Read Ebook: Broken Music by Bottome Phyllis

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Ebook has 842 lines and 49604 words, and 17 pages

ntil after the rehearsal.

"Until we have those few words there can be no rehearsal, Monsieur," she replied, still in the deadly undertone of controlled rage.

The Manager gave himself up for lost.

Within the Manager's small office, Liane addressed herself to the mirror and put an ostrich feather straight; she was never more terrible than when she was arranging her appearance.

Monsieur Picot shook his head.

Liane sat down, but she kept tapping her foot and playing with her muff during the manager's speech; at the end of it she breathed quickly.

"The consideration of Madame touches me to the heart," murmured Monsieur Picot, who detested her. Liane gave him a baleful look and swept on with her speech.

Monsieur Picot turned sulky; no man likes to hear his flattery taken for what it is worth, especially if it is worth nothing, and no Parisian manager will bear to be spoken of as old-fashioned.

Liane rose from her seat with a magnificent gesture of scorn.

Monsieur Picot wrung his hands in a confusion of rage and terror. How he would have loved it to have been the neck of the brutally indispensable woman before him! He had never dealt with any actress so insolent, so jealous, so terrifically shrewd about business! She had none of the pleasant failings of the real artist; only success, a success that reduced him, cowering and malignant, to any terms, even her own.

"No one who knows me could suppose me capable of jealousy," she said, in a disturbed voice.

The manager's eyelids fluttered; he bowed.

It is a curious thing that the more depraved and cold-hearted human beings are, the more passionately sentimental they become. Liane was incorrigibly sentimental, and Margot owed her dismissal entirely to the bunch of violets. It had been Jean's custom to present Liane with violets every day, and for Jean's sake Liane had temporarily thrust aside all the more expensive tributes which besieged her door. She drew back for a moment like a creature about to spring, then she rushed forward on to the middle of the stage.

Liane sprang to her feet.

"What does she say?" she cried. "Is she about to give us a list of her admirers? I beseech you, let us listen. It will not take long!"

"I will not stay here to be insulted," said Moncet, who had been burning to get away for the last half hour. "Mademoiselle Hauteville, allow me to suggest that you follow my example. Madame de Brances is suffering from losses; she is not herself this morning."

"Go, both of you!" said Liane, with a superb gesture of dismissal. "You are not wasted upon each other."

The manager raised his head from his hands.

"There will be no rehearsal this morning," he announced coldly. "To-night at half-past eleven, please, without fail."

Then Liane turned to Margot; she felt all the resistless hunger of the vulgar and violent to wreak their spite visibly upon their victim.

"It appears," said Liane, regarding her slowly from head to foot, "that you are to go. It will be a lesson for you, perhaps; a girl like you, with her way to make, should at least study to appear respectable."

"From Madame such a warning has special significance," said Margot quietly. She had been sick with fright through the loud scene which had followed her unfortunate message, but when she saw she was herself to bear the brunt of Liane's fury, all fear left her.

Liane drew her lips back from her shining white teeth; they looked long and savage like a wolf's.

Margot put out her hands suddenly, as if something precious which she held near her heart had been assailed. Had she then brought trouble upon Jean? Liane laughed. It was a horrible laugh; it made several people who had not particularly kind hearts feel quite uncomfortable.

As for the Manager, he was so uncomfortable, that when he dismissed Margot he gave her a hundred francs more than was due to her. Jean scolded her seriously for taking it. He said she should have had more pride; he had such an heroic way of looking at things. He did not know that when Margot had taken the money she had been thinking that she could feed him up very nicely on that without depriving her mother of anything. If he had known, he would have been more angry still.

Margot was very unhappy, because she was afraid that Jean despised her, but she did not return the hundred francs as he suggested. She preferred that Jean should despise her, than that he should go without extras for his meals. There was nothing at all heroic about Margot!

JEAN felt no delight at having given up Liane, nor more than a passing flicker of gratified self-esteem at giving up the Bank. He waited with hostile eagerness for the expostulation which he expected would follow; but when no expostulations took place, he deeply resented his immunity from interference. When you have burned your ships it is only natural that you should wish to see someone watching the flames; unfortunately for Jean, no one seemed to notice that there were any. The Director made no reply to Jean's announcement, and the Comte D'Ucelles went on preserving the sanctity of the home and disregarding the obligations of relationship, with his usual nonchalance.

Jean found himself left to conquer Paris entirely in his own way. His freedom, was limitless and he could satisfy his craving for music all day long. The only trouble was that he hated his freedom now that he had it, and he seemed to have entirely lost his craving for music.

He had made a desert, and he could not even begin to call it peace.

Liane sacrificed was Liane present, and the presence of Liane crowded out every other possibility. Everywhere Jean saw her face, not Liane's face as he had last seen it with the cruel, narrow eyes and the cutting oblivion of her stare, but Liane's face as it looked out of her picture with the strange entrancing smile, Liane's eyes as they melted into his, and all the miserable memories of his happy, passionate hours!

Jean began to discover that it was not very easy to give anyone up. He had always considered memory a pleasant faculty belonging to the old; he found now that it was a relentless spirit which pursued the flying soul even of the young. They would not let him go, those cruel hours of joy; they came back upon him pure from the clumsy touch of reality, refined by his own imagination, vivid as visions only can be vivid, in anticipation or in memory. He tried hard to reason with himself, to urge that Liane had never been as beautiful as that, never so tender, and never for a moment half so true; but passion with delirious eyes and empty hands pushed him into perilous falsehoods, and dazzled him with wild desires.

He felt incredibly bitter cravings for the sight and touch of Liane. What freedom does a dog desire who has lost its master? and what music was left in a world so empty of delight? And Liane was not only a woman, she was a life; she had dragged him from the sordid sadness of his poor room; she had given him his first taste of luxury and the natural love of living as his own class lived, hours full of beauty, and within reach of their own satisfaction.

He had lost Liane, and he had lost through Liane everything else; was it any wonder that he cursed himself for his incredible folly, kicked his piano, and looked at Margot with hostile, vindictive eyes?

In the first moment of his new life, Jean had received two disagreeable shocks. Margot's mother was one; how could he have expected Margot's mother to be like that?

Somehow or other he had fancied Margot's mother to be an older edition of Margot, a creature aged and softened by time; he was more inclined now to think that Margot was merely a younger edition of her mother, temporarily consecrated by the freshness of her youth; he was, of course, wholly unjust in both surmises. Then he was very naturally shocked and horrified at Margot's dismissal from the theatre. It was an inconceivable and disgusting incident; it looked almost as if he had caused it; it certainly put him under an obligation to the girl. The worst of it was that he saw no way at present of compensating her for the sacrifice . So that he was naturally extremely annoyed with Margot, and ready to quarrel on the first provocation.

"Do you know I have been here three days, and I have not yet given you a lesson?" he observed sternly, one wet morning on which he saw that he must practise, or else face the fact that he hadn't a career at all. Margot was ironing a tablecloth and her mother was sleeping out, with a systematic zeal which crept through the wall, an unfortunate meeting with a too generous friend the evening before.

"It takes time to settle in," ventured Margot, looking up from her ironing.

"Of course, if you do not wish for one," began Jean with great dignity.

"But I do!" cried Margot with immense eagerness and no dignity at all.

"You might, then," said Jean reproachfully "have said so before."

Margot hung her head penitently and began to fold up the tablecloth; she hadn't finished it, but she saw Jean was not in the mood to be kept waiting.

"I think you had better bring your music to my room," he said, after a pause. "We might disturb your mother."

Margot flushed. She had not expected Jean to like her mother, but she had hoped that she would not have to see quite so plainly how much he didn't.

"Very well," she said simply. She was dressed neatly and prettily, as she always was, and her hair curled over her fresh white forehead; her cheeks were a little less rosy and round, and her eyes looked larger--but this was becoming to her rather than otherwise, and it was perhaps unnecessary for Jean to compare her mentally to Liane, wholly to Margot's disadvantage.

"Mademoiselle," said Jean, with awful calm, "is this what you call your music?"

When she returned with her songs, Jean took out a cigarette and looked through them with critical eyes.

"Bah!" he exclaimed. "Haven't you anything better than these?"

Margot had, after all, some spirit; she did not like Jean's tone of contempt, and she thought he should have asked her leave to smoke. She was far more particular about such things than Liane.

"Music is not very cheap, Monsieur," she said, a little sharply. Jean shrugged his shoulders.

"Good music is, however, cheaper than bad," he said indifferently.

"Not unless you are paid to sing it," replied Margot, with admirable common sense. Common sense is a quality all women who desire to please should learn to avoid, or at least conceal; they may use it in their private judgments, but it should never be allowed to appear in their conversation. It annoyed Jean extremely.

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