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Front matter

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Part I Chapter I

T was the evening of Madame Okraska’s concert at the old St. James’s Hall. London was still the place of the muffled roar and the’endearing ugliness. Horse-*buses plied soberly in an unwidened Piccadilly. The private motor was a curiosity. Berlin had not been emulated in an altered Mall nor New York in the facades of giant hotels. The Saturday and Monday pops were still an institution; and the bell of the muffin-man, in such a wintry season, passed frequently along the foggy streets and squares. Already the epoch seems remote.

Madame Okraska was pausing on her way from St. Petersburg to New York and this was the only concert she was to give in London that winter. For many hours the enthusiasts who had come to secure unreserved seats had been sitting on the stone stairs that led to the balcony or gallery, or on the still narrower, darker and colder flight that led to the orchestra from Piccadilly Place. From the adjacent hall they could hear the strains of the Moore & Burgess Minstrels, blatant and innocuously vulgar; and the determined mirth, anatomized by distance, sounded a little melancholy. ‘To those of an imaginative turn of mind it might have seemed that they waited in a tunnel at one far end of which could be perceived the tiny memory of tea at an Aerated Bread shop and at the other the vision of the delights to which they would emerge. For there was no one in the world like Madame Okraska, and to see and hear her was worth cold and weariness and hunger. Not only was she the most famous of living pianists but one of the most beautiful of women; and upon this restoring fact many of the most weary stayed themselves, returning again and again to gaze at the pictured face that adorned the outer cover of the programme.

Illuminated by chill gas-jets, armed with books and sandwiches, the serried and devoted ranks were composed of typical concert-goers, of types, In some cases, becoming as extinct as the muffin-man; young art-students from the suburbs, dressed in Liberty serges and velveteens, and reading ninepenny editions of Browning and Rossetti though a few, already, were reading Yeats; middle-aged spinsters from Bayswater or South Kensington, who took their weekly concert as they took their daily bath; many earnest young men, soft-hatted and long-haired, studying scores; the usual contingent of the fashionable and economical lady; and the pale-faced business man, bringing an air of duty to the pursuit of pleasure.

Some time before the doors opened a growing urgency began to make itself felt. People got up from their insecurely balanced camp-stools or rose stiffly from the stone steps to turn and stand shoulder to shoulder, subtly transformed from comrades in discomfort to combatants for a hazardous reward. The field for personal endeavour was small; the stairs were narrow and their occupants packed like sardines; yet everybody hoped to get a better seat than their positions entitled them to hope for. Hope and fear increased in intensity with the distance from the doors, those mute, mystic doors behind which had not yet been heard a chink or a shuffle and against which leaned, now balefully visible, the earliest comers of all, jaded, pallid, but insufferably assured. The summons came at length in the sound of drawn bolts and chains and a peremptory official voice, blood-tingling as a trumpet-call; and the crowd, shoulder to shoulder and foot to foot, with rigid lips and eyes uplifted, began to mount like one man. Step by step they went, steady and wary, each pressing upon those who went before and presenting a resistant back to those who followed after. The close, emulous contacts bred stealthy strifes and hatreds. A small lady, with short grey hair and thin red face and the conscienceless, smiling eye of a hypnotized creature, drove her way along the wall and mounted with the agility of a lizard to a place several steps above. Others were infected by the successful outlawry and there were some moments of swaying and striving before the crowd adjusted itself to its self-protective solidity. merged upon the broader stairs they ascended panting and scurrying, in a wild stampede, to the sudden quiet and chill and emptiness of the familiar hall, with its high-ranged plaster cupids, whose cheeks and breasts and thighs were thrown comically into relief by a thick coating of dust. Here a permanent fog seemed to hang under the roof; only a few lights twinkled frugally; and the querulous voice of the programme-seller punctuated the monotonous torrent of feet. Row upon row, the seats were filled as if by tumultuous waters entering appointed channels, programmes rustled, sandwiches were drawn from clammy packets, and the thin-faced lady, iniquitously ensconced in the middle of the front row in the gallery, had taken out a strip of knitting and was blandly ready for the evening.

“I always come up here,” said one of the ladies from Kensington to a friend. ‘One hears her pianissimo more perfectly than anywhere else. What a magnificent programme! [ shall be glad to hear her give the Schumann Fantaisie in C Major again.”

“J think I look forward more to the Bach Fantaisie than to anything,” said her companion.

She exposed herself to a pained protest: “Oh surely not; not Bach; I do not come for my Bach to Okraska. She belongs too definitely to the romantics to grasp Bach. Beethoven, if you will; she may give us the Appassionata superbly; but not Bach; she lacks self-effacement.”

“ Liszt said that no one played Bach as she did.”

Authority did not serve her. “ Liszt may have said it; Brahms would not have; ” was the rejoinder.

Down in the orchestra chairs the audience was roughly to be divided into the technical and the personal devotees; those who chose seats from which they could dwell upon Madame Okraska’s full face over the shining surfaces of the piano or upon her profile from the side; and those who, from behind her back, were dedicated to the study of her magical hands.

“T do hope,” said a girl in the centre of the front row of chairs, a place of dizzy joy, for one might almost touch the goddess as she sat at the piano, “I do hope she’s not getting fat. Someone said they heard she was. I never want to see her again if she gets fat. It would be too awful.”

The girl with her conjectured sadly that Madame Okraska must be well over forty.

“T beg your pardon,” a massive lady dressed in an embroidered sack-like garment, and wearing many strings of iridescent shells around her throat, leaned forward from behind to say: “She is forty-six; I happen to know; a friend of mine has met ‘Madame Okraska’s secretary. Forty-six; but she keeps her beauty wonderfully; her figure is quite beautiful.”

An element of personal excitement was evident in the people who sat in these nearest chairs; it constituted a bond, though by no means a friendly one. Emulation, the irrepressible desire to impart knowledge, broke down normal barriers. ‘The massive lady was slightly flushed and her manner almost menacing. Her information was received with a vague, half resentful murmur.

“She looks younger,” she continued, while her listeners gave her an unwilling yet alert attention. “It is extraordinary how she retains her youth. But it tells, it tells, the tragic life; one sees it in her eyes and lips.”

The first girl now put forward with resolution her pawn of knowledge.

“Tt has been tragic, hasn’t it. The dreadful man she was married to by her relations when she was hardly more than a child, and the death of her second husband. He was the Baron von Marwitz; her real name is von Marwitz; Okraska is her maiden name. He was drowned in saving her life, you know.”

“The Baron von Marwitz was drowned no one knows how; he was found drowned; she found his body. She went into a convent after his death.”

“A convent? I was reading a life of her in a magazine the other day and nothing was said about a convent.”

The massive lady smiled tolerantly: “ Nothing would be.

TANTE ‘Mt

She has a horror of publicity. Yes, she is a mystic as well as an artist; she only resigned the religious life because of what she felt to be her duty to her adopted daughter. One sees the mystical side in her face and hears it in her music.”

Madame Okraska was one of those about whose footsteps legends rise, and legend could add little to the romantic facts of her life ;—— the poverty of her youth; her début as a child prodigy at Warsaw and the sudden fame that had followed it; the coronets that had been laid at her feet; her private tragedies, cosmopolitan friendships, her scholarship, caprices and generosities. She had been the Egeria, smiling in mystery, of half a dozen famous men. And it was as satisfactory to the devotee to hear that she always wore white and drank coffee for her breakfast, as that Rubinstein and Liszt had blessed her and Leschetitsky said that she had nothing to learn. Her very origin belonged to the realm of romantic fiction. Her father, a Polish musicmaster in New Orleans, had run away with his pupil, a beautiful Spanish girl of a good Creole family. Their child had been born in Cracow while the Austrians were bombarding it in 1848.

The lights were now all up and the stalls filling. Ladies and gentlemen from the suburbs, over early, were the first comers; eager schoolgirls marshalled by governesses; scrupulous students with music under their arms, and, finally, the rustling, shining, chattering crowd of fashionable London.

The massive lady had by now her little audience, cowed, if still slightly sulky, well in hand. She pointed out each notability to them, and indirectly, to all her neighbours. The Duchess of Bannister and Lady Champney, the famous beauty; the Prime Minister, whom the girls could have recognized for themselves, and Sir Alliston Compton, the poet. Had they read his sonnet to Madame Okraska, last year, in the “ Fortnightly ”? They had not. “I wonder who that odd looking girl is with him and the old lady?” one of them ventured.

“A little grand-daughter, a little niece,’ said the massive lady, who did not know. “Poor Sir Alliston’s wife is in a lunatic asylum; is n’t it a melancholy head? ”

But now one of her listeners, a lady also in the front row, leaned forward to say hurriedly and deprecatingly, her face suffused with shyness: “ That nice young girl is Madame Okraska’s adopted daughter. The old lady is Mrs. Forrester, Madame Okraska’s great friend; my sister-in-law was for many years a governess in her family, and that is how I come to know.”

All those who had heard her turned their eyes upon the young girl, who, in an old-fashioned white cloak, with a collar of swansdown turned up round her fair hair, was taking her place with her companions in the front row of the orchestra-stalls. Even the massive lady was rapt away to silence.

“But I thought the adopted daughter was an Italian,” one girl at last commented, having gazed her fill at the being so exalted by fortune. ‘“ Her skin is rather dark, but that yellow hair does n’t look Italian.”

“She is a Norwegian,” said the massive lady, keeping however an eye on the relative of Mrs. Forrester’s governess; “ the child of Norwegian peasants. Don’t you know the story? Madame Okraska found the poor little creature lost in a Norwegian forest, leaped from her carriage and took her into her arms; the parents were destitute and she bought the child from them. She is the very soul of generosity.”

“She doesn’t look like a peasant,” said the girl, with a flavour of discontent, as though a more apparent rusticity would have lent special magnanimity to Madame Okraska’s benevolence. But the massive lady assured her: ‘“ Oh yes, it is the true Norse type; their peasantry has its patrician quality. I have been to Norway. Sir Alliston looks very much moved, doesn’t he? He has been in love with Madame Okraska for years.” And she added with a deep sigh of satisfaction: “There has never been a word whispered against her reputation; never a word —‘ Pure as the foam on midmost ocean tossed.’ ”

Among the crowds thronging densely to their places, a young man of soldierly aspect, with a dark, narrow face, black hair and square blue eyes, was making his way to a seat in the third row of stalls. His name was Gregory Jardine; he was not a soldier — though he looked one — but a barrister, and he was content to count himself, not altogether incorrectly, a Philistine in all matters «esthetic. Good music he listened to with, as he put it, unintelligent and barbarous enjoyment; and since he had, shamefully, never yet heard the great pianist, he had bought the best stall procurable some weeks before, and now, after a taxing day in the law courts, had foregone his after-dinner coffee in order not to miss one note of the opening Appassionata; it was a sonata he was very fond of. He sometimes picked out the air of the slow movement on the piano with heavy deliberation; his musical equipment did not carry him as far as the variations.

When he reached his seat he found it to be by chance next that of his sister-in-law, his brother Oliver’s wife, a pretty, jewelled and jewel-like young woman, an American of a complicatedly cosmopolitan type. Gregory liked Betty Jardine, and always wondered how she had come to marry Oliver, whom he rather scorned; but he was not altogether pleased to find her near him. He preferred to take his music in solitude; and Betty was very talkative.

“Well, this is nice, Gregory!” she said. “ You and Captain Ashton know each other, don’t you. No, I could n’t persuade Oliver to come; he would n’t give up his whist. Isn’t Oliver dreadful; he moves from the saddle to the whist-table, and back again; and that is all. Captain Ashton and I have been comparing notes ; we find that we have missed hardly any of Madame Okraska’s concerts in London. I was only ten when I heard the first she ever gave here; my governess took me; and actually Captain Ashton was here on that day, too. Was n’t she a miracle of loveliness? It was twenty years ago; she had already her European reputation. It was just after she had divorced that horrible first husband of hers and married the Baron von Marwitz. This isn’t your initiation, of course, Gregory?”

“ Actually my initiation,” said Gregory, examining the portrait of Madame Okraska on the cover of the programme.

“But you ’ve seen her at Mrs. Forrester’s? She always stays with Mrs. Forrester.”

“T know; but I’ve always missed her, or, at all events, never been asked to meet her.”

“T certainly never have been,” said Betty Jardine. “But

10 TANTR

Mrs. Forrester thinks of me as frivolity personified, I know, and does n’t care to admit anything lower than a cabinet minister or a poet laureate when she has her lion domiciled. She is an old darling; but, between ourselves, she does take her lions a little too seriously, doesn’t she. Well, prepare for a coup de foudre, Gregory. Youll be sure to fall in love with her. Everybody falls in love with her. Captain Ashton has been in love with her for twenty years. She is extraordinary.”

“T’m ready to be subjugated,” said Gregory. “Do people really hang on her hands and kiss them? Shall I want to hang on her hands and kiss them?”

“There is no telling what she will do with us,” said Lady Jardine.

Gregory Jardine’s face, however, was not framed to express enthusiasm. It was caustic, cold and delicate. His eyes were as clear and as hard as a sky of frosty morning, and his small, firm lips were hard. His chin and lower lip advanced slightly, so that when he smiled his teeth met edge to edge, and the little black moustache, to which he often gave an absent upward twist, lent an ironic quality to this chill, gay smile, at times almost Mephistophelian. He sat twisting the moustache now, leaning his head to listen, amidst the babel of voices, to Betty Jardine’s chatter, and the thrills of infectious expectancy that passed over the audience like breezes over a corn-field left him unaffected. His observant, indifferent glance had in it something of the schoolboy’s barbarian calm and something of the disabused impersonality of worldly experience.

“Who is the young lady with Mrs. Forrester?” he asked presently. “In white, with yellow hair. Just in front of us. Do you know?”

Betty had leaned forward to look. ‘“ Don’t you even know her by sight?” she said. “That is Miss Woodruff, the girl who follows Madame Okraska everywhere. She attached herself to her years ago, I believe, in Rome or Paris;— some sort of little art-student she was. What a bore that sort of devotion must be. Is n’t she queer?”

“T had heard that she’s an adopted daughter,” said Captain

Ashton; “the child of Norwegian peasants, and that Madame Okraska found her in a Norwegian forest — by moonlight ;— a most romantic story.”

“A fable, I think. Someone was telling me about her the other day. She is only a camp-follower and protégée; and a compatriot of mine. She is an orphan and Madame Okraska supports her.”

‘She does n’t look like a protégée,” said Gregory Jardine, his eyes on the young person thus described; “she looks like a protector.”

“J should think she must be most of all a problem,” said Betty. “ What a price to pay for celebrity — these hangers-on who make one ridiculous by their infatuation. Madame Okraska is incapable of defending herself against them, I hear. The child’s clothes might have come from Norway!”

The protégée, protector or problem, who turned to them now and then her oddly blunted, oddly resolute young profile, had tawny hair, and a sun-browned skin. She wore a little white silk frock with flat bows of dull blue upon it. Her evening cloak was bordered with swansdown.: 'T'wo black. bows, one at the crown of her head and one at the nape of her neck, secured the thick plaits of her hair, which was parted and brushed up from her forehead in a bygone school-girlish fashion. She made Gregory think of a picture by Alfred Stevens he had seen somewhere and of an archaic Greek statue, and her appearance and demeanour interested him. He continued to look at her while the unrest and expectancy of the audience rolled into billows of excitement.

A staid, melancholy man, forerunner of the great artist, had appeared and performed his customary and cryptic function. “Why do they always screw up the piano-stool at the last moment! ” Betty Jardine murmured. “Is it to pepper our tongues with anguish before the claret? — Oh, she must be coming now! She always keeps one waiting like this! ”

The billows had surged to a storm. Signs of frenzy were visible in the faces on the platform. They had caught a glimpse of the approaching divinity.

“ Here she is!” cried Betty Jardine. Like everybody else she was clapping frantically, like everybody, that is, except Gregory Jardine; for Gregory, his elbow in his hand, his fingers still neatly twisting the end of his moustache, continued to observe the young girl in the front row, whose face, illuminated and irradiated, was upturned to the figure now mounting to the platform.

CHAPTER II EK hush that had fallen was like the hush that falls on

Alpine watchers in the moment before sunrise, and, with the great musician’s slow emerging from below, it was as if the sun had risen.

She came, with her indolent step, the thunder of hands and voices greeting her; and those who gazed at her from the platform saw the pearl-wreathed hair and opulent white shoulders, and those who gazed at her from beneath saw the strange and musing face. ‘I'hen she stood before them and her dark eyes dwelt, impassive and melancholy, upon the sea of faces, tumultuous and blurred with clapping hands. The sound was like the roaring of the sea and she stood as a goddess might have stood at the brink of the ocean, indifferent and unaware, absorbed in dreams of ancient sorrow. ‘The ovation was’ so prolonged and she stood there for so long — hardly less the indifferent goddess because, from time to time, she bowed her own famous bow, stately, old-fashioned, formally and sublimely submissive,— that every eye in the great audience could feast upon her in a rapturous assurance of leisure.

She was a woman of forty-eight, of an ample though still beautiful figure. Her flowing dress of white brocade made no attempt to compress, to sustain or to attenuate. No one could say that a woman who stood as she did, with the port of a goddess — the small head majestically poised over such shoulders and such a breast — was getting fat; yet no one could deny that there was redundancy. She was not redundant as other women were; she was not elegant as other women were; she seemed in nothing like others. Her dress was strange; it had folds and amplitudes and dim disks of silver broideries at breast and knee that made it like the dress of some Venetian lady, drawn at random from an ancestral marriage coffer and put on dreamily 13 with no thought of aptness. Her hair was strange; no other woman’s hair was massed and folded as was hers, hair dark as night and intertwined and looped with twisted strands of pearl and diamond. Her face was strange, that crowning face, known to all the world. Disparate racial elements mingled in the long Southern oval and the Slavonic modelling of brow and cheek-bone. The lips, serene and passionate, deeply sunken at the corners and shadowed with a pencilling of down, were the lips of Spain; all the mystery of the South was in the grave and tragic eyes. Yet the eyes were cold; and touches of wild ancestral suffering, like the sudden clash of spurs in the languors of a Polonaise, marked the wide nostrils and the heavy eyelids and the broad, black crooked eye-brows that seemed to stammer a little in the perfect sentence of her face.

She subjugated and she appealed. Her adorers were divided between the longing to le down under her feet and to fold her protectingly in their arms. Calf-love is an undying element in human-nature, a shame-faced derogatory name for the romantic, self-immolating emotion woven from fancy, yearning and the infection of other’s ardour. Love of this foam and flame quality, too tender to be mere esthetic absorption in a beautiful object, too selfless to be sensual, too intense to be only absurd, rose up towards Madame Okraska and encompassed her from hundreds of hearts and eyes. ‘The whole audience was for her one vast heart of adoration, one fixed face of half-hypnotized tenderness. And there she stood before them;—- Madame Okraska whom crowned heads delighted to honour; Madame Okraska who got a thousand pounds a night; Madame Okraska who played as no one in the world could play; looking down over them, looking up and around at them, as if, now, a little troubled by the prolonged adulation, patient yet weary, like a mistress assaulted, after long absence, by the violent joy of a great Newfoundland dog; smiling a little, though buffeted, and unwilling to chill the ardent heart by a reprimand. And more than all she was like a great white rose that, fading in the soft, thick, scented air of a hot-house, droops languidly with loosened petals.

They let her go at last and she took her place at the piano.

TANT EH 15

Her hands fell softly on a group of dreamy ascending chords. Her face, then, in a long pause, took on a rapt expectancy and power. She was the priestess waiting before her altar for the descent of the god, glorious and dreadful. And it was as if with the chill and shudder of a possession that, breathing deeply, drawing her shoulders a little together, she lifted her hands and played. She became the possessed and articulate priestess, her soul, her mind, her passion lent to the message spoken through her. The tumult and insatiable outcry of the Appassionata spread like a river over her listeners. And as she played her face grew more rapt in its brooding concentration, the eyes half-closed, the nostrils wide, the jaw dropping and giving to the mouth an expression at once relaxed and vigilant.

To criticize with the spell of Madame Okraska’s personality upon one was hardly possible. Kmerged from the glamour, there were those, pretending to professional discriminations, who suggested that she lacked the masculine and classic disciplines of interpretation; that her rendering, though breathed through with noble dignities, was coloured by a capricious and passionate personality ; that it was the feeling rather than the thought of the music that she excelled in expressing, its suffering rather than its serenity. Only a rare listener, here and there among her world-wide audiences, was aware of deeper deficiencies and of the slow changes that time had wrought in her art. For it was inspiration no longer; it was the memory of inspiration. The Nemesis of the artist who expresses, not what he feels, but what he is expected to feel, what he has undertaken to feel, had fallen upon the great woman. Her art, too, showed the fragrant taint of an artificial atmosphere. She had played ten times when she should have played once. She lived on her capital of experience, no longer renewing her life, and her renderings had lost that quality of the greatest, the living communication with the experience embodied in the music. It was on the stereotyped memories of such communication that she depended, on the half hypnotic possession by the past; filling in vacancies with temperamental caprice or an emotion no longer the music’s but her own.

But to the enchanted ear of the multitude, professional and unprofessional, the essential vitality was there, the vitality embodied to the enchanted eye by the white figure with its drooping, pearl-wreathed head and face sunken in sombre ecstasy. She gave them all they craved: — passion, stormy struggle, the tears of hopeless love, the chill smile of lassitude in accepted defeat, the unappeasable longing for the past. They listened, and their hearts lapsed back from the hallucinated unity of enthusiasm each to its own identity, an identity isolated, intensified, tortured exquisitely by the expression of dim yearnings. All that had been beautiful in the pain and joy that through long ages had gone to the building up of each human consciousness, re-entered and possessed it; the fragrance of blossoming trees, the farewell gaze of dying eyes, the speechless smile of lovers, ancestral memories of Spring-times, loves, and partings, evoked by this poignant lure from dim realms of sub-consciousness, like subterranean rivers rising through creaks and crannies towards the lifted wand of the diviner. It seemed the quintessence of human experience, the ecstasy of perfect and enfranchising sorrow, distilled from the shackling, smirching halfsorrows of actual life. Some of the listening faces smiled; some were sodden, stupefied rather than enlightened; some showed a sensual rudimentary gratification; some, lapped in the tide, yet unaware of its significance, were merely silly. But no Orpheus, wildly harping through the woods, ever led more enthralled and subjugated listeners.

Gregory Jardine’s face was neither sodden nor silly nor sensual; but it did not wear the enchanted look of the true votary. Instinctively this young man, though it was emotion that he found in music, resisted any too obvious assault upon his feelings, taking refuge in irony from their force when roused. For the form of music, and its intellectual content, he had little appreciation, and he was thus the more exposed to its emotional appeal; but his intuition of the source and significance of the appeal remained singularly just and accurate. He could not now have analysed. his sense of protest and dissatisfaction; yet, while the charm grasped and encircled him, making him, as he said to himself, idiotically grovel or inanely soar, he repelled the poignant sweetness and the thrills that went through him were thrills of a half-unwilling joy.

He sat straightly, his arms folded, his head bent as he twisted the end of his moustache, his eye fixed on the great musician; and he wondered what was the matter with him, or with her. It was as if he couldn’t get at the music. Something interfered, something exquisite yet ambiguous, alluring yet never satisfying.

His glance fell presently from the pianist’s drooping head to the face of the protégée, and the contrast between what was expressed by this young person’s gaze and attitude and what he was himself feeling again drew his attention to her. No grovelling and no soaring was here, but an elation almost stern, a brooding concentration almost maternal, a dedicated power. Madame Okraska, he reflected, must be an extraordinary person if she really deserved that gaze. He didn’t believe that she quite did. His dissatisfaction with the music extended itself to the musician and, looking from her face to the girl’s, he remembered with scepticism Betty’s account of their’ relation.

A group of Chopin Preludes and a Brahms Rhapsodie Hongroise brought the first half of the concert to a close, and Gregory watched with amusement, during the ensuing scene, the vagaries of the intoxicated crowd. People rose to their feet, clapping, shouting, bellowing, screaming. He saw on the platform the face of the massive lady, haggard, fierce, devouring; the face of the shy lady, suffused, the eyes half dazed with adoration like those of a saint in rapture. Old Mrs. Forrester, with her juvenile auburn head, laughed irrepressibly while she clapped, like a happy child. The old poet was nearly moved to tears. Only the protégée remained, as it were, outside the infection. She smiled slightly and steadily, as if in a proud contentment, and clapped now and then quite softly, and she turned once and scanned the audience with eyes accustomed to ovations and appraising the significance of this one.