“My tutor—Mr. Sorell. Ah, you didn’t notice—but you should. He is like the Hermes—only grown older, and with a soul. But there is no Greek sculptor who could have done him justice. It would have wanted a Praxiteles; but with the mind of Euripides!”
The boy’s passionate enthusiasm pleased her. But she could think of nothing less conventional in reply than to ask if Sorell were popular in college.
“Oh, they like him well enough. They know what trouble he takes for them, and there’s nobody dares cheek him. But they don’t understand him. He’s too shy. Wasn’t it good fortune for me that he happens to be my friend?”
And he began to talk at headlong speed, and with considerable eloquence, of Sorell’s virtues and accomplishments. Constance, who had been brought up in a southern country, liked the eloquence. Something in her was already tired of the slangy brevities that do duty in England for conversation. At the same time she thought she understood why Falloden, and Meyrick, and others called the youth a poseur, and angrily wished to snub him. He possessed besides, in-bred, all the foreign aids to the mere voice—gesticulation of hands and head, movements that to the Englishman are unexpected and therefore disagreeable. Also there, undeniably, was the frilled dress-shirt, and the two diamond studs, much larger and more conspicuous than Oxford taste allowed, which added to its criminality. And it was easy to see too that the youth was inordinately proud of his Polish ancestry, and inclined to rate all Englishmen as parvenus and shopkeepers.
“Was it in Paris you first made friends with Mr. Sorell?” Connie asked him.
Radowitz nodded.
“I was nineteen. My uncle had just died. I had nobody. You understand, my father was exiled twenty years ago. We belong to German Poland; though there has always been a branch of the family in Cracow. For more than a hundred years these vile Germans have been crushing and tormenting us. They have taken our land, they have tried to kill our language and our religion. But they can not. Our soul lives. Poland lives. And some day there will be a great war—and then Poland will rise again. From the East and the West and the South they will come—and the body that was hewn asunder will be young and glorious again.” His blue eyes shone. “Some day, I will play you that in music. Chopin is full of it—the death of Poland—and then her soul, her songs, her hopes, her rising again. Ah, but Sorell!—I will explain. I saw him one night at a house of kind people—the master of it was the Directeur of the Ecole des Sciences Politiques—and his wife. She was so beautiful, though she was not young; and gentle, like a child; and so good. I was nothing to them—but I went to some lectures at the school, while I was still at the Conservatoire, and I used to go and play to them sometimes. So when my uncle died, they said, ‘Come and stay with us.’ I had really nobody. My father and mother died years ago. My mother, you understand, was half English; I always spoke English with her. She knew I must be a musician. That was settled when I was a child. Music is my life. But if I took it for a profession, she made me promise to see some other kinds of life first. She often said she would like me to go to Oxford. She had some old engravings of the colleges she used to show me. I am not a pauper, you see,—not at all. My family was once a very great family; and I have some money—not very much, but enough. So then Mr. Sorell and I began to talk. And I had suddenly the feeling—‘If this man will tell me what to do, I will do it.’ And then he found I was thinking of Oxford, and he said, if I came, he would be my friend, and look after me. And so he advised me to go to Marmion, because some of the tutors there were great friends of his. And that is why I went. And I have been there nearly a year.”
“And you like it?” Connie, sitting hunched on the music-stool, her chin on her hand, was thinking of Falloden’s outburst, and her own rebuff in Lathom Woods.
The boy shrugged his shoulders. He looked at Connie with his brilliant eyes, and she seemed to see that he was on the point of confiding in her, of complaining of his treatment, and then proudly checked himself.
“Oh, I like it well enough,” he said carelessly. “I am reading classics. I love Greek. There is a soul in Greek. Latin—and Rome—that is too like the Germans! Now let me play to you—something from Poland.”