GEORGE SHAW - The Complete Works

Lydia did not share all these dissipations. She easily procured invitations and chaperones for Alice, who wondered why so intelligent a woman would take the trouble to sit out a stupid concert, and then go home, just as the real pleasure of the evening was beginning.

One Saturday morning, at breakfast, Lydia said,

“Your late hours begin to interfere with the freshness of your complexion, Alice. I am getting a little fatigued, myself, with literary work. I will go to the Crystal Palace to-day, and wander about the gardens for a while; there is to be a concert in the afternoon for the benefit of Madame Szczymplica, whose playing you do not admire. Will you come with me?”

“Of course,” said Alice, resolutely dutiful.

“Of choice; not of course,” said Lydia. “Are you engaged for tomorrow evening?”

“Sunday? Oh, no. Besides, I consider all my engagements subject to your convenience.”

There was a pause, long enough for this assurance to fall perfectly flat. Alice bit her lip. Then Lydia said, “Do you know Mrs. Hoskyn?”

“Mrs. Hoskyn who gives Sunday evenings? Shall we go there?” said Alice, eagerly. “People often ask me whether I have been at one of them. But I don’t know her — though I have seen her. Is she nice?”

“She is a young woman who has read a great deal of art criticism, and been deeply impressed by it. She has made her house famous by bringing there all the clever people she meets, and making them so comfortable that they take care to come again. But she has not, fortunately for her, allowed her craze for art to get the better of her commonsense. She married a prosperous man of business, who probably never read anything but a newspaper since he left school; and there is probably not a happier pair in England.”

“I presume she had sense enough to know that she could not afford to choose,” said Alice, complacently. “She is very ugly.”

“Do you think so? She has many admirers, and was, I am told, engaged to Mr. Herbert, the artist, before she met Mr. Hoskyn. We shall meet Mr. Herbert there tomorrow, and a number of celebrated persons besides — his wife, Madame Szczymplica the pianiste, Owen Jack the composer, Hawkshaw the poet, Conolly the inventor, and others. The occasion will be a special one, as Herr Abendgasse, a remarkable German socialist and art critic, is to deliver a lecture on ‘The True in Art.’ Be careful, in speaking of him in society, to refer to him as a sociologist, and not as a socialist. Are you particularly anxious to hear him lecture?”

“No doubt it will be very interesting,” said Alice. “I should not like to miss the opportunity of going to Mrs. Hoskyn’s. People so often ask me whether I have been there, and whether I know this, that, and the other celebrated person, that I feel quite embarrassed by my rustic ignorance.”

“Because,” pursued Lydia, “I had intended not to go until after the lecture. Herr Abendgasse is enthusiastic and eloquent, but not original; and as I have imbibed all his ideas direct from their inventors, I do not feel called upon to listen to his exposition of them. So that, unless you are specially interested—”

“Not at all. If he is a socialist I should much rather not listen to him, particularly on Sunday evening.”

So it was arranged that they should go to Mrs. Hoskyn’s after the lecture. Meanwhile they went to Sydenham, where Alice went through the Crystal Palace with provincial curiosity, and Lydia answered her questions encyclopedically. In the afternoon there was a concert, at which a band played several long pieces of music, which Lydia seemed to enjoy, though she found fault with the performers. Alice, able to detect neither the faults in the execution nor the beauty of the music, did as she saw the others do — pretended to be pleased and applauded decorously. Madame Szczymplica, whom she expected to meet at Mrs. Hoskyn’s, appeared, and played a fantasia for pianoforte and orchestra by the famous Jack, another of Mrs. Hoskyn’s circle. There was in the programme an analysis of this composition from which Alice learned that by attentively listening to the adagio she could hear the angels singing therein. She listened as attentively as she could, but heard no angels, and was astonished when, at the conclusion of the fantasia, the audience applauded Madame Szczymplica as if she had made them hear the music of the spheres. Even Lydia seemed moved, and said,

“Strange, that she is only a woman like the rest of us, with just the same narrow bounds to her existence, and just the same prosaic cares — that she will go by train to Victoria, and from thence home in a common vehicle instead of embarking in a great shell and being drawn by swans to some enchanted island. Her playing reminds me of myself as I was when I believed in fairyland, and indeed knew little about any other land.”

“They say,” said Alice, “that her husband is very jealous, and that she leads him a terrible life.”

“THEY SAY anything that brings gifted people to the level of their own experience. Doubtless they are right. I have not met Mr. Herbert, but I have seen his pictures, which suggest that he reads everything and sees nothing; for they all represent scenes described in some poem. If one could only find an educated man who had never read a book, what a delightful companion he would be!”

When the concert was over they did not return directly to town, as Lydia wished to walk awhile in the gardens. In consequence, when they left Sydenham, they got into a Waterloo train, and so had to change at Clapham Junction. It was a fine summer evening, and Alice, though she thought that it became ladies to hide themselves from the public in waiting-rooms at railway stations, did not attempt to dissuade Lydia from walking to and fro at an unfrequented end of the platform, which terminated in a bank covered with flowers.

“To my mind,” said Lydia, “Clapham Junction is one of the prettiest places about London.”

“Indeed!” said Alice, a little maliciously. “I thought that all artistic people looked on junctions and railway lines as blots on the landscape.”

“Some of them do,” said Lydia; “but they are not the artists of our generation; and those who take up their cry are no better than parrots. If every holiday recollection of my youth, every escape from town to country, be associated with the railway, I must feel towards it otherwise than did my father, upon whose middle age it came as a monstrous iron innovation. The locomotive is one of the wonders of modern childhood. Children crowd upon a bridge to see the train pass beneath. Little boys strut along the streets puffing and whistling in imitation of the engine. All that romance, silly as it looks, becomes sacred in afterlife. Besides, when it is not underground in a foul London tunnel, a train is a beautiful thing. Its pure, white fleece of steam harmonizes with every variety of landscape. And its sound! Have you ever stood on a sea-coast skirted by a railway, and listened as the train came into hearing in the far distance? At first it can hardly be distinguished from the noise of the sea; then you recognize it by its vibration; one moment smothered in a deep cutting, and the next sent echoing from some hillside. Sometimes it runs smoothly for many minutes, and then breaks suddenly into a rhythmic clatter, always changing in distance and intensity. When it comes near, you should get into a tunnel, and stand there while it passes. I did that once, and it was like the last page of an overture by Beethoven — thunderingly impetuous. I cannot conceive how any person can hope to disparage a train by comparing it with a stage-coach; and I know something of stage-coaches — or, at least, of diligences. Their effect on the men employed about them ought to decide the superiority of steam without further argument. I have never observed an engine-driver who did not seem an exceptionally intelligent mechanic, while the very writers and artists who have preserved the memory of the coaching days for us do not appear to have taken coachmen seriously, or to have regarded them as responsible and civilized men. Abuse of the railway from a pastoral point of view is obsolete. There are millions of grown persons in England to whom the far sound of the train is as pleasantly suggestive as the piping of a blackbird. Again — is not that Lord Worthington getting out of the train? Yes, that one, at the third platform from this. He—” She stopped.