Torialli moved away. When he spoke again to Jean it was in a colder tone; his enthusiasm seemed to have received a sudden check. At the back of his sharp little eyes there was a jealous, irritated look.
“I ask nothing more but that you should carry out my wishes for Mademoiselle,” he said. “It does not matter who her accompanist is if he sufficiently grasps that fact. Mademoiselle, bring out the flexibility of your voice. You do not want to throw it at people like a stone, but to caress them with it as if it were velvet. Take the airs in the last act for your next lesson. See what you can make of them. Bon jour, Mademoiselle.”
Jean might have felt a little crestfallen at the sudden change in Torialli’s manner, if his eyes had not happened to meet Madame’s. She gave him her hand as if he were an old friend.
“You have charmed my husband, Monsieur,” she said. “And I think you have surprised him. But you did not surprise me! No! that I must claim for myself. I knew when I looked at you that you were about to give us something original and rare! I need not say, then, that you have fully satisfied my expectations!”
Jean bowed politely and with shining eyes—he did not remember until afterwards that Madame Torialli had entirely overlooked her husband’s request that she should arrange with Jean to play for them.
CHAPTER XX
THE big hotel in the Boulevard Malesherbes was the outcome of Madame Torialli’s spirit of compromise. To most people compromise means giving up something in order to obtain its equivalent; to Madame Torialli it meant something quite different. Compromise for her was the appearance of sacrifice with the certainty of compensation. It was necessary for Madame Torialli that she should, for the sake of her husband’s business interests, appeal to the tastes of his pupils and admirers; and as their tastes in general ran in the direction of the appearance of expense lavishly maintained without subtlety or distinction, Madame Torialli ministered to their faith by a modern massive house with a great deal of glass, a portier at the first door, two footmen at the second, a butler of the smartest London type, and large reception rooms in which the florid held an unambiguous sway. Everywhere she had placed busts and portraits, commendations and presentations, of Signor Torialli. “If one must accept vulgarity, it shall at least pay for itself,” said Madame Torialli to her own friends. “If they wish to have something always in front of their eyes in the Boulevard Malesherbes, it shall have the advantage of advertising my husband. I have just hung this last bronze laurel wreath from Germany on a gold mirror. You can imagine how it added to my pleasure to hear a pupil of my husband say it moved her to tears. Tears like that are an extravagance for her and an economy for us. She pays very well for her lessons. Her voice? My friend, you should not ask me for professional secrets—shall we say that it is of gold?”
But these reception-rooms were only the shell of Madame Torialli’s house. Far away out of the sound of the theatre on the other side of her spacious mansion Madame Torialli made herself a home. Here she had three drawing-rooms in particular which were known all over Paris, and into which none of her husband’s most famous pupils had ever penetrated. Madame Torialli called them her “dull little rooms.” Dull they may have been for eyes which rejoiced in the gorgeous tapestries and expensive marbles that looked even more than their price, and reposed in heavy splendour blocking the salle de réception downstairs; but to those who climbed the wide marble staircase with its banisters of old fifteenth-century iron work, passing through noiseless corridors over soft deep Indian carpets, which sank under the feet like cushions, Madame Torialli’s “dull little rooms” appeared the most exquisite of surprises. If below she had introduced the observer to the difficulties of wealth, here he saw before him the finished, distinctive ease which taste alone can draw from the raw material of money. If she had attacked the senses with an abundance of good things—for even downstairs many of the things were good—here she gave to the expert the sharp asceticism of luxury.
The first of her rooms was called the bronze room. All the walls were painted a pale Nile green, a colour which had the clarity of air and something of the restfulness of sea water. The hangings were of the same shade, and at the end of the room against a heavy portière on a bronze pedestal was one of the finest existing copies of Giovanni da Bologna’s Mercury. The chairs were beautifully carved in fantastic shapes. On a little table by the window stood a bronze bowl full of golden daffodils; the mantelpiece held three or four almost priceless bronzes about four to six inches in height. On the wall that caught most light was a copy by a great artist of the Gioconda. Her soft, slow, secretive smile slipped out into the room like some mysterious and sinister sunshine. The classic serenity of the room made Jean feel as if he had entered a shrine, and something in the delicate coldness of its beauty warned him at the same time that there would be no return for his worship.
The second room was called the silver room. There was the same spare priceless simplicity in its arrangement, but the bronzes were replaced by antique silver cups and vases, and the palest shade of silver grey had been introduced into the hangings. Here there were two pictures—one of Whistler’s of a fog on the Thames, and one by a modern French artist of a nude girl sitting on a table.