United States or Canada ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I came up from Morecambe yesterday. Rotten party. Have you seen your mother?" Brigit's lips tightened. "No." "I saw her three weeks ago. She is very much hurt by your behaviour." "Broken-hearted, I should think!" "Well, she's queer enough, I grant you, and not over-motherly, but she is your mother when all's said and done." The girl watched the kettle boil and said nothing.
"I hadn't been in his room for years," sobbed Lady Kingsmead, forgetting her complexion. "Did you see the pastel of me on the wall between the windows? And I gave him the clock, too, for his thirty-fifth birthday. Oh, Brigit! He loved me insanely, poor Gerald, perfectly madly, and so did I." She broke off, to her daughter's relief, and sobbed again. Brigit's flat was warm and smelt unaired.
The two talked about the deplorable marriage, the Orange affair, Brigit's talents. Of course, she was very young. But Rachel the great Rachel made her first triumph at seventeen. "One doesn't like to say it," observed Pensée, "but this death seems providential. If she marries Orange, she will give up the stage. Poor child! At last it really looks as though she might be happy like other people."
And I must write Ponty before we tell." Her practical tone struck chill on Joyselle's glowing young ear, but he followed her obediently to the house. As they reached the door the opening bar of Mendelssohn's Wedding March rang out, played with a mastery of the pianola that, in that house, only Kingsmead was capable of. On entering, Brigit's face was scarlet.
The windows were closed, and the air heavy, as in a room seldom used. The two seated themselves close together, on one of the ugly sofas facing a door through which the beckoning negress had gone out. There was no sound except the harsh ticking of a huge, bulbous clock, all gilding and flowers, which stood in a corner. Monny's and Brigit's eyes met, with a question.
The temptation was irresistible. Robert accepted the invitation, and as he watched the play, it seemed to him that he had never known Brigit till that evening. He had seen her in dreams yes; and talked to her in dreams, yes; but now at last she lived a real creature. Lost in the part, she was able to throw aside the self-restraint which had given her always a cold, almost sexless quality. Her face betrayed a hundred changing emotions: the youth, strength, and passion so severely repressed in her own life came out, though still controlled, with full and perfect harmony in her art. It was one of those consummate revelations of temperament which, in silent or inactive lives, never come till the last hours before death when in one look or one utterance all the time lost and all the long-concealed feelings take their reparation from existence. But with those who may express their true characters through the medium of some creative faculty, the illuminated moment comes at a psychic crisis not to enforce the irony of death but to demonstrate and intensify the richness of humanity. The knowledge which depends upon suffering, and, in a way, springs from it, is good, yet it must always be incomplete. Happiness has its light also, and in order to get the right explanation of any soul, or to understand the eternal meaning of any situation, one must have had at least a few glad hours, felt the ecstasy of thoughtless joy, drifted a little while with the rushing, unhindered tide. As Robert, behind the grille, watched the animated, beautiful girl who seemed to typify the very springtime of the world, he felt he had peered too long at love and life through bars. He would have to break them, get on the other side, and join in the dazzling action. How unreal and far-away seemed all grief, remorse, or anxiety from that brilliant scene! Brigit was laughing, singing, dancing fulfilling, surely enough, her real vocation. What! at seventeen, was she to sit pale, silent, tearful, and alone? At his age, was he to look on with a dead heart and unseeing eyes, murmuring words of tame submission to a contemptuous Fate? His whole nature rose up in revolt, and the self he had once abdicated rushed back to him, howling out taunts which were not the less bitter because they were false. Not pausing to wonder whether the present were a profanation of the past, or the past an insipid forecast of the present, he was conscious only that a change perhaps a terrible change had taken place in his mind a change so sudden and so violent that it had paralysed every power of analysis and reflection. Imaginative love made up of renunciation and spirituality, gave way to the fierce desire to live, to silence the intolerable wisdom of the conscience, and learn folly for a space. He was madly jealous of Castrillon, who gazed into Brigit's eyes and uttered his lines with the most touching air of passionate devotion. She seemed to respond, and, in fact, their joint performance had that delicate, irresistible abandon apparently unconscious and unpremeditated which is only possible between two players who are not in love with each other. Where there is actual feeling, there is always a certain awkwardness and want of conviction (partly caused by the inadequacy of the diagram in comparison with the reality), and the charm, so far as art is concerned, is wholly lost. An acted love was the only love possible between Brigit and Castrillon; hence its sincerity on the stage, where, as a merely assumed thing, it harmonised perfectly with its artificial surroundings the canvas landscape, the painted trees, the mechanical birds, and the sunlight produced by tricks of gauze and gas. But Orange did not stop to consider this. It was enough and too much to see his "sad spirit of the elfin race" completely transformed. Was this the child-like, immature being of their strange visit to Miraflores? That whole episode seemed a kind of phantasy a Midsummer Night's music nothing more, perhaps something less. The very title of the play The Second Surprise of Love carried a mocking significance. Sometimes the soul speaks first, sometimes the senses first influence a life, but the turn, soon or late, must inevitably come for each, and the man or woman, sick of materialism, who begins to suspect that the unseen world and its beauty is an inheritance more lasting and more to be desired than all the vindictive joys of this prison-house, has no such bitterness as the idealist who finds himself brought into thrilling touch with the physical loveliness, the actual enchantment, the undeniable delight of certain things in life. The questions, "What have I missed? What have I lost? What birthright have I renounced?" are bound to make themselves heard. They beat upon the heart like hail upon the sand and fall buried in the scars they cause. Things of the flesh may and do become dead sea fruit; but things of the spirit often become stale and meaningless also. What is more weary than a tired mind? What joys and labours are more exhausting than those of the intellect, and the intellect only? Does an idle week in summer ever beget more lassitude or such disgust of life as a month alone with books in a library? Dissatisfaction and satiety, melancholy and fatigue show as plainly in the pages of
"Come back at half-past eleven, Jarvis," she told the man, and got out. The door was opened by Toinon, somewhat to Brigit's surprise for it would have been more like Joyselle to rush downstairs on hearing her motor stop, but the reason was soon plainly comprehensible, for Joyselle was playing. It was evidently earlier than they had expected her.
Brigit's voice was very gentle; she seemed to see the young violinist, handsome and, as his wife put it, driven half-mad by his music, the centre of attraction at the German castle, and his little plain wife sitting forlorn by herself, looking on. "It was a Lady Créfinne Cranewitz," this name at least, she remembered!
Joyselle, always tender and considerate of her, yet seemed to regard her as a kind of cross between a mother and a nurse, and she, never precisely retiring, and almost always present during Brigit's visits, appeared to be perfectly used to the rôle that he assigned her, and sat, usually silent, a kindly spectator of whatever might be going on.
In spite of her fragility she was, from the habit of self-control, a stronger spirit. "You may be sure that I shall understand," she said. "Forgive me, then, but some enemy has circulated a report that you went to Mr. Orange's rooms in Vigo Street last Wednesday." A deep flush swept over Brigit's face. "I was not there," she said. "I know," said Sara. "I know you were not there.
Word Of The Day