s for his benefit.

Michael sat by himself at the concert. During the afternoon he had
talked to Stella for a few minutes, but she had seemed more than ever
immeasurably remote from conversation, and Michael had contented himself
with offering stock phrases of encouragement and exhortation. He went
early to King's Hall and sat high up in the topmost corner looking down
on the orchestra. Gradually through the bluish mist the indefinite
audience thickened, and their accumulated voices echoed less and less.
The members of the orchestra had not yet entered, but their music-stands
stood about with a ridiculous likeness to human beings. In the middle
was Stella's piano black and lifeless, a little ominous in its naked and
insistent and faintly shining ebon solemnity. One of the orchestra
threaded his way through the chairs to where the drums stood in a
bizarre group. From time to time this lonely human figure struck his
instruments to test their pitch, and the low boom sounded hollowly above
the murmurous audience.

A general accession of light took place, and now suddenly the empty
platform was filled with nonchalant men who gossiped while they made
discordant sounds upon their instruments. The conductor came in and
bowed. The audience clapped. There was a momentary hush, followed by a
sharp rat-tat of the baton, and the Third Leonora Overture began.

To Michael the music was a blur. It was soundless beside his own beating
heart, his heart that thudded on and on, on and on, while the faces of
the audience receded farther and farther through the increasing haze.
The Overture was finished. From the hall that every moment seemed to
grow darker came a sound of ghostly applause. Michael looked at his
programme in a fever. What was this unpronounceable German composition,
this Tonic Poem that must be played before Stella's turn would arrive?
It seemed to go on for ever in a most barbaric and amorphous din; with
corybantic crashings, with brazen fanfares and stinging cymbals it flung
itself against the audience, while the woodwind howled and the violins
were harsh as cats. Michael brooded unreceptive; he had a sense of
monstrous loneliness; he could think of nothing. The noise overpowered
his beating heart, and he began to count absurdly, while he bit his
nails or shivered in alternations of fire and snow. Then his programme
fluttered down on to the head of a bald violoncellist, and the ensuing
shock of self-consciousness, that w