‘You think I am happy,’ said Diaz, gazing at me with a smile suddenly grave; ‘but I am not. I seek something which I cannot find. And my playing is only a relief from the fruitless search; only that. I am forlorn.’

‘You!’ I exclaimed, and my eyes rested on his, long.

Yes, we had met. Perhaps it had been inevitable since the beginning of time that we should meet; but it was none the less amazing. Perhaps I had inwardly known that we should meet; but, none the less, I was astounded when a coated and muffled figure came up swiftly to me in the emptying foyer, and said: ‘Ah! you are here! I cannot leave without thanking you for your sympathy. I have never before felt such sympathy while playing.’ It was a golden voice, pitched low, and the words were uttered with a very slight foreign accent, which gave them piquancy. I could not reply; something rose in my throat, and the caressing voice continued: ‘You are pale. Do you feel ill? What can I do? Come with me to the artists’ room; my secretary is there.’ I put out a hand gropingly, for I could not see clearly, and I thought I should reel and fall. It touched his shoulder. He took my arm, and we went; no one had noticed us, and I had not spoken a word. In the room to which he guided me, through a long and sombre corridor, there was no sign of a secretary. I drank some water. ‘There, you are better!’ he cried. ‘Thank you,’ I said, but scarcely whispering. ‘How fortunate I ventured to come to you just at that moment! You might have fallen’; and he smiled again. I shook my head. I said: ‘It was your coming—that—that—made me dizzy!’ ‘I profoundly regret—’ he began. ‘No, no,’ I interrupted him; and in that instant I knew I was about to say something which society would, justifiably, deem unpardonable in a girl situated as I was. ‘I am so glad you came’; and I smiled, courageous and encouraging. For once in my life—for the first time in my adult life—I determined to be my honest self to another. ‘Your voice is exquisitely beautiful,’ he murmured. I thrilled.

Of what use to chronicle the steps, now halting, now only too hasty, by which our intimacy progressed in that gaunt and echoing room? He asked me no questions as to my identity. He just said that he would like to play to me in private if that would give me pleasure, and that possibly I could spare an hour and would go with him.... Afterwards his brougham would be at my disposal. His tone was the perfection of deferential courtesy. Once the secretary came in—a young man rather like himself—and they talked together in a foreign language that was not French nor German; then the secretary bowed and retired.... We were alone.... There can be no sort of doubt that unless I was prepared to flout the wisdom of the ages, I ought to have refused his suggestion. But is not the wisdom of the ages a medicine for majorities? And, indeed, I was prepared to flout it, as in our highest and our lowest moments we often are. Moreover, how many women in my place, confronted by that divine creature, wooed by that wondrous personality, intoxicated by that smile and that voice, allured by the appeal of those marvellous hands, would have found the strength to resist? I did not resist, I yielded; I accepted. I was already in disgrace with Aunt Constance—as well be drowned in twelve feet of water as in six!

So we drove rapidly away in the brougham, through the miry, light-reflecting streets of Hanbridge in the direction of Knype. And the raindrops ran down the windows of the brougham, and in the cushioned interior we could see each other darkly. He did his best to be at ease, and he almost succeeded. My feeling towards him, as regards the external management, the social guidance, of the affair, was as though we were at sea in a dangerous storm, and he was on the bridge and I was a mere passenger, and could take no responsibility. Who knew through what difficult channels we might not have to steer, and from what lee-shores we might not have to beat away? I saw that he perceived this. When I offered him some awkward compliment about his good English, he seized the chance of a narrative, and told me about his parentage: how his mother was Scotch, and his father Danish, and how, after his father’s death, his mother had married Emilio Diaz, a Spanish teacher of music in Edinburgh, and how he had taken, by force of early habit, the name of his stepfather. The whole world was familiar with these facts, and I was familiar with them; but their recital served our turn in the brougham, and, of course, Diaz could add touches which had escaped the Staffordshire Recorder, and perhaps all other papers. He was explaining to me that his secretary was his stepfather’s son by another wife, when we arrived at the Five Towns Hotel, opposite Knype Railway Station. I might have foreseen that that would be our destination. I hooded myself as well as I could, and followed him quickly to the first-floor. I sank down into a chair nearly breathless in his sitting-room, and he took my cloak, and then poked the bright fire that was burning. On a small table were some glasses and a decanter, and a few sandwiches. I surmised that the secretary had been before us and arranged things, and discreetly departed. My adventure appeared to me suddenly and over-poweringly in its full enormity. ‘Oh,’ I sighed, ‘if I were a man like you!’ Then it was that, gazing up at me from the fire, Diaz had said that he was not happy, that he was forlorn.

‘Yes,’ he proceeded, sitting down and crossing his legs; ‘I am profoundly dissatisfied. What is my life? Eight or nine months in the year it is a homeless life of hotels and strange faces and strange pianos. You do not know how I hate a strange piano. That one’—he pointed to a huge instrument which had evidently been placed in the room specially for him—‘is not very bad; but I made its acquaintance only yesterday, and after to-morrow I shall never see it again. I wander across the world, and everybody I meet looks at me as if I ought to be in a museum, and bids me make acquaintance with a strange piano.’

‘But have you no friends?’ I ventured.

‘Who can tell?’ he replied. ‘If I have, I scarcely ever see them.’

‘And no home?’

‘I have a home on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, and I loathe it.’

‘Why do you loathe it?’

‘Ah! For what it has witnessed—for what it has witnessed.’ He sighed. ‘Suppose we discuss something else.’

You must remember my youth, my inexperience, my lack of adroitness in social intercourse. I talked quietly and slowly, like my aunt, and I know that I had a tremendous air of sagacity and self-possession; but beneath that my brain and heart were whirling, bewildered in a delicious, dazzling haze of novel sensations. It was not I who spoke, but a new being, excessively perturbed into a consciousness of new powers. I said:

‘You say you are friendless, but I wonder how many women are dying for love of you.’

He started. There was a pause. I felt myself blushing.

‘Let me guess at your history,’ he said. ‘You have lived much alone with your thoughts, and you have read a great deal of the finest romantic poetry, and you have been silent, especially with men. You have seen little of men.’

‘But I understand them,’ I answered boldly.

‘I believe you do,’ he admitted; and he laughed. ‘So I needn’t explain to you that a thousand women dying of love for one man will not help that man to happiness, unless he is dying of love for the thousand and first.’

‘And have you never loved?’

The words came of themselves out of my mouth.

‘I have deceived myself—in my quest of sympathy,’ he said.

‘Can you be sure that, in your quest of sympathy, you are not deceiving yourself tonight?’

‘Yes,’ he cried quickly, ‘I can.’ And he sprang up and almost ran to the piano. ‘You remember the D flat Prelude?’ he said, breaking into the latter part of the air, and looking at me the while. ‘When I came to that note and caught your gaze’—he struck the B flat and held it—‘I knew that I had found sympathy. I knew it! I knew it! I knew it! Do you remember?’

‘Remember what?’

‘The way we looked at each other.’

‘Yes,’ I breathed, ‘I remember.’

‘How can I thank you? How can I thank you?’

He seemed to be meditating. His simplicity, his humility, his kindliness were more than I could bear.

‘Please do not speak like that,’ I entreated him, pained. ‘You are the greatest artist in the world, and I am nobody—nobody at all. I do not know why I am here. I cannot imagine what you have seen in me. Everything is a mystery. All I feel is that I am in your presence, and that I am not worthy to be. No matter how long I live, I shall never experience again the joy that I have now. But if you talk about thanking me, I must run away, because I cannot stand it—and—and—you haven’t played for me, and you said you would.’

He approached me, and bent his head towards mine, and I glanced up through a mist and saw his eyes and the short, curly auburn locks on his forehead.

‘The most beautiful things, and the most vital things, and the most lasting things,’ he said softly, ‘are often mysterious and inexplicable and sudden. And let me tell you that you do not know how lovely you are. You do not know the magic of your voice, nor the grace of your gestures. But time and man will teach you. What shall I play?’

He was very close to me.

‘Bach,’ I ejaculated, pointing impatiently to the piano.

I fancied that Bach would spread peace abroad in my soul.

He resumed his place at the piano, and touched the keys.

‘Another thing that makes me more sure that I am not deceiving myself to-night,’ he said, taking his fingers off the keys, but staring at the keyboard, ‘is that you have not regretted coming here. You have not called yourself a wicked woman. You have not even accused me of taking advantage of your innocence.’

And ere I could say a word he had begun the Chromatic Fantasia, smiling faintly.

And I had hoped for peace from Bach! I had often suspected that deep passion was concealed almost everywhere within the restraint and the apparent calm of Bach’s music, but the full force of it had not been shown to me till this glorious night. Diaz’ playing was tenfold more impressive, more effective, more revealing in the hotel parlour than in the great hall. The Chromatic Fantasia seemed as full of the magnificence of life as that other Fantasia which he had given an hour or so earlier. Instead of peace I had the whirlwind; instead of tranquillity a riot; instead of the poppy an alarming potion. The rendering was masterly to the extreme of masterliness.

When he had finished I rose and passed to the fireplace in silence; he did not stir.

‘Do you always play like that?’ I asked at length.

‘No,’ he said; ‘only when you are there. I have never played the Chopin Fantasia as I played it to-night. The Chopin was all right; but do not be under any illusion: what you have just heard is Bach played by a Chopin player.’

Then he left the piano and went to the small table where the glasses were.

‘You must be in need of refreshment,’ he whispered gaily. ‘Nothing is more exhausting than listening to the finest music.’

‘It is you who ought to be tired,’ I replied; ‘after that long concert, to be playing now.’

‘I have the physique of a camel,’ he said. ‘I am never tired so long as I am sure of my listeners. I would play for you till breakfast to-morrow.’

The decanter contained a fluid of a pleasant green tint. He poured very carefully this fluid to the depth of half an inch in one glass and three-quarters of an inch in another glass. Then he filled both glasses to the brim with water, accomplishing the feat with infinite pains and enjoyment, as though it had been part of a ritual.

‘There!’ he said, offering me in his steady hand the glass which had received the smaller quantity of the green fluid. ‘Taste.’

‘But what is it?’ I demanded.

‘Taste,’ he repeated, and he himself tasted.

I obeyed. At the first mouthful I thought the liquid was somewhat sinister and disagreeable, but immediately afterwards I changed my opinion, and found it ingratiating, enticing, and stimulating, and yet not strong.

‘Do you like it?’ he asked.

I nodded, and drank again.

‘It is wonderful,’ I answered. ‘What do you call it?’

‘Men call it absinthe,’ he said.

‘But—’

I put the glass on the mantelpiece and picked it up again.

‘Don’t be frightened,’ he soothed me. ‘I know what you were going to say. You have always heard that absinthe is the deadliest of all poisons, that it is the curse of Paris, and that it makes the most terrible of all drunkards. So it is; so it does. But not as we are drinking it; not as I invariably drink it.’

‘Of course,’ I said, proudly confident in him. ‘You would not have offered it to me otherwise.’

‘Of course I should not,’ he agreed. ‘I give you my word that a few drops of absinthe in a tumbler of water make the most effective and the least harmful stimulant in the world.’

‘I am sure of it,’ I said.

‘But drink slowly,’ he advised me.

I refused the sandwiches. I had no need of them. I felt sufficient unto myself. I no longer had any apprehension. My body, my brain, and my soul seemed to be at the highest pitch of efficiency. The fear of being maladroit departed from me. Ideas—delicate and subtle ideas—welled up in me one after another; I was bound to give utterance to them. I began to talk about my idol Chopin, and I explained to Diaz my esoteric interpretation of the Fantasia. He was sitting down now, but I still stood by the fire.

‘Yes, he said, ‘that is very interesting.’

‘What does the Fantasia mean to you?’ I asked him.

‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘Nothing!’

‘Nothing, in the sense you wish to convey. Everything, in another sense. You can attach any ideas you please to music, but music, if you will forgive me saying so, rejects them all equally. Art has to do with emotions, not with ideas, and the great defect of literature is that it can only express emotions by means of ideas. What makes music the greatest of all the arts is that it can express emotions without ideas. Literature can appeal to the soul only through the mind. Music goes direct. Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate. Therefore all I can say of the Fantasia is that it moves me profoundly. I know how it moves me, but I cannot tell you; I cannot even tell myself.’

Vistas of comprehension opened out before me.

‘Oh, do go on,’ I entreated him. ‘Tell me more about music. Do you not think Chopin the greatest composer that ever lived? You must do, since you always play him.’

He smiled.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I do not. For me there is no supremacy in art. When fifty artists have contrived to be supreme, supremacy becomes impossible. Take a little song by Grieg. It is perfect, it is supreme. No one could be greater than Grieg was great when he wrote that song. The whole last act of The Twilight of the Gods is not greater than a little song of Grieg’s.’

‘I see,’ I murmured humbly. ‘The Twilight of the Gods—that is Wagner, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. Don’t you know your Wagner?’

‘No. I—’

‘You don’t know Tristan?’

He jumped up, excited.

‘How could I know it?’ I expostulated. ‘I have never seen any opera. I know the marches from TannhÄuser and Lohengrin, and “O Star of Eve!”’

‘But it is impossible that you don’t know Tristan!’ he exclaimed. ‘The second act of Tristan is the greatest piece of love-music—No, it isn’t.’ He laughed. ‘I must not contradict myself. But it is marvellous—marvellous! You know the story?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Play me some of it.’

‘I will play the Prelude,’ he answered.

I gulped down the remaining drops in my glass and crossed the room to a chair where I could see his face. And he played the Prelude to the most passionately voluptuous opera ever written. It was my first real introduction to Wagner, my first glimpse of that enchanted field. I was ravished, rapt away.

‘Wagner was a great artist in spite of himself,’ said Diaz, when he had finished. ‘He assigned definite and precise ideas to all those melodies. Nothing could be more futile. I shall not label them for you. But perhaps you can guess the love-motive for yourself.’

‘Yes, I can,’ I said positively. ‘It is this.’

I tried to hum the theme, but my voice refused obedience. So I came to the piano, and played the theme high up in the treble, while Diaz was still sitting on the piano-stool. I trembled even to touch the piano in his presence; but I did it.

‘You have guessed right,’ he said; and then he asked me in a casual tone: ‘Do you ever play pianoforte duets?’

‘Often,’ I replied unsuspectingly, ‘with my aunt. We play the symphonies of Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Haydn, and overtures, and so on.’

‘Awfully good fun, isn’t it?’ he smiled.

‘Splendid!’ I said.

‘I’ve got Tristan here arranged for pianoforte duet,’ he said. ‘Tony, my secretary, enjoys playing it. You shall play part of the second act with me.’

‘Me! With you!’

‘Certainly.’

‘Impossible! I should never dare! How do you know I can play at all?’

‘You have just proved it to me,’ said he. ‘Come; you will not refuse me this!’

I wanted to leave the vicinity of the piano. I felt that, once out of the immediate circle of his tremendous physical influence, I might manage to escape the ordeal which he had suggested. But I could not go away. The silken nets of his personality had been cast, and I was enmeshed. And if I was happy, it was with a dreadful happiness.

‘But, really, I can’t play with you,’ I said weakly.

His response was merely to look up at me over his shoulder. His beautiful face was so close to mine, and it expressed such a naÏve and strong yearning for my active and intimate sympathy, and such divine frankness, and such perfect kindliness, that I had no more will to resist. I knew I should suffer horribly in spoiling by my coarse amateurishness the miraculous finesse of his performance, but I resigned myself to suffering. I felt towards him as I had felt during the concert: that he must have his way at no matter what cost, that he had already earned the infinite gratitude of the entire world—in short, I raised him in my soul to a god’s throne; and I accepted humbly the great, the incredible honour he did me. And I was right—a thousand times right.

And in the same moment he was like a charming child to me: such is always in some wise the relation between the creature born to enjoy and the creature born to suffer.

‘I’ll try,’ I said; ‘but it will be appalling.’

I laughed and shook my head.

‘We shall see how appalling it will be,’ he murmured, as he got the volume of music.

He fetched a chair for me, and we sat down side by side, he on the stool and I on the chair.

‘I’m afraid my chair is too low,’ I said.

‘And I’m sure this stool is too high,’ he said. ‘Suppose we exchange.’

So we both rose to change the positions of the chair and the stool, and our garments touched and almost our faces, and at that very moment there was a loud rap at the door.

I darted away from him.

‘What’s that?’ I cried, low in a fit of terror.

‘Who’s there?’ he called quietly; but he did not stir.

We gazed at each other.

The knock was repeated, sharply and firmly.

‘Who’s there?’ Diaz demanded again.

‘Go to the door,’ I whispered.

He hesitated, and then we heard footsteps receding down the corridor. Diaz went slowly to the door, opened it wide, slipped out into the corridor, and looked into the darkness.

‘Curious!’ he commented tranquilly. ‘I see no one.’

He came back into the room and shut the door softly, and seemed thereby to shut us in, to enclose us against the world in a sweet domesticity of our own. The fire was burning brightly, the glasses and the decanter on the small table spoke of cheer, the curtains were drawn, and through a half-open door behind the piano one had a hint of a mysterious other room; one could see nothing within it save a large brass knob or ball, which caught the light of the candle on the piano.

‘You were startled,’ he said. ‘You must have a little more of our cordial—just a spoonful.’

He poured out for me an infinitesimal quantity, and the same for himself.

I sighed with relief as I drank. My terror left me. But the trifling incident had given me the clearest perception of what I was doing, and that did not leave me.

We sat down a second time to the piano.

‘You understand,’ he explained, staring absently at the double page of music, ‘this is the garden scene. When the curtain goes up it is dark in the garden, and Isolda is there with her maid Brangaena. The king, her husband, has just gone off hunting—you will hear the horns dying in the distance—and Isolda is expecting her lover, Tristan. A torch is burning in the wall of the castle, and as soon as she gives him the signal by extinguishing it he comes to her. You will know the exact moment when they meet. Then there is the love-scene. Oh! when we arrive at that you will be astounded. You will hear the very heart-beats of the lovers. Are you ready?’

‘Yes.’

We began to play. But it was ridiculous. I knew it would be ridiculous. I was too dazed, and artistically too intimidated, to read the notes. The notes danced and pranced before me. All I could see on my page was the big black letters at the top, ‘Zweiter Aufzug.’ And furthermore, on that first page both the theme and the accompaniment were in the bass of the piano. Diaz had scarcely anything to do. I threw up my hands and closed my eyes.

‘I can’t,’ I whispered, ‘I can’t. I would if I could.’

He gently took my hand.

‘My dear companion,’ he said, ‘tell me your name.’

I was surprised. Memories of the Bible, for some inexplicable reason, flashed through my mind.

‘Magdalen,’ I replied, and my voice was so deceptively quiet and sincere that he believed it.

I could see that he was taken aback.

‘It is a holy name and a good name,’ he said, after a pause. ‘Magda, you are perfectly capable of reading this music with me, and you will read it, won’t you? Let us begin afresh. Leave the accompaniment with me, and play the theme only. Further on it gets easier.’

And in another moment we were launched on that sea so strange to me. The influence of Diaz over me was complete. Inspired by his will, I had resolved intensely to read the music correctly and sympathetically, and lo! I was succeeding! He turned the page with the incredible rapidity and dexterity of which only great pianists seem to have the secret, and in conjunction with my air in the bass he was suddenly, magically, drawing out from the upper notes the sweetest and most intoxicating melody I had ever heard. The exceeding beauty of the thing laid hold on me, and I abandoned myself to it. I felt sure now that, at any rate, I should not disgrace myself.’

‘Unless it was Chopin,’ whispered Diaz. ‘No one could ever see two things at once as well as Wagner.’

We surged on through the second page. Again the lightning turn of the page, and then the hunters’ horns were heard departing from the garden of love, receding, receding, until they subsided into a scarce-heard drone, out of which rose another air. And as the sound of the horns died away, so died away all my past and all my solicitudes for the future. I surrendered utterly and passionately to the spell of the beauty which we were opening like a long scroll. I had ceased to suffer.

The absinthe and Diaz had conjured a spirit in me which was at once feverish and calm. I was reading at sight difficult music full of modulations and of colour, and I was reading it with calm assurance of heart and brain. Deeper down the fever raged, but so separately that I might have had two individualities. Enchanted as I was by the rich and complex concourse of melodies which ascended from the piano and swam about our heads, this fluctuating tempest of sound was after all only a background for the emotions to which it gave birth in me. Naturally they were the emotions of love—the sense of the splendour of love, the headlong passion of love, the transcendent carelessness of love, the finality of love. I saw in love the sole and sacred purpose of the universe, and my heart whispered, with a new import: ‘Where love is, there is God also.’

The fever of the music increased, and with it my fever. We seemed to be approaching some mighty climax. I thought I might faint with ecstasy, but I held on, and the climax arrived—a climax which touched the limits of expression in expressing all that two souls could feel in coming together.

‘Tristan has come into the garden,’ I muttered.

And Diaz, turning his face towards me, nodded.

We plunged forward into the love-scene itself—the scene in which the miracle of love is solemnized and celebrated. I thought that of all miracles, the miracle which had occurred that night, and was even then occurring, might be counted among the most wondrous. What occult forces, what secret influences of soul on soul, what courage on his part, what sublime immodesty and unworldliness on mine had brought it about! In what dreadful disaster would it not end! ... I cared not in that marvellous hectic hour how it would end. I knew I had been blessed beyond the common lot of women. I knew that I was living more intensely and more fully than I could have hoped to live. I knew that my experience was a supreme experience, and that another such could not be contained in my life.... And Diaz was so close, so at one with me.... A hush descended on the music, and I found myself playing strange disturbing chords with the left hand, irregularly repeated, opposing the normal accent of the bar, and becoming stranger and more disturbing. And Diaz was playing an air fragmentary and poignant. The lovers were waiting; the very atmosphere of the garden was drenched with an agonizing and exquisite anticipation. The whole world stood still, expectant, while the strange chords fought gently and persistently against the rhythm.

‘Hear the beating of their hearts,’ Diaz’ whisper floated over the chords.

It was too much. The obsession of his presence, reinforced by the vibrating of his wistful, sensuous voice, overcame me suddenly. My hands fell from the keyboard. He looked at me—and with what a glance!

‘I can bear no more,’ I cried wildly. ‘It is too beautiful, too beautiful!’

And I rushed from the piano, and sat down in an easy-chair, and hid my face in my hands.

He came to me, and bent over me.

‘Magda,’ he whispered, ‘show me your face.’ With his hands he delicately persuaded my hands away from my face, and forced me to look on him. ‘How dark and splendid you are, Magda!’ he said, still holding my hands. ‘How humid and flashing your eyes! And those eyelashes, and that hair—dark, dark! And that bosom, with its rise and fall! And that low, rich voice, that is like dark wine! And that dress—dark, and full of mysterious shadows, like our souls! Magda, we must have known each other in a previous life. There can be no other explanation. And this moment is the fulfilment of that other life, which was not aroused. You were to be mine. You are mine, Magda!’

There is a fatalism in love. I felt it then. I had been called by destiny to give happiness, perhaps for a lifetime, but perhaps only for a brief instant, to this noble and glorious creature, on whom the gods had showered all gifts. Could I shrink back from my fate? And had he not already given me far more than I could ever return? The conventions of society seemed then like sand, foolishly raised to imprison the resistless tide of ocean. Nature, after all, is eternal and unchangeable, and everywhere the same. The great and solemn fact for me was that we were together, and he held me while our burning pulses throbbed in contact. He held me; he clasped me, and, despite my innocence, I knew at once that those hands were as expert to caress as to make music. I was proud and glad that he was not clumsy, that he was a master. And at that point I ceased to have volition....

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