 Part 1 of Part 1st of Trilby. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Trilby by Georges du Maurier. Part 1st. Part 1. Mémie-Pinson est une blonde, une blonde que l'on connaît. Elle ne n'a qu'une robe au monde, l'ondeur irait-eut et qu'un bonnet. It was a fine, sunny, showery day in April. The big studio window was open at the top and let in a pleasant breeze from the northwest. Things were beginning to look ship-shape at last. The big piano, a semi-grand by Broadwood, had arrived from England by the little quickness, la petite vitesse, as the goose trains are called in France, and lay, freshly tuned, alongside the eastern wall. On the wall opposite was a panoply of foils, masks, and boxing gloves. A trapeze, a knotted rope, and two parallel cords, supporting each a ring, depended from a huge beam in the ceiling. The walls were of the usual dull red, relieved by plaster casts of arms and legs and hands and feet. And dantes' mask and Michelangelo's alto rilievo of Lida and the swan, and a centaur and lepid from the Elgin marbles. On none of these had the dust as yet had time to settle. There were also studies in oil from the nude, copies of Titian, Rembrandt, Velazquez, Rubens, Tintoret, Leonardo da Vinci, none of the school of Botticelli, Mantegna and Co. a firm whose merits had not as yet been revealed to the many. Along the walls at a great height ran a broad shelf, on which were other casts in plaster, terracotta, imitation bronze, a little thesis, a little Venus of Milo, a little discobulus, a little flayed man threatening high heaven, an act that seemed almost pardonable under the circumstances a lion and a boar by Barry, an anatomical figure of a horse with only one leg left and no ears, a horse's head from the pediment of the Parthenon, earless also, and the bust of Clichy, with her beautiful low brow, her sweet worn gaze, and the ineffable forward shrug of her dear shoulders that makes her bosom as a nest, a rest, a pillow, a refuge, the likeness of a thing to be loved and desired forever and sought for and wrought for and fought for by generation after generation of the sons of men. Near the stove hung a grid iron, a frying pan, a toasting fork, and a pair of bellows. In an adjoining glazed corner cupboard were plates and glasses, black-handled knives, pewter spoons, and three-pronged steel forks, a salad bowl, vinegar cruits, an oil flask, two mustard pots, English and French, and such like things, all scrupulously clean. On the floor, which had been stained and waxed at considerable cost, lay two cheetah skins and a large Persian preying rug. One half of it, however, under the trapeze and at the end farthest from the window, beyond the model throne, was covered with coarse matting that one might fence or box without slipping down and splitting oneself in two, or fall without breaking any bones. Two other windows of the usual French size and pattern with shutters to them and heavy curtains of bays opened east and west to let in dawn or sunset as the case might be, or happily keep them out. And there were alcoves, recesses, irregularities, odd little nooks and corners to be filled up as time wore on with endless personal knick-knacks, bellows, private properties, and acquisitions, things that make a place genial, home-like and good to remember and sweet to muse upon with fond regret in after years. And an immense divan spread itself in width and length and delightful thickness just beneath the big north window, the business window. A divan so immense that three well-fed, well-contented Englishmen could all lie lazily smoking their pipes on it at once, without being in each other's way, and very often did. At present one of these Englishmen, a Yorkshire man by the way, called Taffy, and also the man of blood because he was supposed to be distantly related to a baronet, was more energetically engaged. Bear-armed in his shirt and trousers, he was twirling a pair of Indian clubs round his head. His face was flushed, and he was perspiring freely and looked fierce. He was a very big young man, fair with kind but coloric blue eyes, and the muscles of his brawny arm were strong as iron bands. For three years he had borne Her Majesty's commission and had been through the Crimean Campaign without a scratch. He would have been one of the famous six hundred in the famous charge at Balaklava, but for a sprained ankle, caught playing leapfrog in the trenches, which kept him in hospital on that momentous day. So that he lost his chance of glory or the grave, and this humiliating misadventure had sickened him of soldiering for life, and he never quite got over it. Then, feeling within himself an irresistible vocation for art, he had sold out, and here he was in Paris, hard at work as we see. He was good-looking with straight features, but I regret to say that, besides his heavy plungers moustache, he wore an immense pair of drooping-orban whiskers of the kind that used to be called Piccadilly weepers and were afterwards affected by Mr. Southern in Lord Dandery. It was a fashion to do so then for such of a gilded youth as could afford the time and the hair. The bigger and fairer the whiskers, the more beautiful was thought the youth. It seems incredible in these days when even Her Majesty's household brigade go about with smooth cheeks and lips, like priests or play-actors. What's become of all the gold used to hang and brush their bosoms? Another inmate of this blissful abode, Sandy, the lad of Cockpen, as he was called, sat in similarly simple attire at his easel, painting at a life-like little picture of a Spanish toreador serenading a lady of high degree in broad daylight. He had never been to Spain, but he had a complete toreador's kit, a bargain which he had picked up for a mere song in the boulevard du temple, and he had hired the guitar. His pipe was in his mouth, reversed, for it had gone out, and the ashes were spilled all over his trousers, where holds were often burned in this way. Quite graciously, and with a pleasing scotch accent, he began to declaim, A street there is in Paris famous for which no rhyme or language yields. Rue nerve d'Ipétit chong its nimes, the new street of the little fields. And then, in his keen appreciation of the immortal stanza, he chuckled audibly with a face so blithe and merry and well-pleased that it did one good to look at him. He also had entered life by another door. His parents, good pious people in Dundee, had intended that he should be a solicitor, as his father and grandfather had been before him. And here he was in Paris famous, painting toreadores and spouting the ballad of the bouyabès, as he would often do out of sheer lightness of heart, much oftener indeed than he would say his prayers. Kneeling on the divan with his elbow on the windowsill was a third and much younger youth. The third he was little Billy. He had pulled down the green bays blind and was looking over the roofs and chimney pots of Paris and all about with all his eyes, munching the while a roll and a savoury savourloy, in which there was evidence of much garlic. He ate with great relish, for he was very hungry. He had been all the morning at Carrelle's studio, drawing from the life. Little Billy was small and slender, about 20 or 21, and had a straight white forehead veined with blue, large dark blue eyes, delicate regular features and cold black hair. He was also very graceful and well built, with very small hands and feet and much better dressed than his friends, who went out of their way to outdo the denizens of the Cartier-Latin in careless eccentricity of garb and succeeded. And in his winning and handsome face there was just a faint suggestion of some possible very remote Jewish ancestor. Just a tinge of that strong, sturdy, irrepressible, indomitable, indelible blood, which is of such priceless value in diluted homeopathic doses, like the dry white Spanish wine called Montijo, which is not meant to be taken pure, but without a judicious admixture of which no sherry can go round the world and keep its flavor intact. Or like the famous Bulldog Strain, which is not beautiful in itself, and yet just for lacking a little of the same, no greyhound can ever hope to be a champion. So at least I have been told by wine merchants and dog fanciers, the most voracious persons that can be. Fortunately for the world, and especially for ourselves, most of us have in our veins at least a minimum of that precious fluid, whether we know it or show it or not. Tempi pour les autres. As little Billy munched, he also gazed at the busy place below, the Place Saint Anatole des Arts, at the old house's opposite, some of which were being pulled down, no doubt lest they should fall of their own sweet will. In the gaps between, he would see discolored, old, cracked, dingy walls, with mysterious windows and rusty iron balconies of great antiquity, sites that set him dreaming dreams of medieval French love and wickedness and crime, bygone mysteries of Paris. One gap went right through the block and gave him a glimpse of the river, the cité and the ominous old morgue. A little to the right rose the grey towers of Notre-Dame de Paris into the checkered April sky. Indeed, the top of nearly all Paris lay before him, with a little stretch of the imagination on his part, and he gazed with a sense of novelty, an interest and a pleasure for which he could not have found any expression in mere language. Paris, Paris, Paris. The very name had always been one to conjure with. Whether he thought of it as a mere sound on the lips and in the ear, or as a magical written or printed word for the eye. And here was the thing itself at last, and he, he himself, Ipsissimus, in the very heart of it, to live there and learn there as long as he liked and make himself the great artist he longed to be. Then, his meal finished, he lit a pipe and flung himself on the divan and sighed deeply out of the over-full contentment of his heart. He felt he had never known happiness like this, never even dreamed its possibility, and yet his life had been a happy one. He was young and tender, was little Billy, he had never been to any school and was innocent of the world and its wicked ways, innocent of French especially, and the ways of Paris and its Latin quarter. He had been brought up and educated at home, had spent his boyhood in London with his mother and sister, who now lived in Devonshire on somewhat straightened means. His father, who was dead, had been a clerk in the treasury. He and his two friends, Taffy and the lad, had taken this studio together. The lad slept there in a small bedroom of the studio. Taffy had a bedroom at the Hôtel de Sain in the street of that name. Little Billy lodged at the Hôtel Cornet in the Place de l'Odion. He looked at his two friends and wondered if anyone, living or dead, had ever had such a glorious pair of chums as these. Whatever they did, whatever they said, was simply perfect in his eyes. They were his guides and philosophers as well as his chums. On the other hand, Taffy and the lad were as fond of the boy as they could be. His absolute belief in all they said and did touched them nonetheless that they were conscious of its being somewhat in excess of their desserts. His almost girlish purity of mind amused and charmed them and they did all they could to preserve it, even in the Cartier-Latin where purity is apt to go bad if it be kept too long. They loved him for his affectionate disposition, his lively and caressing ways and they admired him far more than he ever knew. For they recognized in him a quickness, a keenness, a delicacy of perception in matters of form and colour, a mysterious facility and felicity of execution, a sense of all that was sweet and beautiful in nature and a ready power of expressing it that had not been vouchsafed to them in any such generous profusion and which, as they ungrudgingly admitted to themselves and each other, amounted to true genius. And when one within the immediate circle of our intimates is gifted in this abnormal fashion, we either hate or love him for it in proportion to the greatness of his gift, according to the way we are built. So Taffy and the lad loved Little Billy, loved him very much indeed. Not but what Little Billy had his faults. For instance, he didn't interest himself very warmly in other people's pictures. He didn't seem to care for the lads' guitar playing toriador, nor for his serenaded lady. At all events, he never said anything about them, either in praise or blame. He looked at Taffy's realisms, for Taffy was a realist, in silence, and nothing tries true friendship so much as silence of this kind. But then, to make up for it, when they all three went to the louvre, he didn't seem to trouble much about Titian either, or Rembrandt or Velazquez, Rubens, Veronese or Leonardo. He looked at the people who looked at the pictures, instead of at the pictures themselves, especially at the people who copied them, the sometimes charming young lady painters, and these seemed to him even more charming than they really were. And he looked a great deal out of the louvre windows, where there was much to be seen, more Paris, for instance, Paris, of which he could never have enough. But when surfited with classical beauty, they all three went and dined together, and Taffy and the lad said beautiful things about the old masters and quarreled about them, he listened with deference and rapt attention and reverentially agreed with 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 drawn that you felt that the old masters could not have drawn them at all, any more than Milton could have described the quarrel between Seyre Gamp and Betsy Prigg, no one in short but little Billy. Little Billy took up the ballad of the bouyabaisse where the lad 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 berry and a large velveteen cloak and a big metal clasp at the collar. His thick, heavy, languid, lustrous black hair fell down behind his ears onto 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, shallow face and a beard of burnt-up black which grew almost from under his 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 a smallpox and also very shabby. He had large, soft, affectionate brown eyes like a King Charles Spaniel. He had small, nervous, veiny hens with nails bitten down to the quick and carried a fiddle and a fiddle stick under his arm without a case, as though he had been playing in the street. Little Billy, who adored all sweet musicians, jumped up and made Géko as warmly welcome as he could in his early French. Ha, le piano! exclaimed Svengali, flinging his red beret on it and his cloak on the ground. 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 revealed the master. Then he fell to playing Chopin's impromptu in A-flat, so beautifully that Little Billy'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 seizes. He never forgot that impromptu, which he was destined to hear again one day in strange circumstances. Then Svangali and Gekko 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. Chardash gypsy dances, Hungarian love planes, things little known out of Eastern Europe in the fifties of this century, till the lad and taffy were almost as wild in their enthusiasm as Little Billy, 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, and before anyone could say entrée, a strange figure appeared, framed by the gloom of the little ante-chamber. It was the figure of a very tall and fully developed young female, clad in the grey 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 lost themselves in a huge pair of male slippers, which made her drag her feet as she walked. She bore herself with easy, unembarrassed grace, like a person whose nerves and muscles are well-intuned, whose spirits are high, who has lived much in the atmosphere of French studios and feels at home in it. This strange medley of garments was surmounted by a small bare head with short, thick, wavy brown hair, and a very healthy young face, which could scarcely be called quite beautiful at first sight since the eyes were too wide apart, the mouth too large, the chin too massive, the complexion a mass of freckles. Besides, you can never tell how beautiful or how ugly a face may be till you have tried to draw it. But a small portion of her neck, down by the collarbone, which just showed itself between the unbuttoned lapels of her military coat collar, was of a delicate, privet-like whiteness that is never to be found on any French neck and very few English ones. Also, she had a very fine brow, broad and low, with thick level eyebrows, much darker than her hair. A broad, bony, high bridge to her short nose and her full, broad cheeks were beautifully modelled. She would have made a singularly handsome boy. End of part one, part first. Part two of part first of Trilby. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Trilby by Georges Dumourier. Part first. Part two. As the creature looked round at the assembled company and flashed her big white teeth at them in an all-embracing smile of uncommon width and quite irresistible sweetness, simplicity and friendly trust, one saw at a glance that she was out of the common clever, simple, humorous, honest, brave and kind and accustomed to be genially welcomed wherever she went. Then suddenly closing the door behind her, dropping her smile and looking wistful and sweet with her head on one side and her arms akimbo, you're all English now, aren't ye? she exclaimed. I heard the music and I thought I'd just come in for a bit and pass the time of day. You don't mind? Trilby, that's my name. Trilby au ferrel. She said this in English with an accent half Scotch and certain French intonations and in a voice so rich and deep and full as almost to suggest an incipient tenore robusto. And one felt instinctively that it was a real pity that her son-to-boy she would have made such a jolly one. We're delighted on the contrary, said little Billy and advanced a chair for her. But she said, oh, don't mind me, go on with the music and set herself down cross-legged on the model throne near the piano. As they still looked at her, curious and half embarrassed, the paper parcel containing food out of one of the coat pockets and exclaimed, I'll just take a bite if you don't object. I'm a model, you know, and it's just round twelve. The rest? I'm posing for Durien the sculptor on the next floor. I pose to him for the all-together. The all-together? asked little Billy. Yes, l'ensemble, you know, head, hands, and feet, everything, especially feet. That's my foot, she said, kicking off her big slipper and stretching out the limb. It's the handsomest foot in all Paris. There's only one in all Paris to match it, and here it is. And she laughed heartily like a merry peal of bells and stuck out the other. And in truth they were astonishingly beautiful feet, such as one only sees in pictures and statues a true inspiration of shape and color, all made up of delicate lengths and subtly modulated curves and noble straightness and happy little dimpled arrangements in innocent young pink and white. So that little Billy, who had the quick prehensile, aesthetic eye, and knew by the grace of heaven what the shapes and sizes and colors of almost every bit of man, woman, or child should be, and so seldom are, was quite bewildered to find that a real, bare, live human foot could be such a charming object to look at, and felt that such a base or pedestal lent quite an antique and Olympian dignity to a figure that seemed just then rather grotesque in its mixed attire of military overcoat and female petticoat and nothing else. Poor Trilby. The shape of those lovely slender feet that were neither large nor small, facsimileed in dusty pale plaster of Paris, survives on the shelves and walls of many a studio throughout the world, and many a sculptor yet unborn has yet to marvel at their strange perfection in studio's despair. For when Dame Nature takes it into her head to do her very best and bestow her minutest attention on a mere detail, as happens now and then, once in a blue moon perhaps, she makes it uphill work for poor human art to keep pace with her. It is a wondrous thing, the human foot, like the human hand, even more so perhaps, but unlike the hand with which we are so familiar, it is seldom a thing of beauty in civilized adults who go about in leather boots or shoes, so that it is hidden away in disgrace a thing to be thrust out of sight and forgotten. It can sometimes be very ugly indeed, the ugliest thing there is, even in the fairest and highest and most gifted of her sex, and then it is of an ugliness to chill and kill romance, and Scutter loves young dream and almost break the heart. And all for the sake of a high heel and a ridiculously pointed toe, mean things at the best. Conversely, when Mother Nature has taken extra pains in the building of it, and proper care or happy chance has kept it free of lamentable deformations, indurations and discolorations, all those gruesome, boot-begotten abominations which have made it so generally unpopular, the sudden sight of it, uncovered, comes as a very rare and singularly pleasing surprise to the eye that has learned how to see. Nothing else that Mother Nature has to show, not even the human face divine, has more subtle power to suggest high physical distinction, happy evolution and supreme development, the lordship of man over beast, the lordship of man over man, the lordship of woman over all. Trilby had respected Mother Nature's special gift to herself, had never worn a leather boot or shoe, had always taken as much care of her feet as many a fine lady takes of her hands. It was her one cockatry, the only real vanity she had. Gekko, his fiddle in one hand and his bow in the other, stared at her in open-mouthed admiration and delight, as she ate her sandwich of soldier's bread and fromage à la crème, quite unconcerned. When she had finished, she licked the tips of her fingers clean of cheese and produced a small tobacco pouch in another military pocket, made herself a cigarette and lit it and smoked it, inhaling the smoke in large whiffs, filling her lungs with it and sending it back through her nostrils with a look of great beatitude. Swengali played Schubert's Rosamonde and fleshed a pair of languishing black eyes at her with intent to kill. But she didn't even look his way. She looked at little Billy, at Big Taffy, at the lad, at the casts and studies, at the sky, the chimney pots over the way, the towers of Notre-Dame, just visible from where she sat. Only when he finished, she exclaimed, My eye! C'est rudement bien tapé, cette musique-là. Seulement c'est pas gay, vous savez. Comment ça s'appelle? It is called the Rosamonde of Schubert, Matemoiselle, replied Swengali. I will translate. And what's that, Rosamonde? Said she. Rosamonde was a princess of Cyprus, Matemoiselle and Cyprus is an island. Ah, and Schubert then, where's that? Schubert is not an island, Matemoiselle. Schubert was a compatriot of mine and made music and played the piano, just like me. Ah, Schubert was a monsieur then. Don't know him, never heard his name. That's a pity, Matemoiselle. He had some talent. You like this better, perhaps. And he strummed. Monsieur les étudiants s'en vont à la chaumière pour y danser le cancan, striking wrong notes and banging out a key, a hideously grotesque performance. Yes, I like that better. It's gayer, you know. Is that also composed by a compatriot of yours? Asked the lady. Heaven forbid, Matemoiselle. And the laugh was against Swingali. But the real fun of it all, if there was any, lay in the fact that she was perfectly sincere. Are you fond of music? asked little Billy. Oh, ain't I just? she replied. My father sang like a bird. He was a gentleman and a scholar, my father was. His name was Patrick Michael O'Farrell, fellow of Trinity Cambridge. He used to sing Ben Bolt. Do you know Ben Bolt? Oh, yes, I know it well, said little Billy. It's a very pretty song. I can sing it, said Miss O'Farrell. Shall I? Oh, certainly, if you will be so kind. Miss O'Farrell threw away the end of her cigarette, put her hands on her knees, as she set cross-legged on the model throne. And sticking her elbows well out, she looked up to the ceiling with a tender, sentimental smile, and sang the touching song. Oh, don't you remember sweet Alice, Ben Bolt? Sweet Alice with hair so brown? Etc. Etc. As some things are too sad and too deep for tears, so some things are too grotesque and too funny for laughter. Of such a kind was Miss O'Farrell's performance of Ben Bolt. From that capacious mouth and through that high-bridged bony nose there rode a volume of breathy sound, not loud, but so immense that it seemed to come from all round, to be reverberated from every surface in the studio. She followed more or less the shape of the tune, going up when it rose and down when it fell, but with such immense intervals between the notes as were never dreamed of in any mortal melody. It was as though she could never once have deviated into tune, never once have hit upon a true note, even by a fluke. In fact, as though she was absolutely tone deaf and without ear, although she stuck to the time correctly enough. She finished her song amid an embarrassing silence. The audience didn't quite know whether it were meant for fun or seriously. One wondered if she were not paying out Svengali for his impertinent performance of Monsieur les étudiants. If so, it was a capital piece of impromptu tit fortat, admirably acted, and a very ugly gleam yellowed the torny black of Svengali's big eyes. He was so fond of making fun of others that he particularly resented being made fun of himself, couldn't endure that anyone should ever have the laugh of him. At length, little Billy said, Thank you so much. It's a capital song. Yes, said Miss O'Farrell. It's the only song I know, unfortunately. My father used to sing it just like that when he felt jolly after hot rum and water. It used to make people cry. He used to cry over it himself. I never do. Some people think I can't sing a bit. All I can say is that I've often had to sing it six or seven times running in lots of studios. I vary it, you know. Not the words, but the tune. You must remember that I've only taken to it lately. Do you know Litov? Well, he's a great composer, and he came to Durian's the other day, and I sang Ben Bolt. And what do you think he said? Why, he said, Madame Albouni couldn't go nearly so high or so low as I did, and that her voice wasn't half so big. He gave me his word of honour. He said I breathed as natural and straight as a baby, and all I want is to get my voice a little more under control. That's what he said. Qu'est-ce qu'elle dit? asked Swengali, and she said it all over again to him in French, quite French French, of the most colloquial kind. Her accent was not that of the Comédie Française, nor yet that of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, nor yet that of the shop or the pavement. It was quaint and expressive, funny without being vulgar. Par pleu! He was right, Litolphe, said Swengali. I assure you, Mademoiselle, that I have never heard a voice that can equal yours. You have a talent quite exceptional. She blushed with pleasure, and the others thought him a beastly cad for poking fun at the poor girl in such a way, and they thought Monsieur Litolphe another. She then got up and shook the crumbs of her coat, and slipped her feet into durien slippers, saying in English, Well, I've got to go back. Life ain't all beer and skittles, and more's the pity. But what's the odds so long as you're happy? On her way out, she stopped before Taffy's picture, a chiffonniere with his lantern bending over a dust heap. For Taffy was, or thought himself, a passionate realist in those days. He has changed, and now paints nothing but King Arthur's and Guinevere's and Lancelot's and Elaine's and floating ladies of shallot. That chiffonniere's basket isn't hitched high enough, she remarked. How could he tap his pick against the rim and make the rack fall into it if it's hitched only half-way up his back? And he's got the wrong sabours and the wrong lantern. It's all wrong. Dear me, said Taffy, turning very red, You seem to know a lot about it. It's a pity you don't paint yourself. Ah, now your cross, said Miss O'Farrell. Oh, my eye! She went to the door and paused, looking round benignly. What nice teeth you've all three got. That's because you're Englishmen, I suppose, and clean them twice a day. I do too. Trilby O'Farrell, that's my name, 48 rue des pouces Cailloux. Pause pour l'ensemble quand cela m'use. Va t'en ville et fais tout ce qui concerne son état. Don't forget. Thanks all, and goodbye. En v'la une originale, c'est Sven Gali. I think she's lovely, said Little Billy, the young and tender. Oh heavens, what angels' feet! It makes me sick to think she sits for the figure. I'm sure she's quite a lady. And in five minutes or so, with the point of an old compass, he scratched in white on the dark red wall a three-quarter profile outline of Trilby's left foot, which was perhaps the more perfect poem of the two. Slight as it was, this little piece of impromptu etching, in its sense of beauty, in its quick seizing of a peculiar individuality, its subtle rendering of a strongly received impression was already the work of a master. It was Trilby's foot, and nobody else's, nor could have been. And nobody else but Little Billy could have drawn it in just that inspired way. Qu'est-ce que c'est, Benbalt? inquired Gekko, upon which Little Billy was made by Taffy to sit down to the piano and sing it. He sang it very nicely with his pleasant little throaty English baritone. It was solely in order that Little Billy should have opportunities of practising this graceful accomplishment of his for his own and his friend's delectation that the piano had been sent over from London at great cost to Taffy and the lad. It had belonged to Taffy's mother, who was dead. Before he had finished the second verse, Zvengali exclaimed, Mais c'est tout à fait chantis! Allons, Gekko, chouez-nous ça! And he put his big hands on the piano over Little Billy's, pushed him off the music stool with his great gaunt body, and, sitting on it himself, he played a masterly prelude. It was impressive to hear the complicated richness and volume of the sounds he evoked after Little Billy's gentle tinker-tink. And Gekko, cuddling lovingly his violin and closing his upturned eyes, played that simple melody as it had probably never been played before. Such passion, such pathos, such a tone, and they turned it and twisted it and went from one key to another playing into each other's hands. Zvengali taking the lead and fugued and canoned and counter-pointed and battledored and shuttle-cocked it, high and low, soft and loud, in minor, in pizzicato, and in sordino, adagio, andante, allegretto, scherzo, and exhausted all its possibilities of beauty, till their susceptible audience of three was all but crazed with delight and wonder. And the masterful Ben Bolt and his over-tender Alice and his two submissive friend and his old schoolmaster, so kind and so true, and his long-dead schoolmates and the rustic porch and the mill and the slab of granite so gray. And the dear little nook by the clear-running brook were all magnified into a strange, almost holy poetic dignity and splendour quite undreamed of by whoever wrote the words and music of that unsophisticated little song which has touched so many simple British hearts that don't know any better. And among them, once, that of the present scribe, long, long ago. Sacre-plus, il choue bien le secours, c'est Sven Gali, when they had brought this wonderful double improvisation to a climax and a close. C'est mon élève. Je le fais chanter sur son fiolon. C'est comme si c'était moi qui chantait. Ah! Si je savais pour te sous de voix, je serais le premier chanteur du monde. I cannot sing. He continued. I will translate him into English without attempting to translate his accent, which is a mere matter of judiciously transposing P's and B's and T's and D's and F's and V's and G's and K's and turning the soft French into Sh and a pretty language into an ugly one. I cannot sing myself. I cannot play the violin, but I can teach. Hein, Géco? La petite honorine. And here he leered all round with a leer that was not engaging. The world shall hear of la petite honorine some day. Hein, Géco? Listen all. This is how I teach la petite honorine. Géco, play me a little accompaniment in pizzicato. And he pulled out of his pocket a kind of little flexible flagellette of his own invention, it seems, which he screwed together and put it to his lips. And on this humble instrument, he played Ben Bolt, while Géco accompanied him, using his fiddle as a guitar, his adoring eyes fixed in reverence on his master. And it would be impossible to render in any words the deftness, the distinction, the grace, power, pathos and passion, with which this truly phenomenal artist executed the poor old Tupperny tune on his elastic penny whistle. For it was little more. Such thrilling, vibrating, piercing tenderness, now loud and full, a shrill scream of anguish, now soft as a whisper, a mere melodic breath, more human almost than the human voice itself. A perfection unattainable even by Géco, a master, on an instrument which is the acknowledged king of all. So that the tear, which had been so close to the brink of little Billy's eye while Géco was playing, now rose and trembled under his eyelid and spilled itself down his nose. And he had to dissemble and surreptitiously mop it up with his little finger as he leaned his chin on his hand and cough a little husky, unnatural cough pour se donner une contenance. He had never heard such music as this, never dreamed such music was possible. He was conscious while it lasted that he saw deeper into the beauty, the sadness of things, the very heart of them and their pathetic evenessence as with the new inner rye even into eternity itself beyond the veil. A vague cosmic vision that faded when the music was over but left an unfading reminiscence of its having been and a passionate desire to express the like some day through the plastic medium of his own beautiful art. When Sven Gali ended, he leered again on his dumpstruck audience and said, That is how I teach la bedite honorine to sing. That is how I teach Géco to play. That is how I teach the bell canto. It was lost, the bell canto, but I found it in a dream. I and nobody else, I Sven Gali, I, I, I! But that is enough of music. Let us play at something else. Let us play at this, he cried, jumping up and seizing a foil and bending it against the wall. Come along, little Billy and I will show you something more you don't know. So little Billy took off coat and waistcoat, donned mask and glove and fencing shoes and they had an assault of arms as it is nobly called in French and in which poor little Billy came off very badly. The German pole fenced wildly but well. Then it was the lads turn and he came off badly too. So then Taffy took up the foil and redeemed the honour of Great Britain as became a British hussar and a man of blood. For Taffy, by long and assiduous practice in the best school in Paris and also by virtue of his native aptitudes was a match for any metredarme in the whole French army and Sven Gali got what for. And when it was time to give up play and settle down to work others dropped in. French, English, Swiss, German, American, Greek. Curtains were drawn and shutters opened. The studio was flooded with light and the afternoon was healthily spent in athletic and gymnastic exercises till dinner time. But little Billy who had had enough of fencing and gymnastics for the day amused himself by filling up with black and white and red chalkstrokes the outline of Trilby's foot on the wall. Lest he should forget his fresh vision of it which was still to him as the thing itself. An absolute reality born of a mere glance a mere chance a happy caprice. End of part two, part first. Part three of part first of Trilby. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Trilby by Georges du Maurier. Part first. Part three. Durien came in and looked over his shoulder and exclaimed Tiens? Le pied de Trilby? Vous avez fait ça d'après nature? Non? De mémoire alors? Oui. Je vous en fais mon compliment. Vous avez eu la main heureuse. Je voudrais bien avoir fait ça à moi. C'est un petit chef d'œuvre que vous avez fait là. Tout bonnement, mon cher. Mais vous élaborez trop. De grâce, n'y touchez plus. And little Billy was pleased and touched it no more. For Durien was a great sculptor and sincerity itself. And then well, I happen to forget what sort of day this particular day turned into at about six of the clock. If it was decently fine, the most of them went off to dine at the restaurant de la Couronne kept by Père Trin in the Rue de Monsieur who gave you of his best to eat and drink for twenty Soul Parisie or one franc in the coin of the empire. Good distending soups, omelettes that were only two savoury, lentils, red and white beans, meat so dressed and sourced and seasoned that you didn't know whether it was beef or mutton, flesh, fowl or good red herring or even bad for that matter nor very greatly cared. And just the same lettuce, radishes and cheese of gruyère or brie as you got at the Trois Frères Provenceau but not the same butter. And to wash it all down generous wine in wooden brosse that stained a lovely aesthetic blue everything it was spilled over. And you hobnobbed with models, male and female, students of law and medicine, painters and sculptors, workmen and l'enchiseuse and grisette and found them very good company and most improving to your French was of the usual British kind and even to some of your menors if these were very British indeed. And the evening was innocently wound up with billiards, cards or dominos at the café du Luxembourg opposite or at the Théâtre du Luxembourg in the rue de Madame to see funny faces with screamingly droll Englishmen in them or still better at the Jardin Bullier La Closerie des Lilas to see the students dance the carcane or try and dance it yourself which is not so easy as it seems or best of all at the Théâtre de l'Odian to see some piece of the classical repertoire. Or if it were not only fine but a Saturday afternoon into the bargain the lad would put on a necktie the necessary things and the three friends would walk arm in arm to Taffy's hotel in the rue de Seine and wait outside till he had made himself as presentable as the lad which did not take very long and then a little billi was always presentable they would arm in arm the huge Taffy in the middle descend the rue de Seine and cross a bridge to the city and have a look in at the morgue then back again to the keys on the Rive Gauche by the Pau-Neuf to when their way westward now on one side to look at the print and picture shops and the magasins of Brigabrac and happily sometimes buy their off now on the other to finger and cheapen the second hand books for sale on the parapet and even pick up one or two bargains never to be read or opened again when they reached the Pond-désar they would cross it stopping in the middle to look up the river towards the old city and Notre-Dame eastward and dream unutterable things and try to utter them then turning westward they would gaze at the glowing sky and all it glowed upon the corner of the Tuileries and the Louvre the many bridges the chamber of deputies the golden river narrowing its perspective and broadening its bed as it went flowing and winding on its way between Passy and Cronelle to Saint-Clou to Rouen to the Avre to England perhaps where they didn't want to be just then and they would try and express themselves to the effect that life was uncommonly well worth living in that particular city at that particular time of the day and year and century at that particular epoch of their own mortal and uncertain lives then still arm in arm and chatting gaily across the courtyard of the Louvre through gilded gates well guarded by reckless imperial zwarves the arcade at Rue de Rivoli as far as the Rue Castillonne where they would stare with greedy eyes at the window of the great corner pastry cook and marvel at the beautiful assortment of bonbons pralines, dragees, marron glace saccharine crystalline substances of all kinds and colors as charming to look at as an illumination precious stones with sweets, pearls and diamonds so arranged as to melt in the mouth especially at this particular time of the year the monstrous Easter egg of enchanting U enshrined like costly jewels in caskets of satin and gold and the lad who was well read in his English classics and liked to show it would opine that they managed these things better then across the street by a great gate into the Alice des Feuillants and up to the Place de la Concorde to gaze but quite without base envy at the smart people coming back from the Bois de Boulogne for even in Paris carriage people have a way of looking bored of taking their pleasure sadly of having nothing to say to each other as though the vibration of so many wheels all rolling home the same way every afternoon had hypnotized them into silence idiocy and melancholia and our three musketeers of the brush would speculate on the vanity of wealth and rank and fashion on the satiety that follows in the wake of self-indulgence and overtakes it on the weariness of the pleasures that become a toil as if they knew all about it had found it all out for themselves and nobody else had ever found it out before then they found out something else namely that the sting of healthy appetite was becoming intolerable so they would be take themselves to an English eating house in the Rue de la Madeleine on the left hand side near the top where they would renovate their strength and their patriotism British beef and beer and household bread and bracing, biting, stinging yellow mustard and heroic horseradish and noble apple pie and Cheshire cheese and get through as much of these in an hour or so as they could for talking, talking, talking such happy talk as full of sanguine hope and enthusiasm of cocksure, commendation or condemnation of all painters dead or alive of modest but firm belief in themselves and each other as a Paris Easter egg is full of sweets and pleasantness for the young and then a stroll on the crowded, well lighted boulevards and a bock at the café there at a little three-legged marble table right out on the genial asphalt side pavement still talking nineteen to the dozen then home by dark, old silent streets and some deserted bridge to their beloved Latin quarter the morgue gleaming cold and still and fatal in the pale lamplight and Notre Dame pricking up its watchful twin towers which have looked down for so many centuries on so many happy, sanguine expansive youths walking arm in arm by twos and threes and forever talking talking, talking talking the lad and little Billy would see Taffy safe to the door of his hotel-garnie in the rue de Seine where they would find much to say to each other before they said good night so much that Taffy and little Billy would see the lad safe to his door in the Place Saint-Anatole-des-Arts and then a discussion would arise between Taffy and the lad on the immortality of the soul let us say or the exact meaning of the word gentleman or the relative merits of Dickens and Thackeray or some such recondite and quite unhagnet theme and Taffy and the lad would escort little Billy to his door to the Place de l'audience and he would re-escort them both back again and so on till any hour you please or again if it rained and Paris through the studio window loomed lead colored with its shiny slate roofs under skies that were ashen and sober and the wild west wind made woeful music among the chimney-pots and little grey waves would up the river the wrong way and the morgue looked chill and dark and wet and almost uninviting even to three healthy-minded young Britons they would resolve to dine and spend a happy evening at home little Billy taking with him three francs or even four would dive into back streets and buy a yardo-soul of crusty new bread on the outside a fillet of beef a litter of wine, potatoes and onions butter a little cylindrical cheese called bondons de neufchâtel tender curly lettuce with chervil parsley spring onions and other fine herbs and a pod of garlic which would be rubbed on a crust of bread to flavor things with onions and also make the salad for which, like everybody else I ever met he had a special recipe of his own putting in the oil first and the vinegar after and indeed his salads were quite as good as everybody else's the lad, bending over the stove would cook the onions and beef into a savory scotch mess so cunningly that you could not taste beef for the onions nor always the onions for the garlic and they would dine far better than at Le Père Trinse far better than at the English restaurant in the Rue de la Madeleine better than anywhere else on earth and after dinner what coffee, roasted and ground on the spot what pipes and cigarettes of caporal by the light of the shaded lamps while the rain beat against the big north window and the wind went howling round the quaint old medieval tower at the corner of the Rue Vieille des Trois mauvais Ladres the old street of the three bad lepers and the damp logs hissed and crackled in the stove what jolly talk into the small hours Thackeray and Dickens again and Tennyson and Byron who was not deed yet in those days and Titian and Velasquez and Young Millet and Holman Hunt just out and Monsieur Ingres and Monsieur de la Croix and Balzac and Stendhal and Georges Sand and the Good Dumas and Edgar Allen Pose and the Glory that was Greece and the Granger that was Rome good, honest, innocent artless prattle not of the wisest perhaps nor redolent of the very highest culture which by the way can mar as well as make nor leading to any very practical result but quite pathetically sweet from the sincerity and fervour of its convictions a profound belief in their importance and a proud trust in their life long immutability Oh happy days and happy nights sacred to art and friendship Oh happy times of careless impicuniosity and youth and hope and health and strength and freedom with all Paris for a playground and its dear old unregenerate Latin quarter for a workshop and a home and up to then no killjoy complications of love no, decidedly no little Billy had never known such happiness as this never even dreamed of its possibility a day or two after this our opening day but in the afternoon when the fencing and boxing had begun and the trapeze was in full swing Trilbees milk below sounded at the door and she appeared clothed this time and in her right mind as it seemed a tall straight flatbacked square-shouldered deep-chested full-busened young grizzette in a snowy frilled cap a neat black gown and white apron pretty faded well-darned brown stockings and well-worn soft fair-toed slippers of list without heels and originally shapeless but which her feet uncompromising and inexorable as boot-trees had ennobled into everlasting classic shapeliness and stamped with an unforgettable individuality as does a beautiful hand its well-worn glove a fact little Billy was not slow to perceive this conscious thrill that was only half aesthetic then he looked into her freckled face and met the kind and tender mirthfulness of her gaze and the plucky frankness of her fine wide smile with a thrill that was not aesthetic at all nor the reverse but all of the heart and in one of his quick flashes of intuitive insight he divined far down beneath the shining surface of those eyes which seemed for a moment to reflect only a little image of himself against the sky beyond the big north window a well of sweetness and floating somewhere in the midst of it the very heart of compassion generosity and warm sisterly love and under that at the bottom of all a thin slimy layer of sorrow and shame and just as long as it takes for a tear to rise and gather and choke itself back again this sudden revelation shook his nervous little frame with a pang of pity and the nightly wish to help but he had no time to indulge in such soft emotions Trilby was met on her entrance by friendly greetings on all sides Tiens, c'est la grande Trilby exclaimed Jul Guineau through his fencing mask Comment, t'es déjà debout après hier soir? Avant nous assez rigoler chez Mathieu, hein? Créons d'un nom, quel noce v'là une cremaillère qui peut se venter d'être d'y entrement bien pendu, j'espère Et ce matin? Eh, mon vieux, answered Trilby sa boulotte, apparemment et toi, et Victorine, comment casse porte à cette heure? Elle avait un fier coup de chasse-là, c'était joba, hein? De s'fiche pas comme ça devant le monde. Tiens, v'là Gontran, ça marchait-t-il Gontran, zoo zoo de mon coeur? Comme sur des roulettes, ma biche était Gontran, alias zoo zoo, a corporal in the zoo ave. Mais tu t'es donc mise chiffonnière, à présent? T'as fait bancroute? For Trilby had a chiffonnière's basket strapped on her back and carried a pick and lantern. Mais oui, mon bon, she said. Dame, pas de veine hier soir, t'as bien vu? Dans la desche jusqu'aux homoplates corporales sous oeufs, non d'un canon, faut bien vivre est-ce pas? Little Billy's heart's looses had closed during this interchange of courtesies. He felt it to be of a very slangy kind because he couldn't understand a word of it and he hated slang. All he could make out was the free use of the tu and the toi and he knew enough French to know that this implied a great familiarity which he misunderstood. So that Jules Gino's polite inquiries, whether Trilby were none the worse after Mathieu's housewarming which was so jolly, Trilby's kind solicitude about the health of Victorine who had very foolishly taken a drop too much on that occasion, Trilby's mock regrets that her own bad luck at cards would carry that she should retrieve her fallen fortunes by Iraq picking. All these innocent playful little amenities which I have tried to write down just as they were spoken were couched in a language that was as Greek to him and he felt out of it jealous and indignant. Good afternoon to you, Mr. Taffy said Trilby in English. I've brought you these objects of art and virtue to make the peace with you. They are the real thing, you know. I borrowed them from Le Père Martin chiffonnier en gros et en détail. Grand officier de la Légion d'honneur membre de l'institut, etc. Très heureux du puits d'amour réchaussé au fond de la cour à gauche vis-à-vis le monde pieté. He's one of my intimate friends and you don't mean to say you're the intimate friend of a rack picker exclaimed the good Taffy. Oh yes, pourquoi pas? I never brag. Besides, there ain't any beastly pride about Le Père Martin, said Trilby with a wink. You'd soon find that out if you were an intimate friend of his. This is how it's put on. Do you see? If you'll put it on, I'll fasten it for you and show you how to hold the lantern and handle the pick. You may come to it yourself some day, you know. Père Martin will pose for you in person if you like. He's generally disengaged in the afternoon. He's poor, but honest, you know, and very nice and clean, quite the gentleman. He likes artists, especially English. They pay. His wife sells bricabrac and old masters. He runs from two France fifty upwards. They've got a little grandson, a love of a child. I'm his godmother. You know French, I suppose. Oh yes, said Taffy, much abashed. I'm very much obliged to you very much indeed. I... Y'a pas quoi? said Trilby, divesting herself of her basket and putting it with a pick and now it's time to absorb a thin line of silk and I'm breaking it by waiting for the ambassador of Austria and then always going to my children before the box. End of part three. Part first. LibriVox.org Recording by David Lawrence. Trilby. By George de Morier. Part first. Part four. Taffy brought her a cup of coffee and conversed with her in polite formal French very well and carefully pronounced and the layered kept trying to do likewise. His French was of that honest English kind that breaks up the stiffness of even an English party and his jolly manners such as to put an end to all shyness and constraint and make self-consciousness impossible. Others dropped in from neighboring studios the usual cosmopolite crew. It was a perpetual common goal in this particular studio between four and six in the afternoon. There were ladies too on chivots in caps and bonnets some of whom knew Trilby and deed and dowed with familiarity and friendly affection while others maimed with distinct politeness and were maimed and madamed back again. Absolument comme l'ambassade d'Autriche as Trilby observed to the layered with a British wink that was by no means ambassadorial. Then Svengari came and made some of his grandest music which was all completely thrown away on Trilby as fireworks on a blind beggar. For all she held her tongue so piously. Fencing and boxing and trapezing seemed to be more in her line and indeed to a tone deaf person taffy lunging his full spread with a foil in all the splendour of his long, lithe, youthful strength was a far gainlier sight than Svengari at the keyboard flashing his languid bold lies with a sickly smile from one listener to another as if to say N'est-ce pas que je suis soupeau? N'est-ce pas que je suis toussini? N'est-ce pas que je suis soupleam enfin? Then entered durian the sculptor who had been presented with a beignoir at the poor sommartin to see the dame Okamalia and he invited Trilby and another lady to dine with him Okabaré and share his box. So Trilby didn't go to the Austrian Embassy after all as the layered observed to Little Belie was such good imitation of her wink that Little Belie was bound to laugh but Little Belie was not inclined for fun, a dullness a sense of disenchantment had come over him as he expressed it to himself with pathetic self-pity a feeling of sadness and longing that is not akin to pain and resembles sorrow only as the mist resembles the rain and the sadness if he had known was that all beautiful young women with sweet kind faces and noble figures and goddess-like extremities should not be good and pure as they were beautiful and the longing was a longing that Trilby could be turned into a young lady say the vicar's daughter in a little Devonshire village his sister's friend and co-teacher at the Sunday school a simple, pure and pious maiden for he adored piety in women although he was not pious by any means his inarticulate, intuitive perceptions were not of form and color secrets only but strove to pierce the veil of deeper mysteries in impetuous and dogmatic boyish scorn of all received interpretations for he flattered himself that he possessed the philosophical and scientific mind and peaked himself on thinking clearly and was intolerant of human inconsistency that small reserved portion of his ever-active brain which should have lay in follow while the rest of it was at work or play perpetually plagued itself about the mysteries of life and death and was forever propounding unanswerable arguments against the Christian belief through a kind of inverted sympathy with the believer fortunately for his friends little Billy was both shy and discreet and very tender of other people's feelings so he kept all his immature juvenile agnosticism to himself to atone for such ungainly strong mindedness in one so young and tender he was a slave of many little traditional observances which have no very solid foundation in either science or philosophy for instance he wouldn't walk under a ladder for worlds nor sit down thirteen to dinner nor have his hair cut on a Friday and was quite upset if he happened to see the new moon through glass and he believed in lucky and unlucky numbers and dearly loved the sights and sense and sounds of high mass in some dim old French cathedral and found them secretly comforting let us hope that he sometimes laughed at himself if only in his sleeve and with all his keenness of insight into life he had a well brought up middle-class young Englishman's belief in the infallible effecy of gentle birth for gentle he considered his own and taffies and the lords and that of most of the good people he had lived among in England all people in short whose two parents and four grandparents had received a liberal education and belonged to the professional class and with this belief he combined or thought he did a proper democratic scorn for bloated dukes and lords and even poor inoffensive baronettes and all the landed gentry everybody who was born an inch higher up than himself it is a fairly good middle-class social creed if you can only stick to it through life in despite of life's experience it fosters independence and self-respect and in fact it gives you the opportunity practical virtues as well at all events it keeps you out of bad company which is to be found both above and below in media and all this melancholy preoccupation on little Billy's part from the momentary gleam and dazzle of a pair of over-perfect feet in an over-aesthetic eye he had idealized from the base upward many of us older and wiser than little Billy have seen in lovely female shapes the outer garment of a lovely female soul the instinct which guides us to do this is perhaps a right one more often than not but more often than not also lovely female shapes are terrible complicators of the difficulties and dangers of this earthly life especially for their owner especially if she be a humble daughter of the people poor and ignorant of a yielding nature too quick to love and trust this is also true as to be trite as to be a common platitude a modern teller of tales most widely and most justly popular tells us of Californian heroes and heroines who like Lord Byron's corsair were linked with one virtue of a thousand crimes and so dexterously does he weave his story that the young person may read it and were nothing but good my poor heroine was the converse of these engaging criminals she had all the virtues but one but the virtues she lacked the very one of all that plays the title role and gives its generic name to all the rest of that goodly company was of such a kind as to make it quite fit and proper reading for the ubiquitous young person so dear to us all most deeply to my regret for I had fondly hoped it might one day be said of me that whatever my other literary shortcomings might be I at least had never penned a line which a pure-minded young British mother might not read aloud to her little blue-eyed babe as it lies sucking its little bottle yet fate had willed otherwise would indeed that I could duly express poor trilby's one shortcoming in some not too familiar medium in Latin or Greek let us say lest the young person in this ubiquitousness of hers for which heaven is praised should happen to pry into these pages when her mother is looking another way Latin and Greek are languages the young person should not be taught and seeing that they are highly improper languages deservedly dead in which pagan bards who should have known better have sung the filthy loves of their gods and goddesses but at least I am scholar enough to enter one little Latin plea on trilby's behalf the shortest, best, and most beautiful plea I can think of it was once used in extenuation and condemnation of a woman, presumably beautiful and a far worse offender than trilby but who, like trilby repented of her ways and was most justly forgiven whether it be an aggravation of her misdeeds or an extenuating circumstance, no pressure of want no temptations of greed or vanity had ever been factors in urging trilby on her downward career after her first fault in that direction the result of ignorance, bad advice from her mother of all people in the world and base betrayal she might have lived in guilty splendor had she chosen but her wants were few she had no vanity and her tastes were of the simplest and she earned enough to gratify them all and to spare so she followed love for love's sake only now and then, as she would have the heart if she had been a man capriciously, desultorily more in a frolicsome spirit of camaraderie than anything else like an amateur, in short a distinguished amateur who was too proud to sell his pictures but willingly gives one away now and then to some highly valued and much admiring friend sheer gayity of heart and genial good fellowship the difficulty of saying nay to earnest pleading would add a bon fee before everything though her heart was not large enough to harbor more than one light love even in that Latin quarter of genially capricious hearts it had room for many warm friendships and she was the warmest most helpful and most compassionate of friends, far more serious and faithful in friendship than in love indeed she might almost be said to possess a virginal heart how did she know of love's heart aches and raptures and torments and clingings and jealousies with her it was lightly come and lightly go and never come back again as one or two or perhaps three picturesque bohemians of the brush or chisel had found at some cost to their vanity and self-esteem perhaps even to a deeper feeling who knows Troby's father, as she had said had been a gentleman Dublin physician and friend of George IV's he had been a fellow of his college and had entered holy orders he also had all the virtues but one he was a drunkard and began to drink quite early in life he soon left the church and became a classical tutor and failed through this besetting sin of his and fell into disgrace then he went to Paris and picked up a few English pupils there and earned a precarious livelihood from hand to mouth anyhow and sank from bad to worse and when his worst was about reached he married the famous tartan and tamo-shantard barmaid at the Montagnan Écossée in the Rue de Paris Poisson a very fishy paradise indeed she was a most beautiful Highland lassie of low degree and she managed to support him or helped him to support himself for 10 or 15 years Chobe was born to them and was dragged up in some way à la grâce de Dieu Patrick O'Farrell soon taught his wife to drown all care and responsibility in his own simple way and opportunities for doing so were never lacking to her then he died and left the posthumous child born 10 months after his death alas and whose birth cost its mother her life and in two or three years came to grief through her trust in a friend of her mother's then she became a model besides and was able to support her little brother whom she dearly loved at the time this story begins this small waif and stray was Ampechant with the pair martin, the rag picker and his wife the dealer in Bricka Brack and inexpensive old masters they were very good people they were very skilled who was beautiful to look at and full of pretty tricks and pluck and cleverness a popular favorite in the rude de pluie d'armour in its humble neighborhood Trilby, for some freak always chose to speak of him as her godson and as the grandchild of Lapeyre and the mayor martin so that these good people had almost grown to believe that he really belonged to them as a child of Trilby in spite of her youth and she was so fond of him that she didn't mind in the least he might have had a worse home Lapeyre martin was pious or pretended to be Lapeyre martin was the reverse but they were equally good for their kind and though coarse and ignorant and unscrupulous in many ways as was natural enough they were gifted in a very full measure with the saving graces of love and charity, especially he and if people are to be judged by their works this worthy pair are no doubt both equally well compensated by now for the trials and struggles of the sordid earthly life so much for Trilby's parentage and as she sat and wept at Madame d'Oche's impersonation of la dame au quimilat with her hand in durians she vaguely remembered as an awaking dream now the noble presence of taffy as he towered cool and erect foil in hand gallantly waiting for his adversary to breathe now the beautiful sensitive face of little Billy and his deferential courtesy and during the anthrax her heart went out in friendship to the jolly, scarced laird of cock-bin who came out now and then with such terrible French oaths and abominable expletives too without the slightest notion of what they meant for the laird had a quick ear and a craving to be colloquial and idiomatic before everything else and made many awkward and embarrassing mistakes it would be with him as though a polite Frenchman should say to a fair daughter of Albion D. my eyes meese your tea is getting blank cold let me tell that good old blank of a jewels to bring you another cup till time and experience taught him better it is perhaps well for him that his first experiments in conversational French were made in the unconventional circle of the Place Saint Anatole desert end of part 1 part 4 recording by David Lawrence in Brampton, Ontario June 2010 part 1 of part 2 of Trilby this is a LibriVox recording and the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Estelle Jobson Trilby by George Dumarier part 2nd part 1 Dieu qui fait bon la regarder la gracieuse bonne et belle pour les grands biens qui sont en elle chacun est près de la louer nobody knew exactly how Spengali lived and very few knew where or why he occupied a roomy, dilapidated garret au 6e in the rue Thierlière with chuckle-bed and a piano forte for furniture and very little else he was poor for in spite of his talent he had not yet made his mark in Paris his manners may have been accountable for this he would either fawn or bully and could be grossly impertinent he had a kind of cynical humour which was more offensive than amusing and always laughed at the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong place and his laughter was always derisive and full of malice and his egotism and conceit were not to be borne and then he was both tawdry and dirty in his person more greasily, mattedly unkempt than even a really successful pianist has any right to be he was not a nice man and there was no pathos in his poverty a poverty that was not honourable and need not have existed at all for he was constantly receiving supplies from his own people in Austria his old father and mother his sisters, his cousins and his aunts hard-working frugal folk of whom he was the pride and the darling he had but one virtue or rather his love of himself as a master of his art the master for he despised or effected to despise all other musicians living or dead even those whose work he interpreted so divinely and pitted them for not hearing Sven Gali give utterance to their music which of course they could not utter themselves he sauv'd tous un peu touché du piano mais pas grand chose he had been the best pianist of his time at the conservatory in Leipzig and indeed there was perhaps some excuse for this overweening conceit since he was able to lend a quite peculiar individual charm of his own to any music he played except the highest and best of all in which he conspicuously failed he had to draw the line just above Chopin where he reached his highest level it will not do to lend your own quite peculiar individual charm to Handel and Bach and Beethoven and Chopin is not bad as a pisale he had ardently wished to sing and had studied hard to that end in Germany, in Italy, in France with the forlorn hope of evolving from some inner recess a voice to sing with but nature had been singularly harsh to him in this one respect inexorable he was absolutely without voice beyond the harsh horse weak raven's croak he used to speak with and no method availed to make one for him but he grew to understand the human voice as perhaps no one has understood it before or since so in his head he went for ever singing singing singing as probably no human nightingale has ever yet been able to sing out loud for the glory and delight of his fellow mortals making unheard heavenly melody of the cheapest trivialist tunes tunes of the cafe concert tunes of the nursery the shop parlor, the guard room the school room, the pot house, the slum there was nothing so humble so base even but what his magic would transform it into the rarest beauty without altering a note the seems impossible I know but if it didn't where would the magic come in whatever of heart or conscience love, tenderness, manliness courage, reverence, charity endowed him at his birth had been swallowed up by this one faculty and nothing of them was left for the common uses of life he poured them all into his little flexible flageole Svengali playing Chopin on the piano forte even or especially Svengali playing Ben Bolt on that penny whistle of his was as one of the heavenly host Svengali walking up and down the earth seeking whom he might cheat, betray exploit, borrow money from make brutal fun of bully if he dared cringe to if he must man, woman, child or dog was about as bad as they make him to earn a few pence when he couldn't borrow them he played accompaniments at cafe concerts and even then he gave a fence for in his contempt for the singer he would play too loud and embroider his accompaniments with brilliant improvisations of his own and lift his hands on high and bring them down with a bang in sentimental parts and shake his dirty mane and shrug his shoulders and smile and leer at the audience and do all he could to attract their attention to himself he also gave a few music lessons not at ladies' schools let us hope for which he was not well paid presumably since he was always without a soot always borrowing money that he never paid back and exhausting the pockets and the patience of one acquaintance after another he had but two friends there was Gekko who lived in a little garret close by in the Ampaste Ramonneur and he was second violin in the orchestra of the gymnase and shared his humble earnings with his master to whom indeed he owed his great talent not yet revealed to the world Singali's other friend and pupil was or rather had been the mysterious honorine of whose conquest he was much given to boast hinting that she was a young woman of the world this was not the case Mademoiselle Honorine Cayenne better known in the quartier latin as Mimi Lassalope was a difty, draby little dolly from the mob of a Jewess a model for the figure a very humble person indeed socially she was however of a very lively disposition and had a charming voice and a natural gift of singing so sweetly that you forgot her accent which was that of the Tuscilia de Pluccanai she used to sit at Carrell's and during the pose she would sing when little Billy first heard her he was so fascinated that it made him sick to think she sat for the figure an effect by the way that was always produced upon him by all specially attractive figure models of the gender sex for he had a reverence for woman and before everything else he had for the singing woman an absolute worship he was especially thrall to the contralto the deep low voice that breaks and changes in the middle and soars all at once into a heroic boy treble it pierced through his ears to his heart and stirred his very vitals he had once heard Madame Albani and it had been an epoch in his life he would have been an easy prey to the sirens even beauty paled before the lovely female voice singing in the middle of the note the nightingale killed the bird of paradise I need hardly say that Nila Salop had not the voice of Madame Albani nor the art but it was a beautiful voice of its little kind always in the very middle of the note and her artless art had its quick seduction she sang little songs of Bérongez grand-mère, parlez-nous de lui oh, t'en souviens-tu disais-tu un capitaine oh, enfoncez-moi qui suis-les-être and such like pretty things that little Billy's easily moistened eyes but soon she would sing little songs that were not by Bérongez little songs with slang words little Billy hadn't French enough to understand but from the kind of laughter with which the points were received by the rapin in Carin's studio he guessed these little songs were vile though the touching little voice was as that of the seraphim still and he knew the pang of disenchantment and vicarious shame Spengali had heard her sing at the brasserie des porcherans in the rue du crapeau-volant and had volunteered to teach her and she went to see him in his garret and he played to her and leered and ogled and flashed his bold black beady-juice eyes into hers and she straightway mentally prostrated herself in reverence and adoration before this dazzling specimen of her race so that her sordid, mercenary little gutter-draggled soul was filled with the sight and the sound of him as of a lordly godlike shorn playing symbol-banging hero and prophet of the lord god of israel David and Saul in one and then he set himself to teach her kindly and patiently at first calling her sweet little pet names his rose of Sharon his pearl of Pabilon his casale-eyed little Jerusalem skylark promised her that she should be the queen of the nightingales but before he could teach her anything he had to untie her all she knew her breathing, the production of her voice, its emission everything was wrong she worked indefatigably to please him and soon succeeded in forgetting all the pretty little sympathetic tricks of voice and phrasing mother nature had taught her but though she had an exquisite ear she had no real musical intelligence no intelligence of any kind except about Sue and Santim she was a stupid little downy owl and her voice was just a light, native warble a thrussel's pipe all in the head and nose and throat a voice he didn't understand for once a thing of mere youth and health a room and high spirits like her beauty such as it was bote du diable bote d'année she did her very best and practised all she could in this new way and sang herself horse she scarcely ate or slept for practising he grew harsh and impatient and coldly severe and of course she loved him all the more and the more she loved him the more nervous she got the voice cracked her ear became demoralised her attempts to vocalise grew almost as distressing as trilby's so that he lost his temper completely and called her terrible names and pinched and punched her with his big bony hands till she wept worse than Naiobi and borrowed money of her five frank pieces even franks and demi-franks which he never paid her back and browbeat and bullied and bully-ragged her till she went quite mad for love of him and would have jumped out of his sixth floor window to give him a moment's pleasure he did not ask her to do this it never occurred to him and would have given him no pleasure to speak of but one fine Sabbath morning a Saturday of course he took her by the shoulders and plucked her neck and crop out of his garret with the threat that if she ever dared to show her face there again he would denounce her to the police an awful threat to the likes of poor Mimila Salop for where did all those five frank pieces come from her with which she had tried to pay for all the singing lessons that had been thrown away upon her not from merely sitting to paint us, huh thus the little gazelle, i.e. Jerusalem Skylark went back to her native streets again a mere mudlark of the Paris slums her wings clipped her spirit quenched and broken and with no more singing left in her than a common or garden sparrow not so much and so no more of La Budite Donorine the morning after this adventure Sven Gali woke up in his garret with a tremendous longing to spend a happy day for it was Sunday and a very fine one he made a long arm and reached his waistcoat and trousers off the floor with the contents of their pockets on to his tattered blanket no silver no gold only a few sous and two sous pieces just enough to pay for a meager premier déjeuner he had cleared out Gekko the day before and spent the proceeds ten francs at least in one night's riotous living pleasures in which Gekko had had no share and he could think of no one to borrow money from but little Billy Taffy and the Laird whom he had neglected and left untapped for days so he slipped into his clothes and looked at himself in what remained of a little zinc mirror and found that his forehead left little to be desired but that his eyes and temples were decidedly grimy wherefore he poured a little water out of a little jug into a little basin and twisting the corner of his pocket handkerchief around his dirty forefinger he delicately dipped it and removed the offending stains his fingers he thought would do very well for another day or two as they were he ran them through his matted black mane pushed it behind his ears and gave it the twist he liked and that was so much disliked by his English friends then he put on his beret and his velveteen cloak and went forth into the sunny streets with a sense of the fragrance and freedom and pleasantness in the morning in Paris in the month of May he found little Billy sitting in a zinc hip bath busy with soap and sponge and was so tickled and interested by the sight that he quite forgot for the moment what he had come for Himmel why the devil are you doing that he asked in his German Hebrew French doing what asked little Billy in his French of Stratford at Bau sitting in water and playing with a cake and a sponge why did you try and get myself clean I suppose and how the devil did you get yourself dirty then to this little Billy found no immediate answer and went on with his ablutions after the hissing splashing energetic fashion of Englishmen and Sven Gali laughed loud and long at the spectacle of a little Englishman trying to get himself clean dachon de sonnette d'oyer when such cleanliness had been attained as was possible under the circumstances Sven Gali begged for the loan of 200 francs and little Billy gave him a 5 franc piece content with this Fort de Mure the German asked him when he would be trying to get himself clean again as he would much like to come and see him do it de main matin à votre service said little Billy with a courteous bow got Monday to got in hemmer you try to get yourself clean every day and he laughed himself out of the room, out of the house out of the Place de l'Odian all the way to the rue de Sain where dwelt the man of blood whom he meant to propitiate with the story of that original little Billy trying to get himself clean that he might borrow another 5 franc piece or perhaps two as the reader will no doubt anticipate he found Taffy in his bath also and fell to laughing with such convulsive laughter such twistings, screwings and doublings of himself up such pointings of his dirty forefinger at the huge naked Britain that Taffy was offended and all but lost his temper what the devil are you cackling at sacred head of pig that you are do you want to be pitched out of that window into the rue de Sain you filthy black Hebrew sweep just you wait a bit I'll wash your head for you and Taffy jumped out of his bath such a towering figure of righteous perculean wrath that Sv'ngali was appalled and fled Donna Vetta he exclaimed as he tumbled down the narrow staircase of the hotel de Sain what for a thick head what for a pig dog what for a rotten, brutal englander then he paused for thought now will I go to that Scottish englander in the Place Saint-Anatole-des-Arres for that other five franc piece but first will I wait a little while till he has perhaps finished trying to get himself clean so he breakfasted at the cremerie sous chais in the rue clopin clopin and feeling quite safe again he laughed and laughed till his very sides were sore englanders in one day as naked as your hand a big one and a little one trying to get themselves clean he rather flattered himself he had scored off those two englanders after all he was right perhaps from his point of view you can get as dirty in a week as in a lifetime so what's the use of taking such a lot of trouble besides so long as you are clean enough to suit your kind to be any cleaner and prigish and pedantic and get you disliked just as Svengali was about to knock at the laird's door Trilby came downstairs from Durian's very unlike herself her eyes were red with weeping and there were great black rings round them she was pale under her freckles Foussafé du Chakram at Moselle asked he she told him that she had neuralgia in her eyes a thing she was subject to that the pain was maddening and generally lasted 24 hours perhaps I can cure you come in here with me the laird's ablutions if he had indulged in any that morning were evidently over for the day he was breakfasting on a roll and butter and coffee of his own brewing he was deeply distressed at the sight of poor Trilby's sufferings and offered whiskey and coffee and ginger-nuts which she would not touch Svengali told her to sit down on the divan and sat opposite to her and bade her look him well into the white of her eyes Regardez-moi bien dans le plein des yeux then he made little passes and counter passes on her forehead and temples and down her cheek and neck soon her eyes closed and her face grew placid after a while a quarter of an hour perhaps he asked her if she suffered still oh presque plus du tour monsieur c'est le ciel end of part 1, part 2 recording by Steele Jobson Rome, Italy