by Rebecca West
I was to wonder soon if I had not been disinherited altogether. At first I was not greatly drawn to Mr Burney Harper, who was my chief teacher when I went to the Athenaeum. He was seedy with professionalism, looking so much like a musician that he looked like a street musician. His dark red hair sprang from a centre parting in large soft waves, as if a giant handlebar moustache had been transplanted to his scalp. It was in fact a marmalade parody of Paderewski’s amber aureole. Too many picturesque touches, including an excessive resort to velveteen, made his suits seem like some kind of native costume. I greatly preferred the appearance of my former teacher, Mr Kisch, who had belonged to that elect tribe, the Jews of Budapest. His eyes were black fire among his finely incised wrinkles, the bones under his yellowing ivory flesh might have been put in by a fan-maker. But I observed very soon that Mr Kisch would have approved of Mr Harper’s teaching, which followed the same lines as his own, though it was differently expressed. ‘You ignorant little brat,’ Mr Harper would say, ‘you’re not holding that G in the left hand. Don’t you see you need it? This is one of the places where Mozart pops in a bit of grand opera into a piano sonata, and your right hand’s all right, it’s playing as if it were singing an aria with its ribs out to keep all the air in, but what’s opera without an orchestra? That G gives the harmonic background, it spreads on the richness, keep it on, on, on, you silly little cuckoo.’
But almost at the same time that I passed Mr Harper as all right, I became aware that he was not prepared to do the same by me. He said nothing comminatory. He was, indeed, very friendly. He told me little things about himself, mentioning quite often how lonely he felt now that his mother was dead. He had lived with her, and he never could get used to going home in the evening and not finding her by the fire. All the same, after each lesson he dismissed me with kind words which were quite spiritless. I did not expect praise, for that is the prerogative of amateurs, who have a limited objective in view. Once one is a professional musician one’s goal is set in infinity and one can never be congratulated on getting any nearer to it. All that one can hope from a professional (even if that be oneself) is an admission that one is in a state of motion, and when this admission is respectful it often takes the paradoxical form of a complaint that one is not moving fast enough. This seems inconsistent, but then to be a professional musician one must be schizophrenic, with a split mind, half of which knows it is impossible to play perfectly, while the other half believes that to play perfectly is only a matter of time and devotion. I was fairly certain that had I played to Mamma and Mr Kisch as I was playing to Mr Harper I would have rated the compliment of denunciation, that Mamma would have shrieked, not like an eagle defending its young, but like an eagle doubting if its young were worth defending or even rearing, and Mr Kisch would have shuddered in glittering peevishness. Their scorn would have meant that I was walking with them in the procession that would gloriously never arrive at its destination; but Mr Harper’s embarrassed indifference implied that so far as he was concerned I had never joined it. Weakly, I tried to tell myself that he disliked me and was therefore biased; but I knew the suspicion to be absurd. The fantasy of his appearance showed him to be so trustfully fond of people that he dared play at charades without feeling they would mock him; and even had some circumstances forced him to go against the grain and dislike somebody, he still could not have lied about their musical ability. His ear had an honesty his mind could not have overborne.
And indeed he liked me. I learned that suddenly when I was part of the stream of students tumbling out of the Athenaeum into a November dusk, our blood so warm that the slap of the cold air on our faces was like a pleasantry and we laughed as we ran. Girls ran out of school then as they run today, though their skirts were long tubes touching the ground. When I had got outside I halted to look about me, at the gold bar of sunset lying across the Marylebone Road, at the primrose reflection that faced it. The plane-trees were casting their last crumpled maroon and silver leaves on the pewter pavements, the lights of the passing traffic paid out yellow ribbons of reflection on the shining roadway. The haze above was a violet-dun. There was a grip on my arm, and Mr Harper said he knew I walked to Oxford Circus, and he would be glad to keep me company. He went on holding my arm till we got across the road, and that was very pleasant, for the traffic was very disconcerting in those days when it was half motor-cars and half horse-drawn vehicles. Also the beat of the horses’ hooves on the cobblestones made a drumming noise, which was quite confusing. When Mr Harper and I got into the canyon of Harley Street an uneasy silence fell between us. He broke the ice by striking an area railing with his stick and saying, ‘E, I’d say, or E flat, what would you say?’ Without waiting for an answer, he passed on to other matters; and presently I found that he was talking to me as Mr Morpurgo talked to Mamma, in a steady flow of self-revelation, without any attempt to find out whether he was interesting me or whether I would like to make any remarks myself. I listened with pride, for Mamma had told me that this was one of the highest compliments a man could pay a woman.
It was a lovely evening, winter though it was, said Mr Harper; and such evenings always made him think of the days when he was a boy. He had been at Bufton, a famous school in the Midlands, where his father had been music-master, a lovely place, not old, no older than 1860, but built in imitation of the Gothic style by a pupil of Ruskin, and many people considered it as fine as anything done in the Middle Ages. It was very much like Keble College at Oxford, but better, for there was more of it. When November came round he always remembered what it had been like to run out of chapel after carol practice and see the sunset red behind the elms beyond the playing-fields, and scamper round the Big Square (that was what they called the lawn in the middle of the school buildings, though goodness knows why, he said with tender amusement, it couldn’t have been more of a circle) and get back to one’s house and into one’s study, where there’d be a fire going fit to roast an ox, it was astonishing how boys loved a fug, and then eat a huge tea, with crumpets dripping butter and spread with mulberry jam. That was one of the great things at Bufton, the mulberry jam. There was a wonderful mulberry tree in the tuckshop garden, they laid muslin on the grass underneath to catch the fruit as it fell, and made it into the best jam he had ever tasted. It had been a marvellous school, the finest tribute he could pay to the Athenaeum was that it had something of the same spirit as Bufton, and he was proud to say that his father was responsible for a good deal of the Bufton spirit. He had fallen in love with the place as soon as he got there, and his very first year he’d written the famous Bufton School Song, ‘Fair are the spires that arise from the plain’ - very flat, that part of the Midlands - ‘Fair are the dreams of youth in its prime.’ And the old man had stayed on forty years after that, though it wasn’t easy for the first twenty, because then he’d been under the famous Dr Disney.
I must, Mr Harper told me, have heard of Dr Disney, the Bull they used to call him, oh, a great, great man, he made the school, but he was a devil in lots of ways. But, Mr Harper proudly proclaimed, his father had known how to handle the Bull. One time he got him right down. It was funny, but the two things that the Bull couldn’t stand were Hanover and Rockingham. Could I imagine? I gained time by giggling; a German town and a kind of china? But he went on to point out that his poor father couldn’t help having to dish them out sometimes, they were the favourites of at least one bishop who sometimes visited them. I recalled that hymn-tunes have pet-names, and that ‘O Worship the King’ is sung to ‘Hanover’ and ‘When I survey the wondrous Cross’ to ‘Rockingham’. So, one day after evensong, Mr Harper went on, and I did not mind at all that I had to stand outside Oxford Circus tube station in the biting air until he had finished the story, and that it was not a very good one. This was the first time that any man had ever been in my company not because we had floated together on the current of my family life, but because he had sought me out. It did not matter that he was unattractive. It did not matter that I could not think of any other man I w
ould like to have standing in his place. It was, I vaguely felt, the principle of the thing that mattered.
That night and all the following day I was serene. Henceforward, I thought, I would play better for Mr Harper, and he would be the more ready to see that I was playing better, and it would all be like carol practice at Bufton. But the next lesson went badly. While I rendered Mozart’s sonata in C major (the eleventh) he looked up at the corner of the ceiling as if a stain was spreading there, and when I had finished he sighed, ‘Oh, leave it, leave it.’ There was a small puff of marmalade moustache on his upper lip, so inconspicuous compared to the huge paramoustache which sprang from his scalp that I had hardly noticed it. Through this he blew for a moment or two, then told me that he had thought of me a lot since we had had that stroll together the other evening, and that our chat had told him one thing: that I was a very intelligent girl.
I heard this with surprise. That had been no chat but a monologue, not delivered by me; and though I had found it interesting, especially the bit about the mulberry jam, it had not struck me as a manifestation of intelligence at all.
‘So I’m going to be frank with you.’ Even after that I was not afraid. He was as cheerful and commonplace as a Christmas card with a robin on it. Nothing was less likely than that he would say anything very terrible. Yet he said, ‘You’re not doing well, you know. You’re not doing well at all.’
I could not speak. A voice within me was saying coldly, ‘If you cannot play you are lost. You can do nothing else.’ I remembered that when one felt faint one should breathe deeply, and when I came to the surface again I recalled that Mamma thought I could play, and that Mr Kisch thought I could play, and I made myself remember how the Mozart sonata I had just gone through had sounded, and I was sure I could play. I clung to rage as to a spar. I struck the keyboard with both my clenched fists and cried through the discords, ‘What do you mean? I am not as bad as all that.’
‘Now, now, temper,’ said Mr Harper. ‘Who said you were bad? If you were bad there’d be no problem, we’d fling you out on your ear, and a nice-looking girl like you would pick herself up, no bones broken, and go home and get married. But you’re good, and that’s why it makes me sick to see you heading straight for an annual concert at the Wigmore Hall, the Wigmore Hall, mark you, not the Queen’s Hall, and sympathetic notices in The Times and the Telegraph, the sensitive musicality and wide scope of interpretative talent which we have learned to expect from Miss Aubrey, hogwash, hogwash, and more and more of your time spent teaching. There’s something horrible, I always think, in women teaching girls. Little gifts of flowers. You couldn’t stand that life, indeed you couldn’t. Look at the way you answered me back just now. Usually when I say, “You’re not doing so well, you know,” what I get is, “Oh, Mr Harper, I’m sorry, what am I doing wrong?” Not you. You spit out, “I’m not so bad as all that.”’
I weakened. ‘Oh, did you mind?’ I humbly asked.
‘No, I didn’t mind,’ said Mr Harper, ‘but it places you. You mustn’t get in with the nice musicianly girls, it’s not you. And to get among the others, you’ve started off on the wrong foot.’
‘What do you mean?’ I said, getting up from the piano and stamping. ‘What am I doing that I shouldn’t do?’
He spent some seconds blowing through his little moustache before he answered. ‘It’s such a pity you were Clare Keith’s daughter. She’s taught you to play as if you were her, and you’re not, by a long chalk. According to what my father used to say, when he was alive, I’ve lost both my father and my mother, I was telling you about her, your mother was one of those miracles that come into the world part trained. Say Mozart and Liszt came into the world three quarters trained, we can grant her a quarter and to spare. You’re not like that, and my father says she was the size of a shrimp, but had such blazing nervous energy that she could get as much out of her instrument as Teresa Carreno, who’d got a couple of carthorse legs instead of arms. You’re not like that either.’
I gazed at him as if I had doll’s eyes, fixed, of glass. It was the blessing and the curse of my life that I had a genius for my mother. That she had laid her talismanic hands on me was my sole reason for hoping that I in my weakness might survive in this hostile world; it was because I was so inferior to her that I felt I would be only getting my deserts if the world destroyed me. I did not know how he could bear to speak so nakedly of this promise and this threat which tore me apart.
‘You can play what music you’ve heard her play, you can tackle the music you haven’t heard her play by thinking musically as she’s taught you to think,’ he went on, blind to my anguish. ‘And now it’s gone wrong.…’ For some time, because music deals with sounds which are not words, words were a maze in which he wandered, never coming close enough to the truth he desired to impart. After several aphorisms had started well and ended in, ‘I mean to say,’ after he had made several allusions to contemporary pianists which I could not follow, he pursued a line which presently made me aware that he thought Mamma had made a mistake in sending us to Mr Kisch. He did not say this directly; he was so uncomfortable about stating it indirectly that he began to stammer. I told myself, while he felt about for the words he could not tolerate using, that what he said was sure to be biased, for he was like a dog, while Mr Kisch was like a cat, but again I had to concede that his musical honesty could never be deflected, and so I listened, and found he had a case. Mr Kisch had had to give up his career as a pianist because he had caught a cold playing in St Petersburg in winter and it had developed into consumption, and he had had to go into a sanatorium for some years; and when he came out he had, in Mr Harper’s opinion, declined from a professional to an amateur.
But Mr Harper could not explain to me exactly what he meant by that. Mr Kisch, he said hesitantly, played as if, as if, as if he were giving a treat to some friends in a room full of flowers. Mr Harper evidently felt that music and friends and flowers ought to be kept apart. And the windows shut, he added. Had I ever seen, he asked, an abominable picture called ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’, with a pianist and a fiddler going at it hammer and tongs while a lot of people sat round in huddles, looking all woozy, as if there was a gas escape somewhere, though if there had been the pianist and the fiddler couldn’t have kept at it. And there was a worse picture called ‘Beethoven’, with a man and woman sitting looking as if they were full of beer, and it was Beethoven, Beethoven, of all composers, who was supposed to have put them into that state. Music was something you had to do sober as a judge. Hard, you had to be. ‘You’ve got to realise that,’ he insisted, ‘or it’s no use your doing what I’m going to ask you to do. You’re a willing girl, you’d do it. But you must understand that it’s part of a plan, you’ve got to start now and get some real technique.’
Now the agony I felt was what a fish must feel when the barbed fly settles in its gill, eeling itself into the wound by its shape. The world was going to destroy me, just as I had always feared. There was nothing before me but to gasp and die. What else had I been doing all my life but ‘get technique’? That was why I had had no childhood, why I had seen so much sunlight through window-panes, why tomorrow had always been a day when the hoop I had to jump through would be held a little higher. I felt angrily that I could not have worked any harder, and there I was right. If I had toiled as painfully in a textile mill or in the fields society would have regarded me as its pitiful victim and sent some agent to rescue me. Now this man was killing my hope that I was near to the end of my slavery. Of course I had known that to endure I would have some measure of this drudgery all my life, because a musician’s technique keeps in being only through practice, the hand is a lout and keeps on sinking back into ignorance, but surely, surely I had got near the point where work would become almost wholly pleasure and I could give myself up to the meaning of music?
‘You listen to me,’ Mr Harper went blandly on in his Christmas card way. ‘You’ve got to sit down at the piano and say to yourself, “Now, I’ve not begu
n to be a pianist yet, but I’m going to begin today, and it’s going to take a long time, but” - Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord! What have I said? You silly little bit of nonsense, you mustn’t cry!’
My state was far worse than he perceived. For as I sobbed I was only partly anguished. I also saw a vision of myself walking by the river near the Dog and Duck, as happy as the blessed dead, my mind flowing bright and unconfined and leisured as the Thames I looked on, because I had cast away the burden, so infinitely greater than myself who had to bear it, of my vocation. I would earn a living somehow. I could become a Post Office clerk, and it was snobbish nonsense that one could not work in a shop. Perhaps they would let me help at the Dog and Duck.
‘Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord!’ wailed Mr Harper, ‘I didn’t mean to make you unhappy, that’s the last thing in the world I’d want to do! Oh, don’t, don’t look at me like that! You poor little thing, I’ve been trying you too hard. You are a girl, after all, and you’re not Jewish, being Jewish is a great help, these Jewish scholarship kids can go on for ever. You being a girl makes me forget—’
‘I’ve got a scholarship,’ I interrupted angrily through my tears.
‘Yes, but being a scholarship kid and being a Jewish scholarship kid’s not the same thing, somehow. And the important thing is that you’re a girl, and maybe you’re right in giving up, maybe a woman’s happiness doesn’t lie in being an artist, maybe you’ll do just as well teaching, and anyway you should marry, you’re a nice-looking girl, oh, I blame myself—’
His voice broke. By this time we had got over to the window and I had turned my wet face towards the glass and was clinging on to the sash to steady my sobbing body. But at this sign that he was nearly as distressed as I was I whirled about. Yes, his eyes were moist with pity. I realised that he thought me a weaker person than I was, and that it would be pleasant to pretend that he was right, and that it would not be altogether a pretence. I did not trouble to dry my tears, but lifted my face towards his, drinking in his kindness.
