Odette was at home one evening, and alone. Stretched out upon a lounge, she was gazing at the photographs of Jean on little tables or within her reach upon the walls, hypnotizing herself with the sight of them, kissing them as she always did.
Amelia came in saying that the next apartment was "crammed full."
"Madame, if there aren't twenty men six feet high in that room, my own poor husband isn't a prisoner with the Boches!"
In fact there was a great commotion on the other side of the partition. Furniture and chairs were being moved about, and as all sounds penetrated through the cracks of the door, the syllables of an unfamiliar language could be heard, perhaps Rumanian or Russian. The neighbor was a foreigner.
Suddenly there was silence. Amelia had withdrawn. It was an imposed, perhaps a concerted, silence. "It is a musical recital," said Odette to herself. In fact she almost immediately recognized the sprightly touch of the pianist, mellow, languishing, melting into the keyboard as into a tender flesh, by turns nervous, light, cruel as a hammer, heavy as a pile-driver, seeming to crush the instrument, then suddenly soft, fluttering on the keys like the wing of a dying bird. Though the woman often played for herself alone, this was not the first time that many people had gathered around her to hear her music.
A chorus of men's voices burst forth. It was strange, weird, enough to make one catch one's breath. Odette listened. That sensitiveness to music which often reached depths in her unknown to herself, was suddenly wrought up to its utmost pitch. She did not know the chorus, and sought in vain for an author to whom to ascribe it. It might be a popular song, perhaps very ancient, to judge by its artless simplicity, its pure rhythm, and its wild, sweet accent. At times a soprano voice uprose in a solo, and the chorus, a third below, responded softly in whisperings that grew nearer and nearer, quickly spreading like oil upon the sea, or as if transmitted from man to man over immense plains and endlessly flowing rivers. Suddenly two or three raucous or strident cries gathered up all the voices to a sharp point directed toward the heavens. Then all sound ceased, and one felt as if falling from a superb altitude into the depths of an abyss.
Then the fingers of the enchantress executed a ballad of Balakireff, or Dvorak's hymn, "On the Death of a Hero." And then, after a pause, another chorus broke forth.
There was in it all a melancholy which no words could so much as suggest, in which amid the uniformly plaintive murmur one discerned such lifelike wailings that one could have stretched out the hands to succor these vague, unrecognized, and multiplied sufferings. They swelled, spread abroad, took on so mighty an extension that in spite of oneself one saw the surface of the suffering world, heard the feeble and resigned voice of man, of man always the sport of fate, always in leading-strings, always sacrificed like cattle to gods whose secret he could not fathom. It was the lament of the ancient earth of humanity, timid, uncouth, and despairing, issuing from bruised hearts, from torn flesh, from souls robbed of their innocent ideals, a disturbing lament issuing from the borders of marshes, from forests, from glacial plains, from desert steppes, from nameless villages, prisons, palaces, battlefields, tombs, and stoically, pathetically, and yet childishly addressed to—no one!
Odette had often been on the verge of sentiments corresponding to this music, primitive, barbarous, perhaps divine, but when music comes to be mingled with our sentiments it reveals them to themselves and amplifies them without measure. Odette saw what she had never dared to see; for the first time she was transported outside of herself, or at least she felt the conviction that she was. It produced in her such an overturning of her points of view as almost to make her dizzy. She suddenly discovered how completely she had considered everything with reference to herself, even in her seemingly most generous moments. At this instant she thought of herself in relation to the incalculable number of persons who were not she. It was not that the moans of humanity were now reaching her for the first time, but it was the first time that the sobs of others came to her ears with a tone of majestic sadness which forced her to grovel upon the earth, saying: "I no longer count; I am only the servant of grief."
It was a painful sentiment if there is one, and yet, by a curious contradiction, a sentiment in the same degree joyful. A boundless commiseration caused her heart to throb and tears to come to her eyes, and yet this painful sympathy, far from being cruel or depressing, wrought in her soul an unsuspected outflowering, like an outburst of inconceivable elation in which was mingled bitterness and pity.