While the Light Lasts Read Free

quickly:
    â€˜Broken glass. That’s bad luck. I wish–it hadn’t happened.’
    â€˜Don’t worry. How does it go? “Ill luck thou canst not bring where ill luck has its home.”’
    She turned once more to Wetterman. John, resuming conversation with Maisie, tried to place the quotation. He got it at last. They were the words used by Sieglinde in the Walküre when Sigmund offers to leave the house.
    He thought: ‘Did she mean–?’
    But Maisie was asking his opinion of the latestRevue. Soon he had admitted that he was fond of music.
    â€˜After dinner,’ said Maisie, ‘we’ll make Allegra play for us.’
    They all went up to the drawing-room together. Secretly, Wetterman considered it a barbarous custom. He liked the ponderous gravity of the wine passing round, the handed cigars. But perhaps it was as well tonight. He didn’t know what on earth he could find to say to young Segrave. Maisie was too bad with her whims. It wasn’t as though the fellow were good looking–really good looking–and certainly he wasn’t amusing. He was glad when Maisie asked Allegra Kerr to play. They’d get through the evening sooner. The young idiot didn’t even play Bridge.
    Allegra played well, though without the sure touch of a professional. She played modern music, Debussy and Strauss, a little Scriabin. Then she dropped into the first movement of Beethoven’s Pathétique , that expression of a grief that is infinite, a sorrow that is endless and vast as the ages, but in which from end to end breathes the spirit that will not accept defeat. In the solemnity of undying woe, it moves with the rhythm of the conqueror to its final doom.
    Towards the end she faltered, her fingers struck a discord, and she broke off abruptly. She looked across at Maisie and laughed mockingly.
    â€˜You see,’ she said. ‘They won’t let me.’
    Then, without waiting for a reply to her somewhat enigmatical remark, she plunged into a strange haunting melody, a thing of weird harmonies and curious measured rhythm, quite unlike anything Segrave had ever heard before. It was delicate as the flight of a bird, poised, hovering–suddenly, without the least warning, it turned into a mere discordant jangle of notes, and Allegra rose laughing from the piano.
    In spite of her laugh, she looked disturbed and almost frightened. She sat down by Maisie, and John heard the latter say in a low tone to her:
    â€˜You shouldn’t do it. You really shouldn’t do it.’
    â€˜What was the last thing?’ John asked eagerly.
    â€˜Something of my own.’
    She spoke sharply and curtly. Wetterman changed the subject.
    That night John Segrave dreamt again of the House.
    III
    John was unhappy. His life was irksome to him as never before. Up to now he had accepted it patiently–a disagreeable necessity, but one which left his inner freedom essentially untouched. Now all that waschanged. The outer world and the inner intermingled.
    He did not disguise to himself the reason for the change. He had fallen in love at first sight with Allegra Kerr. What was he going to do about it?
    He had been too bewildered that first night to make any plans. He had not even tried to see her again. A little later, when Maisie Wetterman asked him down to her father’s place in the country for a weekend, he went eagerly, but he was disappointed, for Allegra was not there.
    He mentioned her once, tentatively, to Maisie, and she told him that Allegra was up in Scotland paying a visit. He left it at that. He would have liked to go on talking about her, but the words seemed to stick in his throat.
    Maisie was puzzled by him that weekend. He didn’t appear to see–well, to see what was so plainly to be seen. She was a direct young woman in her methods, but directness was lost upon John. He thought her kind, but a little overpowering.
    Yet the Fates were stronger than Maisie.