Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/168

142 142 MR. GRANVILLE BARKER AND AN ALIBI (pages 16-36). But the most beautiful, the most memorable, is the visible chord that comes and goes, reversing and returning, dying down and then ascend- ing, through a shifting series of softest variations, from the instant the curtain first goes up and Ann makes her swift appearance (Ann Leetb runs quickly down the steps) to the moment it descends whilst she mounts slowly out of sight. I mean the optical descant, the physical phrase, made by her passage up or down a scale of steps — a motif that is repeated, subtly varied, through every scene that is to follow ; and that finally forms, transposed adroitly, the deep concluding cadence, ending the piece upon a slow ascending chord. Ann goes to the little door and opens it. Abud takes up the candle. He lights her up the stairs. Ill We follow Ann. We pass out of the end of this first play and into the one that comes next — The Voysey Inheritance, the middle compartment of the book ; and a startling change is instantly observed. The best description of The Marrying of Ann Leete is still Arthur Symons' : " The play opens in the dark," he wrote, "and remains for some time bril- liantly ambiguous. People, late eighteenth - century people, talk with bewildering abruptness, with not less bewildering point ; they, their motives, their characters, swim slowly into daylight. A courtly in- dolence, an intellectual blackguardism, is in the air; people walk, it seems, aimlessly in and out, and the game goes on ; it fills one with excitement, the ex- citement of following a trail." Now the trail leads, as we have seen, towards reality; it is out of this artificial garden with its " brilliant ambiguities " that Ann longs and determines to escape : she wants to