full of that bitter joy and anguish we can feel at twenty-four, when the knowledge of man’s brevity first comes to us, when we first know ruin and defeat, when we first understand what we have never known before: that for us, as for every other man alive, all passes, all is lost, all melts before our grasp like smoke; when we know that the moment of beauty carries in it the seeds of its own instant death, that love is gone almost before we have it, that youth is gone before we know it, and that, like every other man, we must grow old and die.
The orchestra had finished playing this tune and the dancers were going to their tables from the polished little square of floor; in a moment Starwick called the leader of the orchestra over to the table and asked him to play Starwick’s favourite song. This was a piece called “My Chile Bon Bon”; it was not new, Starwick had first heard it several years before in Boston, but like the other piece this tune was pregnant with the mournful fatality of a place and period; in its grotesque words and haunting melody there was the sense of something irrevocable, an utter surrender and a deliberate loss, a consciousness of doom. These two pieces together evoked the whole image and quality of that year, and of the life of these four people: for Starwick, in fact, this “Chile Bon Bon” song somehow perfectly expressed the complete fatality that had now seized his life, the sensual inertia of his will.
The orchestra leader nodded smilingly when Starwick asked him to play the song, went back and conferred with his musicians for a moment, and, himself taking up a violin, began to play. As the orchestra played, the leader walked toward their table, and, bending and swaying with the infinite ductile grace which a violin seems to give to all its performers, he stood facing the two women, seeming to offer up the wailing, hauntingly mournful and exciting music as a kind of devotion to their loveliness.
Elinor, tapping the tune out with her fingers on the table-cloth, hummed the words lightly, absently, under her breath; Ann sat quietly, darkly, sullenly attentive; Starwick, at one end of the table, sat turned away, his legs indolently crossed, his ruddy face flushed with emotion, his eyes fixed in a blind stare, and a little wet.
Once, while the piece was being played, Starwick’s pleasant ruddy face was contorted again by the old bestial grimace of nameless anguish and bewilderment which Eugene had seen so many times before, and in which the sense of tragic defeat, frustration, the premonition of impending ruin was legible.
