Aaron's Rod, D. H. Lawrence [book recommendations for young adults .TXT] 📗

said. “Do you find this room very cold?” she asked of Aaron.

“Not a bit cold,” he said.

“The stove goes all the time,” she said, “but without much effect.”

“You wear such thin clothes,” he said.

“Ah, no, the stove should give heat enough. Do sit down. Will you smoke? There are cigarettes—and cigars, if you prefer them.”

“No, I’ve got my own, thanks.”

She took her own cigarette from her gold case.

“It is a fine room, for music, the big room,” said he.

“Yes, quite. Would you like to play for us some time, do you think?”

“Do you want me to? I mean does it interest you?”

“What—the flute?”

“No—music altogether—”

“Music altogether—! Well! I used to love it. Now—I’m not sure. Manfredi lives for it, almost.”

“For that and nothing else?” asked Aaron.

“No, no! No, no! Other things as well.”

“But you don’t like it much any more?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps I don’t. I’m not sure.”

“You don’t look forward to the Saturday mornings?” he asked.

“Perhaps I don’t—but for Manfredi’s sake, of course, I do. But for his sake more than my own, I admit. And I think he knows it.”

“A crowd of people in one’s house—” said Aaron.

“Yes, the people. But it’s not only that. It’s the music itself—I think I can’t stand it any more. I don’t know.”

“Too emotional? Too much feeling for you?”

“Yes, perhaps. But no. What I can’t stand is chords, you know: harmonies. A number of sounds all sounding together. It just makes me ill. It makes me feel so sick.”

“What—do you want discords?—dissonances?”

“No—they are nearly as bad. No, it’s just when any number of musical notes, different notes, come together, harmonies or discords. Even a single chord struck on the piano. It makes me feel sick. I just feel as if I should retch. Isn’t it strange? Of course, I don’t tell Manfredi. It would be too cruel to him. It would cut his life in two.”

“But then why do you have the music—the Saturdays—then?”

“Oh, I just keep out of the way as much as possible. I’m sure you feel there is something wrong with me, that I take it as I do,” she added, as if anxious: but half ironical.

“No—I was just wondering—I believe I feel something the same myself. I know orchestra makes me blind with hate or I don’t know what. But I want to throw bombs.”

“There now. It does that to me, too. Only now it has fairly got me down, and I feel nothing but helpless nausea. You know, like when you are seasick.”

Her dark-blue, heavy, haunted-looking eyes were resting on him as if she hoped for something. He watched her face steadily, a curious intelligence flickering on his own.

“Yes,” he said. “I understand it. And I know, at the bottom, I’m like that. But I keep myself from realising, don’t you know? Else perhaps, where should I be? Because I make my life and my living at it, as well.”

“At music! Do you! But how bad for you. But perhaps the flute is different. I have a feeling that it is. I can think of one single pipe-note—yes, I can think of it quite, quite calmly. And I can’t even think of the piano, or of the violin with its tremolo, or of orchestra, or of a string quartette—or even a military band—I can’t think of it without a shudder. I can only bear drum-and-fife. Isn’t it crazy of me—but from the other, from what we call music proper, I’ve endured too much. But bring your flute one day. Bring it, will you? And let me hear it quite alone. Quite, quite alone. I think it might do me an awful lot of good. I do, really. I can imagine it.” She closed her eyes and her strange, sing-song lapsing voice came to an end. She spoke almost like one in a trance—or a sleep-walker.

“I’ve got it now in my overcoat pocket,” he said, “if you like.”

“Have you? Yes!” She was never hurried: always slow and resonant, so that the echoes of her voice seemed to linger. “Yes—do get it. Do get it. And play in the other room—quite—quite without accompaniment. Do—and try me.”

“And you will tell me what you feel?”

“Yes.”

Aaron went out to his overcoat. When he returned with his flute, which he was screwing together, Manfredi had come with the tray and the three cocktails. The Marchesa took her glass.

“Listen, Manfredi,” she said. “Mr. Sisson is going to play, quite alone in the sala. And I am going to sit here and listen.”

“Very well,” said Manfredi. “Drink your cocktail first. Are you going to play without music?”

“Yes,” said Aaron.

“I’ll just put on the lights for you.”

“No—leave it dark. Enough light will come in from here.”

“Sure?” said Manfredi.

“Yes.”

The little soldier was an intruder at the moment. Both the others felt it so. But they bore him no grudge. They knew it was they who were exceptional, not he. Aaron swallowed his drink, and looked towards the door.

“Sit down, Manfredi. Sit still,” said the Marchesa.

“Won’t you let me try some accompaniment?” said the soldier.

“No. I shall just play a little thing from memory,” said Aaron.

“Sit down, dear. Sit down,” said the Marchesa to her husband.

He seated himself obediently. The flash of bright yellow on the grey of his uniform seemed to make him like a chaffinch or a gnome.

Aaron retired to the other room, and waited awhile, to get back the spell which connected him with the woman, and gave the two of them this strange isolation, beyond the bounds of life, as it seemed.

He caught it again. And there, in the darkness of the big room, he put his flute to his lips, and began to play. It was a clear, sharp, lilted run-and-fall of notes, not a tune in any sense of the word, and yet a melody, a bright, quick sound of pure animation, a bright, quick, animate noise, running and pausing. It was like a bird’s singing, in that it had no human emotion or passion or intention or meaning—a ripple and poise of animate sound. But it was unlike a bird’s singing, in that the notes followed clear and single one after the other, in their subtle gallop. A nightingale is rather like that —a wild sound. To read all the human pathos into nightingales’ singing is nonsense. A wild, savage, non-human lurch and squander of sound, beautiful, but entirely unaesthetic.

What Aaron was playing was not of his own invention. It was a bit of mediaeval phrasing written for the pipe and the viol. It made the piano seem a ponderous, nerve-wracking steam-roller of noise, and the violin, as we know it, a hateful wire-drawn nerve-torturer.

After a little while, when he entered the smaller room again, the Marchesa looked full into his face.

“Good! “she said. “Good!”

And a gleam almost of happiness seemed to light her up. She seemed like one who had been kept in a horrible enchanted castle—for years and years. Oh, a horrible enchanted castle, with wet walls of emotions and ponderous chains of feelings and a ghastly atmosphere of must-be. She felt she had seen through the opening door a crack of sunshine, and thin, pure, light outside air, outside, beyond this dank and beastly dungeon of feelings and moral necessity. Ugh!—she shuddered convulsively at what had been. She looked at her little husband. Chains of necessity all round him: a little jailor. Yet she was fond of him. If only he would throw away the castle keys. He was a little gnome. What did he clutch the castle-keys so tight for?

Aaron looked at her. He knew that they understood one another, he and she. Without any moral necessity or any other necessity. Outside— they had got outside the castle of so-called human life. Outside the horrible, stinking human castle Of life. A bit of true, limpid freedom. Just a glimpse.

“Charming!” said the Marchese. “Truly charming! But what was it you played?”

Aaron told him.

“But truly delightful. I say, won’t you play for us one of these Saturdays? And won’t you let me take the accompaniment? I should be charmed, charmed if you would.”

“All right,” said Aaron.

“Do drink another cocktail,” said his hostess.

He did so. And then he rose to leave.

“Will you stay to dinner?” said the Marchesa. “We have two people coming—two Italian relatives of my husband. But—”

No, Aaron declined to stay to dinner.

“Then won’t you come on—let me see—on Wednesday? Do come on Wednesday. We are alone. And do bring the flute. Come at half-past six, as today, will you? Yes?”

Aaron promised—and then he found himself in the street. It was half- past seven. Instead of returning straight home, he crossed the Ponte Vecchio and walked straight into the crowd. The night was fine now. He had his overcoat over his arm, and in a sort of trance or frenzy, whirled away by his evening’s experience, and by the woman, he strode swiftly forward, hardly heeding anything, but rushing blindly on through all the crowd, carried away by his own feelings, as much as if he had been alone, and all these many people merely trees.

Leaving the Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele a gang of soldiers suddenly rushed round him, buffeting him in one direction, whilst another gang, swinging round the corner, threw him back helpless again into the midst of the first gang. For some moments he struggled among the rude, brutal little mob of grey-green coarse uniforms that smelt so strong of soldiers. Then, irritated, he found himself free again, shaking himself and passing on towards the cathedral. Irritated, he now put on his overcoat and buttoned it to the throat, closing himself in, as it were, from the brutal insolence of the Sunday night mob of men. Before, he had been walking through them in a rush of naked feeling, all exposed to their tender mercies. He now gathered himself together.

As he was going home, suddenly, just as he was passing the Bargello, he stopped. He stopped, and put his hand to his breast pocket. His letter-case was gone. He had been robbed. It was as if lightning ran through him at that moment, as if a fluid electricity rushed down his limbs, through the sluice of his knees, and out at his feet, leaving him standing there almost unconscious. For a moment unconscious and superconscious he stood there. He had been robbed. They had put their hand in his breast and robbed him. If they had stabbed him, it could hardly have had a greater effect on him.

And he had known it. He had known it. When the soldiers jostled him so evilly they robbed him. And he knew