Maurice Guest

by Henry Handel Richardson

  II.

  In Maurice Guest, it might be said that the smouldering unrest of twogenerations burst into flame. As a young man, his father, then a poorteacher in a small provincial town, had been a prey to certain dreamsand wishes, which harmonised ill with the conditions of his life. When,for example, on a mild night, he watched the moon scudding a silvery,cloud-flaked sky; when white clouds sailed swiftly, and soft springbreezes were hastening past; when, in a word, all things seemed to bemaking for some place, unknown, afar-off, where he was not, then he,too, was seized with a desire to be moving, to strap on a knapsack andbe gone, to wander through foreign countries, to see strange cities andhear strange tongues, was unconsciously filled with the desire totaste, lighthearted, irresponsible, the joys and experiences of theWANDERJAHRE, before settling down to face the matter-of-factnesss oflife. And as the present continually pushed the realisation of hisdreams into the future, he satisfied the immediate thirst of his soulby playing the flute, and by breathing into the thin, reedy tones hedrew from it, all that he dreamed of, but would never know. For hepresently came to a place in his life where two paths diverged, and hewas forced to make a choice between them. It was characteristic of theman that he chose the way of least resistance, and having married, moreor less improvidently, he turned his back on the visions that hadhaunted his youth: afterwards, the cares, great and small, that came inthe train of the years, drove them ever further into the background.Want of sympathy in his home-life blunted the finer edges of hisnature; of a gentle and yielding disposition, he took on thecommonplace colour of his surroundings. After years of unhesitatingtoil, it is true, the most pressing material needs died down, but thedreams and ambitions had died, too, never to come again. And as it isin the nature of things that no one is less lenient towards romanticlongings than he who has suffered disappointment in them, who hasfailed to transmute them into reality, so, in this case, the son'sfirst tentative leanings to a wider life, met with a moredeeply-rooted, though less decisive, opposition, on the part of thefather than of the mother.

  But Maurice Guest had a more tenacious hold on life.

  The home in which he grew up, was one of those cheerless, middle-classhomes, across which never passes a breath of the great gladness, theideal beauty of life; where thought never swings itself above thematerial interests of the day gone, the day to come, and existencegrows as timid and trivial as the petty griefs and pleasures thatintersperse it. The days drip past, one by one, like water from a spoutafter a rain-shower; and the dull monotony of them benumbs allwholesome temerity at its core. Maurice Guest had known days of thiskind. For before the irksomeness of the school-bench was well behindhim, he had begun his training as a teacher, and as soon as he hadlearnt how to instil his own half-digested knowledge into the minds ofothers, he received a small post in the school at which his fathertaught. The latter had, for some time, secretly cherished a wish tosend the boy to study at the neighbouring university, to make a scholarof his eldest son; but the longer he waited, the more unfavourable didcircumstances seem, and the idea finally died before it was born.

  Maurice Guest looked back on the four years he had just come through,with bitterness; and it was only later, when he was engrossed heart andsoul in congenial work, that he began to recognise, and be vaguelygrateful for, the spirit of order with which they had familiarised him.At first, he could not recall them without an aversion that was almostphysical: this machine-like regularity, which, in its disregard of moodand feeling, had something of a divine callousness to human stirrings;the jarring contact with automaton-like people; his inadequacy anddistaste for a task that grew day by day more painful. His ownknowledge was so hesitating, so uncertain, too slight forself-confidence, just too much and too fresh to allow him to generalisewith the unthinking assurance that was demanded of him. Yet had anyone,he asked himself, more obstacles to overcome than he, in his efforts toset himself free? This silent, undemonstrative father, who surroundedhimself with an unscalable wall of indifference; this hard-faced,careworn mother, about whose mouth the years had traced deep lines, andfor whom, in the course of a single-handed battle with life, the truereality had come to be success or failure in the struggle for bread.What was art to them but an empty name, a pastime for the drones andidlers of existence? How could he set up his ambitions before them, tobe bowled over like so many ninepins? When, at length, after muchheartburning and conscientious scrupling, he was mastered by ahealthier spirit of self-assertion, which made him rebel against theuselessness of the conflict, and doggedly resolve to put an end to it,he was only enabled to stand firm by summoning to his aid all thestrengthening egoism, which is latent in every more or less artisticnature. To the mother, in her honest narrowness, the son's choice of acalling which she held to be unfitting, was something of a tragedy. Sheallowed no item of her duty to escape her, and moved about the house asusual, sternly observant of her daily task, but her lips werecompressed to a thin line, and her face reflected the anger that burntin her heart, too deep for speech. In the months that followed, Mauricelearnt that the censure hardest to meet is that which is never put intowords, which refuses to argue or discuss: he chafed inwardly againstthe unspoken opposition that will not come out to be grappled with, andoverthrown. And, as he was only too keenly aware, there was more to befaced than a mere determined aversion to the independence with which hehad struck out: there was, in the first place, a pardonably human senseof aggrievedness that the eldest-born should cross their plans andwishes; that, after the year-long care and thought they had bestowed onhim, he should demand fresh efforts from them; and, again, mostharassing of all and most invulnerable, such an entire want of faith inthe powers he was yearning to test--the prophet's lot in the meanblindness of the family--that, at times, it threatened to shake hishard-won faith in himself.--But before the winter drew to a close hewas away.

  Away!--to go out into the world and be a musician--that was his longingand his dream. And he never came to quite an honest understanding withhimself on this point, for desire and dream were interwoven in hismind; he could not separate the one from the other. But when he weighedthem, and allowed them to rise up and take shape before him, it wasinvariably in this order that they did so. In reality, although hehimself was but vaguely conscious of the fact, it was to some extent asmeans to an end, that, when his eyes had been opened to its presence,he clutched--like a drowning man who seizes upon a spar--clutched andheld fast to his talent. But the necessary insight into his powers hadfirst to be gained, for it was not one of those talents which, from thebeginning, strut their little world with the assurance of the peacock.He was, it is true, gifted with an instinctive feeling for the valueand significance of tones--as a child he sang by ear in a small, sweetvoice, which gained him the only notice he received at school, and heeasily picked out his notes, and taught himself little pieces, on theold-fashioned, silk-faced piano, which had belonged to his mother as agirl, and at which, in the early days of her marriage, she had sung ina high, shrill voice, the sentimental songs of her youth. But here, forwant of incentive, matters remained; Maurice was kept close at hisschool-books, and, boylike, he had no ambition to distinguish himselfin a field so different from that in which his comrades won theirspurs. It was only when, with the end of his schooldays in sight, hewas putting away childish things, that he seriously turned hisattention to the piano and his hands. They were those of the pianist,broad, strong and supple, and the new occupation soon engrossed himdeeply; he gave up all his spare time to it, and, in a few months,attained so creditable a proficiency, that he went through a course ofinstruction with a local teacher of music, who, scenting talent,dismissed preliminaries with the assurance of his kind, and initiatedhis pupil into all that is false and meretricious in the literature ofthe piano--the cheaply pathetic, the tinsel of transcription, thetitillating melancholy of Slavonic dance-music--to leave him, but foran increased agility of finger, not a whit further forward than he hadfound him. Then followed months when the phantom of discontent stalkedlarge through Ma
urice's life, grew, indeed, day by day more tangible,more easily defined; for there came the long, restless summer evenings,when it seemed as if a tranquil darkness would never fall and bar offthe distant, the unattainable; and as he followed some flat, whitecountry road, that was lost to sight on the horizon as a tapering line,or looked out across a stretch of low, luxuriant meadows, the veryplacidity of which made heart and blood throb quicker, in a sense ofopposition: then the desire to have finished with the life he knew,grew almost intolerable, and only a spark was needed to set his resolveablaze.

  It was one evening when the summer had already dragged itself to aclose, that Maurice walked through a drizzling rain to the neighbouringcathedral town, to attend a performance of ELIJAH. It was the firstimportant musical experience of his life, and, carried away by thevolumes of sound, he repressed his agitation so ill, that it becameapparent to his neighbour, a small, wizened, old man, who was leaningforward, his hands hanging between his knees and his eyes fixed on thefloor, alternately shaking and nodding his head. In the intervalbetween the parts, they exchanged a few words, halting, excited onMaurice's part, interrogative on his companion's; when the performancewas over, they walked a part of the way together, and found so much tosay, that often, after this, when his week's work was behind him,Maurice would cover the intervening miles for the pleasure of a fewhours' conversation with this new friend. In a small, dark room, theair of which was saturated with tobacco-smoke, he learned, by degrees,the story of the old musician's life: how, some thirty yearspreviously, he had drifted into the midst of this provincialpopulation, where he found it easy to earn enough for his needs, andwhere his position was below that of a dancing-master; but how, longago, in his youth--that youth of which he spoke with a far-away tone inhis voice, and at which he seemed to be looking out as at a fadingshore--it had been his intention to perfect himself as a pianist. Lifehad been against him; when, the resolve was strongest, poverty andill-heath kept him down, and since then, with the years that passed, hehad come to see that his place would only have been among the multitudeof little talents, whose destiny it is to imitate and vulgarise thestrivings of genius, to swell the over-huge mass of mediocrity. And so,he had chosen that his life should be a failure--a failure, that is, inthe eyes of the world; for himself, he judged otherwise. The truth thatcould be extracted from words was such a fluctuating, relative truth.Failure! success!--what WAS success, but a clinging fast, unabashed bysmile or neglect, to that better part in art, in one's self, thatcannot be taken away?--never for a thought's space being untrue to theideal each one of us bears in his breast; never yielding jot or tittleto the world's opinion. That was what it meant, and he who was proudlyconscious of having succeeded thus, could well afford to regard thelives of others as half-finished and imperfect; he alone was at onewith himself, his life alone was a harmonious whole.

  To Maurice Guest, all this mattered little or not at all; it was merelythe unavoidable introduction. The chief thing was that the old man hadknown the world which Maurice so desired to know; he had seen life, hadlived much of his youth in foreign lands, and had the conversation beenskilfully set agoing in this direction, he would lay a wrinkled hand onhis listener's shoulder, and tell him of this shadowy past, with shorthoarse chuckles of pleasure and reminiscence, which invariably ended ina cough. He painted it in vivid colours, and with the unconsciousheightening of effect that comes natural to one who looks back upon ahappy past, from which the countless pricks and stings that make upreality have faded, leaving in their place a sense of dreamy, unrealbrightness, like that of sunset upon distant hills. He told him ofGermany, and the gay, careless years he had spent there, working at hisart, years of inspiriting, untrammelled progress; told him of famousmusicians he had seen and known, of great theatre performances at whichhe had assisted, of stirring PREMIERES, long since forgotten, ofburning youthful enthusiasms, of nights sleepless with holy excitement,and days of fruitful, meditative idleness. Under the spell of thesereminiscences, he seemed to come into touch again with life, and hiseyes lit with a spark of the old fire. At moments, he forgot hiscompanion altogether, and gazed long and silently before him, noddingand smiling to himself at the memories he had stirred up in his brain,memories of things that had long ceased to be, of people who had longbeen quiet and unassertive beneath their handful of earth, but for whomalone, the brave, fair world had once seemed to exist. Then he wouldlose himself among strange names, in vague histories of those who hadborne these names, and of what they had become in their subsequentjourneyings towards the light, for which they had set out, side byside, with so much ardour (and oftenest what he had to tell was amodest mediocrity); but the greater number of them had lost sight oneof the other; the most inseparable friends had, once parted, soonforgotten. And the bluish smoke sent upwards as he talked, in cloudsand spirals that mounted rapidly and vanished, seemed to Mauricesymbolic of the brief and shadowy lives that were unrolled before him.But, after all this, when the lights came, the piano was opened, andthen, for an hour or two, the world was forgotten in a different way.It was here that the chief landmarks of music emerged from the mists inwhich, for Maurice, they had hitherto been enveloped; here he learnedthat Bach and Beethoven were giants, and made uncertain efforts atappreciation; learnt that Gluck was a great composer, Mozart a geniusof many parts, Mendelssohn the direct successor in this line of kings.Sonatas, symphonies, operas, were hammered out with tremendous forceand precision on the harsh, scrupulously tuned piano; and all weredominated alike by the hoarse voice of the old man, who never wavered,never faltered, but sang from beginning to end with all his might. Eachone of the pleasant hours spent in this new world helped to deepenMaurice's resolution to free himself while there was yet time; each onegave more clearness and precision to his somewhat formless desires;for, in all that concerned his art, the nameless old musician hated hisnative land, with the hatred of the bigot for those who are hostile orindifferent to his faith.

  With a long and hot-chased goal in sight, a goal towards which ourhearts, in joyous eagerness, have already leapt out, it is astonishinghow easy it becomes to make light of the last, monotonous stretch ofroad that remains to be travelled. Is there not, just beyond, aresting-place?--and cool, green shadows? Events and circumstances whichhad hitherto loomed forth gigantic, threatening to crush, now appearedto Maurice trivial and of little moment; he saw them in otherproportions now, for it seemed to him that he was no longer in theirmidst: he stood above them and overlooked them, and, with his eyesfixed upon a starry future, he joyfully prepared himself for his newlife. What is more, those around him helped him to this altered view ofthings. For as the present marched steadily upon the future, devouringas it went; as the departure this future contained took on the shape ofa fact, the countless details of which called for attention, it beganto be accepted as even the most unpalatable facts in the long runusually are, with an ungracious resignation in face of the inevitable.Thus, with all his ardour to be gone, Maurice Guest came to see thelast stage of his home-life almost in a bright light, and even with atouch of melancholy, as something that was fast slipping from him,never to be there in all its entirety, exactly as it now was, again:the last calm hour of respite before he plunged into the triumphs, butalso into the tossings and agitations of the future.