ELISE ANGEL, proclaimed this placard to the tide of traffic, ELISE ANGEL IN HER FAMOUS ATTIC DANCE.
All his dizziness disappeared in a moment and the iron wedge that had worked itself into his brain during these miserable weeks seemed pulled out by invisible hands and flung under the wheels of the crowded street.
He rushed to the theatre entrance, paid for a ticket in the second row and was led to his place by a damsel in apron and cap, whom he smiled at with a smile of a drunken man entering paradise.
The house was not particularly full that afternoon and it was not long before the performance began.
It was a vaudeville entertainment and the great dancer’s ‘turn’ was the last on the list. It was indeed nearly an hour and a half before she made her appearance, the longest hour and a half, but in one sense the very happiest, that Richard Storm had ever known. He saw and heard all that preceded her entrance as if he was in a trance.
At last she appeared, with the familiar background of plain black curtains; and out of infinite depths of obscure suffering his spirit rose up, healed and refreshed, to greet her.
She danced to some great classical rhapsody, tragic, passionate, world-destroying, world-creating; and the harmonies of the dead musician lived a life greater, more formidable, more liberating, than humanity could have dared to dream they contained. Her arms, her limbs were bare; her nobly modelled breasts, under some light fabric, outlined themselves as the breasts of some Phidian divinity.
Once more, as if all between this moment and when he had last seen her were a dark and troubled dream, she lifted for him the veil of Isis. In the power of her austere and olympian art, all the superficial impressions that had dominated him through that long summer dissolved like a cloud of vapour.
This was what he had been aiming at in his own blundering way; this was what he was born to understand! The softness of ancient lawns under immemorial trees, the passion of great winds in lonely places, the washing of sea tides under melancholy harbour walls, the retreats of beaten armies, the uprising of the multitudinous oppressed, the thunder of the wings of destroying angels, the ‘still small voice’ of the creative spirit brooding upon the foundations of new worlds — all these things rose up upon him as he watched her, all these things were in the gestures of her outspread arms, in the leap and the fall and the monumental balance of her divine white limbs.
Her physical beauty was the mere mask of the terrible power within her. Her spirit seemed to tear and rend at her beauty and mould it with a recreating fire into a sorrow, into a pity, into a passion, that flew quivering and exultant over all the years of man’s tragic wayfaring.
But her dancing was not the wild lyrical outburst of an emotion that spurned restraint. Beneath every movement, every gesture, binding the whole thing together and realizing the cry of the beginning in the finality of the silence of the close, there was the stern intellectual purpose of a mind that was consciously, deliberately, building a bridge from infinite to infinite, from mystery to mystery.
The scattered audience that watched her was largely composed of poor people, many of them unknown unrecognized artists of both sexes, mingled with a sprinkling of wealthy virtuosos, mostly young men and women.
It was to youth — that was plain enough — to the youth of these after-war days, that she came with this great new art, an art that changed former values, an art that created the taste that was destined to understand it.
And how, for one man at least who watched, white-cheeked and still as a statue in his place, the important things became the unimportant and the things that had been half forgotten became everything that mattered!
All the complicated weight of sensual sensations, of refined sensuous sensations even, which had hitherto meant so much, seemed to be torn away from him. New York had loosened them from his heart already — those insidious pleasures! New York had cut at them and prodded them, had hammered them and crushed them, with its iron engines and the howling arena of its energies. But New York had left his soul naked, helpless, flayed and bleeding.
With these divine gestures that seemed to arise out of some tremendous unseen victory over all that was in the path of the spirit, Elise Angel clothed that wounded soul of his with the garments of new flesh and blood.
She had never danced quite like this in the days when he had known her in Paris. He felt she must have endured strange tribulations while he was taking his pleasure in green pastures and beside still waters. And this new phase of her unconquerable art was the result of what she had gone through!
When it was over and the curtain fell, Richard felt like a man to whom has been manifested at last the hidden god of a lifetime of hopeless prayers.
He rose to his feet when they began applauding her and stared at her without a movement. In his eyes were tears, but they did not fall. On his lips was a cry ‘Elise! Elise!’ but he did not utter it. He only stood motionless and white as a ghost, staring at her, his whole soul one inarticulate ecstasy of gratitude. He knew, all of a sudden, that she had seen him; for the frank infantile smile of delight at the shouts that rose from every part of the house changed in the flicker of a moment to a quick agitated look of troubled concern. She must have found him sorely changed! She made an imperceptible movement towards him and gave him a direct sign of recognition. He smiled faintly in answer to this and moved at once from his place towards the theatre door.
Out in the street his dizziness came upon him again; so that it was all he could do to stagger up the little dark passage that led to the stage entrance. Here he sank down upon a flight of wooden steps and closed his eyes. He only prayed that he might not lose consciousness before she came out.
She came at last, hurriedly, anxiously and unattended.
‘Richard, Richard!’ she cried, bending over him.
He struggled to his feet and she gave him both her hands. ‘What’s happened, my dear? You are old, you are ill, you are horribly changed! What have they done to you? Didn’t you get my letters?’
He could only smile at her with perfect happiness and contentment. Then he staggered and sank down again on the wooden steps.
‘Mon Dieu! You are ill,’ she cried. ‘Oh I must get you away from here. I must get you to my rooms. Stay where you are. Don’t try to move. I’ll be back in a moment. Ah! there’s Tommy!’
A tall thin man in fashionable attire approached them from the street. ‘Tommy dear,’ she began at once in a pleading, cajoling voice, full of a vibrant plaintiveness. ‘This is the great critic Richard Storm, the friend of Richepin and Barrès. Have you got your car there? I must beg you to help me get him into it. He’s going to dine with me. The theatre was too much for him.’
The gentleman addressed as Tommy obeyed her with courtly alacrity.
Between them they supported Richard to the street and got him into the automobile. Then ‘Tommy’, after giving his chauffeur the dancer’s address, bowed to Elise and bade her goodbye. ‘I shall be here tonight,’ he said. ‘You can tell me then how your friend is.’ With a farewell wave of his hand the man was gone and Richard was alone with Elise.
She made Tommy’s servant help her to get him up the single flight of stairs that led to her luxurious apartments.
Once safely ensconced here and laid out upon the cushions of her divan she hurriedly brought him a glass of cognac.
When he had drunk this she told him to rest for a bit; leaving the door between the two rooms ajar she retired into her bedroom and changed her dress for a long loosely fitting tea-gown.