“No miss!” shouted Mr. Mendizabal. She cast a fierce general scowl towards his promenading figure. He was another of those foreigners who care for nothing in England but practising English. Then she would fight her theory.
“Je n’ai pas tort” he thundered, standing before her with his hands in his pockets. He was taking her French for granted. In her thankfulness she sat docile before a torrent of words taking in nothing of their meaning, throwing out provisional phrases according to his tone of question or assertion. The Baileys coming in and out of the room would see “an animated French conversation” and Sissie and Emile would forget her desperate onslaught in their admiration of the spectacle. The more she kept it glowing and emphatic and alive the further she was redeemed. She gave no glance their way. Dinner must be almost ready. Soon she would have to go. The gong would tell her. Till then she could remain immersed in the tide of words. The little man was earnest and enraged. He used his French easily and fluently. It was not wonderful to him suddenly to become French, to feel the things he expressed change, become clear neat patterns, lose some of their meaning, fall open to attack; the pain of the failure of words so set out, was made bearable by the wonder of the journey from speech to speech. He remained himself, apparently unaware of the change of environment, or indifferent to it. … En déche what did that mean? Vous devez me voir en déche. You ought to see me en déche. That seemed to be his summing up, the basis of his denial of a cosmopolis. She attended. The only way he declared, as if recalling an earlier assertion, of proving the indifference of everyone to everyone else is to be en déche. Smiling comprehensively just before he turned on his heel and swung round, she drifted out of the room amidst the clangour of the gong … en déche … déchéance? … somehow at a disadvantage. She thought her written phrases in French. They sounded a little grandiloquent. Someone seemed to be declaiming them from a platform. He probably had not realised what she was trying to say. But he was a cosmopolitan, and he denied that there was any cosmopolis, any sympathy between races, even between individuals. He was a pessimist. With all his charm and zest he believed in nothing and nobody. And he spoke from experience. Perhaps it was only in thoughts not in life that these things existed. People talked about cosmopolis because they wanted to believe it. Had he said that?
IV
Sitting down almost the moment Mr. Mendizabal brought him into the room and playing Wagner. With many wrong notes and stumbling phrases, but self-forgetfully, in the foreign way. Keeping bravely on, making the shape come even in the most difficult parts. He was hearing the Queen’s Hall Orchestra all the time, and he knew that anyone who knew it could hear it too. He was one of those people who stand in the arena and talk about the music and know that there are piano scores and get them and play them. It was amazing that there should be piano scores of Wagner. Did he play because he wanted to remember the orchestra; without thinking of the people who were listening. He did not know the Baileys and their boarders. He could not imagine how extraordinary it was to hear Wagner in the room, suddenly offered to the Baileys. They knew something important was going on; sitting close round the piano surprised and attentive, busily speculating, in scraps, hampered by the need to appear to be listening. Afterwards they would talk to him arching and laughing, Mr. Mendizabal’s friend. Perhaps he would come and play Wagner again; there would be music in the room undisturbed by their forced attention. This was only a beginning.
At the end of the overture he sat quite still, making no movement of turning towards the room. The group about the piano were taken by surprise, waiting for him to turn. When they began making exclamations his hands were on the piano again. The room was silenced by strange little sentences of music. He played short fragments, unfamiliar things with strange phrasing, difficult to trace, unmelodious, but haunted by suggested melody; a curious flattened wandering abrupt intimate message in their phrases; perhaps Russian or Brahms. Not Wagner writing down the world in sound nor Beethoven speaking to one person. Other foreign musicians, set apart, glancing, and listening to strange single things, speaking in pain, just out of clear hearing, their speech unfinished. Russian or Hungarian. Dvor-tchak. I will ask him. Perhaps he plays Chopin.
The Baileys were growing weary of listening. They were becoming strangers in their own dining-room, with a wonderful important evening going on all round them. Miriam consulted Sissie, probing enviously for the dark busy sulkily hidden thoughts going to and fro behind her attitude of listening. Her eyes were drawing pictures of Mr. Bowdoin’s back view and noting his movements. Mrs. Bailey was still smiling her pride. Her tired eyes were strained brightly towards the performance with the proper expression of delighted appreciation. But now and again they moved observantly across the slender shabby form and revealed her circling thoughts. When she looked at the back of the thatch of soft fine fair hair she was seeing that officeful of men painting posters, the first arrival of Mr. Mendizabal, their
