as mingled with a violent desire to
laugh very loudly, restored him to his normal calm. The Tonic Poem
shrieked and tore itself to death. The world became very quiet.

There was a gradual flap of rising applause, and it was Stella who, tall
and white, was being handed across the platform. It was Stella who was
sitting white and rigid at the black piano that suddenly seemed to have
shrunk into a puny insignificance. It was Stella whose fingers were
causing those rills of melody to flow. She paused, while the orchestra
took up their part, and then again the rills began to flow, gently,
fiercely, madly, sadly, wildly. Now she seemed to contend against the
mighty odds of innumerable rival instruments; now her own frail
instrument seemed to flag; now she was gaining strength; her cool clear
harmonies were subduing this welter of violins, this tempest of horns
and clarionets, this menace of bass-viols and drums. The audience was
extinguished like a candle. The orchestra seemed inspired by the angry
forces of Nature herself. The bows of the violins whitened and flickered
like willows in a storm, and yet amid this almost intolerable movement
Stella sat still as a figure of eternal stone. A faint smile curved more
sharply her lips; the black bows in her hair trembled against her white
dress; her wonderful hands went galloping away to right and left of her
straight back. Plangent as music itself, serene as sculpture, with
smiling lips magically crimson, adorably human, she finished her first
concerto. And while she bowed to the audience and to the orchestra and
the great shaggy conductor, Michael saw ridiculous teardrops bedewing
his sleeve, not because he had been moved by the music, but because he
was unable to shake by the hand every single person in King's Hall who
was now applauding his sister.

It was not until Beethoven's somber knock at the opening of the Fifth
Symphony that Michael began to dream upon the deeps of great music, that
his thoughts liberated from anxiety went straying into time. Stella,
when for a little while he had reveled in her success, was forgotten,
and the people in this hall, listening, listening, began to move him
with their unimaginable variety. Near him were lovers who in this
symphony were fast imparadised; their hands were interlaced; visibly
they swayed nearer to each other on the waves of melody. Old men were
near him, solitary old men listening, listening ... old men who at the
summons of th