Half the house was arranged entirely to suit the pupils.
Beyond the entrance hall was a large waiting-room leading into a small theatre. The pupil and his accompagnateur appeared upon a large platform, while Torialli sat in one of the stalls, listening and shouting his directions. Occasionally, if the pupil was one of great importance, a few guests would be allowed to be present, and very often Madame herself would come in, sometimes to encourage a nervous pupil, and occasionally to appease an angry one.
The day of Jean’s first attempt the big salle d’attente was even fuller than usual; it reminded Jean of nothing so much as the consulting room of some fashionable doctor. There was the same air of strained suspense, and of superficial efforts to appear at ease.
It was one of Madame Torialli’s favourite sayings that Torialli’s pupils were like a “family party.” If she meant to express a cynical disregard for the amenities of domesticity it struck Jean that her comparison would have been perfect. All the members of Torialli’s little family were, beneath a certain outward courtesy and ease, intensely antagonistic to each other. In the musical world there are very few plums, and there are a great many appetites. There were two sides to Torialli’s world as well. The professionals who paid with their earnings and worked with a fierce seriousness for bare existence, and the rich amateurs who gave lightly of their superabundance both of money and leisure. It is possible that Torialli, if left to himself, would have put the artists first; but he was not left to himself. He was a rich man and a great success, and he had won these benefits through his wife, who had taught him to give the first place to the amateurs, and to keep his professional pupils merely as an ornamental addition to his profitable life-work.
Even in the salle d’attente there was a distinct cleavage between the two branches—a little group of beautifully dressed women and well-groomed men sat apart by itself, in a kind of upper Paradise, near the door which led to the theatre, and where Jean leaned by an open window sat the professionals. They were well dressed, too, but their whole air was different; there was a restlessness in their eyes and the definite marks of age and work written in the lines of their faces. Nobody from either group took the least notice of Jean.
He was amused to see that among the group of amateurs sat, enthroned in the foremost place, the handsome figure of Pauline Vanderpool, the lady whom Romain D’Ucelles had offered to Jean as a commendable source of income.
She certainly upheld her reputation, for her furs alone cost more than those of all the other women in the room, and she wore a pair of very large and fabulously expensive diamond earrings.
“Of course, Clothilde Duffray hadn’t the least voice when she came here,” a girl with a magnificent mass of red hair exclaimed. “Ma foi! One would have had to lay one’s ears to the ground to catch a note! And now, I assure you, she drowns an orchestra. What she paid I can’t tell you, but she told me herself that she suffered torments. Torialli literally stood over her like a wild beast. I’m not sure he didn’t bite her. He raved at her, I know, like a madman. I’ve seen her come out purple with tears—but it was worth it; she’s making two hundred francs a night now, without turning a hair.”
“What I can’t understand is,” Pauline’s flat, uncertain French struck across from the other side of the room, “how Torialli ever came to let Clara sing at the Salle Fémina. She hasn’t any voice, she hasn’t any style, and she must have done him about just as much credit as a tin trumpet; it doesn’t seem to me to be any catch to be Torialli’s pupil, if he’s going to let women like that loose on one’s ears.”
The men laughed.