It was only her sense of honour that made her refer to this latter point, as she herself would have greatly preferred to continue, in the quiet of their own ménage, an evening so auspiciously commenced. But her hope was that Richard would, as she said to herself, ‘turn the thing down’. Whether it was the California wine, however, or a sudden craving to see his ivory goddess dance her Dionysian dance on this ‘night of all nights in the year’, he leaped eagerly to meet the suggestion, and at once began to hurry through the rest of the meal.
Catharine was surprised at herself over the vexation which this interruption of their little feast caused her; but she fell in gallantly with his mood and while they were washing up the things together the effort she had been making, ever since Elise first appeared, to be ‘good’ in the whole affair was rewarded by one of those rare inspirations of disinterested happiness which selfish people never know and which are by no means as frequent in the experience of the unselfish as ideal justice would demand.
Thus it happened that when, an hour later, they found themselves seated side by side in the new Stuyvesant Theater there was hardly a more excited or more carefree pair among all that holiday-thrilled Bohemian audience.
The new Stuyvesant was in every respect worthy of the great artist. It had been designed by a young acquaintance of Roger Lamb; Richard and Catharine whispered to each other a mutual recognition, as they looked round them, of the passionate theories of their dead friend now realized for the first time. The decoration was not only simple; it was austere. It was rigid and reserved in a manner suggestive of Byzantine work. There was about it something of that kind of ritualistic imagination which, perhaps erroneously, the modern world has come to name ‘archaic’.
Richard could not help becoming conscious that here, in the middle of this orgy of raw newness, there had been evoked something more suggestive of the passion of the human spirit ransacking the remote past and steering into the unborn future than anything in London or Paris. He recalled Karmakoff’s casual remark about certain affinities between Russia and America; and he whispered to Catharine that Roger Lamb’s idea of a revival of real mythology, of something that was both adventurous and religious, was actually present in what they looked at now.
The dancer’s inevitable black curtains were there; but they were there for the first time as an organic portion of a setting that might have been designed for some ancient classic ritual, some real worship of the Platonic idea of beauty, envisaged as a palpable presence. What the new Stuyvesant represented was preeminently an achievement of youth, of youth coming sternly and resolutely into its own, after the deadly disillusionments of the recent war. The actual fabric of the building itself — its contours, its curves, its nobly designed blank spaces — was all part of a musical rhythm which only reached its consummation when Elise began to dance.
It seemed to both Richard and Catharine that Elise had acquired yet more subtle art since they had last seen her. Her first dance was one to a certain musical fantasy written by a little-known Russian composer who was at that moment coming into fame in Revolutionary Moscow. Richard recognized Karmakoff’s influence over the dancer in this choice; and he recognized it without the least touch of jealousy.
There was indeed something about this whole Christmas Eve performance that lifted him as it evidently lifted the girl by his side into a region where personal and possessive instincts had no place. Richard felt ashamed of himself, of his own inadequate and chaotic work, in presence of this achievement. He felt ashamed of himself that he had allowed this thing, this great new creation, to be born without his knowledge. The quiet cynical Roger, the inscrutable Ivan, his own ivory goddess, had together produced something, through the medium of an American boy of whose very name he was ignorant, which put his whole life’s intention to shame!
While he had been trying to detach himself from life’s flood and to see the mystery in large and flowing outlines, these alien spirits had plunged into the stream and had moulded those evasive waters themselves into vast stern human shapes of exultation and grandeur.
What he recognized as he glanced over that audience of cosmopolitan enthusiasts was that here in this new world, in this turbulent city of youth, was an opportunity for the old human passion for beauty such as the earth had never before known. The crudity and rawness of the crushing materialism around that bold experiment gave it an angry and free power which the very mellowness of more civilized places tended to undermine. But what struck him most of all in that thrilling hour was the amazing anonymity of the whole thing achieved by some unknown boy out of the far west whose youthful receptiveness was that of a reed played upon by the undying spirit of dead generations.
As he watched Elise dancing to a rising crescendo of hidden music, it seemed to him as though the whole architecture of that place, with every curve and space and line and mass and colour which it contained, melted into the rhythm of her movements and became part of the Dionysian passion which she evoked. By a wonderful touch of genius, beyond all his expectations, it seemed as though the youthful architect had allowed for the very audience there, and had given it also a part to play in the resultant harmony.
He experienced the sensation, and he was certain that everyone in the theatre experienced the sensation, of taking an actual part in some passionate ritual, some ritual that was itself a very dithyramb of exultant protest against all that was base, gross, possessive and reactionary amid the forces of the world.
Thus he became more vividly conscious than ever of what he had always vaguely held; namely, that art is not something separate from life, but the premonition, reflected inhuman intelligence, of what nature is perpetually aiming at and never altogether reaching.
Elise danced a much larger variety of motifs than he had ever seen her bring together in one evening. She seemed bent on extracting something congruous to her spirit from the music of every race. Richard noted that there was one insistent mood running through the whole series on that night, a mood that was at once heathen and Christian, rebellious and sensual, yet full of a passionate faith.
In her grand finale the amazing woman certainly surpassed herself. Catharine was so wrought up that she clutched at Richard’s hand and held it tightly in her own. An electric thrill of excitement passed like a spiritual vibration through the whole of the excited house.
Richard thought in his heart, This is more than the work of Bernhardt or Eleanora Duse or Yvette Guilbert. This is on a level with Milton or Nietzsche!
When it was all over and the great audience rose to its feet with one wild cry of applause Richard and Catharine raised their hands into the air and shouted, ‘Elise!’ in the same way no doubt as, at some similar festival, two platonic friends in ancient Hellas might have shouted ‘Evoé!’ Their cry seemed perfectly natural to the ardent young persons about them, and it was caught up, and echoed from every quarter of the theatre.
At length the ovation was over and the two friends, in a state of tremendous excitement, were carried out with the rest of the crowd into the street. They both felt that they could not see Elise again that night. Even to touch her hand after what she had done for them would have seemed a profanation and banality.
They hardly spoke to each other as they made their way across the centre of New York to their own Seventh Avenue subway.