Trilby | Page 4

all they said; and afterwards
made the most delightfully funny little pen-and-ink sketches of them,
saying all these beautiful things (which he sent to his mother and sister
at home); so lifelike, so real, that you could almost hear the beautiful
things they said; so beautifully drawn that you felt the old masters
couldn't have drawn them better themselves; and so irresistibly droll
that you felt that the old masters could not have drawn them at all--any
more than Milton could have described the quarrel between Sairey
Gamp and Betsy Prig; no one, in short, but Little Billee.
Little Billee took up the 'Ballad of the Bouillabaisse' where the Laird

had left it off, and speculated on the future of himself and his friends,
when he should have got to forty years--an almost impossibly remote
future.
These speculations were interrupted by a loud knock at the door, and
two men came in.
First, a tall bony individual of any age between thirty and forty- five, of
Jewish aspect, well-featured but sinister. He was very shabby and dirty,
and wore a red beret and a large velveteen cloak, with a big metal clasp
at the collar. His thick, heavy, languid, lustreless black hair fell down
behind his ears on to his shoulders, in that musician-like way that is so
offensive to the normal Englishman. He had bold, brilliant black eyes,
with long heavy lids, a thin, sallow face, and a beard of burnt-up black,
which grew almost from his under eyelids; and over it his moustache, a
shade lighter, fell in two long spiral twists. He went by the name of
Svengali, and spoke fluent French with a German accent and humorous
German twists and idioms, and his voice was very thin and mean and
harsh, and often broke into a disagreeable falsetto.
His companion was a little swarthy young man--a gypsy,
possibly---much pitted with the smallpox, and also very shabby. He had
large, soft, affectionate brown eyes, like a King Charles spaniel. He had
small, nervous, veiny hands, with nails bitten down to the quick, and
carried a fiddle and a fiddlestick under his arm, without a case, as
though he had been playing in the street.
'Ponchour, mes enfants,' said Svengali. 'Che vous amene mon ami
Checko, qui choue du fiolon comme un anche!'
Little Billee, who adored all 'sweet musicianers,' jumped up and made
Gecko as warmly welcome as he could in his early French.
'Ha! le biano!' exclaimed Svengali, flinging his red beret on it, and his
cloak on the ground. 'Ch'espere qu'il est pon, et bien t'accord!'
And sitting down on the music-stool, he ran up and down the scales
with that easy power, that smooth even crispness of touch, which reveal

the master.
Then he fell to playing Chopin's impromptu in A flat, so beautifully
that Little Billee's heart went nigh to bursting with suppressed emotion
and delight. He had never heard any music of Chopin's before, nothing
but British provincial home-made music--melodies with variations,
'Annie Laurie,' 'The Last Rose of Summer,' 'The Blue Bells of Scotland';
innocent little motherly and sisterly tinklings, invented to set the
company at their ease on festive evenings, and make all-round
conversation possible for shy people, who fear the unaccompanied
sound of their own voices, and whose genial chatter always leaves off
directly the music ceases.
He never forgot that impromptu, which he was destined to hear again
one day in strange circumstances.
Then Svengali and Gecko made music together, divinely. Little
fragmentary things, sometimes consisting of but a few bars, but these
bars of such beauty and meaning! Scraps, snatches, short melodies,
meant to fetch, to charm immediately, or to melt or sadden or madden
just for a moment, and that knew just when to leave off---czardas,
gypsy dances, Hungarian love-plaints, things little known out of eastern
Europe in the fifties of this century, till the Laird and Taffy were almost
as wild in their enthusiasm as Little Billee--a silent enthusiasm too
deep for speech. And when these two great artists left off to smoke, the
three Britishers were too much moved even for that, and there was a
stillness....
Suddenly there came a loud knuckle-rapping at the outer door, and a
portentous voice of great volume, and that might almost have belonged
to any sex (even an angel's), uttered the British milkman's yodel, 'Milk
below!' and before any one could say 'Entrez,' a strange figure appeared,
framed by the gloom of the little antechamber.
It was the figure of a very tall and fully-developed young female, clad
in the gray overcoat of a French infantry soldier, continued netherwards
by a short striped petticoat, beneath which were visible her bare white
ankles and insteps, and slim, straight, rosy heels, clean cut and smooth

as the back of a razor; her toes