“I speak to you thus, Madame, not because I think little of your sex, but because I grudge them to the monster who will not spare us even one!”
Hadria worked with sufficient energy to please even Jouffroy. Her heart was in it, and her progress rapid. Everything was organized, in her life, for the one object. At the School of Music, she was in an atmosphere of work, everyone being bent on the same goal, each detail arranged to further the students in their efforts. It was like walking on a pavement after struggling uphill on loose sand; like breathing sea-breezes after inhaling a polluted atmosphere.
In old days, Hadria used to be haunted by a singular recurrent nightmare: that she was toiling up a steep mountain made of hard slippery rock, the summit always receding as she advanced. Behind her was a vast precipice down which she must fall if she lost her footing; and always, she saw hands without bodies attached to them placing stones in the path, so that they rolled down and had to be evaded at the peril of her life. And each time, after one set of stones was evaded, and she thought there would be a time of respite, another batch was set rolling, amid thin, scarcely audible laughter, which came on the storm-wind that blew precipice-wards across the mountain; and invariably she awoke just as a final avalanche of cruel stones had sent her reeling over the hideous verge.
One is disposed to make light of the sufferings gone through in a dream, though it would trouble most of us to explain why, since the agony of mind is often as extreme as possibly could be endured in actual life. From the day of her arrival in Paris, Hadria was never again tormented with this nightmare.
Composition went on rapidly now. Soon there was a little pile of new work for M. Jouffroy’s inspection. He was delighted, criticizing severely, but always encouraging to fresh efforts. As for the publishing, that was a different matter. In spite of M. Jouffroy’s recommendation, publishers could not venture on anything of a character so unpopular. The music had merit, but it was eccentric. M. Jouffroy was angry. He declared that he would play something of Madame’s at the next Châtelet concert. There would be opposition, but he would carry his point. And he did. But the audience received it very coldly. Although Hadria had expected such a reception, she felt a chill run through her, and a sinking of the heart. It was like a cold word that rebuffs an offer of sympathy, or an appeal for it. It sent her back into depths of loneliness, and reminded her how cut off she was from the great majority of her fellows, after all. And then Guy de Maupassant’s dreadful “Solitude” came to her memory. There is no way (the hero of the sketch asserts) by which a man can break the eternal loneliness to which he is foredoomed. He cannot convey to others his real impressions or emotion, try as he may. By a series of assertions, hard to deny, the hero arrives at a terrible conclusion amounting to this: Art, affection, are in vain; we know not what we say, nor whom we love.
Jouffroy came out of the theatre, snorting and ruffled.
“But they are imbeciles, all!”
Hadria thought that perhaps she was the “imbecile”; it was a possibility to be counted with, but she dared not say so to the irate Jouffroy.
He was particularly angry, because the audience had confirmed his own fear that only very slowly would the quality of the music be recognized by even the more cultivated public. It had invaded fresh territory, he said, added to the range of expression, and was meanwhile a new language to casual listeners. It was rebel music, offensive to the orthodox. Hubert had always said that “it was out of the question,” and he appeared to have been right.
“Bah, ce ne sont que des moutons!” exclaimed Jouffroy. If the work had been poorer, less original, there would not have been this trouble. Was there not some other method by which Madame could earn what was necessary, en attendent?