Bella Donna Part 20

"Grand music! But it's all wrong."

"Why?"

"Wrong in its lesson."

The artist in Isaacson could not conceal a shudder.

"I don't look for a lesson; I don't want a lesson in it."

"But the composer forces it on one--a lesson of despair. Give it all up!

No use to make your effort. The Immanent Will broods over you. You must go down in the end. That music is a great lie. It's splendid, it's superb, but it's a lie."

"Shall we go out? We've got ten minutes."

They made their way to the corridor and strolled slowly up and down, pa.s.sing and repa.s.sing others who were discussing the music.

"Such music puts my back up," Nigel continued, with energy; "makes me feel I won't give in to it."

Isaacson could not help smiling.

"I can't look at Art from the moral plane."

"But surely Art often makes you think either morally or immorally.

Surely it gives you impulses which connect themselves with life, with people."

Isaacson looked at him.

"I don't deny it. But these impulses are like the shadowy spectres of the Brocken, mere outlines which presently, very soon, dissolve into the darkness. Though great music is full of form, it often creates chaos in those who hear it."

"Then that music should call up in you a chaos of despair."

"It does."

"It makes me want to fight."

"What?"

"All the evil and the sorrow of the world. I hate despair."

Isaacson glanced at him again, and noticed how strong he was looking, and how joyous.

"Scotland has done you good," he said. "You look splendid to-night."

Secretly he gave a special meaning to the ordinary expression. To-night there was a splendour in his friend which seemed to be created by an inner strength radiating outward, informing, and expressing itself in his figure and his features.

"I'm looking forward to the winter."

Isaacson thought of the note of triumph in Mrs. Chepstow's voice when she said to him, "I don't feel such things this summer." Surely Nigel now echoed that note.

An electric bell sounded. They returned to the concert-room.

They stayed till the concert was over, and then walked away down Regent Street, which was moist and dreary, full of mist and of ugly noises.

"When do you start for Egypt?" said Meyer Isaacson.

"In about ten days, I think. Do you wish you were going there?"

"I cannot possibly escape."

"But do you wish to?"

For a moment Isaacson did not answer.

"I do and I don't," he said, after the pause. "Work holds one strangely, because, if one is worth anything as a worker, its grip is on the soul.

Part of me wants to escape, often wants to escape."

He remembered a morning ride, his desire of his "own place."

"The whole of me wants to escape," Nigel replied.

He looked about him. People were seeking "pleasure" in the darkness. He saw them standing at street corners, watchfully staring lest they should miss the form of joy. Cabs containing couples rolled by, disappeared towards north and south, disappeared into the darkness.

"I want to get into the light."

"Well, there it is before us."

Isaacson pointed to the brilliant illumination of Piccadilly Circus.

"I want to get into the real light, the light of the sun, and I want every one else to get into it too."

"You carry your moral enthusiasm into all the details of your life,"

exclaimed Isaacson. "Would you carry the world to Egypt?"

Nigel took his arm.

"It seems so selfish to go alone."

"Are you going alone?"

The question was forced from Isaacson. His mind had held it all the evening, and now irresistibly expelled it into words.

Nigel's strong fingers closed more tightly on his arm.

"I don't want to go alone."

"I would far rather be alone than not have the exactly right companion--some one who could think and feel with me, and in the sort of way I feel. Any other companions.h.i.+p is destructive."

Isaacson spoke with less than his usual self-possession, and there were traces of heat in his manner.