And after a moment, though his face did not change, he gave a sharp sigh, somehow the last thing that one had expected from him.
All at once as she stared at him she had a feeling of unreality. Why were they three standing here? A whim, transformed into a command by a vision of a Saharan coffee house, had materialized this abjectly clothed young human exotic in the midst of the blue-and-white Delia Robbias! But she had a feeling that she had stood here before with him, or else had dreamed of this, perhaps, in one of those psychopathological moments that have a prophetic quality. This sensation of recurrence—or else, this impression of the unavoidable—gave her a twinge of awe. Was everything, even a baggy young teacher of Arabic, foreordained? "Am I," she thought, with a sort of comic despair, "doomed by fate, as well as by my own foolishness, to learn a language like the snarling of camels? Or is it that his old Allah has picked me out to tide him along for a while?" She wanted to laugh aloud, at the restlessness, superstition, weakness, and folly that had composed her life, and had now produced this egregious interview. And in the midst of this emotion she was touched by his statuesque face, with its glimmering suggestion of gentility cast down, of pride lost in a dread that she might not find him worth her charity.
"I shall expect you on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at eleven o'clock."
He bowed in silence. She felt his relief that was mingled with a sense of abasement; and she wondered what he had been, that he should suffer from the prospect of turning an honest penny.
CHAPTER XX
She received a note from Brantome, informing her that if she went to a certain orchestral concert she would hear a piece that David Verne had written at the height of his promise.
To Lilla it was a new voice in the world of music, ultra-modern, yet incorrigibly melodic, giving utterance to immemorial emotions with great nobility. Those passages of almost intolerable aspiration were underlaid with dissonant harmonies, as if hell itself had poured all its allurements into tone, to engulf the theme that was struggling to soar upward. It became a terrific combat, in which beauty was to be recognized in sublimated form, striving to end its likeness to another beauty, seductive in a different, monstrous way, yet all too similar. It was a battle translated into sound, so enlarged and enriched by the imagination of the composer that a universe, instead of one soul, seemed to be involved in it.
Suddenly in the midst of a piercing blare of brass there was a moment of chaos; then the theme, as if soaring free, lost itself in extraordinary altitudes, borne up by a whirl of violin notes. A crash of cymbals ended everything.
When she roused herself at last, Lilla perceived that the concert hall was empty except for the ushers who were turning up the seats.