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Page 55
VERA
Why?
JEAN
He said it was written in an old-fashioned style. It was curious--in his
playing he appreciated the most advanced technic, but when be came to
compose he found himself imitating the things he had admired when he was
eighteen. It had to be worked out of his mind. Well, he did it all through
again. This time he said he was only about two years behind. Tore it up
again. But now he was convinced he could succeed. And he was magnificent!
I would have shared him with the world gladly, but I knew it was best for
him to do this work. The hours this room has seen! Well, he made a few
notes, stopped a few days to take breath, and then caught the cold that
wore him out. Over there, in that drawer, are the notes, a few scraps of
paper. The rest of it--the experience of a strong life, a visioning life,
are with the mind that is dumb. Sometimes when I sit here I hear it all
played, an orchestra ... new harmonies, pure emotion.... The wonder and
then the pain of it are almost unbearable.
VERA
Ah, Jean, I begin to understand.
JEAN
Over in London there are half a dozen men and women who caught a glimpse
of Paul as he really was. In Munich there are half a dozen more. He was at
his best in a studio among friends with a congenial atmosphere. _They_
knew... but what is that?
I tell you, Vera, the only way I can explain it all is by seeing two
forces, two moralities; the morality of God and the morality of nature.
Perhaps in some people they both work together for the same end, but they
don't always.... In the sight of heaven, Paul was an apostle of harmony.
In the sight of nature, he was the seed too many on the tree, the bird
wrongly colored in the forest. I sit among these things, the fast-ebbing
beats of his memory, thinking of what he might have been for others as he
was to me, and my heart breaks. Our unhappiness? A cloud passing before
the sun--nothing more. And during this past year I have come to love him
all over again, not as mate but as mother.
VERA
Ah, Jean, with all his bad luck, he had you! Who knows what might have
happened if you had not been there?
JEAN
He had _me_? No, he never had me--he _made_ me.... And that's why I sit
all alone with the things that are Paul,--Paul, the flame that was never
lit on the altar, the sword that was never drawn from the scabbard.... We
talk together, Vera. Paul and I. We talk together, and I wait for him to
tell me what to do.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Read-Aloud Plays, by Horace Holley
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