word, intonation by intonation. She read it over, not really knowing
what it was about; she learned it by heart mechanically, getting the
words into her memory first. Then the meaning had to be explained to
her, scene by scene, and she had to say the words over until she had
found the right accent. Once found, she never forgot it; she could
repeat it identically at any moment; there were no variations to allow
for. Until that moment she was reaching out blindly in the dark, feeling
about her with uncertain fingers.
And, with her, the understanding came with the power of expression,
sometimes seeming really to proceed from the sound to the sense, from
the gesture inward. Show her how it should be done, and she knew why it
should be done; sound the right note in her ears, arrest her at the
moment when the note came right, and she understood, by a backward
process, why the note should sound thus. Her mind worked, but it worked
under suggestion, as the hypnotists say; the idea had to come to her
through the instinct, or it would never come.
As Esther found herself, almost unconsciously, becoming what she had
dreamed of becoming, what she had longed to become, and, after all,
through Philip Haygarth, a more personal feeling began to grow up in her
heart toward this lover who had found his way to her, not through the
senses, but through the mind. A kind of domesticity had crept into their
relations, and this drew Esther nearer to him. She began to feel that he
belonged to her. He had never, she knew, been wholly absorbed in her,
and she had delighted him by showing no jealousy, no anxiety to keep
him. As long as she remained so, he felt that she had a sure hold on
him. But now she began to change, to concern herself more with his
doings, to assert her right to him, as she had never hitherto cared to
do. He chafed a little at what seemed an unnecessary devotion.
Love, with Esther, had come slowly, taking his time on the journey; but
he came to take possession. To work at her art was to please Philip
Haygarth; she worked now with a double purpose. And she made surprising
advances as an actress. People began to speculate: had she genius, or
was this only an astonishingly developed talent, which could go so far
and no farther?
For, in this finished method, which seemed so spontaneous and yet at the
same time so deliberate, there seemed still to be something, some
slight, essential thing, almost unaccountably lacking. What was it? Was
it a fundamental lack, that could never be supplied? Or would that
slight, essential thing, as her admirers prophesied, one day be
supplied? They waited.
Esther was now really happy, for the first time in her life; and as she
looked back over those years, in the street by the Docks, when she had
lived alone in the midst of her family, and since then, when she had
lived alone, working, not finding the time long, nor wishing it to go
more slowly, she felt a kind of surprise at herself. How could she have
gone through it all? She had not even been bored. She had had a purpose,
and now that she was achieving that purpose, the thing itself seemed
hardly to matter. Her art kept pace with her life; she was giving up
nothing in return for happiness; but she had come to prize the
happiness, her love, beyond all things.
She knew that Haygarth was proud of her, that he looked upon her talent,
genius, whatever it was, as partly the work of his hands. It pleased her
that this should be so; it seemed to bind him to her more tightly.
In this she was mistaken, as most women are mistaken when they ask
themselves what it is in them that holds their lovers. The actress
interested Haygarth greatly, but the actress interested him as a
problem, as something quite apart from his feelings as a man, as a
lover. He had been attracted by the woman, by what was sombre and
unexplained in her eyes, by the sleepy grace of her movements, by the
magnetism that seemed to drowse in her. He had made love to her
precisely as he would have made love to an ignorant, beautiful creature
who walked on in some corner of a Drury Lane melodrama. On principle, he
did not like clever women. Esther, it is true, was not clever, in the
ordinary, tiresome sense; and her startling intuitions, in matters of
acting, had not repelled him, as an exhibition of the capabilities of a
woman, while they preoccupied him for a long time in that part of his
brain which worked critically upon any interesting material. But nothing
that she could do as an artist made the least difference to his feeling
about her as a woman; his pride in her was like his pride in a play
that he had written finely, and put aside; to be glanced at from time to
time, with cool satisfaction. He had his own very deliberate theory of
values, and one value was never allowed to interfere with another. A
devoted, discreet amateur of woman, he appreciated women really for
their own sakes, with an unflattering simplicity. And for a time Esther
absorbed him almost wholly.
He had been quite content with their relations as they were before she
fell seriously in love with him, and this new, profound feeling, which
he had never even dreaded, somewhat disturbed him. She was adopting
almost the attitude of a wife, and he had no ambition to play the part
of a husband. The affections were always rather a strain upon him; he
liked something a little less serious and a little more exciting.
Esther understood nothing that was going on in Philip Haygarth's mind,
and when he began to seem colder to her, when she saw less of him, and
then less, it seemed to her that she could still appeal to him by her
art and still touch him by her devotion. As her warmth seemed more and
more to threaten his liberty, the impulse to tug at his chain became
harder to resist. His continued, unvarying interest in her acting, his
patience in helping her, in working with her, kept her for some time
from realising how little was left now of the more personal feeling. It
was with sharp surprise, as well as with a blinding rage, that she
discovered one day, beyond possibility of mistake, that she had a rival,
and that Haygarth was only doling out to her the time left over from her
rival.
It was an Italian, a young girl who had come over to London with an
organ-grinder, and who posed for sculptors, when she could get a
sitting. It was a girl who could barely read and write, an insignificant
creature, a peasant from the Campagna, who had nothing but her good
looks and the distinction of her attitudes. Esther was beside herself
with rage, jealousy, mortification; she loved, and she could not pardon.
There was a scene of unmeasured violence. Haygarth was cruel, almost
with intention; and they parted, Esther feeling as if her life had been
broken sharply in two.
She was at the last rehearsals of a new play by Haygarth, a play in
which he had tried for once to be tragic in the bare, straightforward
way of the things that really happen. She went through the rehearsals
absent-mindedly, repeating her words, which he had taught her how to
say, but scarcely attending to their meaning. Another thought was at
work behind this mechanical speech, a continual throb of remembrance,
going on monotonously. Her mind was full of other words, which she heard
as if an inner voice were repeating them; her mind made up pictures,
which seemed to pass slowly before her eyes: Haygarth and the other
woman. At the last rehearsal Quellen came round to her, and, ironically
as she thought, complimented her on her performance. She meant, when the
night came, not to fail: that was all.
When the night came, she said to herself that she was calm, that she
would be able to concentrate herself on her acting and act just as
usual. But, as she stood in the wings, waiting for her moment to
appear, her eyes went straight to the eyes of the other woman, the
Italian model, the organ-grinder's girl, who sat, smiling contentedly,
in the front of a box, turning her head sometimes to speak to some one
behind her, hidden by the curtain. She was dressed in black, with a rose
in her hair: you could have taken her for a lady; she was triumphantly
beautiful. Esther shuddered as if she had been struck; the blood rushed
into her forehead and swelled and beat against her eyes. Then, with an
immense effort, she cleared her mind of everything but the task before
her. Every nerve in her body lived with a separate life as she opened
the door at the back of the stage, and stood, waiting for the applause
to subside, motionless under the eyes of the audience. There was
something in the manner of her entrance that seemed to strike the fatal
note of the play. She had never been more restrained, more effortless;
she seemed scarcely to be acting; only, a magnetic current seemed to
have been set in motion between her and those who were watching her.
They held their breaths, as if they were assisting at a real tragedy; as
if, at any moment, this acting might give place to some horrible, naked
passion of mere nature. The curtain rose and rose again at the end of
the first act; and she stood there, bowing gravely, in what seemed a
deliberate continuation, into that interval, of the sentiment of the
piece. Her dresses were taken off her and put on her, for each act, as
if she had been a lay-figure. Once, in the second act, she looked up at
the box; the Italian woman was smiling emptily, but Haygarth, taking no
notice of her, was leaning forward with his eyes fixed on the stage.
After the third act he sent to Esther's dressing-room a fervent note,
begging to be allowed to see her. She had made his play, he said, and
she had made herself a great actress. She crumpled the note fiercely,
put it carefully into her jewel-box, and refused to see him. In the last
act she had to die, after the manner of the Lady of the Camellias,
waiting for the lover who, in this case, never came. The pathos of her
acting was almost unbearable, and, still, it seemed not like acting at
all. The curtain went down on a great actress.
Esther went home stunned, only partly realising what she had done, or
how she had done it. She read over the note from Haygarth,
unforgivingly; and the long letter that came from him in the morning. As
reflection returned, through all the confused suffering and excitement,
to her deliberate, automatic nature, in which a great shock had brought
about a kind of release, she realised that all she had wanted, during
most of her life, had at last come about. The note had been struck, she
had responded to it, as she responded to every suggestion, faultlessly;
she knew that she could repeat the note, whenever she wished, now that
she had once found it. There would be no variation to allow for, the
actress was made at last. She might take back her lover, or never see
him again, it would make no difference. It would make no difference, she
repeated, over and over again, weeping uncontrollable tears.
CHRISTIAN TREVALGA.
He had never known what it was to feel the earth solid under his feet.
And now, while he waited for the doctor who was to decide whether he
might still keep his place in the world, and make what he could of all
that remained to him of his life, the past began to come back to him,
blurred a little in his memory, and with whole spaces blotted out of it,
but in a steady return upon himself, as the past, it is said, comes back
to a drowning man at the instant before death. There was that next step
to take, the step that frightened him; was it into another, more
painful, kind of oblivion? He was still an artist, his fingers were
still his own; but had the man all gone out of him, the power to live
for himself, when his fingers were no longer on the keyboard? That was
to be decided; and the past was trying to make its own comment on the
situation.
Christian Trevalga was born in a little sea-coast village in Cornwall,
and the earliest thing he remembered was the sharp, creaking voice of
the sea-gulls, as they swept past him at the edge of the cliff, high up
over the sea. He was conscious of it, because it hurt him, sooner than
he was conscious of the many voices of the sea, which, all through his
childhood, sang out of the midst of all his dreams. Pain always meant
more to him than pleasure, though, indeed, he was not always sure if the
things that hurt him were not the things he cared for most.
He was thirty-six now, and he had never gone back to the village since
he left it, at the age of sixteen, to come to London and try to win a
scholarship at the College. His father was a gentleman, who had come
down in the world; drink, gambling, and a low kind of debauchery brought
him down; and when he came back from Spain in a certain year, sobered,
something of a wreck, and married to a slow-witted Spanish woman whom he
had found no one knew where, he had only an old-fashioned, untidy, but
large and rambling, house on a cliff to live in, on the outskirts of a
village, most of which had once belonged to him. Debts and mortgages
left just enough to live on uncomfortably; he was not exacting now, and
the place was good for an idle, helpless man, who was tired of what he
called living, and had taken a late fancy to the open air, and, as soon
as the child was old enough, to the companionship of his child. His wife
sat indoors all day, crouching over the fire, except when the summer
heat was extreme, and then she lay on the grass, under an umbrella. When
they sat at table her fingers were always crumbling the bread into tiny
crumbs, and often, at tea-time especially, she would take a large slice
of bread and mould it into little figures, little nude figures
exquisitely proportioned, with all the modelling of the limbs and
shoulder-blades. Sometimes she would do more than a single figure, a
little well, for instance, and a woman kneeling at the brink, and
leaning over it, with her arms outstretched. She loved the little
figures, and talked about them very seriously, criticising their
defects, not content with the lines that she had got, seeing them with
subtler curves than any she had been able to get. She would like to have
kept some of them, but, though she soaked them in milk, they would
always crumble away as soon as the bread dried. Christian stared at her
when her fingers were busy; he was puzzled, not exactly happy; he
generally ran away and left her for his father, who was not so queer,
half-absorbed, and busy about nothing.
His father had a great fondness for music, but he could not play any
instrument, only whistle. He whistled elaborate tunes, with really a
kind of skill. There was a good old Broadwood piano in the house, and,
from as long ago as he could remember, Christian had been put on the
music-stool, and told to play what his father whistled. The first time
he was put there he picked out every note correctly, with one finger.
The father caught him up in his exuberant way: 'You will be a great
musician, my boy!' he said. The mother nodded over the fire, and looked
down at her tiny fingers, which could pick out form as the child, it
seemed, could pick out sound.
Christian lived at the piano, playing all the music that he could find
in the house, and making up a strange, formless music of his own when
there was nothing else to play. His ear, from the first, was faultless;
if a poker fell in the fireplace he could tell you the pitch of the note
which it sounded. He was always listening, and sounds, with him, often
became visible, or at least reflected themselves upon his brain in
contours and patterns. The wind at night, when it flapped at the windows
with the sound of a sail flapping, seemed to surround the house with
realisable forms of sound. The music which he played on the piano made
lines, whenever he thought of it; never pictures. His mother, who did
not seem to herself to know or care anything about music, sometimes
described a little scene which the music he had been playing called up
to her, but he could never see things in that way. When he played the
first ballad of Chopin, for instance, she saw two lovers, sheltering
under trees in a wood, out of the rain which was falling around them,
and she followed their emotions, as the music interpreted them to her.
But he did not understand music like that; what was mathematical in it
he saw as pattern, but the emotion came to him in an almost equally
abstract way, as musical emotion, beginning and ending in the music
itself, and not needing to have any of one's own feelings put into it.
It was the music itself that cried and wept, and tore one; the passions
of abstract sound.
For, he knew from the beginning, the soul of music is something more
than the soul of humanity expressing itself in melody, and the life of
music something more than an audible dramatisation of human life.
Beethoven, let us say, is angry with the world, Schumann dreams about
the roots of a flower; and they sit down to make music under that
impulse. Well, the anger will be there, and the flower coming up out of
the earth, but the music itself will have forgotten both the dream and
the feeling, the moment it begins to speak articulately in sound. It
will have its own message, as well as its own language, and you will not
be able to write down that message in words, any more than your words
can be translated into that language.
And so Christian, with his divination of what music really means, was
never able to attach any expressible meaning to the pieces he played,
and became tongue-tied if any one asked him questions about them. The
emotion of the music, the idea, the feeling there, that was what moved
him; and his own personal feelings, apart from some form of music which
might translate them into a region where he could recognise them with
interest, came to mean less and less to him, until he seemed hardly to
have any personal feelings at all. It was natural to him to be kind,
people liked him and often imagined that he responded to their liking;
but, at many periods of his life, accused him of gross unkindness, or
even treachery, and he had not been conscious of the affection or of its
betrayal.
And outward things, too, as well as people, meant very little to him,
and meant less and less as time went on. What he saw, when he went for
long walks with his father, had vanished from his memory before he had
returned to the house; it was as if he had been walking through
underground passages, with only a little faint light on the roadway in
front of his feet. He knew all the sea-cries, but never seemed to notice
the movement, the colour, of the sea; the sunsets over the sea left him
indifferent; he looked, with the others, but said nothing, and seemed to
see nothing.
When he had decided that he was going to be a great pianist, and this
was when he was about ten, he had settled down to the hard work which
that meant, with an enthusiasm so profound and tenacious that it looked
like stolidity. They gave him a room at the top of the house, where he
could practise without disturbing anybody, and he shut himself in there,
until he was dragged out unwillingly to his meals, grudging the time
when he had to sit quiet at the table. 'What are you always thinking
about?' they would ask him, as he frowned silently over his food; but
he was thinking about nothing, he wanted to get back to the bar in the
middle of which he had been interrupted. The cadence seemed to hang in
space, swinging like a spider, and unable to catch the cornice on the
other wall.
He was sixteen when he went up to London for the first time, and it had
been arranged that he should take lodgings in Bloomsbury, and try to
hear some of the great pianists, and, if possible, get some help
privately, before he tried for the scholarship. He got a bedroom at the
top of a house in Coptic Street, and hired a piano, which took up most
of the space left over by the bed; and he began to go to the shilling
seats at concerts, especially when there was any piano music to be
heard. Just then several of the most famous pianists were in London; he
went to hear them, at first with a horrible apprehension, and then more
boldly, as he saw what could be learned from them, and yet seemed to
fancy that they, too, might have found something to learn from him. He
heard their thunders, and laughed: that was not his idea of the
instrument, a thing, in their hands, that could overtop an orchestra
playing fortissimo. He saw these athletes fight with the poor instrument
as if they fought with a dangerous wild beast. Some used it as an anvil
to hammer sparks out of it; the chords rang and rebounded as if iron had
struck iron; it was the new art of attack, and piano-makers were
strengthening their defences daily. Some displayed an incredible
agility, and invented all sorts of ugly difficulties, in order to
overcome them; they reminded him of the dancing girls he had read of,
who used, at Roman feasts, to leap head-foremost into the midst of a
circle of sword-blades, and dance there on their hands, and leap out
again. He knew that he could not do any of these things, as he heard
them done; but was that really the way to treat music, or the way to
treat the piano?
* * * * *
Christian Trevalga remembered all this as he sat waiting for the doctor
in his rooms in Piccadilly; and it came to him like the first act of a
play which he was still watching, without knowing how the curtain was to
come down. That year in London, the loneliness, poverty, labour of it;
the great day of the competition, when he played behind the curtain, and
Rubinstein, sitting among the professors, silenced every hesitation with
his strong approval; the three years of hard daily work, the painful
perfecting of everything that he had sketched out for himself; life, as
he had lived it, a queer, silent, sullen, not unattractive boy, among
the students in whom he took so little interest; all this passed before
him in a single flash of memory. He had gone abroad, at the expense of
the college; had travelled in Germany and Austria; had extorted the
admiration of Brahms, who had said, 'I hate what you play, and I hate
how you play it, but you play the piano!' Tschaikowsky was in Vienna; he
had taken a warm personal liking to the unresponsive young Englishman,
who seemed to be always frowning, and looking at you distrustfully from
under his dark, overhanging eyebrows. It was not to the musician that he
was unresponsive, as he was to the musician in Brahms, the German doctor
of music in spectacles, that peered out of those learned, intellectual
scores. He felt Tschaikowsky with his nerves, all that suffering music
without silences, never still and happy, like most other music, at all
events sometimes. But the man, when he walked arm in arm with him,
seemed excessive, a kind of uneasy responsibility.
Then he had come back to London, lived and worked there, given concerts,
made his fame in the world, seen himself triumph, watching his own
career with an absolute certainty of being able to do what he wanted.
And all the time he had been, as he was that day at the college when he
won the scholarship, playing behind a curtain. He knew that on the other
side of the curtain was the world, with many things to do besides
listening to him, though he could arrest it when he liked, and make it
listen; then it went on its way again, and the other things continued to
occupy it. Well, for him, where were those other things? They hardly
existed. The great men who had given him their friendship, all the
people who came to him because they admired him, those who came to him
because his playing seemed to speak to them from somewhere inside their
own hearts, in the little voices of their blood, the women who, as it
seemed, loved him: why was it that he could not be as they were, respond
to them in their own language, which was that of humanity itself,
admire, like, love them back?