The more she studied him the more she hoped that her guess about
Charmian had been wrong, and yet the more she studied him the better she
liked him. There was an intensity in him that captivated her intense
mind, an unworldliness that her soul approved. His lack of social
ambition, of all desire to be rich and prosperous, refreshed her. She
compared him secretly with other men of great talent. Some of them were
not greedy for money, but even they were greedy for fame, were almost
fearfully solicitous about their "position," if not their social
position then their position in the artistic world. Jealousies
accompanied them, and within them were jealousies. They had not only the
desire to build, but also the desire to pull down, to obliterate, to
make ruins and dust.
Among all the men whom she knew, Claude Heath was the only one who was
alone with his art, and who wished to remain alone with the thing he
loved. There was a purity in the situation which delighted Mrs.
Mansfield. Yet she realized that Heath was a man who might be won away
from that which was best in him, from that which he almost sternly clung
to and cherished. And one day he made her aware that he knew this.
They went to a concert together at Queen's Hall, and sat in the gallery,
in seats which Heath habitually frequented when the music given was
orchestral, when he wished to see as little as possible and to hear
perfectly. He enjoyed hearing a fine orchestra without watching the
conductor, whose necessary gestures, sometimes not free from an element
of the grotesque, hindered the sweet toil of his imagination, held him
back from worlds he desired to enter.
Between the two parts of the not long concert there was a pause. During
it Mrs. Mansfield and Claude left their seats and strolled about in the
corridor, talking. They were both of them heated by music and ready for
mental intimacy. But they did not discuss the works they had just heard.
Combinations of melody and harmony turned them toward life and humanity.
The voices of the great orchestral family called them toward the dim
avenues where in the shadows destiny wanders. Some music enlarges the
borders, sets us free in regions whose confines we cannot perceive. They
spoke of aims, of ideals, of goals which are very far off.
"Fine music gives me the conception of great distances," Mrs. Mansfield
said presently. "It makes me feel that the soul is born for travel."
Heath stood still.
"The winding white road over the hills that loses itself in the
vagueness which, in a picture, only some shade of blue can suggest. The
road! The road!"
He stood leaning against the wall. As she stood by him Mrs. Mansfield
felt strangely, almost cruelly, young. It was as if student days had
come for them both. She could hardly believe that her hair was
snow-white, and that Charmian had been going to parties for nearly four
years.
"The worst of it is," Claude continued, "that it is so hard sometimes
not to wander from it."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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