At last Fanny’s eyes could open, could meet the glow of her friend’s.
“I am glad we ran into each other.... I am glad to see you.”
Clara was pale.—She is very understanding.... No ... not to-night shall I be better than you, strange girl crowned in your defeat. I know what you have done. I am glad to be willing to be weak beside you.
Once again Clara smiled. “Here’s a good one. Music ... you need music and dancing.”
—I live in music and dance....
“O I am so happy! I have missed you, Fanny. I did not know until there you were gone.... I did not know....” She stopped. Fanny’s eyes were turned inward.—Don’t, don’t! they said.—The space between us is what I breathe. There was silence.
Fanny was weak. She had walked level through the dark. Now for some time she felt that she was mounting. Felt this as one would who tramped in blackness by the strain upon herself. She could not touch the essence of her thoughts, gazing at Clara. They both had left a common world which they had never shared, years since. What in the sheer uncommonness of their separate careers was it they felt they shared? It was very strange to Fanny. They had no mutual subject. They sat across the table from each other, mostly in silence. What there had been to speak of ... Christopher Johns, the Office ... was dead in them both, was no subject. Yet now they shared a silence, they shared a pregnancy.—I am at ease, here, weary, full of food.... I am going to listen to music. Mounting, I am at rest!
They sat in the first row of the Balcony. Fanny knew these two young women ... one not so young!... sharp in the motley welter of the crowd. They were swathed together in one sharpness by the anarchic auras of the other men and women. Fanny saw herself: small, pallid, worn in her black skirt and her dun waist, close to this girl who had sold her defeat for the clear rose-colored smartness of her suit, for the diamond pin under her lovely throat, for the sleek health of her hair. But her eyes, she felt her eyes greater than ever, wandering in the hunger of her face ... the eyes of Clara were great and were her own.
The music was far away.... “This is a tale of far away, a world I have left and forgotten.” The curtain rose. The actors were clad in costumes of 1840. White Pierrot danced through the glitter of ladies in prim bonnets, gleaming bared breasts, hooped skirts. Rhymed words, words of love and fidelity and perfection chimed with the pelt of taffetas and brocade, of powdered hands flirting fans: and white Pierrot with eyes lost in the paint of a gay world, seeking love and perfection.
—People do not dream this way. I was not alive then. This is a costume comedy with pretty airs. Romantic ... means false, in time and in place. Fanny struggled now against a world falsely remembered.—This is not true, not yours. Pierrot was in love with a fine lady who tinkled at a clavichord ... gowned in sheer black with her white shoulders bare. Her flirting shoulders and her painted lips took his round love: his deep was lost in her shallow: Pierrot was lost. He left her broken: and another man with words of love sharp like hooks to catch her flesh caught in her shoulders (they had not turned for Pierrot), turned her round, won her.