“No; I don’t. When I was your age I might have thought so, but I know better now; you can’t write music just by getting away from people. Slavery is for the technicians, like you and me; we thrive under the lash. But creators must simply do what seems best to them. Some like solitude: some like a crowd. As for the girl, why not? When I was a student in Vienna my teacher told me how often he had seen old Brahms, when he was all sorts of ages, strolling meditatively home from the house of a certain lady who lived in the Weiden. Couldn’t matter less. Nothing, nothing whatever really stands in the way of a creative artist except lack of talent.”
“You don’t think a disorderly life matters?”
“Wouldn’t suit me. I couldn’t answer for anyone else.”
“Then you don’t think that Shakespeare was right—about the expense of spirit in a waste of shame?”
“It’s only shame when you feel it so. And he obviously doesn’t feel it. You are the one who feels it, and there can be only two explanations of that: either you’re more of a missionary than a musician, or else you’re jealous of that girl with the black hair and blue eyes.”
Monica turned back to her bread-cutting. She had never been much of a blusher, but she knew that her appearance had changed in many tell-tale ways.
“Am I right?” said Sir Benedict, taking a pull at his drink. “Well, falling in love with one’s master is recognized practice in the musical world. Even in his eighties I can remember old Garcia having to fight ’em off, to protect his afternoon nap. Well, go ahead by all means. Anything to broaden your range of feeling.”
Monica turned toward him, and her expression was so angry, her eyes so brilliant, and the bread-knife in her hand so menacing, that Sir Benedict skipped backward.
“I hate you damned superior Englishmen!” said she. “Murtagh Molloy tells me I have no emotion; Giles Revelstoke treats me like the village idiot because I haven’t read everything that’s ever been written, and you tell me to fall in love because it will extend my range of feeling! To hell with you all! If I haven’t got your easy, splattering feelings I’m proud of it. I’ll throw this all up and go home. I won’t stay here and be treated like a parrot, and learn to say ‘Polly wants a cracker’ in just the right accent and with just the right shade of feeling! I hate the whole pack of you, and I hate your rotten little Ye Olde Antique Shoppe of a country. I’d rather go home and be a typist in the Glue Works than take your dirt for another day.”
Sir Benedict looked thoughtfully at her for a full minute, then he said: “You’re perfectly right, my dear, and I apologise.” Monica made a dreadful face, snorted painfully, and burst into tears. She had never been a pretty weeper.
Sir Benedict had for many years made it a habit to carry two handkerchiefs, one for his own nose and one for other people’s; he produced the second now, shook out its folds and gave it to Monica just in time to hide a very messy face. Then he sat her down on the kitchen table and sat beside her, holding her tenderly.
“You mustn’t mind us,” said he; “it’s just a way of going on that we have carried over from the nineteenth century, when we really ruled the waves. Molloy would be terribly hurt if he knew you had called him an Englishman. As for me, I’m English, right enough, but not really out of the top drawer; there is a large grandpaternal pop-shop in Birmingham which it would be ungrateful of me to deny. Revelstoke is English, too, and I don’t mind telling you that I worked it that you should go to his mother for Christmas. Not that she, or Giles, knew, of course; I cooked it up with Miss Eigg, who is an old friend of mine; I thought it might be more friendly for you. Weren’t they nice people? Surely Giles must have relaxed a little, in his own home? Of course he plays the great man with these silly hangers-on of his, but it’s only mannerism.
“I didn’t realize you had any really strong feeling for him. But what I said was quite sincere, and not meant to be hurtful. A love-affair, if it is anything more than a tennis-club flirtation, does enlarge one’s range of feeling. Of course that isn’t why one does it, but you must understand that I was speaking as your teacher and advisor, looking at the thing from outside. And of course what looks unique and glorious to you, at your age—and is so, too, of course—has a rather more accustomed look from my age and my point of view. The terrible truth is that feeling really does have to be learned. It comes spontaneously when one is in love, or when somebody important dies; but people like you and me—interpretative artists—have to learn also to recapture those feelings, and transform them into something which we can offer to the world in our performances. You know what Heine says—and if you don’t I won’t scold you: ‘Out of my great sorrows I make my little songs.’ Well—we all do that. And what we make out of the feelings life brings us is something a little different, something not quite so shattering but very much more polished and perhaps also more poignant, than the feelings themselves. Your jealousy—it hurts now, but if you are as good an artist as I begin to think you are, you’ll never have to guess at what jealousy means again, when you meet with it in music. And love—don’t ask me what it is, because I can’t tell you anything more than that it is an intense and complex tangle of emotions—you’ll have to feel that, too. Everybody claims to have been in love, but to love so that you can afterward distill something from it which makes other people know what love is or reminds them forcibly—that takes an artist. Do you feel a little better now?”
“Gluh.”
“Good. And you won’t go back to the Glue Works tomorrow?”
A shake of the head.
“Then perhaps we should return to the others, or they will think that I am up to no good with you, and although that would be flattering to me, in a way, I don’t think it really desirable.”
But at this moment Mrs. Merry came into the kitchen. She wore a splendid, elevated look, more like a martyr than Monica had ever seen her; her teeth were bared in a smile which suggested that the first flames of the pyre were licking at her toes.
“Sir Benedict, I must leave you now,” said she. “It is quite time—indeed it has been made obvious to me that it is far past time—that I quitted the gathering.” She gave a slight, refined hiccup, and burst into tears.
For the first time in his life Sir Benedict had no clean handkerchief to offer. But Mrs. Merry, a lady even in grief and liquor, fished one out of her bosom, and held its lacy inadequacy to her lips.
“My dear lady, has anyone ill-used you?” said he. In perfect fairness he should have sat Mrs. Merry on the table and held her, but he did not.
“My fault,” she quavered. “Intruded. Went too far. Artist—high strung. Should have remembered.”
Sir Benedict took the glass from Mrs. Merry’s hand and hunted in a cupboard where the cooking things were. He found a bottle of cherry brandy, and poured a generous slug. “Drink this, and tell us all about it,” said he.
“Mr. Revelstoke—a genius, of course. And fresh from a great success.—Well, if you insist. Oh dear, I shall never be able to drink such a lot!—Well, I ought to have known. Madame Gertrude Belcher-Chalke was just the same after a concert—elevée, indeed one might say utterly ballonée—and hardly civil for hours. I meant no harm. Asked him to play. Well, I mean—a musician? Surely he plays? He said no. I pressed. I mean, they expect to be pressed. Nono. Press again. Nonono. I entreat the others to support my request. That man with the nasty picked-looking head shouts something in German. Then Mr. Revelstoke rushes to the piano and says—‘For you, for you alone, you lovely creature!’ And plays.” Here Mrs. Merry’s bosom heaved as no bosom has heaved since the heyday of the silent films. She drained the cherry brandy to the dregs. “He played Chopsticks!” she cried and hurled her glass dramatically into the sink.
Sir Benedict proved amply that a conductor of the first rank is not only a notable interpretative musician, but also a diplomat and an organizer of uncommon ability. He soothed Mrs. Merry. He shooed Monica upstairs to his own bedroom to wash and restore her face. He enlisted Eccles to help him bring ch
ampagne up from the cellar. He brought the party to some semblance of unity and enjoyment. And, finally, he went to the piano.
“Giles and I want to play something for Mrs. Merry,” said he. “It is called Paraphrases, and it is what all musicians play when they are happy.”
Drawing Revelstoke down at the piano by his side, Domdaniel compelled him to join in a duet; with great verve and gusto they played the twenty-four variations on Chopsticks which were written by Liszt, Borodin, Cui and Rimsky-Korsakov. Mrs. Merry, very much at the mercy of her feelings and with her remaining self-possession disappearing beneath the champagne, managed to get to the piano, against which she posed, smiling soulfully at Sir Benedict until, suddenly, all meaning disappeared from her face and she fell heavily to the floor.
Eccles, expert in such affairs, lifted her head and fanned her. Mrs. Merry opened her eyes, and she smiled blissfully. “Put me to bed and don’t bend me,” said she. And thus the party ended.
(2)
On stage and screen the business of getting a drunken person to bed is always represented as uproariously funny. Monica, Revelstoke and Eccles found it merely laborious. Mrs. Merry was a Junoesque woman in her late fifties; as a deadweight, she was not easily budged. It seemed that they had no sooner stuffed her untidily into a taxi at Dean’s Yard, than they had to haul her out of it at Courtfield Gardens. The men held her upright while Monica paid the taxi, and while they hoisted her up the steps, Monica retrieved her shoes, which fell off in that process. When they got her inside, there was the problem of the stairs. It was not that she was so heavy (though she was substantial) as that she offered no handholds. They made a Boy Scout chair with their hands, but in her satin gown she slipped twice to the floor before the first step was mounted. At last they were compelled to take Mrs. Merry up her own staircase as if she were a piano; Eccles crawled up the steps on his hands and knees, with Mrs. Merry on his back, steadied, and to some extent borne, by Revelstoke and Monica. It was slow, noisy and toilsome. When they reached the landlady’s room they tumbled her into bed with everything on but her shoes, and climbed on to Monica’s quarters, greatly exhausted.
“Good thing I liberated this,” said Bun, pulling a bottle of Sir Benedict’s champagne out of one of the large poacher’s pockets in his jacket. “Don’t suppose you’ve such a thing as a bottle of brandy, Monny?”
Monica had not. Eccles was philosophic. He removed the wire from the bottle and then, seizing the bulbous part of the cork in his teeth, he gave a tremendous wrench; when the champagne spurted he checked it dexterously with his thumb. “Here,” he said, passing it to her, “stab yourself and pass the dagger.”
Monica had had only one glass of champagne at the party, and Revelstoke, who never drank much, had taken little more. They were both glad of a refreshing pull at the champagne, but did not want more than a gulp or two. He was still in high spirits, which he could support on excitement alone; he had enjoyed the party, springing as it did from his personal success; the only annoyance he felt was with Persis, who had vanished with Odingsels. Monica was too much elated at having him in her living-room, almost to herself, to want other stimulant. But Eccles was a hardened and persistent drinker. When his turn at the bottle came he did not take it from his lips until it was empty. Then—“I want a bath,” said he; “humping the old trout upstairs has brought me out in a lather.” He rose, belched cavernously, waved a casual farewell and went. They heard him go down the stairs; the bathroom door was slammed and its noisy bolt pressed home; water ran, and the whole house hummed with the rumble of pipes.
“I hope he doesn’t come to any harm,” said Monica.
“Not Bun,” said Revelstoke, “but he may have a doze in the tub.”
What now? Girls in books and plays always seemed to know what to do when left alone with the men they loved; Monica hadn’t an idea in her head.
“Would you like something to eat?” she said.
He wanted nothing to eat.
Silence that went on for minutes.
“It was wonderful of you and Sir Benedict to rescue me. I was afraid Mrs. Merry was going to throw us out.”
“Would have served them right. They have no manners.”
“It would have been a shame, though, just as you came. We wanted to celebrate the broadcast.”
“You saw how they celebrated.”
“They all said you were a genius.”
“I wish I had their certainty.”
“I thought it was magnificent.”
“Did you really?”
“Of course I don’t know much about it. You know that. But if you won’t laugh, I’d like to say that I think you have an extraordinary melodic gift.”
“Oh? How do you mean?”
“Well, of course you know that I’m no judge of modern music, or any music, really, but I think I have a feeling for it, and it seems to me that so many modern composers write for the voice without having any real understanding of it, or love for it. And all the vocal part of Discoverie seemed to me to be so wonderfully singable. The idiom was modern, of course, but the feeling was—you know, the feeling you get with Handel, the feeling that you are in expert hands. The singers could settle into their parts, without having to be getting ready all the time for the next bit of acrobatics. A certainty of touch, I suppose you would call it.”
“That’s very shrewd of you. The others don’t really know anything about music, and what they say doesn’t matter. Odingsels knows a good deal, but he’s terribly jealous of anyone who makes a mark, you know. That’s why he’s pinched Persis for tonight; wants to take me down a peg.”
Monica had heard all her life that Opportunity knocks but once. But when Opportunity knocks, the sound can bring your heart into your mouth. No use dithering. She plunged.
“Do you think she’d have behaved like that if she really loved you?”
“I’ve never thought for an instant that she loved me.”
Opportunity had a foot in the door and was thundering on the knocker. Now was the moment. She felt awkward and plain; her head was light and seemed to be thumping. But, beneath these discomforts, she was elated. She was alive as never before.
“If I had Persis’ chance to show that I loved you I could do things for you that she can’t. You’re a genius. I know it and she doesn’t. I care about it and she doesn’t. I’m ignorant and silly, and I made a fool of myself at your mother’s house at Christmas, boasting and pretending. You must have despised me. But I wanted to impress you. I suppose I ought to have known better, but I didn’t. And you had shown that you had some feeling for me. And there it is.”
As she finished this speech, sitting bolt upright on the uncomfortable day-bed, looking at the carpet, Monica’s mind was almost entirely filled with a sense of having taken an irrevocable step, of having gone beyond the bounds of modesty which had been established for her in twenty-two years, of having burned her bridges: but there was room also for a sense of wonder, and indeed of admiration, for herself, and a pleased recognition that she had spoken plainly and well. She was ashamed of these latter sensations, and tried to banish them, but they would not go. Very far at the back of her mind a triumphant Monica was exulting, I’ve done it, I’ve done it, I’ve brought it to the point!
Revelstoke looked at her for a time, smiling, and twisting the ring which he wore on his left hand. He looked as he had looked when first she saw him, when he interrupted her playing of Danse Macabre.
“If you love me, prove it,” said he.
He means going to bed with him, she thought. Well, I knew that. I’m ready.
“I know that sounds hatefully egotistical,” he went on, “but I have always wondered what people meant when they talked about love. My mother has always told me that she loves me, but it’s astonishing how little she will do to show it; the love between us always seems to mean great concessions on my part, and very little ones on hers. And there have been girls—quite a few girls—who were sure they loved me, and whom I thought I loved
, but it never seemed to go beyond what was pleasant and flattering to themselves. Once they had me, as they thought, under their thumb, they wanted great changes in me. I do not propose to change to anybody’s pattern. That is the charm of Persis; she doesn’t expect changes in me, and she certainly doesn’t mean to make any in herself. She knows that I am no Darby, and certainly she is no Joan. Now, I have a suspicion—and I know it is caddish of me to mention it at such a tender moment as this—that you want to reform me, and make me better. Am I right?”
“No.”
“Don’t you want to make a quiet haven for me, in which I shall write immortal music, while you keep bad influences from the door, and do wonders with our tiny income?”
“No. You must do whatever seems best to you.”
“You have no notions about marriage?”
“I hadn’t thought about it.”
“Swear?”
“I swear.”
“Then let me tell you a thing or two. Our meeting at Neuadd Goch was a shock to me, and when I thought you had planned it, I hated you and determined to do you a very bad turn for it. But when I found out from my mother that it was all quite unplanned, I was delighted to find you there, and our encounter in the bathroom was proof of it. You were silly, bragging about your family; I don’t know anything about them, but every word you said was palpably false. And what were you trying to do? You wanted to impress my family. Why? Did you think them so marvellous that you couldn’t live without their admiration?”
“They were kind to me; I don’t know any other people like that. I wanted to be a little bit like them, I suppose.”