Edith Wharton - SSC 09 (19 page)

 
          
He
paused a moment, and then ventured: “Don’t you need it? On the boat yesterday
evening I rather thought you did.”

 
          
She
turned toward him with a quick swing of her whole body.
“The
boat yesterday evening?
You were there?”

 
          
“I
was sitting close to you. I very nearly had the impertinence to go up to you
and tell you I was—sorry.”

 
          
She
received this in a wondering silence. Then she dropped down on the piano-stool,
and rested her thin elbows on the closed lid of the instrument, and her
drooping head on her hands. After a moment she looked up and signed to him to
take the only chair. “Put the music on the floor,” she directed. Kilvert
obeyed.

 
          
“You
were right—I need pity, I need sympathy,” she broke out, her burning eyes on
his.

 
          
“I
wish I could give you something more—
give
you real
help, I mean.”

 
          
She
continued to gaze at him intently. “Oh, if you could bring him back to me!” she
exclaimed, lifting her prayerful hands with the despair of the mourning women
in some agonizing Deposition.

 
          
“I
would if I could—if you’d tell me how,” Kilvert murmured.

 
          
She
shook her head, and sank back into her weary attitude at the piano. “What
nonsense I’m talking! He’s gone for good, and I’m a desolate woman.”

 
          
Kilvert
had by this time entirely forgotten the object of his visit. All he felt was a
burning desire to help this stricken Ariadne.

 
          
“Are
you sure I couldn’t find him and bring him back—if you gave me a clue?”

 
          
She
sat
silent,
her face plunged in her long tortured
hands. Finally she looked up again to murmur: “No. I said things he can never
forgive—”

 
          
“But
if you tell him that, perhaps he will,” suggested Kilvert.

 
          
She
looked at him questioningly, and then gave a slight laugh. “Ah, you don’t
know—you don’t know either of us!”

 
          
“Perhaps
I could get to, if you’d help me; if you could tell me, for instance, without
breach of confidence, the subject of that painful discussion you were having
yesterday—a lovers’ quarrel, shall we call it?”

 
          
She
seemed to catch only the last words, and flung them back at him with a careless
sneer.
“Lovers’ quarrel?
Between
us!
Do you take us for children?” She swept her long arms across
the piano-lid, as if it were an open keyboard. “Lovers’ quarrels are pastry
eclairs.
Brand and I are artists, Mr.

 
          
Mr. “

 
          
“Kilvert.”

 
          
“I’ve
never denied his greatness as an artist—never! And he knows it. No living
‘cellist can touch him. I’ve heard them all, and I know. But, good heavens, if
you think that’s enough for him!”

 
          
“Such
praise from you—”

 
          
She
laughed again. “One would think so! Praise from Margaret Aslar! But no—! You
say you saw us yesterday on the boat. I’d gone to Fusina to meet him—really in
the friendliest spirit. He’d been off on tour in
Poland
and
Hungary
; I hadn’t seen him for weeks. And I was so
happy, looking forward to our meeting so eagerly. I thought it was such a
perfect opportunity for talking over our Venetian programmes; tonight’s, and
our two big concerts next week. Wouldn’t you have thought so too? He arrived
half an hour before the boat started, and his first word was: ‘Have you settled
the programmes?’ After that—well, you say you saw us….”

 
          
“But
he was awfully glad to see you; I saw that, at any rate.”

 
          
“Oh, yes; awfully glad!
He thought that after such a
separation I’d be like dough in his hands—accept anything, agree to anything! I
had settled the programmes; but when he’d looked them over, he just handed them
back to me with that sort of
sotto voce
smile he has, and said: ‘Beautiful—perfect. But I thought it was understood
that we were to appear together?’“

 
          
“Well—wasn’t
it?” Kilvert interjected, beginning to flounder.

 
          
She
glanced at him with a shrug. “When Brand smiles like that it means: ‘I see
you’ve made out the whole programme to your own advantage. It’s really a piano
solo from one end to the other’. That’s what he means. Of course it isn’t, you
understand; but the truth is that nowadays he has come to consider me simply as
an accompanist, and would like to have our tour regarded as a series of ‘cello
concerts, so that he’s furious when I don’t subordinate myself entirely.”

 
          
Kilvert
listened in growing bewilderment. He knew very little about artists, except
that they were odd and unaccountable. He would have given all his possessions
to be one himself; but he wasn’t, and he had never felt his limitations more
keenly than at this moment. Still, he argued with himself, fundamentally we’re
all made of the same stuff, and this splendid fury is simply a woman in love,
who’s afraid of having lost her lover. He tried to pursue the argument on those
lines.

 
          
“After
all—suppose you were to subordinate yourself, or at least affect to? Offer to
let him make out your next few programmes, I mean … if you know where he’s to
be found, I could carry your message. …”

 
          
“Let
him give a ‘cello tour with Mrs. J. Margaret Aslar at the piano’—in small type,
at the bottom of the page? Ah,” she cried, swept to her feet by a great rush of
Sybilline passion, “
that’s
what you
think of my playing, is it? I always knew fashionable people could barely
distinguish a barrel-organ from a Steinway—but I didn’t know they confused the
players as well as the instruments.”

 
          
Kilvert
felt suddenly reassured by her unreasonableness. “I wasn’t thinking of you as a
player—but only as a woman.”

 
          
“A woman?
Any woman, I suppose?”

 
          
“A
woman in love
is
‘any woman.’ A man
in love is ‘any man.’ If you tell your friend that all that matters is your
finding him again, he’ll put your name back on the programme wherever you want
it to be.”

 
          
Margaret
Aslar, leaning back against the piano, stood looking down at him sternly. “Have
you
no
respect for art?” she
exclaimed.

 
          
“Respect
for art? But I venerate it—in all its forms!” Kilvert stammered, overwhelmed.

 
          
“Well,
then—you ought to try to understand its interpreters. We’re instruments, you see,
Mr.—Mr.—”

 
          
“Kilvert.”

 
          
“We’re
the pipes the god plays on—not mere servile eyes or ears, like all the rest of
you! And whatever branch of art we’re privileged to represent, that we must
uphold, we must defend—even against the promptings of our own hearts. Brand has
left me because he won’t recognise that
my
branch is higher, is more important, than his. In his infatuated obstinacy he
won’t admit what all the music of all the greatest composers goes to show; that
the piano ranks above the ‘cello. And yet it’s so obvious, isn’t it? I could
have made my career as a great pianist without him—but where would he as a
‘cellist be without me? Ah, let him try—let him try! That’s what I’ve always
told him. If he thinks any girl of twenty, because she has long eyelashes, and
pretends to swoon whenever he plays his famous Beethoven adagio, can replace an
artist who is his equal; but his equal in a higher form of art—” She broke off,
and sank down again on the piano-stool. “Our association has made him; but he
won’t admit it. He won’t admit that the ‘cello has no life of its own without
the piano. Well, let him see how he feels as number four in a string quartet!
Because that’s what he’ll have to come to now.”

 
          
Kilvert
felt himself out of his depth in this tossing sea of technical resentments. He
might have smiled at it in advance, as a display of artistic fatuity; but now
he divined, under the surface commotion, something nobler, something genuine
and integral. “I’ve never before met a mouthpiece of the gods,” he thought,
“and I don’t believe I know how to talk to them.”

 
          
And
then, with a start, he recalled the humble purpose of his mission, and that he
was there, not as the answering mouthpiece of divinity, but only as Mrs.
Roseneath’s. After all, it was hard on her to have her party wrecked for a
whim. He looked at Margaret Aslar with a smile.

 
          
“You
have a wonderful opportunity of proving your argument to your friend this very
evening. Everybody in
Venice
is coming to hear you at Mrs. Roseneath’s. You have simply to give a
piano recital to show that you need no one to help you.”

 
          
She
gazed at him in a sort of incredulous wonder, and slowly an answering smile
stole over her grave lips. “Ah, he’d see
then
—he’d
see!” She seemed to be looking beyond Kilvert’s shoulder, at a figure unseen by
him, to whom she flung out her ironic challenge. “Let him go off, and do as
much himself! Let him try to cram a house to bursting, and get ten recalls,
with a stammering baby at the piano!” She put up her hands to her tossed hair. “I’ve
grown gray at this work—and so has he! Twenty years ago we began. And every
gray hair is a string in the perfect instruments that time has made of us.
That’s what a man never sees—never remembers! Ah, just let him
try
; let him have his lesson now, if he wants to!”

 
          
Kilvert
sprang up, as if swept to his feet on the waves of her agitation. “You will
come then, won’t you?
And the programme—?
Can I go
back and say you’ll have it ready in an hour or two? I hate to bother you; but,
you see, Mrs. Roseneath’s in suspense—I must hurry back now with your promise.”

 
          
“My promise?”
Margaret Aslar confronted him with a brow of
tragic wonderment. Her face reminded him of a windswept plain with
cloud-shadows rushing over it.
“My promise—to play tonight
without Brand?
But my poor Mr
.—
Mr.—”

 
          
“Kilvert.”

 
          
“Are
you serious?
Really serious?
Do you really suppose
that a tree torn up by the roots and flung to the ground can give out the same
music as when it stands in the forest by its mate, and the wind rushes through
their branches? I couldn’t play a note tonight. I must bury my old self
first—the self made out of Brand and Margaret Aslar. Tell Mrs. Roseneath I’m
sorry—tell her anything you like. Tell her I’m burying a friend; tell her that
Brand’s dead—and he
is
dead, now that
he’s lost me. Tell her I must watch by him tonight….”

 
          
She
stood before Kilvert with lifted arms, in an attitude of sculptural desolation;
then she turned away and went and leaned in the window, as unconscious of his
presence as if he had already left the room.

 
          
Kilvert
wanted to speak, to argue, urge, entreat; but a kind of awe, a sense of her
inaccessibility, restrained him. What plea of expediency would weigh anything
in the scales of such anger and such sorrow? He stood waiting for a while, trying
to think of something to say; but no words came, and he slipped out and closed
the door on the greatest emotional spectacle he had ever witnessed.

 
          
The
whirr of wings was still in his ears when he reached the door of the hotel and
began to walk along the narrow street

 
          
(
Saturday Evening Post 205
, 12 November
1932)