So far as it took place it was of a "subtlety," as we used to say at Newmarch, in relation to which the common register of that pressure would have been, I fear, too old-fashioned a barometer.I had moreover the comfort--for it amounted to that--of perceiving after a little that we understood each other too well for our understanding really to have tolerated the interference of passion, such passion as would have been represented on his side by resentment of my intelligence and on my side by resentment of his.The high sport of such intelligence--between gentlemen, to the senses of any other than whom it must surely be closed--demanded and implied in its own intimate interest a certain amenity.Yes, accordingly, I had promptly got the answer that my wonder at his approach required: he had come to me for the high sport.He would formerly have been incapable of it, and he was beautifully capable of it now.It was precisely the kind of high sport--the play of perception, expression, sociability--in which Mrs.Server would a year or two before have borne as light a hand.I need scarcely add how little it would have found itself in that lady's present chords.He had said to me in our ten minutes everything amusing she couldn't have said.
Yet if when our host gave us the sign to adjourn to the drawing-room so much as all this had grown so much clearer, I had still, figuratively speaking, a small nut or two left to crack.By the time we moved away together, however, these resistances had yielded.The answers had really only been waiting for the questions.The play of Long's mind struck me as more marked, since the morning, by the same amount, as it might have been called, as the march of poor Briss's age; and if I had, a while before, in the wood, had my explanation of this latter addition, so I had it now of the former--as to which I shall presently give it.
When music, in English society, as we know, is not an accompaniment to the voice, the voice can in general be counted on to assert its pleasant identity as an accompaniment to music; but at Newmarch we had been considerably schooled, and this evening, in the room in which most of us had assembled, an interesting pianist, who had given a concert the night before at the near county town and been brought over during the day to dine and sleep, would scarce have felt in any sensitive fibre that he was not having his way with us.It may just possibly have been an hallucination of my own, but while we sat together after dinner in a dispersed circle I could have worked it out that, as a company, we were considerably conscious of some experience, greater or smaller from one of us to the other, that had prepared us for the player's spell.Felicitously scattered and grouped, we might in almost any case have had the air of looking for a message from it--of an imagination to be flattered, nerves to be quieted, sensibilities to be soothed.The whole scene was as composed as if there were scarce one of us but had a secret thirst for the infinite to be quenched.And it was the infinite that, for the hour, the distinguished foreigner poured out to us, causing it to roll in wonderful waves of sound, almost of colour, over our receptive attitudes and faces.Each of us, I think, now wore the expression--or confessed at least to the suggestion--of some indescribable thought; which might well, it was true, have been nothing more unmentionable than the simple sense of how the posture of deference to this noble art has always a certain personal grace to contribute.We neglected nothing of it that could make our general effect ample, and whether or no we were kept quiet by the piano, we were at least admonished, to and fro, by our mutual visibility, which each of us clearly desired to make a success.
I have little doubt, furthermore, that to each of us was due, as the crown of our inimitable day, the imputation of having something quite of our own to think over.
We thought, accordingly--we continued to think, and I felt that, by the law of the occasion, there had as yet been for everyone no such sovereign warrant for an interest in the private affairs of everyone else.As a result of this influence all that at dinner had begun to fade away from me came back with a rush and hovered there with a vividness.I followed many trains and put together many pieces; but perhaps what I most did was to render a fresh justice to the marvel of our civilised state.The perfection of that, enjoyed as we enjoyed it, all made a margin, a series of concentric circles of rose-colour (shimmering away into the pleasant vague of everything else that didn't matter,) for the so salient little figure of Mrs.Server, still the controlling image for me, the real principle of composition, in this affluence of fine things.What, for my part, while I listened, I most made out was the beauty and the terror of conditions so highly organised that under their rule her small lonely fight with disintegration could go on without the betrayal of a gasp or a shriek, and with no worse tell-tale contortion of lip or brow than the vibration, on its golden stem, of that constantly renewed flower of amenity which my observation had so often and so mercilessly detached only to find again in its place.This flower nodded perceptibly enough in our deeply stirred air, but there was a peace, none the less, in feeling the spirit of the wearer to be temporarily at rest.There was for the time no gentleman on whom she need pounce, no lapse against which she need guard, no presumption she need create, nor any suspicion she need destroy.In this pause in her career it came over me that I should have liked to leave her; it would have prepared for me the pleasant after-consciousness that I had seen her pass, as I might say, in music out of sight.
