The Innocent Moon Read Online Free PDF

below, the orchestra was tuning up, beyond the wide arc of grand circle and unseen dress circle. They saw one aspect of the boxes, and part of the stalls, all upholstered in red. They were in the gods, a place of iron railings and wooden seats—in one of the side-galleries, with the pink-painted Doves’ Nest. It was unoccupied. He whispered that, as soon as the fireman had gone his rounds, and the lights went out, they would get up into the Nest.
    “What is it tonight?” he asked a crippled girl, one of the regular galleryites, with whom he had struck up a sort of friendship.
    “Stravinsky’s Nightingale. First performance in England.”
    “Oh—isn’t he rather cacophonous? I mean, all discords?”
    “Stravinsky all discords?” exclaimed Spica. “If this new opera is anything like Fire Bird, it will be marvellous!” She added with some of her eagerness gone, “My respected Papa says Fire Bird is a frightful row, and forbids me to play the records on my gramophone!”
    “My father loves music. He used to play the ’cello.”
    “You’re fortunate!” she said, decisively. “I come from a Cornish family, cathedral close and all that sort of thing, but the Celtic sensitivity seems to have given my Papa a wide berth. He’s a doctor, by the way, a G.P., just demobbed from the R.A.M.C.”
    The fireman in dark tunic, round pork-pie hat, leather knee-boots and belt came in, looked round to see if anyone was smoking, and left the side gallery just as the lights in the chandeliers hanging from the dome of the roof went out.
    Sir Thomas Beecham appeared from under the stage, while clapping rippled against the tiny figure far down below. “Now! Get up on my back,” whispered Phillip, as he bent down beside the plastered pillar. “Hold on to the rim. I’ll bunk you up.” Having done this, with a jump he levered himself up and lay beside her, looking down upon the illumined figure with upraised baton.
    May 6. This is one of the most wonderful nights of my life. Within half a dozen bars of the opening I was face down on the Doves’ Nest, head on arm and eyes closed, living in the darkness of the woods; and the longing of the fisherman, dim-seen in the shadows of the stage, waiting for the bird to sing to him, and the sad doubt, “She will not sing tonight”, was my own longing and doubt; then I was uplifted into the realm of the pure beauty which only genius knows. How could Stravinsky, a Russian, know exactly the feelings of the English woods at night, and the longing of the poet? And then the miracle—from the orchestra the voice of the nightingale suddenly broke out, in wild but dispassionate purity, a voice above all earthly passion, and the tears ran from my eyes and I knew, with wild but remote emotion, that I had the same power in me to translate the voice of the spirit of life, which was beauty come upon the planet as love, and that I was destined to walk the same lonely path, perhaps all my life.
    Phillip introduced one of his gallery acquaintances, Jack O’Donovan, a part-time journalist who worked on a theatrical paper, The Age. He knew a lot about music, he told Spica;whereupon Jack O’Donovan began to tell them what the opera was about—based on a story by Hans Andersen, The Emperor and the Nightingale. Phillip only half-listened, preferring his own ideas aroused by the music: for him the longing and faith of the fisherman had turned the bird into a woman—the soprano in white, sitting in the orchestra pit, just visible in the dark blue-green dusk from the stage—and so into the miracle of love. The inspiration of love had created the miracle, through Stravinsky, of art in its purest, highest form: while the story Jack told was one of material gain by the rich Emperor, by which the pure flow of beauty in the nightingale’s song was muted, withered away as bricks-and-mortar had suppressed the country he had known as a boy, killing the life which was its spirit.
    “You look pale,” whispered