“Very well, and, what is so odd, extraordinarily happy,—happy in some steadily-shining way. Deep, broad, bright happiness, like sunlight. Now, how do you account for that? Away from Frank,—she doesn’t even write to him or hear from him,—continuing to do all that she found so intolerable under hugely aggravated conditions,—he not there,—and yet awfully happy. Not that father has changed to her at all,—he is very silent, very sad, very—well, sometimes very cross. And she feels his sadness, too,—feels it as if it were her own——“
“Ah, you have it,” said Karl; “that is why she is happy. It is what I have always told you—the fact of sympathy, whether it is with joy or pain, is what enriches and perfects; the fact of sympathy is what makes her happy. You are as happy—with the broad sunshine of happiness, even though a bitter wind whistles—when Isolde sinks lifeless by the body of Tristran as when Siegfried hears the singing of the bird.”
He paused a moment looking at the fire, then turned to Martin.
“Ah, my dear lad,” he said, “pray that you drink to the dregs any cup of sorrow or of joy that may be given you. Never shrink from pain—you will not become your best self without it. But by it and through it, and in no selfish or egoistic manner, you will fulfil yourself.”
He rose from his chair and turned on switch after switch of electric light.
“It is like this,” he said, feeling in his sudden desire for light some instinctive connection with what he was saying. “Open the doors, open the windows of your soul,—let the sun in and the wind. And this is a music-lesson,” he added, laughing. “Well I have given a good many in my life, and should be pleased to know I never gave a worse one. Now, what have you done since I saw you last?”
Martin walked quickly over to the piano with a laugh.
“Listen,” he said.
He played a few bars of very intricate phrase after the manner of the opening of a fugue. Then in the bass half the phrase was repeated, but it finished with something perfectly different, a third and a fourth or a fifth joined in, and before the “whole kennel was a-yelp” the original subject had passed through rapid gradations until it had become something totally different to what it began with, though still an incessant jabber of cognate phrases, never quite coherent, were somehow strung together and worked against each other by a miracle of ingenuity. Then the original subject was repeated with emphatic insistence, as if to call renewed attention to itself, but it was answered this time by a phrase that had nothing whatever to do with it; a third short melody totally different from anything that had gone before or was to come after ran its brief and ridiculous course, and then a perfect hodge-podge of reminiscences of all that had previously occurred, handled with extraordinary dexterity, made the brain positively reel and swim. Finally a huge bravura passage, as much decked out with ribands and lace as a fashionable woman at a party, brought this insane composition, which taxed even Martin’s fingers, to a totally unexpected close.
Karl Rusoff had listened at first with sheer uncomprehending bewilderment, unable, since indeed there was neither head nor tail nor body to it, to make anything whatever out of it, and for a moment he wondered if Martin was merely playing the fool. But as he looked at his face bent over the piano, and saw even his fingers nearly in difficulties, a sudden light struck him, and he began to smile. And before the end was reached he sat shaking in his chair with hopeless laughter.