CHAPTER XIX
THE Toriallis had a handsome new house in the wide Boulevard Malesherbes; it was, as Madame often explained, “only a business residence.”
This, however, had not prevented her from doing full justice to her consummate taste and to the large sums of money which her husband’s professional successes had put at her disposal.
Half the house was arranged entirely to suit the pupils.
Beyond the entrance hall was a large waiting-room leading into a small theatre. The pupil and hisaccompagnateurappeared upon a large platform, while Torialli sat in one of the stalls, listening and shouting his directions. Occasionally, if the pupil was one of great importance, a few guests would be allowed to be present, and very often Madame herself would come in, sometimes to encourage a nervous pupil, and occasionally to appease an angry one.
The day of Jean’s first attempt the bigsalle d’attentewas even fuller than usual; it reminded Jean of nothing so much as the consulting room of some fashionable doctor. There was the same air of strained suspense, and of superficial efforts to appear at ease.
It was one of Madame Torialli’s favourite sayings that Torialli’s pupils were like a “family party.” If she meant to express a cynical disregard for the amenities of domesticity it struck Jean that her comparison would have been perfect. All the members of Torialli’s little family were, beneath a certain outward courtesy and ease, intensely antagonistic to each other. In the musical world there are very few plums, and there are a great many appetites. There were two sides to Torialli’s world as well. The professionals who paid with their earnings and worked with a fierce seriousness for bare existence, and the rich amateurs who gave lightly of their superabundance both of money and leisure. It is possible that Torialli, if left to himself, would have put the artists first; but he was not left to himself. He was a rich man and a great success, and he had won these benefits through his wife, who had taught him to give the first place to the amateurs, and to keep his professional pupils merely as an ornamental addition to his profitable life-work.
Even in thesalle d’attentethere was a distinct cleavage between the two branches—a little groupof beautifully dressed women and well-groomed men sat apart by itself, in a kind of upper Paradise, near the door which led to the theatre, and where Jean leaned by an open window sat the professionals. They were well dressed, too, but their whole air was different; there was a restlessness in their eyes and the definite marks of age and work written in the lines of their faces. Nobody from either group took the least notice of Jean.
He was amused to see that among the group of amateurs sat, enthroned in the foremost place, the handsome figure of Pauline Vanderpool, the lady whom Romain D’Ucelles had offered to Jean as a commendable source of income.
She certainly upheld her reputation, for her furs alone cost more than those of all the other women in the room, and she wore a pair of very large and fabulously expensive diamond earrings.
“Of course, Clothilde Duffray hadn’t the least voice when she came here,” a girl with a magnificent mass of red hair exclaimed. “Ma foi!One would have had to lay one’s ears to the ground to catch a note! And now, I assure you, she drowns an orchestra. What she paid I can’t tell you, but she told me herself that she suffered torments. Torialli literally stood over her like a wild beast. I’m not sure he didn’t bite her. He raved at her, I know, like a madman. I’ve seen her come out purple with tears—but it was worthit; she’s making two hundred francs a night now, without turning a hair.”
“What I can’t understand is,” Pauline’s flat, uncertain French struck across from the other side of the room, “how Torialli ever came to let Clara sing at the Salle Fémina. She hasn’t any voice, she hasn’t any style, and she must have done him about just as much credit as a tin trumpet; it doesn’t seem to me to be any catch to be Torialli’s pupil, if he’s going to let women like that loose on one’s ears.”
The men laughed.
“Oh, it wasn’t Torialli’s fault,” said a famous tenor (so famous that from Torialli’s point of view he was almost as good as an amateur). “You’d have, you know, to chain Clara up to prevent her. Why, I heard her sing at Chevillard myself last week, and when I met Torialli afterwards his language quite astonished me; nothing but the fact that she’s got the largest fortune in Paris prevented him from suing her on the spot. One doesn’t, you see, try to take money from people who have it, only from poor devils like ourselves, who haven’t a sou to live upon!” This was really a great joke, for Lucien had any other quality of the devil rather than the one he was usually most eager to assume.
The door opened, and a dark, handsomely dressed woman entered. A glance at her assured Jean that she belonged to that race whose markedfeatures, both physical and mental, have caused it to be the most hated, feared, and despised in the world.
Hester Lévi was no bad example of her creed. She looked gracefully immobile and rather feline, the only feature that lived in her little expressionless face was her marvellous great eyes—out of them shone an untameable fire. As she advanced to the centre of the room the little group stood back to let her pass. She represented the two greatest powers in the world—money and brains, and she made the many fat women in the room look strangely insignificant beside her tiny forceful little figure. She lifted her heavy eyelids and bowed unwillingly from right to left.
“So you’re back!” said Pauline without rising. “But I might have known that as soon as there was wind of the Toriallis coming you’d get to know of it. I guess there isn’t much going on that you don’t know!”
Hester Lévi looked wearily about her before she loosened her heavy furs and sank into a seat the great tenor stepped forward hastily to offer her.
“Yes,” she said, without looking at Pauline. “I knew.”
“Well, you’d better tell me how long he means to take you for this season?” said Pauline dryly; “then we can’t have another mix up.”
A curious light flickered across Mademoiselle Lévi’s eyes.
“I am to have extra time, I fancy,” she said, “to practise the solos forParsifal.”
There was a hush over the whole room—so Hester, then, was to take the coveted part. A hurricane of short angry whispers arose in the further corner of the room; the little group about Miriam and Pauline exchanged glances.
Lucien laughed.
“So that affair’s settled then,” he said. “Mademoiselle is one of those who arrive early and stay late. I felicitate her.”
Pauline looked straight in front of her, her eyes had an icy glitter in them; she was profoundly angry and bitterly disappointed. Jean, looking at her, felt a sick distaste for the whole performance—this, then, was music—the goddess of his lonely soul! Was experience, then, merely a prompt profanation of dreams? If so, what a pity ever to awake! A silent, slender girl beside him made a stifled sound. She had worked for four years upon the solo parts ofParsifal, and her voice was worth three of the rich Jewess’s clever but mediocre gift. Hester Lévi looked at her watch. There was a stir at the other end of the room. The door opened quickly. A dapper-looking man of early middle age, rather fat and very pink with an air of just having arrived from a lengthy toilet, stepped briskly forward. He smiled continuously and rubbed his plump little hands together. He spoke obsequiously to Hester Lévi.
“You will not be kept waiting more than one moment, I promise you,” he said. “How charmingly you are looking this morning! I can see your little holiday has agreed with you! Torialli is longing to hear how the voice goes.”
He turned as if he meant to speak to Pauline.
“Ah! Mademoiselle—” he began.
Pauline stood up; her cold grey eyes fastened themselves like a gimlet into the face of the man before her. The smile slipped from his face; he turned white and flinched like a dog.
“Well,” said Pauline with a grim smile. “It seems I’m come back too, Monsieur Flaubert. Torialli has arranged for me to have anotheraccompagnateur. A gentleman who knows how to do accounts, how to play the piano, and how to behave!”
Flaubert stepped back a little and gave a slight grimace and a slighter bow. “The gentleman is to be congratulated, I take it, Mademoiselle, on his opportunity,” he replied softly. “Monsieur D’Ucelles is, I believe, the name of this personage. I do not know yet if he has arrived.”
Jean stepped forward. The occasion seemed to him singularly uncomfortable, but he tried to put some conciliation into his bow.
“Charmed,” murmured the affable Monsieur Flaubert, holding out a plump pink hand.
Pauline stood stiff, angular, and impenetrable. Then she gave Jean the slightest possible inclinationof her head, and turned her back on him; evidently she intended to have no recollection of a former meeting.
Louis Flaubert turned hurriedly away to where the slender little girl in black leaned forward—her bent head raised at last, and her heart in her eyes. He spoke to her rapidly in an undertone. Jean could not catch what he said, but it was enough to look at the girl to guess what had happened. Louis Flaubert was hideously angry, and he had utilized his anger to avoid the strong and attack the weak in the most prudent manner.
The girl tried to speak, her face seemed to grow old and to contract, she held out her trembling hands with a sharp little gesture of appeal. Flaubert bowed and smiled, and retreated almost as quickly as he had come. The girl, who had sat quite still for a moment, gave a loud wild laugh, then another, and then the whole room filled with peal after peal of cruel hysterical laughter. She bent and swayed under it, shrieking with uncontrollable sobs. It seemed to Jean as if he were watching a tree caught in a gale of wind, and flung and twisted here and there by an invisible Torturer. Nobody expressed any surprise at the outburst, one or two people smiled and shrugged their shoulders—a few paused in their conversation and looked slightly uncomfortable.
“For the love of God, can we do nothing to helpher?” cried Jean in a fury of disgust and rage. “Where can one get a glass of water?”
The great tenor Lucien D’Arblay smiled at his impetuosity.
“You will have your work set, my dear young man, if you go through the world trying to relieve people—believe me, it is not worth while! She’s just had her dismissal, poor little one! It would take more than a glass of water to cure that. Torialli won’t see her again. I can’t think why Flaubert didn’t write it. He might have known there’d be a row. Ah! here’s Madame!”
The door opened again and Jean, looking up, met the candid innocent blue eyes of a little child gazing into his.
Madame Torialli was any age you like when her eyes were shut, and the thick bisque shadows under them betrayed her struggles with time; but when they were open and yours met them, you found yourself gazing into the fountain of eternal youth.
She was a very small woman who carried her head like a queen. If time had taken away the bloom from her delicate mobile face, it had replaced it by a riper charm which had in it nothing but the sweetness of experience. You could not look at Madame Torialli and remember that the world was hard.
She went straight up to the shrieking girl and put her tiny hand on her shoulder. It seemedto Jean as if a miracle had taken place; the girl ceased crying and looked up at her. Madame spoke a few simple words with an air of mingled sympathy and authority, then she turned gracefully away with a laughing comradeship to the group of artists near the door. She left them only to assuage the impatience of others.
She took Pauline’s hand in both of hers, and Jean, to his astonishment, saw Miss Vanderpool’s annoyed sharpness change to a calm serenity.
“To-morrow,” said Madame Torialli, with her grave gentleness, “you will sing at my At Home. Non? It will not be a great affair except for that,ma belle! but it will be our real welcome to Paris—it is what we have been looking forward to, Torialli and I; we shall not ask anyone else to sing. One does not hand apples after peaches. We may count on you then?” And Madame, hardly waiting for Pauline’s quick assent, floated off with Hester Lévi beside her into Torialli’s theatre. Nobody seemed to have any complaints left. The tiny woman with the child-like eyes had carried them away with her as if they were so many decorative flowers.
“She says she’s quite sure there’s been a mistake.” The slender girl confided to Jean whose sympathy she had divined rather than heard. “And she is going to send me a note to-night herself.”
“She is like the East,” said Lucien half to himself,“a land where there is always sunshine and warmth—and secrecy.”
“But don’t you think mystery is the most beautiful thing there is?” ventured Jean. Lucien looked at him for a moment.
“The most beautiful? Yes,” he said at last, “and the most tragic. If you want to be—I don’t say happy,mon cher, I am not guilty of the absurdity of supposing that at your age you want to be that—but if you want to be even tolerably safe—avoid mystery and stick to facts. Facts, it is true, may knock you down, but they let you pick yourself up again. When mystery knocks you down, she has, on the other hand, a little habit of keeping you there.Au revoir, mon ami. La grande Américainewants you.”
“We go in next,” said Pauline to Jean.
Half an hour later Hester Lévi came out of the theatre as impassively as she had entered it, and Jean found himself following the sweep of Pauline’s train, with a quaking heart. The theatre was empty except for the Toriallis. Madame was leaning against one of the stalls, and looking across the empty spaces with a charming, friendly smile; it was not so much a welcome as a recognition. She looked as if she had been always expecting them with pleasure and without suspense.
“There, my dear,” she said to Torialli who stood near her, “is our grand Pauline.”
Torialli came forward briskly. He by no meansrelished Pauline’s behaviour to Flaubert, and his bow to Jean was of the stiffest and shortest. Madame Torialli, however, looked at Jean with a flash of sympathy; her eyes seemed to say: “Be patient; I know you have talent; you shall soon have an opportunity of showing it.”
She was the most wholly graceful woman Jean had ever seen; it was as if she had bloomed all her life in some summer garden and had learned the secret poise of a flower and the easy hoverings of a butterfly. If she came up to a difficulty it melted away; if she looked at an embarrassment it vanished.
Torialli, on the other hand, was made of a stouter and harder substance; he was a big man with a bald head and heavy eyebrows, under which the eyes sprang, round balls of vigorous fire. He was full of feeling, irritable and impatient, easily depressed and warm-hearted. Much of his original nature and some of the real strength of his genius had been weakened by the easiness of his success. It had fallen upon him—his success—in mid-career, blunting his finest faculties and developing at a fierce rate his vanity and greed. The artist and the business instinct still struggled violently at times, but for the most part the business instinct had won.
Perhaps Madame had helped it to win. She adored artists much as Delilah adored the strength of Samson, but like Delilah she took the earliestopportunity of delivering Torialli to the Philistines.
“Now, Mademoiselle,” said Torialli, not without an undertone of malice. “We will see how the holidays have improved your voice. It ought to be as eager to get out as a well-bred hunter kept a week in the stable. We will begin, please, with the air of Herodiade, ‘Prophète bien aimé.’ Monsieur, you will conduct Mademoiselle to the piano. Gabrielle, do you remain?”
Madame Torialli smiled at Jean.
“If Pauline and Monsieur D’Ucelles permit,” she said modestly, sailing into one of the stalls. “I am not a critic, Monsieur, merely a lover!”
“There is no person so exacting as a lover!” ventured Jean in an undertone.
“What a discovery!” cried Gabrielle, and she laughed with a spontaneous infectious gaiety, in which even Torialli joined.
“Now, Gabrielle, no jokes!” he said warningly. “We are here to work.Commencez, Mademoiselle!”
Pauline rose to the occasion magnificently; she was never afraid of herself; but she had the incentive of a desire to shine more in some company than in others. She always wished to impress the Toriallis, and to-day she wished to make them feel that they had made a mistake in passing her over for Hester Lévi. Jean played faultlessly. He did not desire to shine and he had quite forgotten Torialli and Pauline, but he had not forgotten thathe was playing to a lover of music, and he played to satisfy her and please the child that had smiled at him out of Gabrielle’s eyes.
Pauline’s voice was hard, tuneless, and without emotion; it was a good organ, and it had been well trained. Like all her other acquisitions she had done the best she could with it, and for want of something better, which can never be done to anything, it yet failed to please.
To-day she took her notes with deliberate skill and threw into their rendering a dramatic force which she had never shown before; and so interweaving with her voice that it almost seemed one being, Jean gave the velvet and tenderness, the fire and magic of the music in his heart and under his flying finger-tips.
Torialli leaned back in his seat with drawn brows and seemed to be listening with his small light eyes as well as with his ears. He hardly spoke at all during the performance; once or twice he called to Pauline to repeat a phrase, but he made no comment till the end. Then he sprang from his seat, rushed across the stage, and flinging his arms round Jean, embraced him on both cheeks.
“But my dear young man! my good young man! You have music in your fingers, but it is there, I tell you, the real thing we are working for, and listening for, and trying to drag out all day long! And you kept it up, you kept it up! Yougot into her big brass voice and made it yield up gold! You must come and play for us! Gabrielle, arrange something this instant! I cannot afford to lose sight of such an excellent talent!”
Fortunately, perhaps, Pauline could not follow Torialli’s rapid French; she only understood enough of it to know that Jean had succeeded; and she knew that she herself had never sung so well before.
“I’m right glad you’re pleased,” she said to Torialli. “Monsieur D’Ucelles helped my voice a lot, I know. It’s something to have a man who knows how to play. You don’t suppose I could have sung like that if your secretary had been at the piano.”
Madame Torialli laughed. Her voice was like the deeper note of a silver bell.
“Our poor little Louis!” she said, “is not a musical genius, perhaps, but you know we couldn’t do with him so well if he was; and you will not think me conceited if I say that when I look for genius—I turn to my husband!”
Madame gave Jean a charming compensating smile; she seemed to be saying that he must excuse her for appearing not to take his part; she must do what was safe and wise, but at the same time she had, perhaps, other ideas.
Torialli moved away. When he spoke again to Jean it was in a colder tone; his enthusiasm seemed to have received a sudden check. At theback of his sharp little eyes there was a jealous, irritated look.
“I ask nothing more but that you should carry out my wishes for Mademoiselle,” he said. “It does not matter who her accompanist is if he sufficiently grasps that fact. Mademoiselle, bring out the flexibility of your voice. You do not want to throw it at people like a stone, but to caress them with it as if it were velvet. Take the airs in the last act for your next lesson. See what you can make of them.Bon jour, Mademoiselle.”
Jean might have felt a little crestfallen at the sudden change in Torialli’s manner, if his eyes had not happened to meet Madame’s. She gave him her hand as if he were an old friend.
“You have charmed my husband, Monsieur,” she said. “And I think you have surprised him. But you did not surprise me! No! that I must claim for myself. I knew when I looked at you that you were about to give us something original and rare! I need not say, then, that you have fully satisfied my expectations!”
Jean bowed politely and with shining eyes—he did not remember until afterwards that Madame Torialli had entirely overlooked her husband’s request that she should arrange with Jean to play for them.