And at dinner again he sat apart wrapped in his gloom until again Vereker was rescuing him with speech and he was responding in the withheld, disclaiming Russian way.
A Latin consciousness was, in this group, something far more remote than a Russian would have been, and she wondered what it was that behind Vereker’s unchanging manner was making his half of the bridge upon which they met. Music perhaps, if Vereker, with eyes candid and not profound and not deep-set, were musical. She caught a few words. It was the weather. Do Italians discuss the weather? Was Guerini, behind his gratitude in being rescued from isolation, wondering at the Englishman’s naivete? Vereker was not showing off his French. He was being courteous, being himself. No one, except when he could seize a chance the American, made any sort of parade. Nor was it that they made a parade of not making a parade. Talk with them was easy because it was quite naturally serene. No emphasis. No controversy. The emergence of even a small difference of opinion produced at once, on both sides, a smiling retreat. Deep in his soul the American must certainly be smiling at this baffling urbanity. English correctness and hypocrisy. Here was the original stuff from which the worldwide caricatures were made.
And talk with these people always ended in a light and lively farewell, a manner of dropping things that handed a note of credit for future meetings. A retreat, as from royalty, backwards. A retreat from the royal game of continuous courtesy.
And together with the surprise of discovering—when having departed upstairs she was drawn down to the little salon by the sound of the Chopin ballade—not the Italian but Vereker at the piano in the empty room, was the boon of his composure. Of his being and continuing to be after she had slipped into the room and reached a chair from which she could just see him in profile, so quietly engrossed. A little strung, as though still the phrases that yesterday he had so carefully recaptured might again elude him; but listening. Led on, and listening and in the hands of Chopin altogether.
Seated thus exposed he was slender, delicate, musicianly; only the line of his jaw gave him an appearance of strength; and perhaps the close cropping of his hair so that of what would have been a flamboyant mass only crisp ridges were left, close against a small skull, like Caesar’s. His spruceness and neatness made stranger than ever the strange variance between the stiff, magpie black and white of dress clothes, and the depth and colour of music.
He played the whole ballade; sketchily where the technical difficulties came thick and fast, but keeping the shape, never losing the swinging rhythm.
Its concluding phrases were dimmed by the need of finding something to say that should convey her right to say anything at all; but when the last chord stood upon the air, the performance seemed to have been a collaboration before which they now sat equally committed. And when his face came round, its smile was an acknowledgment of this.
For an instant she felt that nothing could fit but a gratefully affectionate salute and then a “How’s old So-and-So in these days?” after the manner of men of his type drifting happily about upon the surfaces of life. And when she said: “You got the whole of it this time,” it was as if the unexpressed remainder had indeed passed across to him, as if she were the newly-arrived friend whose presence somewhere upstairs had made him so radiant during dinner and afterwards sent him to pour out his happiness in the deserted little salon.
“After a fashion,” he said with the little flicker of the eyelids that was his way, from sixth-form or from undergraduate days, of sustaining for further speech the pose of his turned head and smiling face: “There’s no one like him, is there?”
“You were playing last evening just after I came. For a moment I couldn’t believe that ballade was actually here. I heard it long ago, and never since, and I’ve never been able to recall the theme.”
“I’m so glad,” he said with his little note of distress. “I’ve been trying for days to get it all back.”
For him, too, it came out of a past, and brought that past into this little Swiss room, spread it across whatever was current in his life, showed him himself unchanged. And in that past they had lived in the same world, seen and felt in the same terms the things that are there forever before life has moved. So far they were kindred. But since then she had been flung out into another world; belonged to the one in which he had gone forward only through an appreciative understanding of its code, of what it was that created its self-operating exclusiveness. He did not yet know that she stood outside the charmed circle, had been only an occasional visitor, and that now, visiting again after years of absence, she was hovering between the desire to mask and remain within it and her proper business as a Lycurgan: to make him aware of the worlds outside his own, let him see that his innocent happiness was kept going by his innocent mental oblivion.
And whilst they called up cherished names and
