"Please!…"
Smiling at his weakness, Christophe made him sit at the piano, and talked to him about music. He asked him many questions, and made him solve several little problems of harmony. Georges did not know much about it, but his musical instinct supplied the gaps of his ignorance; without knowing their names, he found the chords Christophe wanted; and even his mistakes in their awkwardness showed a curiosity of taste and a singularly acute sensibility. He did not accept Christophe's remarks without discussion; and the intelligent questions he asked in his turn bore witness to the sincerity of a mind that would not accept art as a devout formula to be repeated with the lips, but desired to live it for its own sake.—They did not only talk of music. In reference to harmony Georges would summon up pictures, the country, people. It was difficult to hold him in check: it was constantly necessary to bring him back to the middle of the road: and Christophe had not always the heart to do so. It amused him to hear the boy's joyous chatter, so full of wit and life. What a difference there was between his nature and Olivier's! With the one life was a subterranean river that flowed silently; with the other all was above ground: a capricious stream disporting itself in the sun. And yet it was the same lovely, pure water, like their eyes. With a smile, Christophe recognized in Georges certain instinctive antipathies, likings and dislikings, which he well knew, and the naïve intolerance, the generosity of heart which gives itself entirely to whatsoever it loves…. Only Georges loved so many things that he had no time to love any one thing for long.
He came back the next day and the days following. He was filled with a youthful passion for Christophe, and he worked enthusiastically at his lessons….—Then his enthusiasm palled, his visits grew less frequent. He came less and less often. Then he came no more, and disappeared for weeks.
He was light-hearted, forgetful, naïvely selfish, and sincerely affectionate; he had a good heart and a quick intelligence which he expended piecemeal day by day. People forgave him everything because they were so glad to see him; he was happy….
Christophe refused to judge him. He did not complain. He wrote to Jacqueline to thank her for having sent her son to him. Jacqueline replied with a short letter filled with restrained emotion: she expressed a hope that Christophe would be interested in Georges and help him in his life. Through shame and pride she could not bring herself to see him again. And Christophe thought he could not visit her without being invited.—So they stayed apart, seeing each other at a distance at concerts, bound together only by the boy's infrequent visits.
The winter passed. Grazia wrote but seldom. She was still faithful in her friendship for Christophe. But, like a true Italian, she was hardly at all sentimental, attached to reality, and needed to see people if she were, perhaps not to think of them, but certainly to take pleasure in talking to them. Her heart's memory needed to be supported by having her sight's memory refreshed from time to time. Her letters became brief and distant. She was as sure of Christophe as Christophe was of her. But their security gave out more light than warmth.
Christophe did not feel his new disappointments very keenly. His musical activity was enough to fill his life. When he reaches a certain age a vigorous artist lives much more in his art than in his life; his life has become the dream, his art the reality. His creative powers had been reawakened by contact with Paris. There is no stronger stimulant in the world than the sight of that city of work. The most phlegmatic natures are touched by its fever. Christophe, being rested by years of healthy solitude, brought to his work an enormous accumulation of force. Enriched by the new conquests forever being made in the fields of musical technique by the intrepid curiosity of the French, he hurled himself in his turn along the road to discovery: being more violent and barbarous than they, he went farther. But nothing in his new audacities was left to the hazardous mercies of his instinct. Christophe had begun to feel the need of clarity; all his life his genius had obeyed the rhythm of alternate currents: it was its law to pass from one pole to the other, and to fill everything between them. Having greedily surrendered in his last period to "the eyes of chaos shining through the veil of order," even to rending the veil so as to see them more clearly, he was now striving to tear himself away from their fascination, and once more to throw over the face of the sphinx the magic net of the master mind. The imperial inspiration of Rome had passed over him. Like the Parisian art of that time, by the spirit of which he was infected, he was aspiring to order. But not—like the reactionaries who spent what was left of their energies in protecting their slumber—to order in Varsovia; the good people who are always going back to Brahms—the Brahmses of all the arts, the thematics, the insipid neo-classics, in search of solace! Might one not say that they are enfeebled with passion! You are soon done for, my friends…. No, it is not of your order that I speak. Mine has no kinship with yours. Mine is the order in harmony of the free passions and the free will…. Christophe was studying how in his art to maintain the just balance between the forces of life. These new chords, the new musical daimons that he had summoned from the abyss of sounds, were used to build clear symphonies, vast, sunlit buildings, like the Italian cupola'd basilicas.
These plays and battles of the mind occupied him all winter. And the winter passed quickly, although, in the evening, as he ended his day's work and looked behind him at the tale of days, he could not have told whether it had been long or short, or whether he was still young or very old.
Then a new ray of human sunshine pierced the veil of his dreams, and once more brought in the springtime. Christophe received a letter from Grazia, telling him that she was coming to Paris with her two children. For a long time she had planned to do so. Her cousin Colette had often invited her. Her dread of the effort necessary to interrupt her habits and to tear herself away from her careless tranquillity and the home she loved in order to plunge into the Parisian whirligig that she knew so well, had made her postpone the journey from year to year. This spring she was filled with melancholy, perhaps with a secret disappointment—(how many unspoken romances there are in the heart of a woman, unknown to others, often unconfessed to herself!)—and she longed to go right away from Rome. A threatened epidemic gave her an excuse for hurrying on her children's departure. She followed her letter to Christophe in a very few days.
Christophe hastened to her as soon as he heard she was at Colette's. He found her still absorbed and distant. He was hurt, but did not show it. By now he was almost rid of his egoism, and that gave him the insight of affection. He saw that she had some grief which she wished to conceal, and he suppressed his longing to know its nature. Only he strove to keep her amused by giving her a gay account of his misadventures and sharing with her his work and his plans, and he wrapped her round with his affection. Her mournful heart rested in the heart of her friend, and he spoke to her always of things other than that which was in both their minds. And gradually he saw the shadow of melancholy fade from her eyes, and their expression became nearly, and ever more nearly, intimate. So much so, that one day, as he was talking to her, he stopped suddenly, and in silence looked at her.