The Revue was very like all Revues; it was the latest thing; so that there wasn’t a joke that was born as late as yesterday or would be remembered beyond to-morrow. Still it was very clever, very neat, and topical and gay, and the music was that fine malleable French art, which is as clear cut as a cameo and as hard as a problem in algebra.
Jean did not pay any attention to it because, of course, he knew it wasn’t real; and then he suddenly saw Margot. He couldn’t think what she was doing on a pretence stage and in a place that looked like a hall and was as hollow as a bad nut; it puzzled and annoyed him to see her there, but he did not doubt Margot’s reality.
You could, if you were as clever and as cruel as sin, make up anything on earth, but you couldn’t invent Margot.
“C’est la petite Margot,” he muttered; then she sang.
All the music he had ever thought of, all the music he had ever heard, sang with her; and sang to set Jean free.
He did not realize at first what was happening to him. Her voice drowned the bitterness of his heart, there was something in it deeper than bitterness.
The hours he had starved in Paris drove their old meaning into his brain; he saw the Parc Monceau in the cold spring dusk, the smell of the coffee-stalls at dawn came back to him, and the flash of the lights outside the theatre in the rain.
All these were in Margot’s voice, for out of Jean’s sufferings she had made her little songs; and as he listened he felt as if a band of iron had been broken, a band that was pressing his life out.
He was no longer possessed by phantoms. He saw instead the little figure on the stage. She stood close to the footlights; a tiny frown came between her brows; she always looked like that when she was very anxious to please Jean.
The song was over; she had only been singing one of the clever light songs like all the others, but she had put into it the whole quality of her voice; and she had pleased Paris. She stood there while the hall rang with applause and flowers fell right and left upon her.