第72章

Once you get hold of that principle, all other divisions and classifications, such as by race or language or nationality, seem pure foolishness.It is the only true division there is.It is just as true among negroes or wild Indians who never heard of Greece or Jerusalem, as it is among white folks.That is the beauty of it.

It works everywhere, always."

"Try it on me," urged Theron, with a twinkling eye.

"Which am I?"

"Both," said the girl, with a merry nod of the head.

"But now I'll play.I told you you were to hear Chopin.

I prescribe him for you.He is the Greekiest of the Greeks.

THERE was a nation where all the people were artists, where everybody was an intellectual aristocrat, where the Philistine was as unknown, as extinct, as the dodo.

Chopin might have written his music for them.""I am interested in Shopang," put in Theron, suddenly recalling Sister Soulsby's confidences as to the source of her tunes.

"He lived with--what's his name--George something.

We were speaking about him only this afternoon."Celia looked down into her visitor's face at first inquiringly, then with a latent grin about her lips.

"Yes--George something," she said, in a tone which mystified him.

The Rev.Mr.Ware was sitting up, a minute afterward, in a ferment of awakened consciousness that he had never heard the piano played before.After a little, he noiselessly rearranged the cushions, and settled himself again in a recumbent posture.It was beyond his strength to follow that first impulse, and keep his mind abreast with what his ears took in.He sighed and lay back, and surrendered his senses to the mere unthinking charm of it all.

It was the Fourth Prelude that was singing in the air about him--a simple, plaintive strain wandering at will over a surface of steady rhythmic movement underneath, always creeping upward through mysteries of sweetness, always sinking again in cadences of semi-tones.With only a moment's pause, there came the Seventh Waltz--a rich, bold confusion which yet was not confused.

Theron's ears dwelt with eager delight upon the chasing medley of swift, tinkling sounds, but it left his thoughts free.

From where he reclined, he turned his head to scrutinize, one by one, the statues in the corners.No doubt they were beautiful--for this was a department in which he was all humility--and one of them, the figure of a broad-browed, stately, though thick-waisted woman, bending slightly forward and with both arms broken off, was decently robed from the hips downward.The others were not robed at all.Theron stared at them with the erratic, rippling jangle of the waltz in his ears, and felt that he possessed a new and disturbing conception of what female emancipation meant in these later days.Roving along the wall, his glance rested again upon the largest of the Virgin pictures--a full-length figure in sweeping draperies, its radiant, aureoled head upturned in rapt adoration, its feet resting on a crescent moon which shone forth in bluish silver through festooned clouds of cherubs.

The incongruity between the unashamed statues and this serene incarnation of holy womanhood jarred upon him for the instant.Then his mind went to the piano.

Without a break the waltz had slowed and expanded into a passage of what might be church music, an exquisitely modulated and gently solemn chant, through which a soft, lingering song roved capriciously, forcing the listener to wonder where it was coming out, even while it caressed and soothed to repose.

He looked from the Madonna to Celia.Beyond the carelessly drooping braids and coils of hair which blazed between the candles, he could see the outline of her brow and cheek, the noble contour of her lifted chin and full, modelled throat, all pink as the most delicate rose leaf is pink, against the cool lights of the altar-like wall.

The sight convicted him in the court of his own soul as a prurient and mean-minded rustic.In the presence of such a face, of such music, there ceased to be any such thing as nudity, and statues no more needed clothes than did those slow, deep, magnificent chords which came now, gravely accumulating their spell upon him.

"It is all singing!" the player called out to him over her shoulder, in a minute of rest."That is what Chopin does--he sings!"

She began, with an effect of thinking of something else, the Sixth Nocturne, and Theron at first thought she was not playing anything in particular, so deliberately, haltingly, did the chain of charm unwind itself into sequence.

Then it came closer to him than the others had done.

The dreamy, wistful, meditative beauty of it all at once oppressed and inspired him.He saw Celia's shoulders sway under the impulse of the RUBATO license--the privilege to invest each measure with the stress of the whole, to loiter, to weep, to run and laugh at will--and the music she made spoke to him as with a human voice.

There was the wooing sense of roses and moonlight, of perfumes, white skins, alluring languorous eyes, and then--"You know this part, of course," he heard her say.

On the instant they had stepped from the dark, scented, starlit garden, where the nightingale sang, into a great cathedral.

A sombre and lofty anthem arose, and filled the place with the splendor of such dignified pomp of harmony and such suggestions of measureless choral power and authority that Theron sat abruptly up, then was drawn resistlessly to his feet.He stood motionless in the strange room, feeling most of all that one should kneel to hear such music.

"This you'll know too--the funeral march from the Second Sonata," she was saying, before he realized that the end of the other had come.He sank upon the divan again, bending forward and clasping his hands tight around his knees.

His heart beat furiously as he listened to the weird, mediaeval processional, with its wild, clashing chords held down in the bondage of an orderly sadness.

There was a propelling motion in the thing--a sense of being borne bodily along--which affected him like dizziness.