Alice Lauder/Part 1/Chapter 7

THE large empty room in the hotel garden, used occasionally for concerts or dances, looked dim and shady, and as cool as any place could be on that burning afternoon. There was a grand piano at one end, a big punkah which was worked rather intermittently by the bribed but intelligent native outside, a number of dusty wooden forms, and only a narrow gleam of green leaves and white sunshine from the half-open Venetian shutter at one end of the room. One of the white-robed silent-footed natives brought in the tea-tray and placed it on the long table, and Alice made the tea and handed it to Campbell with as calm and domestic a mien as if they had been married ten years, slightly flavoured, however, by the consciousness that not a soul knew where they were—outside the room. They had some fruit, too, mangoustines and bananas, and they talked and laughed and ate together as if it were a child’s tea-party. But Campbell had something on his mind to say.

​“I know you will be vexed with me, Miss Lauder, but I do wish you would give up this stage idea. I don’t like it at all, though I’ve no right to say so.”

Alice wished very much to say something pleasant at parting, but this was a little too much to ask. She considered for a moment or two what she could say.

“Don’t think me obstinate. I know you think differently about these things, but I cannot help it—I must go on. I don’t talk much about art, like some people, and I’ve always approached it from the practical side, which makes a difference; but I do love it all the same. What should I do without it? It’s my living, in every sense—I can’t give it up.”

“But you will marry some day, perhaps.”

“Ah, perhaps; but sufficient to the day is the evil thereof.”

“Then do you think that your husband will like you to appear in public for money? Five shillings box seats, gallery eighteenpence, and that sort of thing! I hope not.”

“As far as that goes,” said Alice, with much dignity, raising her head and showing a spark of fire in her eyes, “I have acted in public—and for money—already. My father used to go round as a pianist sometimes to a travelling ​company, and I went with him, and now and then I took a small part. I must say he only did it when he was very hard up, and the companies were not very grand, and we played in all kinds of out-of-the-way halls and theatres—at little up-country diggings, and so on. But it was experience for me, and I got on very well.” She saw that this was rather a blow to her companion, and to soften it she went on talking—

“Amateurs always think that anyone can do the small parts. That’s such a mistake. The big parts are comparatively easy—they are all chalked out for you; but the little side-characters are a blank sheet, and you have to make your own sketch. However, they all said I managed it very well. So now I’ve made a beginning, you see, and I don’t think there is any way out of it.”

Campbell got up hastily and walked away to the other end of the room, where the window was open. A storm was brewing out at sea, and the wind began to rise, and rattled the big leaves of the bananas and palms in the garden, and drew out a creepy sort of rustling, like a ghostly flock of mice running over the walls, from the ropy vines and creepers that clothed the roof. He came back to Alice, who was rather sadly looking down, and playing a funereal little tune ​on the table with her teaspoon, and took her hand up as if to say good-bye.

“There’s one way out of it, Miss Lauder. Give it up, and take me instead. I haven’t very much to offer you, but it’s better than going to a miserable little theatre—And you have no one to take care of you,” he added, in a very gentle tone.

There are some moments in life—moments few and far between, but never to be forgotten in their swift, sudden thrill of mingled joy and pain—when the world does actually seem to stand still, not in a figure of speech, but in a strange reality; moments of vision when we see other skies, other constellations, and gaze on them bewildered, till, before one can say, “It lightens!” the horizon reels back again, and our old familiar earth wheels away as of old in her star-lighted voyage round the sun. Perhaps it is our own hearts that stand still, and not the solid earth-fields and the immemorial horizon, but the strangeness of the sensation could not be much more perplexing in either case.

Such a momentary experience came to Alice Lauder at these commonplace words, dividing asunder one part of her life from all that had gone before. She was pale and remained standing, silent and immovable, her blue eyes fixed ​on his with a serious, penetrating gaze. Childish and inexperienced as she was in many ways, she had all the quick perception of the artist-nature when once her thought was thoroughly aroused; and probably she read and understood all that was passing in his mind—the sudden generous impulse, the conflict of old associations and influences, even the want of real passion, better than he understood himself. For more than a moment she wavered, balanced, almost yielded. He looked so manly, so kind, with something noble in his eyes, and he would be pleased if she yielded to his wishes and threw over her own future for his. Should she throw it over? To him this appeared no sacrifice, but a great advantage offered to the untried and friendless girl. And she knew too well the wrong side of the medal—the hard experience of cares and work, and endless struggle with poverty, of small successes and depressing failures, and fond speculations in hope deferred. Even if she succeeded, as she so often promised herself, what would that success be compared with a home and a woman's happiness? . . . But Love must build his house upon a rock.

“No, Mr. Campbell,” she said at last, very softly but decidedly, withdrawing her hand from his—“it cannot be.”

​“Then you won’t give anything up? Even for my sake? I am disappointed———”

He walked away, feeling bitter and hurt, and leaned out into the garden. There was a low roll of thunder out at sea, and some big drops of rain fell like bullets here and there on the leaves. The palms in the woods shook and clattered together with a sharp metallic sound, like the clash of men in armour. The storm would be upon them directly. Alice looked at him, and her eyes slowly filled with tears. It was hard to part like this, yet she did not know how to make friends with him again. He looked very gloomy and unapproachable; it never occurred to him he had not said a word about love, and he thought she was foolishly setting her heart on this scheme of hers above everything a woman ought to prize.

She returned to the teaspoon and the “Funeral March of a Marionette,” while in her mind a passage out of a little drawing-room comedy she had once taken part in, kept repeating itself vexatiously, “If you want to make a man respect you, the best way is to refuse him.” In despair she took up her music and looked over it. She had brought down some of her songs, and on the top was a MS. copy of Mendelssohn’s 47th Psalm, arranged as a solo, as ​her father had taught her to sing it. The beautiful music in which a great artist—arrived at the highest point of success in his art, his love, and his genius, while still in the first golden radiance of his honeymoon—poured out the inextinguishable desire of the soul for something higher still, and so wonderfully translated that “divine despair” into melody, rose to her lips almost involuntarily. She played a few chords, and began the recitative in a low and nervous tone; but by degrees her voice seemed to gain new life from the music, and rose in the soprano part with all the lift and spring of a fountain starting into the sunshine:

Her higher notes were pure and spontaneous, and there was a dramatic power and intensity in her singing which she had never shown before. The depths were stirred, and her whole mind and soul seemed to seize on the music as a vital instrument to express that inexpressible “yearning for the lamps of night,” which all the poets have striven to reveal, but never so nobly and simply as in the words of the Hebrew shepherd:

​Then almost in a whisper, with a deep vibrating intensity, she repeated the beautiful cadences:

. . . .A blue quiver of lightning hovered over the room tentatively, as if searching for something hidden there; then came the hesitating snap of thunder—the stammering thunder, as the old Greek poets called it—and the storm suddenly fell upon the house with a spinning blow that made it clatter and shake to its foundations. The tropical outburst—almost explosion—of rain followed in a blinding, hissing deluge. Through all this uproar Alice heard Campbell’s step—he was coming to say good-bye. He had to bend over her almost to her ear to make himself heard:

“Good-bye again, and thank you. You have made me understand. That was beautiful, and I know now what you mean. Good-bye, and per haps some day we may meet again.”

“Auf wiedersehen!”

The door slammed, the rain swayed past in almost level showers, all the colouring of the room disappeared in the grey muffled atmosphere. Alice stood by the piano and looked out at the raving storm. It was very dim indoors, and very silent and melancholy. She was alone.