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,’
