had not found it difficult to fall in love with him; his reticence, his
enigmatical reluctance to speak out, the sympathetic sullenness of his
face, a certain painful sensibility which shot like distressed nerves
across his cheeks and forehead and tugged at the restless corners of his
eyelids, seemed to attract them as to something which they could perhaps
find out, and then soothe, and put to rest. He had no morals, and was
too indifferent to refuse much that was offered to him. When it was a
simple adventure of the flesh, he accepted it simply, and, without
knowing it, won the reputation of being both sensual and hard-hearted, a
sort of coldly passionate creature, that promised everything in the
sincerity of one moment, and broke every promise in the sincerity of the
next. He did not go out of his way to find a woman who did not seem to
suggest herself to him; and when he mistook what was, perhaps, real love
for something else, all he wanted, he was genuinely sorry, and, at least
once, almost fancied that he was going to answer in key at last.
He had met Rana Vaughan at the college, where she was trying,
impossibly, to learn the piano. She had the artist's soul, and long,
white fingers, which seemed eager to touch the ivory and ebony of the
instrument; only, the soul and the fingers never could agree among
themselves, there was some stoppage of the electric current between
them. The piano never responded to her, but she knew, better than all
the professors, how it should respond; and Trevalga's playing was the
only playing she had ever liked. She adored him because he could do what
she wanted, above all things, to do; and it was with almost a vicarious
ecstasy that she listened to him. She admired, pitied, wanted to help
him; exulted in him, became his comrade, perhaps (he wondered?) loved
him, or would have loved him if he would have let her. He, who could
talk to no one else, could talk to her; and she brought him a warmth and
reality of life which he had never known. In her, for a time, he seemed
to touch real things; and, for a time, the experience quickened him.
She cared intensely for the one thing he cared for, and not less
intensely (and here was the wonder to him) for all the other things that
existed outside his interests. For her, life was everything, and
everything was a part of life. She would have given everything she had
to become a great player; but, if you found your way down to the root of
things, her feeling for music was neither more nor less than her feeling
for every form of art, and her feeling for art, which was unerring, was
the same thing as her feeling for skating or dancing. She got as much
pleasure from bending a supple binding in her hand as from reading the
poems inside it. She made no selections in life, beyond picking out all
the beautiful and pleasant things, whatever they might be. Trevalga
studied her with amazement; he felt withered, shrivelled up, in body and
soul, beside her magnificent acceptance of the world; she vitalised him,
drew him away from himself; and he feared her. He feared women.
To live with a woman, thought Christian, in the same house, the same
room with her, is as if the keeper were condemned to live by day and
sleep by night in the wild beast's cage. It is to be on one's guard at
every minute, to apprehend always the claws behind the caressing
softness of their padded coverings, to be continually ready to amuse
one's dangerous slave, with one's life for the forfeit. The strain of
it, the trial to the nerves, the temper! it was not to be thought of
calmly. He looked around him, and saw all the other keepers of these
ferocious, uncertain creatures, wearing out their lives in the exciting
companionship; and a dread of women took the place of his luxurious
indifference, as he imagined himself actually playing the part, too.
It would be, he saw, a conflict of egoisms, and he could not afford to
risk his own. Woman, as he saw her, is the beast of prey: rapacious of
affection, time, money, all the flesh and all the soul, one's nerves,
one's attention, pleasure, duty, art itself! She is the rival of the
idea, and she never pardons. She requires the sacrifice of the whole
man; nothing less will satisfy her; and, to love a woman is, for an
artist, to change one's religion.
Christian had tried honestly to explain himself to Rana, but the girl
would not understand him. She cared for his art as much as he did; she
would never come between him and his art; she would hate him if he
preferred her to his art. She said all that, sincerely; but he shook his
head obstinately, a little sadly, knowing that for him possible things
were impossible. The mere presence of any one he cared for, all the more
if he cared for her a great deal, disturbed him, upset his life. And he
must keep his life intact while he might.
After all, he considered, what was he? Caged already, for another kind
of slavery, the prisoner of his own fingers, as they worked,
independently of himself, mechanically, doing their so many miles of
promenade a day over the piano. He was such another as the equilibrist
whirling around his fixed bar, or swinging from trapeze to trapeze in
the air; a specialist in a particular kind of muscular movement, which
in him communicated itself to the mechanism of an instrument of sound.
For ever on the trapeze of sound, his life, the life of his reputation,
risked whenever he went through his performance before the public; yes,
he was only a kind of acrobat, doing tricks with his fingers.
As he looked fairly at all his imprisonments, dreading the worst, the no
longer solitary imprisonment, he realised that he had no outlook, that
he would never be able to look through the bars. 'I have only felt,' he
said to himself, 'I have never thought, and I have felt only one thing
very acutely, music.' He was almost frightened as he saw, in a flash,
within that narrow limits this one interest, this exercise of one
instinct, caged him. Other men were curious about many things; the
world existed for them, not only as substance, but as a matter for
thought; there were all the destinies of nations and of mankind to think
about, and he had never thought about them. He wondered what people
meant when they spoke about general interests. Were they a kind of
safety valve, for the lack of which he was bound, sooner or later, to
come to grief?
Occupied more and more nervously with himself, shutting himself up for
days and nights, almost without food, in an agony of attack on some
difficulty hardly tangible enough to be put into words, he let Rana
Vaughan drift away from him, with an unavowed sense of failure, of
having lost something which he could not bring himself to take, and
which might yet have saved him. She parted from him, at the last,
angrily, her pity worn out, her admiration stained with contempt. He
remembered the look of her face, flushed, indignant, as, withdrawn now
wholly into herself, she said good-bye for the last time. With her went
his last hold on the world.
Gradually sound began to take hold of him, like a slave who has overcome
his master. The sensation of sound presented itself to him continually,
not in the form of memory, nor as the suggestion of a composition, but
in a disquieting way, like some invisible companion, always at one's
side, whispering into one's ears. He was not always able to distinguish
between what he actually heard, a noise in the street, for instance,
which came to him for the most part with the suggestion of a cadence,
which his ear completed as if it had been the first note of a well-known
tune, and what he seemed to hear, through noise or silence, in some
region outside reality. 'So long as I can distinguish,' he said to
himself, 'between the one and the other, I am safe; the danger will be
when they become indistinguishable.'
He had realised a certain danger, always. He felt that he was a piece of
mechanism which was not absolutely to be trusted. There had been
something wrong from the beginning; the works did not wear evenly; one
part or another was bound to use itself up before its time; and then,
well, not even a shock would be needed to set everything out of order:
it was only a question of time.
He began to watch himself more closely, to watch for the enemy; and now
a kind of expectant uneasiness came of itself to suggest otherwise
imperceptible pains and troubles of sound. He was always listening, with
a frequent precipitation of pulses, to nothing, to something about to
come, to the fancy of music. The days dragged, and yet some feverish
idea seemed always to be hurrying him along; he was restless whenever
his fingers were not on the keys of the piano.
One day, at a concert, while he was playing one of Chopin's studies,
something in the curve of the music, which he had always seen as a wavy
line, going on indefinitely in space, spreading itself out elastically,
but without ever forming a pattern, seemed to become almost externally
visible, just above the level of the strings on the open top of the
piano. It was like grey smoke, forming and unforming as if it boiled up
softly out of the pit where the wires were coiled up. It was so distinct
that he shut his eyes for a moment, to see if it would be there when he
opened them again. It was still there, getting darker in colour, and
more distinct. He looked out of the corner of his eyes, to see if the
people sitting near him had noticed anything; but the people sitting
near him had their eyes fixed on his fingers, from which he seemed, as
usual, to be quite detached; they evidently saw nothing. He smiled to
himself, half apologetically; the piece had come to an end, and he was
bowing to the applause; he walked boldly off the platform.
When he came back to play again, he looked nervously at the top of the
piano, but there was nothing to be seen. He sat down, and bent over the
keyboard, and his hands began to run to and fro softly. When he looked
up he saw what he was playing as clearly as he could have seen the notes
if they had been there: but the wavy line was upright now, and drifted
upwards swiftly, vanishing at a certain point; it swayed to and fro like
a snake beating time to the music of the snake-charmer; and he looked at
it as if it understood him, and nodded his head to it, to show that he
understood. By this time it seemed to him quite natural, and he forgot
that there had ever been a time when he had not seen the music like
that.
On his way home after the concert, it occurred to him that something
unusual had happened, but he could not remember what it was. He dined by
himself, and after dinner went out into the streets, and walked in the
midst of people, as he liked to do, that he might take hold of something
real. But he could not concentrate his mind, he seemed somehow to be
slipping away from himself, dissolving into an uneasy vacancy. The
people did not seem, very real that night: he stopped for a long time at
the corner of the pavement, near Piccadilly Circus, and tried to see
what was going on around him. It was quite useless. The confusing
lights, the crush and hurry of figures wrapped in dark clothes, the
noise of the horses' hoofs striking the stones, the shouts of
omnibus-conductors and newsboys, all the surge and struggle of horrible
exterior forces, seeming to be tightened up into an inextricable
disorder, but pushing out with a hundred arms this way and that, making
some sort of headway against the opposition of things, brought over him
a complete bewilderment. 'I can see no reason,' he said to himself, 'why
I am here rather than there, why these atoms which know one another so
little, or have lost some recognition of themselves, should coalesce in
this particular body, standing still where all is in movement.' He
looked at the horses pulled back roughly at a cross-current, and tossing
back their heads as the hind-legs grew convulsively rigid, and he felt
sorry for them, and wondered why the driver was driving them and why
they were not driving the driver. Some one ran violently against him,
and apologised. The shock did nothing to wake him up; he noticed it,
waited for the effect, and was surprised that no effect came.
'Decidedly,' he said to himself, 'I am losing my sense of material
things, for, slight as it always has been, I have always resented being
pushed into the mud.'
He went home, and opened the piano; but he was afraid of it, and shut it
up, and went to bed. He slept well, but he dreamed that he was on the
island of Portland, among the convicts; there was a woman with him, who
seemed to be Rana, and they had tea at a farm, high up among trees; and
then he went away and forgot her, and found himself in a lonely place
where there were a number of cucumber-frames on the ground, and several
convicts were laid out asleep in each, half-naked, and packed together
head to heel. Then he remembered the woman, and went back to the farm
where he had left her; but she was no longer there, she had gone to look
for him, and he thought she must have lost her way among the convicts.
He was greatly distressed, but he found he was walking with her along
Piccadilly, and she told him that she had been waiting for him a long
time in an omnibus which had stopped at the corner of the Circus.
When he awoke in the morning he was relieved to find that his brain
seemed to have become quite clear, surprisingly clear, as if the fog
that had been gathering about him had lifted; and he sat at the piano
playing for many hours, and when he had finished playing he heard still
more ravishing sounds in the air, a music which was like what Chopin
might have written in Paradise. Tears of delight came into his eyes; he
sat listening in an ecstasy. Now everything had come right; all the
trouble and confusion had gone out of the sounds; they no longer teased
him with their muttering, coming and going elusively; they were all
about him, they flooded the air, they were like pure joy, speaking at
last its own language.
And for days after that he went about with a strange, secret smile on
his face, more than reconciled to his new companion, enamoured of him;
and at last he could keep the secret no longer, but had to tell every
one he met of this miracle that now went with him wherever he went. When
he stopped listening, and played the music that he had known before this
new music spoke to him, he seemed to play better than he had ever played
before. Only, when he had stopped playing, he sank back sleepily into
his ecstatic oblivion, not distinguishing between those he talked with
in his dream (the Chopin out of Paradise) and the few remaining friends,
who now came about him pityingly, and tried to do what they could for
him. Their coming awakened him a little; he awoke enough to realise that
they thought him mad; and it was with a very lucid fear that he waited
now for the doctor who was to decide finally whether he might still keep
his place in the world.
* * * * *
Five years later, when Christian Trevalga died in the asylum at ----,
some loose scraps of paper were found, on which he had jotted down a few
disconnected thoughts about music. They are, perhaps, worth giving, for
they are more explicit than he ever cared, or was able, to be when he
was quite sane; and, fragmentary as they are, may help to complete one's
picture of the man.
'It has been revealed to me that there is but one art, but many
languages through which men speak it. When the angels talk among
themselves, their speech is art; for they do not talk as men do, to
discuss matters or to relate facts, but to express either love or
wisdom. It is partly the beauty of their voices which causes whatever
they say to assume a form of beauty. Music comes nearer than any other
of the human languages to the sound of these angelic voices. But
painting is also a language, and sculpture, and poetry; only these have
more of the atmosphere of the earth about them, and are not so clear. I
have heard pictures which spoke to me melodiously, and I have listened
to the faultless rhythm of statues; but it was as an Englishman who
knows French and Italian quite well follows a conversation in those
languages. He has to substitute one sound for another in his mind.
* * * * *
'When I am playing the piano I am always afraid of hurting a sound. I
believe that sounds are living beings, flying about us like motes in the
air, and that they suffer if we clutch them roughly. Have you ever tried
to catch a butterfly without brushing the dust off its wings? Every time
I press a note I feel as if I were doing that, and it is an agony to
me. I am certain that I have hurt fewer sounds than any other pianist.
* * * * *
'Chopin's music screams under its breath, like a patient they are
operating upon in the hospital. There are flowers on the pillow, great
sickly pungent flowers, and he draws in their perfume with the same
breath that is jarred down below by the scraping sound of the little
saw.
* * * * *
'Chopin always treats the piano like a gentleman. He never gives it a
note that it cannot sing, he is always scrupulous towards its whims, he
indulges it like a spoilt child. Schumann comes back cloudily out of a
dream, and sets down the notes as he heard them, upon paper; then he
leaves the piano to make the best of it.
* * * * *
'Most modern music is a beggar for pity. The musician tries to show us
how he has suffered, and how hopeless he is. He sets his toothache and
his heartache to music, putting those sufferings into the music,
without remembering that sounds have their own agonies, which alone they
can express in a perfect manner. He forgets also that joy is the natural
speech of music, and that when he comes to sound for the expression of
his joy he is asking it to sing out of its own heart.
* * * * *
'I remember I once heard a Siamese band playing on board the yacht of
the King of Siam. It played its own music, of which I could make
nothing; and also passages from our operas. How can the same ears hear
in two different ways? And how far behind these Eastern musicians are
we, who cannot even understand their music when it is played to us! Some
day some one will dig down to the roots, and turn up music as it is
before it is tamed to the scale.
* * * * *
'It is strange, I never used to think about music: I accepted it by an
act of faith; I was too near it to look all round it. But lately, I do
not know why, I have been forced to think out many of the things which
I used to know without thinking. It all comes to the same thing in the
end; one form or another of knowledge; and does it matter if I can
explain it to you or not?'
THE CHILDHOOD OF LUCY NEWCOME.
The house which Lucy Newcome remembered as her home, the only home she
ever had, was a small house, hardly more than a cottage, with a little,
neat garden in front of it, and a large, untidy garden at the back.
There was a low wooden palisade cutting it off from the road, which, in
that remote suburb of the great town, had almost the appearance of a
road in the country. The house had two windows, one on each side of the
door, and above that three more windows, and attics above that. The
windows on each side of the door were the windows of the two
sitting-rooms; the kitchen, with its stone floor, its shining rows of
brass things around the walls, its great dresser, was at the back. It
was through the kitchen that you found your way into the big garden,
where the grass was always long and weedy and ill-kept, and so all the
pleasanter for lying on; and where there were a few alder-trees, a
pear-tree on which the pears never seemed to thrive, for it was quite
close to Lucy's bedroom window, a flower-bed along the wall, and a
great, old sundial, which Lucy used to ponder over when the shadows came
and stretched out their long fingers across it. The garden, when she
thinks of it now, comes to her often as she saw it one warm Sunday
evening, walking to and fro there beside her mother, who was saying how
good it was to be well again, or better: this was not long before she
died; and Lucy had said to herself, What a dear little mother I have,
and how young, and small, and pretty she looks in that lilac bodice with
the bright belt round the waist! Lucy had been as tall as her mother
when she was ten, and at twelve she could look down on her quite
protectingly.
Her father she but rarely saw; but it was her father whom she
worshipped, whom she was taught to worship. The whole house, she, her
mother, and Linda, the servant, who was more friend than servant (for
she took no wages, and when she wanted anything, asked for it), all
existed for the sake of that wonderful, impracticable father of hers; it
was for him they starved, it was to him they looked for the great future
which they believed in so implicitly, but scarcely knew in what shape to
look for. She knew that he had come of gentlefolk, in another county,
that he had been meant for the Church, and, after some vague misfortune
at Cambridge, had married her mother, who was but seventeen, and of a
class beneath him, against the will of his relations, who had cast him
off just as, at twenty-one, he had come into a meagre allowance from the
will of his grandfather. He had been the last of eleven children, born
when his mother was fifty years of age, and he had inherited the
listless temperament of a dwindling stock. He had never been able to do
anything seriously, or even to make up his mind quite what great thing
he was going to do. First he had found a small clerkship, then he had
dropped casually upon the post which he was to hold almost to the time
of his death, as secretary to some Assurance Society, whose money it was
his business to collect. He did the work mechanically; at first,
competently enough; but his heart was in other things. Lucy was never
sure whether it was the great picture he was engaged upon, or the great
book, that was to make all the difference in their fortunes. She never
doubted his power to do anything he liked; and it was one of her
privileges sometimes to be allowed to sit in his room (the sitting-room
on the left of the door, where it was always warmer and more comfortable
than anywhere else in the house), watching him at his paints or his
manuscripts, with great serious eyes that sometimes seemed to disquiet
him a little; and then she would be told to run away and not worry
mother.
The little mother, too, she saw less of than children mostly see of
their mothers; for her mother was never quite well, and she would so
often be told: 'You must be quiet now, and not go into your mother's
room, for she has one of her headaches,' that she gradually accustomed
herself to do without anybody's company, and then she would sit all
alone, or with her doll, who was called Arabella, to whom she would
chatter for hours together, in a low and familiar voice, making all
manner of confidences to her, and telling her all manner of stories.
Sometimes she would talk to Linda instead, sitting on the corner of the
kitchen fender; but Linda was not so good a listener, and she had a way
of going into the scullery, and turning on a noisy stream of water, just
at what ought to have been the most absorbing moment of the narrative.
Lucy was a curious child, one of those children of whom nurses are
accustomed to say that they will not make old bones. She was always a
little pale, and she would walk in her sleep; and would spend whole
hours almost without moving, looking vaguely and fixedly into the air:
children ought not to dream like that! She did not know, herself, very
often, what she was dreaming about; it seemed to her natural to sit for
hours doing nothing.
Often, however, she knew quite well what she was dreaming about; and
first of all she was dreaming about herself. Really, she would explain
if you asked her, she did not belong to her parents at all; she belonged
to the fairies; she was a princess; there was another, a great mother,
who would come some day and claim her. And this consciousness of being
really a princess was one of the joys of her imagination. She had
composed all the circumstances of her state, many times over, indeed,
and always in a different way. It was the heightening she gave to what
her mother had taught her: that she was of a better stock than the other
children who lived in the other small houses all round, and must not
play with them, or accept them as equals. That was to be her consolation
if she had to do without many of the things she wanted, and to be
shabbily dressed (out of old things of her mother's, turned and cut and
pieced together), while perhaps some of those other children, who were
not her equals, had new dresses.