The Finer Grain | Page 4

the opera--John alertly thought of that: the composition sung might be
Wagnerian, but no Tristram, no Iseult, no Parsifal and, no Kundry of
them all could ever show, could ever "act" to the music, as our friend

had thus the power of seeing his dear contemporaries of either sex
(armoured they so otherwise than in cheap Teutonic tinsel!) just
continuously and inscrutably sit to it.
It made, the whole thing together, an enchantment amid which he had
in truth, at a given moment, ceased to distinguish parts--so that he was
himself certainly at last soaring as high as the singer's voice and
forgetting, in a lost gaze at the splendid ceiling, everything of the
occasion but what his intelligence poured into it. This, as happened,
was a flight so sublime that by the time he had dropped his eyes again a
cluster of persons near the main door had just parted to give way to a
belated lady who slipped in, through the gap made for her, and stood
for some minutes full in his view. It was a proof of the perfect hush that
no one stirred to offer her a seat, and her entrance, in her high grace,
had yet been so noiseless that she could remain at once immensely
exposed and completely unabashed. For Berridge, once more, if the
scenic show before him so melted into the music, here precisely might
have been the heroine herself advancing to the foot-lights at her cue.
The interest deepened to a thrill, and everything, at the touch of his
recognition of this personage, absolutely the most beautiful woman
now present, fell exquisitely together and gave him what he had been
wanting from the moment of his taking in his young Englishman.
It was there, the missing connection: her arrival had on the instant
lighted it by a flash. Olympian herself, supremely, divinely Olympian,
she had arrived, could only have arrived, for the one person present of
really equal race, our young man's late converser, whose flattering
demonstration might now stand for one of the odd extravagant forms
taken by nervous impatience. This charming, this dazzling woman had
been one member of the couple disturbed, to his intimate conviction,
the autumn previous, on his being pushed by the officials, at the last
moment, into a compartment of the train that was to take him from
Cremona to Mantua--where, failing a stop, he had had to keep his place.
The other member, by whose felt but unseized identity he had been
haunted, was the unconsciously insolent form of guaranteed happiness
he had just been engaged with. The sense of the admirable intimacy
that, having taken its precautions, had not reckoned with his

irruption--this image had remained with him; to say nothing of the
interest of aspect of the associated figures, so stamped somehow with
rarity, so beautifully distinct from the common occupants of padded
corners, and yet on the subject of whom, for the romantic structure he
was immediately to raise, he had not had a scrap of evidence.
If he had imputed to them conditions it was all his own doing: it came
from his inveterate habit of abysmal imputation, the snatching of the ell
wherever the inch peeped out, without which where would have been
the tolerability of life? It didn't matter now what he had imputed--and
he always held that his expenses of imputation were, at the worst, a
compliment to those inspiring them. It only mattered that each of the
pair had been then what he really saw each now--full, that is, of the
pride of their youth and beauty and fortune and freedom, though at the
same time particularly preoccupied: preoccupied, that is, with the
affairs, and above all with the passions, of Olympus. Who had they
been, and what? Whence had they come, whither were they bound,
what tie united them, what adventure engaged, what felicity, tempered
by what peril, magnificently, dramatically attended? These had been his
questions, all so inevitable and so impertinent, at the time, and to the
exclusion of any scruples over his not postulating an inane honeymoon,
his not taking the "tie," as he should doubtless properly have done, for
the mere blest matrimonial; and he now retracted not one of them,
flushing as they did before him again with their old momentary life. To
feel his two friends renewedly in presence--friends of the fleeting hour
though they had but been, and with whom he had exchanged no sign
save the vaguest of salutes on finally relieving them of his
company--was only to be conscious that he hadn't, on the spot, done
them, so to speak, half justice, and that, for his superior entertainment,
there would be ever so much more of them to come.

II
It might already have been coming indeed,