unconscious face, gazing out over his head impersonally with shy, liquid, dark eyes. She was breathing a little rapidly, her young breast rising and falling under the filmy white of her dress. A timid propitiatory smile curved her sensitive mouth and arched her long, finely-drawn eyebrows.
Not a muscle of Jean-Pierre's face changed; every line of his careless, confident attitude froze taut as it was. And underneath this motionless exterior, he felt his heart hotly, joyfully weeping in a passion of thanksgiving, like a frightened lost child who has come into the right way. He lost all sense of connection with his body and yearning, worshipping, clamoring, imperiously calling, humbly beseeching, he gazed out from the bars of his immobile, well-dressed external self at the girl sitting before the piano. Two years, two long years of exile, how could life ever make up to him for those two lost years? How he had starved! His famished eyes fed ravenously on what they saw, the supple, elastic slimness of the young body, the fine, thin ankle and shapely foot, the creamy forearm, the agile, strong, white fingers, so bravely flinging out harmonies beyond the comprehension of the smooth broad brow, inviolate, intact, innocent, ignorant, which bent its full child's curve over the keys.