Shadows of Ecstasy by Charles Williams Page B

violins. The gentleman in waiting, standing in the opening, made a sign with his hand, withdrew to the door, and remained standing there. The music began.
    Both the Travers loved music; it was indeed—besides events—Sir Bernard’s only emotional indulgence, and he was therefore more on his guard against it than perhaps even his alert intelligence altogether realized. Philip was not far advanced in its obedience; he, in a despised but correct phrase, “knew what he liked,” and was humbly and properly aware that “he didn’t know much about it.” He prepared to listen, and for the first few minutes was engaged in trying to recognize some of the phrases that floated to him. He seemed to have heard them before, but he couldn’t place them; they were followed by other sounds which he knew he couldn’t place. It was, he supposed, “modern music”; there was at intervals something very like a discord. But as he listened he began to lose touch with it, and to think more and more of Rosamond. There was nothing surprising in this; he very often did think of Rosamond, with or without music. But he was thinking of her in harmony with the music. A rush and ripple of sound went through him and in his brain it was not so much sound as Rosamond’s visible form, the quivering line of her exquisite side; and the violins swept up more quickly and her round full neck grew up in that beautiful dream and her chin became visible, and they slowed and sighed, and there between her welcoming arms and her breasts was a something of fullness and satisfaction which invited him, but not to her. For the music that so created her form in his imagination at the same time swept his imagination round and round her form, but its cry drove him from her. She seemed to be there; almost she moved her hands to him, the music moulded itself into her palms, but the force of it kept him from them. More clearly than ever before in his waking thoughts he saw the naked physical beauty that was Rosamond and would have drawn her to his heart, but that, darkly and deeply as never before, the energy of music which was in that beauty invited and adjured him to attend to itself alone. His blood flowed, his breath came heavily, in the growing intoxication of love, but the harmony that caused it summoned him back from its image to its power. He felt himself flowing away from Rosamond, with no less but with greater passion than he had seemed to flow towards it. His passion had reached a point of trembling stillness before, and had closed then, perhaps in a kiss or an uncertain caress, perhaps in a separation and a departure. But now it found no such sweet conclusion, and still as the sources of his strength were opened up, and the currents of masculinity released, still he, or whatever in that music was he, seemed to control and compel them into subterranean torrents towards hidden necessities within him. Flux and reflux existed at once, but he could not name the end to which the reflux turned. It should be dispelled into some purpose, but what? but what? He seemed to cry out, and he heard an answer; he heard Considine saying, “It is two hundred years since I was born, and how near am I to any kind of death?” That might well be; this strength within might well carry him on through two hundred years; time was only its measure, not its limit; its condition, not its control. “Feed; feed and live,” he heard a voice crying, and then the voice was itself but music, and the music receded, and he heard it mighty at a distance, and then less mighty but nearer, and at last, trembling all over, he realized how he was sitting, shaken and troubled, in a chair by the fireside, and how beyond the curtains the sound of the violins trembled also and died away. He looked round and met Roger’s eyes, and knew that in them also recognition was beginning slowly to return.
    Roger never much cared for music, but he had not been