Maurice Guest | Page 4

grass-laid square, until then white and
silent in the sunshine, grow dark with many figures.
The public rehearsal of the weekly concert was just over, and, from the
half light of the warm-coloured hall, which for more than two hours
had held them secluded, some hundreds of people hastened, with
renewed anticipation, towards sunlight and street sounds. There was a
medley of tongues, for many nationalities were represented in the
crowd that surged through the ground-floor and out of the glass doors,
and much noisy ado, for the majority was made up of young people, at
an age that enjoys the sound of its own voice. In black, diverging lines
they poured through the heavy swinging doors, which flapped
ceaselessly to and fro, never quite closing, always opening afresh, and
on descending the shallow steps, they told off into groups, where all
talked at once, with lively gesticulation. A few faces had the strained
look that indicates the conscientious listener; but most of these young
musicians were under the influence of a stimulant more potent than
wine, which manifested itself in a nervous garrulity and a nervous
mirth.
They hummed like bees before a hive. Maurice Guest, who had come
out among the first, lingered to watch a scene that was new to him, of

which he was as yet an onlooker only. Here and there came a member
of the orchestra; with violin-case or black-swathed wind-instrument in
hand, he deftly threaded his way through the throng, bestowing, as he
went, a hasty nod of greeting upon a colleague, a sweep of the hat on an
obsequious pupil. The crowd began to disperse and to overflow in the
surrounding streets. Some of the stragglers loitered to swell the group
that was forming round the back entrance to the building; here the
lank-haired Belgian violinist would appear, the wonders of whose
technique had sent thrills of enthusiasm through his hearers, and whose
close proximity would presently affect them in precisely the same way.
Others again made off, not for the town, with its prosaic suggestion of
work and confinement, but for the freedom of the woods that lay
beyond.
Maurice Guest followed them.
It was a blowy day in early spring. Round white masses of cloud
moved lightly across a deep blue sky, and the trees, still thin and naked,
bent their heads and shook their branches, as if to elude the gambols of
a boisterous playfellow. The sun shone vividly, with restored power,
and though the clouds sometimes passed over his very face, the
shadows only lasted for a moment, and each returning radiance seemed
brighter than the one before. In the pure breath of the wind, as it gustily
swept the earth, was a promise of things vernal, of the tender beauties
of a coming spring; but there was still a keen, delightful freshness in
the air, a vague reminder of frosty starlights and serene white snow--the
untrodden snow of deserted, moon-lit streets--that quickened the blood,
and sent a craving for movement through the veins. The people who
trod the broad, clean roads and the paths of the wood walked with a
spring in their steps; voices were light and high, and each breath that
was drawn increased the sense of buoyancy, of undiluted satisfaction.
With these bursts of golden sunshine, so other than the pallid gleamings
of the winter, came a fresh impulse to life; and the most insensible was
dimly conscious how much had to be made up for, how much lived into
such a day.
Maurice Guest walked among the mossgreen tree-trunks, each of which
vied with the other in the brilliancy of its coating. He was under the
sway of a twofold intoxication: great music and a day rich in promise.
From the flood of melody that had broken over him, the frenzied

storms of applause, he had come out, not into a lamplit darkness that
would have crushed his elation back upon him and hemmed it in, but
into the spacious lightness of a fair blue day, where all that he felt
could expand, as a flower does in the sun.
His walk brought him to a broad stream, which flashed through the
wood like a line of light. He paused on a suspension bridge, and
leaning over the railing, gazed up the river into the distance, at the
horizon and its trees, delicate and feathery in their nakedness against
the sky. Swollen with recent rains and snows, the water came hurrying
towards him--the storm-bed of the little river, which, meandering in
from the country, through pleasant woods, in ever narrowing curves,
ran through the town as a small stream, to be swelled again on the
outskirts by the waters of two other rivers, which joined it at right
angles. The bridge trembled at first, when