Next morning I got a rowing up from my father. Indeed, as soon as I
saw my face in the glass, I knew it would be quite useless to try to
hide what had happened, and I told him frankly I had been fighting.
Fortunately, it was not necessary for me to say anything about our
club, nor did I even mention Sam’s name. I simply told him that the
fight had taken place at night to prevent its being stopped, and
after that held my peace. My main feeling, in spite of my father’s
lecture, was that I was extraordinarily glad it _had_ taken place, for
I had come out of it victorious, even though I was pretty sure I had
received more punishment than I had given. My state of mind absurdly
resembled that of a young cock who gets up on a wall to crow, and
nothing my father could say had the least power to damp my spirits. My
face――especially all round my forehead and temples――was beautifully and
variously marked, yet there was nothing I more ardently desired than
that Katherine should see me in this condition. I even felt amicably
disposed towards Gerald, who, after all, couldn’t help being a coward.
Perhaps he would come round this morning to see how I had fared.
But nobody came, and in the afternoon I determined to go up to
Derryaghy. Willie Breen, who now regarded me in the light of a hero,
accompanied me. When I left him at the lodge-gate, instead of going to
the hall-door, I went round to the back of the house, hoping to find
Katherine on the terrace. She was not there; nobody was there but Miss
Dick, who cried out at once on seeing my battered condition. Her tone
was certainly far enough removed from that of Willie Breen to have
cooled my conceit had such a thing been possible, but fortunately she
was too much occupied with a letter she kept folding and unfolding to
bestow any very lengthy attention on my appearance. “My sister, Mrs.
Arthur Jenkins,” she began, not because I was worthy of her confidence,
but because there was nobody else, “wants me to go and stay with her. I
don’t know what to do. Mrs. Carroll may not be able to spare me; though
I haven’t been there for a long time.”
“Oh, you ought to go,” I said easily. “Where is everybody?” I looked
round, preparatory to making my escape. Miss Dick regarded me
doubtfully.
“The last time I was there the youngest child had croup. They were very
anxious about him; indeed the doctor almost gave him up; though he
managed to pull through in the end, and is quite strong now. Not that
any of them are actually what you would call robust. They really take
after Arthur, Mr. Jenkins that is, though Sissie, that’s my sister,
always says _he’s_ stronger than he looks. I’m sure I hope so, for he
looks wretched. The whole family, you know, the whole Jenkins family
I mean, are vegetarians, and vegetarians, whatever they may feel,
invariably _look_ ill. When I say that to Sissie she always gets cross,
as if I could help it! But that’s what people are like. Arthur wants
to bring up the children in the same way, which is silly, and, to my
mind, trifling with their lives. Besides, it’s so difficult when you’ve
only one maid who has to do everything: and they only give fourteen,
and what can you get for fourteen nowadays, even in the country?
You certainly can’t expect a girl like that to cook two dinners a
day, because, you see, Sissie eats meat.” She stopped suddenly, as
if she had lost the thread of her discourse. “We’re all going to a
garden-party at Castlewellan. I’m just waiting for the others. Except
Gerald――he won’t come. You’ll find him over there,”――she waved her
left hand. “He’s put up a hammock and he’s been sleeping in it all
day. He’s dreadfully lazy. He won’t even practise. And though he’s so
polite and gentlemanly, I must say he’s really rather irritable: he got
quite cross at lunch. I don’t think Katherine understands him. People
with very artistic feelings, I’m sure, _are_ more easily annoyed than
others. It’s not as if he were just an ordinary person like you or me.”
Whether I was an ordinary person or not, I didn’t relish being told so,
even by Miss Dick, and I decided, as I had frequently decided before,
that she was a stupid creature, and that I didn’t like her. I left
her referring to the epistle from Mrs. Arthur Jenkins, or Sissie, or
whatever she was called, and went to look for Gerald.
He had heard me coming, for when I found him he had swung himself out
of his hammock and was standing beside it.
“Are the others gone yet?” he asked.
“They’re just starting. I only saw Miss Dick.”
“They’re going to some party, thank the Lord!”
“Yes; she told me.”
A pause followed, for I didn’t know what to say, and he himself kept
silence. What I had intended to do was to put him at his ease, to let
him know that it was all right about last night, but my magnanimity and
sympathy were evidently quite superfluous, and I was annoyed at this.
We strolled back slowly to the house. “Wouldn’t it be rather a good
time to play to me?” I said. “You promised to, and now we have the
place to ourselves.”
“If you like.”
We entered by the open window, and pulling the sofa over beside it, I
lay down in supreme laziness among a heap of coloured cushions. Gerald
went at once to the piano.
“What sort of music do you care for?” he asked me. “Or shall I just
play anything?”
“Yes; whatever you feel in the mood for.”
His head was bent a little over the key-board, and he seemed to be
thinking of what he should play. I watched a tendril of clematis that
waved softly over my head, and every now and again I breathed in
the sweet scent of a stalk of mignonette I had gathered in passing.
My thoughts floated away through the quiet afternoon, and I began
to wonder what things were like when there was no one there to be
conscious of them.
I know now that it was the fifteenth Prelude, but at the time I had
never even heard the name of Chopin, and all I was aware of was that
a soft, very delicate tune, was coming to me across the room, with a
curious pallor, suggestive of the whiteness of water. I half closed my
lids and lay absolutely still. Even in my ignorance I knew that the
beauty of Gerald’s playing was extraordinary. It may have had many
faults; he may have been incapable of doing all kinds of things that
professional pianists can do; he may have been, and probably was,
deficient in power: I do not know. He seemed to caress the notes rather
than to strike them, he seemed literally to draw the music out, and the
whole tone had a kind of liquid, singing quality, such as I have never
heard since save in the playing of Pachmann. As I listened, the music
gathered force and sombreness, growing louder and darker in a heavily
marked crescendo, and then once more it passed into the clear soft tune
with which it had begun.
The sound had stopped. I said nothing; I simply waited. The cool,
pleasant summer afternoon had become full of lovely voices which
flickered, like waves of coloured light, across my senses. Pensively,
a little shyly even, a simple, drooping melody breathed itself out on
the air with a strange hesitation and indecision, rising and falling,
faltering, repeating itself, resting on the “F” with a kind of desire
that gathered intensity as the note swelled and died away, sinking back
into “D.”
Listening to Gerald playing that sixth Nocturne, listening to him
playing all that followed it, you would have thought he was a youth
of the deepest feelings, yet I could never find any trace of those
feelings at any other time. Somewhere, I suppose, they must have been,
somewhere below the surface, but I was never able to discover them. It
was as if his soul only came into being when he sat down at a piano.
When he played you could see him listening to his own music, you could
see him drinking it up as if it were the perfume of my mignonette, as
if there were some finer echo audible only to himself. And his playing
would alter, would grow gayer, or a kind of weariness would creep into
it. I offer these only as the impressions I received at the time; what
I should receive now I cannot tell. Yet I find it hard to believe I was
utterly mistaken. It was never my fortune to hear him in later years,
when I had heard many famous pianists――and I suppose I have heard
practically all those of my time――but I cannot help thinking he might
have been among the greatest had he not chosen to be something else,
something I last saw at a café in Berlin. The puffed, horrible face,
the glazed, sodden eyes――no, there was no music there. Or if there was,
it was hidden, buried, lost for ever in that desecrated, half-paralysed
body, buried alive, like a lamp burning in a tomb. Now, I have nothing
to go upon save those first impressions of a boyish, uncultivated
taste, and the fact that in after years the playing of Vladimir de
Pachmann brought back sharply to me the memory of that afternoon.
He played on for nearly two hours. In the end he stopped abruptly and
got up from the piano, while I thanked him. I knew that he knew he had
given me a tremendous pleasure, and there was no need to say much. He
told me the music I had been listening to was all, or nearly all, by
one composer.
“And that last thing?” I asked.
“That was one of the Studies――the one in A flat. I can’t play anybody
else. I don’t mean that other things are more difficult, but they don’t
suit me.” He was silent, until he added, “I may as well tell you that
I’m not as good as you think.”
“I haven’t told you yet what I think,” I answered, smiling, for I
was still under the glamour of his mood, and indeed at that moment I
could have hugged him. I did not want to talk of ordinary things. The
music had wakened in me a feeling of melancholy, like a memory of some
delicious thing that had happened long ago, and would never happen
again.
I tried to explain my very tenuous ideas to Gerald, but they did not
interest him. And already I felt our relation altering. When he was at
the piano he had seemed to me a kind of angel; now that other element,
that element of latent antagonism, was beginning to re-awaken in me.
Tea had meanwhile been laid for us upon the terrace. Tony, who had
been asleep outside in the sun, threw off drowsiness like an outworn
garment, and sat up beside my chair, with raised head, and beautiful,
dark eyes that watched every movement I made, especially those which
happened to convey a piece of bread and butter or cake into my mouth.
When I looked at him he instantly gave half a dozen quick wags of his
tail, and then resumed his former attitude of motionless expectation,
to which attention was attracted by a variety of queer little highly
expressive noises he produced from somewhere in his throat. Nobody
being there to prevent me, I gave him about half the cake, piece by
piece, each of which he swallowed almost whole, and with a wag of the
tail to show how he appreciated this delicate pastime.
“Did you get much hurt last night?” Gerald asked me suddenly.
The question was unexpected, for I looked upon the whole incident as
closed. I glanced up from feeding Tony. “No; not much,” I answered.
“And the other――I forget his name――Sam something?”
“Oh, Sam’s all right.”
“Do you think I should have fought him?”
“One was enough,” I said carelessly.
“Did you think I was afraid?”
I looked away. His question seemed somehow to be all wrong. “I didn’t
think about it,” I answered, after a slight pause.
“It must have looked as if I were afraid,” he went on. “I thought so
afterwards.”
I couldn’t imagine what he was trying to get at. I wanted to stop him
talking like this. It was even less to my taste than his funking Sam
last night had been.
“Are you working at anything besides music?” I asked him, jerkily.
He shook his head. “Not very much. I have a tutor. Why won’t you talk
about last night?”
“What is there to talk about? I’m sorry it turned out that way, but I
can’t help it, though of course it was my fault for taking you without
letting the others know. I should have told them beforehand.”
“I’m not afraid of that lout, anyway. If I see him again――――”
“Oh, well, what’s the use of worrying about it?” I interrupted,
disgusted with his persistence.
The pause that followed was an uncomfortable one. If he had deliberately
tried to efface the impression his music had made upon me he could not
have succeeded better.
He gave a strange little laugh. “I see you don’t believe me.”
“No: I don’t believe you,” I answered bluntly, “and I don’t know why
you should want me to.”
“I suppose you think it is pleasant to be taken for a coward?”
“I’m sure it isn’t pleasant; but I can’t imagine that it matters
greatly to you what I think.”
“Of course, if I hadn’t done what I did, you wouldn’t have had _your_
particular little swagger!”
“Isn’t that rather a rotten sort of thing to say?” I answered as I got
up. “I think I’ll move on. Come, Tony.”
Gerald began to apologize.
“Oh, it’s all right,” I said, coldly, leaving him there.