II

The golden lights of late afternoon were kindled in London, warring with the smoky remnants of an April day. They shone on the wet pavements and mud-slopped streets—down Oxford Street poured the full blaze of the sunset, flamy, fogged, mysterious, crinkling into dull purples behind the Circus and the spire in Langham Place.

The Queen's Hall was emptying—crowds poured out, taxi-horns answered taxi-whistles, and the surge of the streets swept by, gathering up the units, and whirling them into the nothingness of many people. It gathered up Nigel Furlonger, and rushed him, like a bubble on a torrent, down Regent Street, with his face to the darkness of the south—lit from below by the first flash of the electric advertisements in Piccadilly Circus, from above by the first pale, useless glimmer of a star.

He walked quickly, his chin lifted, but mechanically taking his part in the general hustle, not too much in dreamland to make way, shift, pause, or plunge, as the ballet of the pavements might require. His hands were clenched in his pockets. He, perhaps alone among those hundreds, saw the timid star.

A dream was threading through his heart, knitting up the tags of longing, regret and hope that fluttered there. A definite scheme seemed now to explain the sorrow of the world. The armies of the sorrowful had received marching orders, had marched to music, had been given a nation, and a song. Nigel had heard the Eroica Symphony.

In his ears was still the bourdon of drums, the sigh of strings, the lilt of wood-wind, the restless drone of brasses. He had heard sorrow claim its charter of rights, vindicate its pleadings, fight, triumph and crown itself. He had seen the life-story of the sorrowful man, presented not as a tragedy or a humiliation, a shame to be veiled, but as a pageant, a tremendous spectacle, set to music, lighted, staged, applauded.

At first the sorrowful man was half afraid, he sought refuge and disguise in laughter, he pined for distraction and a long sleep. But each time he touched his desire, the wailings of heavenly wood-wind called him onward to holier, darker things. He had dropped the dear, dustless prize, and gone boldly on into the fire and blackness.... A thick, dark cloud swagged on the precipices of frozen mountains, frowned over deserts of snow. The sorrowful man stumbled in the dark, and his loud crying and the flurry of his seeking rose in a wail against the thudding drums of fate. Gold crept into the cloud, curling out from under it like a flame, and the sorrowful man seemed to see a human face looking down on him, and a hand that held seven stars.... "Who made the Seven Stars and Orion...." It was by the light of those stars in the Hero's hand that the sorrowful man saw, in a sudden awful wonder, that he was not alone—he marched in the ranks of a huge army. All round him, over the frozen plain, under the cloud with its lightnings, towards the blackness of the boundless void, marched the army of the sorrowful, unafraid. They marched in mail, helmeted, plated, with drawn swords. The ground shook with the thunder of their tread, the mountains quaked, the darkness smoked, the heavens heeled over, toppled and scattered before the conquering host whom the Lord had stricken—triumphant, fearless, proud, crowned and pierced....

Footsteps overtook Nigel, and he heard the greeting of a fellow student.

"You're in the clouds, old man. Who sent you there? Beethoven?"

Nigel stared.

"But the only cosmic genius is Offenbach."

"You mean the 'Orphée'?"

"Yes—and 'Hoffmann.' Life isn't a triumphal march, for all Beethoven would make it—it's comic opera, with just a pinch of the bizarre and a spice of the macabre. That's Offenbach."

Furlonger was still marching with the stricken army.

"When a man suffers," continued the student, "the gods laugh, the world laughs, and last of all—if he's a sport—the man laughs too."

"Sorrow is a triumph," said Nigel, dreamily.

"Not at all, old man—sorrow is a commonplace. The question is, what are we to make of the commonplace—a pageant or a joke? I'm not sure that Offenbach hasn't given a better answer than Beethoven."