Authors: Rebecca West
‘No, no,’ he said impatiently, ‘we were not rich, but we were not poor. But why were you so poor? How did it happen?’ He shook my arm to make me tell, but it was then that the Admiral came up in an old Daimler, driven by an old chauffeur, it might have been a chariot in a masque representing honourable old age. He hobbled out and introduced himself, and we were at once torn by that conflict which, for us, usually raged in the shadow of a great house such as Barbados Hall. The Admiral’s blue eyes were hard in the wrinkled waste of his old eyelids, he was hard and stupid and obsolete. There was impertinence in the candour with which he conveyed to us that, though it was not surprising that I was reasonably elegant and a pianist, since women were condemned to be entertainers of all sorts, it was surprising that anybody as masculine as Oliver should be a musician. But Oliver explained with perfect civility that from his earliest childhood he had never cared for anything but music, as he might have confessed to congenital asthma. The Admiral was so much nearer death than we were that it was not becoming for us to correct him; and indeed it is necessary that some people should be insensitive to music. All musicians know that a community in which everyone was susceptible to musical excitement would run mad. The old man’s deafness let sound speak its meaning in safety. Also he and the chauffeur, and all the crowd of servants one could divine behind him, had their own mystery. We drove into a park flooded by the setting sun, and on a knoll of golden turf, before a golden hanger, a herd of deer, bright brown, amber-bright, stood fixed in fineness, a line of attention running taut from each raised muzzle to the same point of the compass. ‘It’s easy to know what’s coming to them down the wind,’ called the chauffeur, and the Admiral gave a connoisseur’s chuckle and grunt. We had no idea what they meant. For these men the earth was covered with forms and embodied motives of which we were ignorant, as for us the air was a complex of sounds and articulated motives which they could not hear. They were also our associates in art, practitioners of a craft we could not undertake. Their kind had not built the house that lay in a sudden garden amid the deep folds of this part; but their kind had caused it to be built and had preserved it, as our careless kind could not. We reached it as the sunset blazed. The central wing had two storeys of deep red brick divided by stone pilasters; the brick was glowing, the stone was stained the colour of ripe peach flesh. In the windows flamed small reflected sunsets, their wildness bridled by good taste, for each window was so right a shape. Pilaster, strip of brick, pilaster, strip of brick, might have made too simple a pattern had not the pilasters burst into capitals under the eaves, capitals ornate as the heads of the heavier flowers, the stronger lilies or the Datura. On each side there was a wing in a later, classical mode, faced by a colonnade; the one not flushed by the sunset was lilac-blue. Time had not been allowed to spoil one square inch of this.
We could not drive up to the door, for there was a car in front of it. On the broad steps three menservants were coloured by the sunset like the stone, and might have been architectural details of the huge and highly decorated doorway. They looked at the Admiral’s car with a certain distaste, and the Admiral cut through our goodbyes with an enquiry as to whether we were quite sure that Lady Mortlake expected us to arrive tonight, and telling us that he had only wondered, and that he must be getting on, his wife had had a special salmon sent from Ireland, and some friends were coming in to share it at an early dinner. It might have been that there was the fog of a family quarrel in the air.
As we mounted the steps the butler remained standing against the carved framework of the door, his face and hands and shirt-front glowing in this remarkable identity of colour; he might have been a
trompe l’oeil
butler painted on the stone. We found it odd that his silvered handsomeness should be discomposed, that he should regard us with what seemed like open reproach, and should abruptly exclaim, ‘We would have fetched you!’ and should make no motion to usher us into the house. But just then there came through the door a woman whom I could not doubt to be Lady Mortlake, and not for a moment could we believe that she was there with the intention of welcoming us. She was dressed for departure, and she burst out of the house as if it were a constraining bodice and now her bosom could be bare and free. She looked at us with frank impatience because we were in her way, then recognised us, and after a hostile pause repeated our names loudly and with ecstasy. Some faces had shown behind her in the darkness of the doorway, and with a freshet of laughter these disappeared. It had been obvious that she had raised her voice for other ears than ours, that she had been giving what she knew would be a cue for that laughter, which was not good-natured, which she had known would not be good-natured. On us she turned the full brilliance of her appearance in a greeting far too cordial, to listen to it was like looking at a pattern material from too short a distance. Like many women of that time, she spoke with a cat’s voice, and overstressed certain words, introducing into each sentence an affectation of unbounded enthusiasm and a satire on all spontaneity. She explained to us that she had to rush to the bedside of a sick relative. To convince us of her regret she leaned towards us and we were lapped by waves of an intoxicating scent, surely more useful at the bedside of the well than that of the sick. She had not seen the Admiral’s car, so she identified the invalid as his wife, her mother-in-law. The doctors could not tell, it seemed, what was the matter with her.
‘Well, she has a special salmon tonight,’ said Oliver, but Lady Mortlake was not attending. She ran on into the orange light as if it were the sea on which she was embarking for Cythera.
We went through a circular hall, where gods and goddesses stood on pedestals round the curved wall. Some people had a second before been looking down from the gallery above, but they had stepped back. We went to our bedrooms, which were the usual thing one finds in old houses, big square boxes with Queen Anne furniture and needlework pictures and 1860 watercolours, and I gave the housemaid my keys and washed and made up, and was ready when Oliver knocked on my door. His room was just round the corner of the corridor, I had heard him singing the theme of the first movement of the sonata as I washed. We went downstairs and found the butler, and before we could ask him where Martin Allen was, he told us with a bizarre hauteur, as if he were acting a butler in a film, that if we followed the footman to the small music-room we would find the violinist. As we went along the corridor Oliver hung back and muttered, ‘I wonder what this means. She was going to a lover, of course.’ It angered me that he spoke as if I would not know that. ‘But to the girdle do the gods inherit. But there is something else wrong: I cannot understand why she should think we cared whether she was here or not tonight, our time will be taken up with the rehearsal. Still, Martin will be able to tell us.’
But when the footman opened the door Martin was not there. It was a shabby little room with an upright piano in a corner, and in front of the fireplace stood a stout and sallow girl of seventeen or so, dressed in crumpled bluish-pink linen, and holding a violin and a bow.
‘Oh, it’s you!’ she said, scowling. ‘I thought you would never come. Why have you been so long? I am Avis Jenkinson. What, do you not know who I am? Didn’t that horrible woman tell you? Oh, I know I should not call her a horrible woman, for we are in her house. But I told her I would not come unless she telephoned you both and heard it was all right. You see, Martin Allen cannot come. He has had an attack or appendicitis and is having an operation tomorrow morning. I am supposed to play instead of him. Oh, do not trouble to stop looking like that, I know how awful it is. I should not ever have consented to it for a moment, but I wanted so much to meet you both, and I did make it clear that I would not think of it unless she telephoned to both of you and told you who my teacher was and you could telephone him and he would tell you how good I am. But of course she did not do it. Everybody here is a beast, and she is the worst beast of all. They have been such beasts I did not dare to go in to tea. But I suppose,’ she said bitterly, ‘by this time you think I am a maniac.’
Oliver stood silent. He raised his right hand to his lips and bit the knuckles, then whispered to himself, ‘Jasperl.’ Then he shook himself, as if he were a dog coming out of the water, smiled at the girl, and said, ‘Let us sit down and then you can tell us all about it.’ She looked so awkward and bedraggled as she dropped into an armchair, one foot beneath her, that I had to ask, ‘How long have you been here?’
‘Since yesterday afternoon.’
‘Alone?’
‘Of course. How would I know people like this? There are some professional musicians here, but they are as horrid as the rest. Of course I do not mind what they do to me, but I want to kill them.’
‘But there are three of us now,’ I said.
‘Yes, yes, and we are the real people, and they aren’t,’ said Avis. ‘I have been telling myself that, ever since I got here, I have been reminding myself that in a hundred years’ time I shall be remembered, and they will be forgotten as if they had been sheep or horses. Spavined horses, they say in books, though I do not know what it means.’
‘But how did it all happen?’ asked Oliver.
‘I live near here,’ said Avis. ‘My father is clerk of the gasworks at Aysthorp and I went to the music summer school were Mr Allen has been. When Mr Allen had to go into hospital, because he had appendicitis, the people at the music summer school telephoned to Lady Mortlake, and she was in a panic, she wanted you to come
to
the concert whatever happened. It is something to do with someone called Lady Southways. Oh, it has nothing to do with music, Lady Southways likes you,’ she said, pointing her bow at Oliver in a censorious manner. ‘And Lord Southways has a lot of money and breeds wonderful racehorses, and Lord Mortlake is poor, or what these people call poor, and anyway I wish the Mortlakes were so poor that they would starve, and Lord Mortlake is trying to breed horses, and he has a mare that is very good, and he wants it to have a foal by a horse that belongs to Lord Southways, so Lady Mortlake wants to please Lady Southways by getting you here. She knows nothing about music, though she talks about it all the time. She went on and on about a concert of Beethoven’s later quartets, and I think Beethoven’s later quartets are jolly difficult to understand, don’t you? Don’t you? But she came to me just because they told her at the music summer school that Mr Allen had been practising Jasperl’s violin and piano sonata with me, she did not see how impossible it is that I should play it with you; I should not have said I would, of course, but she was so nice to me when she came and asked me to do it, and I did so want to be with you. So I came here, and I have been practising it, and I see how impossibly difficult it is, I cannot get the hang of it at all, everybody here has been foul, when I come into the room they stare at me and stop talking. I must have been mad when I said I would come, though really I am quite good, I am exceptional, my teacher would have told you so.’
‘Who is your teacher?’ asked Oliver.
I shut my eyes. It seemed to me inevitable that she would answer ‘Silvio Sala’. For many years I had not thought of the poor old humbug who had sat in a gilt armchair, once part of a touring company’s
Rigoletto
set, between two panels of machine-made tapestry, representing Mascagni and Verdi, in a house on the Brixton Road, pretending to have been a professor at Milan Conservatory and charging Miss Beevor huge fees for lessons to Cordelia. Inevitably he must by now be in his grave. But this girl’s air of foredoomed failure was so great that I could not doubt a parallel between her fate and Cordelia’s; and it would not be a true parallel, for this girl had no last resource of loveliness, no alternative career. Her defeat would be absolute.
But she answered, ‘I have two really. Kingsley Torbay and Pietro Pedrucci. But I like Kingsley Torbay better. There is almost nothing more that Pedrucci can teach me, and so he does not like me.’
‘What, you are at the Athenaeum?’
‘Yes, yes, I have a scholarship there. You haven’t been to a single students’ concert since I’ve been there,’ she accused me. ‘But if you had you would see that I am pretty much what you were when you were there, allowing for the difference between a violin and a piano. Why did you choose the piano? Surely the violin is a better instrument. I would be happy at the Athenaeum if it were not that nobody likes me much except Mr Torbay. But I expect they liked you.’
‘No, they did not like me much.’
‘Did you ever find out why?’
‘No, never.’
‘I wish, I wish people were not such beasts,’ the girl raged. ‘But how extraordinary they dared to be beasts to you. You must always have been good-looking. How horrible that I am going to fail you, for of course I cannot play this sonata.’
‘Play us something, anything,’ said Oliver, ‘then we will know where we are. Though I think I know where we are.’
She sighed. Instead of a plain and harsh adolescent, she looked a pretty and timid child. She put her pad under her chin and picked up her violin and bow, muttered through her teeth, ‘I am no good, really,’ and began to play. I was right that she was foredoomed to failure. She would perpetually suffer the same defeat which was the lot of Mamma and Mary and myself and all our company of interpretative musicians. Her body could not produce the sounds which would make others hear the music which her mind knew the great composers had intended to convey; nor did her mind fully grasp what their intention was. But her body was so nearly obedient to her mind that it was aware of the extent of its disobedience and was ashamed; and she understood so much great music that she could see where she had a blank space on her map. She would possibly be a better player than I was. I could hear signs that she would ultimately possess that sublime lucidity which made Mary my superior.
She lowered her bow and grumbled, ‘I played that like a carthorse.’