Touched and warmed by his youth, the old woman chuckled. “Pour votre marraine?” she asked. (She had sold him flowers before now.)
“No,” he told her. “Not this time. They are for my sister.”
It was Ellen whom he was to see in the Rue Raynouard, Ellen whom he had not seen in years.... Ellen who was famous now, a great musician.
As he moved away, it struck him as luck that he had come by chance on the flower woman. For a musician, an artist, flowers were the thing ... an enormous bunch of flowers. Ellen would appreciate the gesture. She would play up to it. She would, he fancied, even expect it.
In the blue darkness (it was an excellent night, he thought, for an air raid) he turned the corner past the Café des Tourelles and the blind, steel-shuttered magasin. The houses stood forbidding and black. The Rue Raynouard between the magasin and the tobacconist’s shop gaped like the mouth of Avernus. It would be difficult to find the house, turning its deceptive, insignificant face to the street, so lost among its commonplace neighbors. From far away, on the slope that led down toward the Seine, the sound of footsteps, muffled by the damp, came to him across the cobblestones. But the solitary walker turned away and the sound died presently into silence.
A hundred paces from the square he halted before a house to search for the number. In the darkness it remained invisible; it was impossible to find it even by sense of touch. Puzzled, he stood for an instant looking up and down the street, and then through the thick stillness there rose the faint sound of music, distant and fragmentary. Listening, he found presently that the melody took form: the fragments joined into a pattern of sound. It was the Appassionata. Only the crescendos were swept toward him through the damp night air, only the moments when the music rose into a wild abandon. There could be no mistaking it ... the music was Ellen’s, more magnificent than it had ever been.
As he stood there in the thin mist upon the doorstep the sound, coming distantly from inside the house up the long paneled stairs, had upon him an amazing effect. It was a sensation bordering upon clairvoyance; he no longer stood on the dripping cobblestones before a solid door, his feet upon solid earth. It was as if he existed in space alone at a great height; rather as if he had died. There was in the feeling something of terror at the immensity which surrounded him, an emotion which he had known once or twice before when, flying at night, there had been for a time no earth below him, nothing solid in all creation—a time when, if he existed at all, it was as an atom lost in all time and space. It was, he felt dimly, like being dead ... a reverent, humbled feeling.
And yet in a confused fashion all life had suddenly achieved an amazing clarity. He knew himself suddenly, honestly, for what he was—a man who had harmed none, who had achieved nothing, who had asked only to find pleasure in living. And the others—He saw them too with the same terrifying brilliance.... Ellen, who for all her faults was so much more worthy, who had in her the elements of a great nobility; his mother, passionate and bursting with vitality, a little somber and tragic save that she would never recognize tragedy when it came her way; and Lily, who had lived by some plan which she had never revealed, choosing instead to hide it away among the other mysteries of her life; and Jean, whom he scarcely knew until this moment, Jean who was neither French nor American nor even an honest child. He saw Jean’s life too and its queer, inarticulate tragedy. And Old Gramp, who stood outside them all, aloof and cold, uncaught by the web that bound them all together.... Gramp hugging his secret passionately to him. But it was Ellen whom he saw more clearly than all the others, struggling, fighting with a strange unconquerable courage, using the weapons which she found at hand, weapons which were not always fair. Some day she would choose the honest ones and then....
Far away, somewhere in the blanket of darkness the music died away and presently he stood again before the door on the cobblestones, rubbing the sleeve of his blue greatcoat across his face with the gesture of one awaking from a profound sleep. The great bunch of mimosa lay at his feet. It was amazing. He had been for a moment dead, quite outside this world. The street was still again with a blue, dripping silence. Under each lamp there was a pool of blue light that was not light at all, but only another kind of darkness.
He gathered up the damp flowers and knocked loudly. It was too dark to find the bell and he stood there for a long time before the door was opened by Augustine who it seemed had gone to bed in the belief that no one could be out on such a night. She stood in a sort of wrapper ornamented with a gay design of Cupids, holding up her black hair with one hand. He saw with an amazing clarity each tiny detail, even the veins in her big red feet half-muffled in gigantic purple slippers.