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Updated: May 19, 2025
Will you be that other?" She put this question as if she were proposing a commonplace human undertaking. Ferval in his confusion fancied that she was provoking him to a declaration. To grasp his receding reason he fatuously exclaimed: "Is this a Salvation Army fantasy?" With that she called out, in harsh resentment: "Not salvation for you!"
"Here, at Ischl, last summer," was the grim reply. Ferval returned to Rouen after a fatiguing trip down the Seine as far as Croisset, the old home of Gustave Flaubert. Here he viewed, not without a dismal sense of fame and its futility, the little garden-house in which the masterpieces of the great Frenchman had been conceived in joy and executed in sorrow.
I ate his sin, and truth, my son, is stranger than theology! Listen!" Before his daughter could check him he had hastily donned his armament of instruments and, tramping slowly the broad, smooth path, began playing. Ferval, much disappointed, was about to disappear, for he remembered the racking noises of the previous day. But this music, this Tune of Time!...
The old man burst into scornful laughter. "The music!" he exclaimed. "The music!" echoed his daughter. Ferval wished himself down in Rouen. But he held his position. "Yes," he continued, "your music. It interested me. And now I find you speaking my own tongue. I must confess that I am curious, that my curiosity has warrant." Thus was he talking to beggars as if they were his social equals.
Had he not read in the Talmud that Lilith, Adam's first wife, was low of voice? And this beggar-maid? Maybe a masquerading singer with a crazy father! What else could mean such art wasted on the roads, thrown in the faces of a rabble! Ferval kindled with emotion. Here was romance. Brahms and his dark song under the bowl of the troubled blue sky strongly affected him.
Henceforth Ferval became a lover of shadows. The tenderness of the growing night disquieted the dying woman. "Aline!" she called. But it was only the name that reverberated within the walls of her brain, harrowed by fever. A soft air rustled the drawn curtains of lawn; and on the dressing table the two little lamps fluttered in syncopated sympathy. One picture the room held.
These words were like the sting of hail; they seemed to drop from the sky, so out of key were they with the speaker's ragged clothes and the outlandish garb of his daughter. Purcell! Brahms! Strauss! What could these three composers mean to such outcasts? Believing that he was the victim of a mystification, Ferval waited, his pulses beating as if he had been running too hard.
If he could have met Debora again, he would have forgiven her sibylline deceptions, her father's chicanery. And how did they spin their web? Ferval, student of the occult, greedy of metaphysical problems, at first set it down to Indian Yogi magic. But the machinery the hideously discordant human orchestra, the corybantic dancing! No, he rejected the theory.
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