by Rebecca West
‘There are things,’ said Mr Harper with an air of bravery and revelation, ‘just as important as playing the piano, every bit as important, we’ve got to own it. We live in a beautiful world. Look at that tree down there, it’s only a tree in a London back-garden, but with that shaft of sunlight on it, it’s really lovely. Though it’s bare that bit of light on the trunk makes one think of the spring. Oh, it’s a shame to limit oneself but you came to me to learn to play the piano, and I’m here to teach you to play the piano, and I overlooked things I ought to have paid attention to. Playing the piano’s become a murderous game. You might say that to play the piano nowadays you’ve got to turn yourself into a pianola, oh, worse, a barrel-organ, or one of those electric pianos that go on as long as you drop in a penny, churning it out, a machine that can’t tire and hasn’t a heart. Not that it’s wrong, if you can do it. But there’s no reason why we should all take the hard way in this life. I’ve tried to say that in my work, you know. I’m not really a pianist, you see, I’m a composer.’
‘Oh, I didn’t know,’ I said respectfully, wiping my nose.
‘Yes, I’ve written three operas, but you wouldn’t have heard of them. I wasn’t,’ sighed Mr Harper, ‘very fortunate in my librettists. But my operas were all about times when life wasn’t as hard as it is today, when people paid due regard. One was about the Court of Love in Provence, and another was about Athens before things went wrong, and the last was about Paul and Virginia, but I insisted on having a happy ending. Mind you,’ he said with sudden vigour, ‘this hardness has its point. How do you think that Rachmaninoff has given us a brand new performance of the last movement of the Chopin E flat minor sonata? Simply because he could get on to all the rhythms that Chopin had in his mind and made us hear them, and how did he do that? Because he’s a master of tempo, and he’s that because next to Busoni he’s got the finest technique of any pianist alive today. Talking of Busoni, it was he who put me on to the thing I was going to ask you to do when you started frightening me. You’ll never know how much you upset me when you started to cry. But of course you’re right. We’ll leave these things to the Busonis and the Rachmaninoffs—’
‘But what were you going to ask me to do?’ I demanded.
‘What does that matter now?’ he asked, with what seemed to me a strange and fatuous obstinacy. ‘Where human beings are highly strung, you shouldn’t put too much on them, it’s like thumping out “Les Papillons” with the loud pedal down.’
‘Tell me, tell me, what you wanted me to do,’ I insisted.
‘Would it amuse you to see?’ he asked tenderly, and went over to the cupboard in the corner of the room. He angered me by delaying to look over his shoulder and tell me with an apologetic little laugh, ‘I’m not tidy, I’m afraid.’ I wished he would not go on about himself. ‘Ah, here it is. Now tell me, what edition of Mozart’s sonatas did your mother give you? I thought so. It’s as good as any. Oh, really, it’s the best. Well, this is the edition I meant you to work on. Of course you’ve never heard of it. Nobody ever has. I found it in Switzerland.’ He showed for a minute or two a maddening disposition to enlarge on the beauties of Lucerne, and a curiosity as to whether I had ever been there, but I hurried him on. ‘I brought it home because not in all my life have I seen such awkward fingering. It wouldn’t suit anybody who wasn’t an ape. Well, I make the people who look like going somewhere take this stuff home and break their hearts on it. If I hadn’t seen that I was pressing you too hard and realised there wasn’t any sense in it, that it was really wrong, you being what you are, I’d have asked you to go home and practise this Eleventh Sonata you’ve been playing, with this fool’s fingering. See what I mean? I’d have told you, go on with this wrong fingering and work and work until you get your legatos as smooth and your allegrettos as fast as you get them now with the right fingering. Ever heard of that one?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘What’s the point?’
‘The point? Well, then you go back to the right fingering and you find you play it twice as well as before. That’s the point of the trick.’
‘Does it work?’ I asked.
‘Of course it does. All Busoni’s tricks work.’
I firmly took the volume out of his hands, though they clung to it. ‘Yes, yes. I see. Oh, why didn’t you tell me at once that this is what you wanted me to do? Of course it will work, and it’s going to be fun. I will feel like Liszt playing the Beethoven B flat concerto when he couldn’t use his third finger.’
‘That’s a nice modest comparison, I must say,’ he grumbled, following me slowly to the piano.
‘Is the eleventh really a good one for this?’ I asked happily.
‘As good as any.’
After half a page I came on a frightful piece of fingering, did it, and spun round on the stool and laughed up at him. ‘How could the ape-handed wonder have thought of that one?’
‘Can’t think,’ he answered absently. I swung the stool from side to side, annoyed because he had liked me quite well a few moments earlier, when I was weeping and rebellious, and now liked me much less, though I was doing what he had wanted me to do. I could not see why he should say so grimly, ‘You like that trick, don’t you? By next week you’ll have broken its back once and for all. You’ll go right through this Swiss book, hour by hour, and come out on the other side, like a dog that’s been into a river to fetch a stick, and you’ll have the facility you were out to get. And it’s right that you should. You must do it. It isn’t that you’re what I’d call ambitious. I don’t see you planning a campaign to get your hooks into Sir Henry Wood, or sucking up to the critics. But all the same you wouldn’t be happy unless you were at the top. Funny thing, it takes a lot of character, a lot of discipline, to be second-rate. What am I saying? It sounds as if I thought it was better to play badly than well. But what would I mean by “better” if I did think that?’ I forbore from starting to play again, because he seemed to be contending with some strong emotion, but I wished he would keep his mind on the lesson. He saw that himself in a moment, for he turned to the window where we had been standing, and made a gesture of dismissal to the winter sunlight and the tree it had turned golden, saying, ‘Beautiful day or not,’ and was again useful to me.
I was back in my prison cell, my hard labour harder than ever before. Henceforward I engaged in a conflict with every composition I learned which was far below the level of the arts as they are enjoyed and even below the level of human activity; it was animal warfare, such as a mongoose might wage against a snake. Before I performed a composition, in the sense of playing it so that anybody could get any pleasure from listening to it, I went through it over and over again, phrase by phrase, singing each phrase at the tempo in which I intended to play it, then playing it, then singing the next phrase, and so on: I cracked out all passages, even those meant to be legato as oil, in the crispest staccato, to build up the strength of my hand; I practised the skeleton of the composition with my thumbs only, then with each of the other four fingers, and I practised it in octaves. I played it slowly, less slowly, quickly and very quickly, and I chose the pace I found most difficult and repeated it at that over and over again until it came easily. Any passages which I found specially resistant I played in all the twelve keys; and I moved my stool and played the right hand part with my left hand, and moved the stool again and played the left hand part with my right hand. By these and other devices I broke down the composition till its notes had no more relation to art than the blows a boxer rains on a punch-ball; and then I had to put it together again into a work of art.
I sat down at the piano with the music in front of me and sang the whole composition through, strictly observing the time, using a metronome if I found myself hurrying or lagging. After that I put the music away and sang it from memory; and after that I played it through on the surface of the keys making no sound. At this stage I had to hold open the doors of my mind by a conscious effort, and welcome back with a feeling not really different from personal love t
he part of the composition I had repudiated and repelled, its meaning. Then at last I began to practise it as a whole, as I would play it to Mr Harper, as I would play it to an audience if ever I got an engagement as a concert pianist, as I was playing it to an invisible audience, the nature of which I cannot define. It could not be called imaginary, for it was real enough to pass the only judgment which I feared. I could conceive that Mr Harper and the concert-goers might be wrong, too kind or too cruel. But this unseen tribunal was always right and was implacable; if I betrayed my composer or my instrument they knew and scourged me. That tribunal was obviously my own judgment. Yet was it? Then why did my judgment so often make me play in a way the tribunal did not approve? But my trade was a mystery. When I had used up all my strength, when I could not go on a moment longer, another strength welled up in me, which seemed to flood me from without, for my will had nothing to do with the making of it, and I had had no inkling it was there. That was glorious.
But the way was not simple. I hardly knew my own mind, that evening in the first winter of my apprenticeship, when I went home and let myself into the house (it was wonderful to have a latchkey, though the fear of losing it was awful) and felt relief because the drawing-room was in darkness. I had dreaded facing Mamma, because of a doubt which was so strong that I would have had to speak of it if I had seen her, and I had forgotten that this was the day of the month when she went on a peculiar errand of mercy. Cordelia had been induced to believe that she had exceptional talent as a violinist by a music-mistress named Miss Beatrice Beevor, a poor silly creature who wore Pre-Raphaelite garments of sage-green or mulberry velveteen, carried white leather bags inscribed in pokerwork with such names as Venezia and Bayreuth, and called herself Bay-ah-tree-chay on the pretext, hardly credible, that she had been given that name in her youth by friends who had been struck by her likeness to Dante’s beloved in a Victorian picture representing Dante and Beatrice passing each other in the streets of Florence. Though Miss Beevor’s belief in Cordelia’s genius had been due as much to besotted affection as to lack of musical discrimination this did not soften my sister’s resentment. During the long illness which had followed Cordelia’s disillusionment Miss Beevor had sent her fruit and flowers, but Cordelia would never let Mamma leave them in her room, and she tore up the poor thing’s letters without reading them. Cordelia could not be blamed for this. She looked as if she were going to be sick when she saw the fruit and flowers, her stony face seemed unaware that her wild fingers were attacking the envelopes addressed in the familiar handwriting. When she and I came face to face with Miss Beevor in Lovegrove High Street my sister crossed the road to avoid her, not out of brutality, but out of pain which made her walk blindly into the thick of the traffic.
Mamma’s heart bled for the unhappy music-mistress, though strangers might not have guessed this from her conversation. She rarely referred to her except as ‘that poor idiot’. But she often took the opportunity to pay an afternoon call on Miss Beevor in her little Victorian Gothic villa at any time when she could be certain that Cordelia would not return from her classes until after tea. This was one of those days; it was the second Wednesday in the month, and Cordelia would be attending a lecture on the Great Florentine Painters at King’s College in Harley Street. So there was no sign of my mother in the drawing-room except the small indentation made by her meagre body on the cushions of her armchair. I knew well what she was doing at this moment, for I had accompanied her on one of these visits. She would be edging her way into what comfort she could find on a sofa piled with tooled leather cushions brought from Italy, keeping her eyes away from the large print of the Victorian picture representing the famous Florentine encounter which hung over the chimneypiece, lest she should break into hysterical laughter; and her foot would be jerking nervously, because she was about to violate her conscience. She could hold out no hope to Miss Beevor that Cordelia would ever forgive her. But she could make some small concessions to the poor woman’s depraved musical appetites. Her foot would cease to jerk, her whole body would become tense, she would swallow; and then she would ask Miss Beevor if she had been at a good ballad concert. Her whole musical past would rise up and confront her as soon as she said the words, and she would add, ‘But I have just found it out. Very late, I fear.’ Or, setting her jaw, she would say that she had heard a Minuet by Madame Guy Chaminade the other day which had been very graceful, and she now understood (and again there would be a confession of a wasted life, of a delayed revelation) why Miss Beevor thought so well of this composer.
While I stood laughing in the empty room, an owlet hooted in the basement, and I knew that at least one of us was down there having tea in the kitchen with Kate because Mamma was out. We liked the sound the owlets made in the woods by the Dog and Duck at night, and we made it our private call. When I went downstairs I found Mary sitting at the table, drinking strong tea, as we had not been allowed to have it till we were grown up, while Kate in her basket-chair read aloud the Daily Mail serial.
Mary started to tell me that I would have to pour some hot water into the teapot, there was such a thing after all as tea that was too strong, but I had to put my fear before her at once. ‘Mary,’ I said, ‘I don’t believe we’re going to find it as easy to be as much of a success as we thought we were. Half the people at the Athenaeum play as well as I do.’
I was so anxious that my voice cracked. But Mary’s face remained as bland as cream. ‘Yes, I know. Half the people at the Prince Albert play as well as I do. But we needn’t worry.’
‘Why on earth not?’
‘Because nobody except us seems to notice that we don’t play particularly well. They don’t see through you at the Athenaeum, do they? Nobody’s shown any signs of seeing through me yet.’
‘But some day they must,’ I persisted.
‘Well, they’ve had a term and three-quarters to do it in,’ said Mary. ‘If they were going to find us out they would have done it by now.’
‘But the critics and the conductors?’ I asked, and my voice cracked again.
‘The chances are they won’t either. My teachers are just as much taken in by me as the students. Aren’t yours? What about Mr Burney Harper? And maybe we’re not really taking them in. Possibly we have a slight advantage over the other students, though I don’t know what it is, and I don’t believe it amounts to much. Anyway, we’ll have got it from Mamma. Do fill up that teapot. I really have over-done it, it tastes like ink.’
My confidence was restored, though it chilled me that she was talking of herself and me, of our teachers and our fellow-students, as if we were all dead and she were reading about us in a book, not a real book but a text-book, a volume of the encyclopaedia. I asked her no more questions and she said, ‘Do go on, Kate. Rose, this is a lovely serial. The hero’s serving a sentence in Portland Jail instead of his twin brother, at first because there was a mistake and afterwards to save somebody’s honour, and now he’s escaped and stolen a boat and rowed out to sea, and the warders have taken another boat and are rowing after him. Go on, Kate.’
‘That I won’t,’ said Kate. ‘Who would have thought it, it opened so well, but it is nonsense, it is wicked nonsense. While you two have been talking I have looked at the end of the instalment and the Honourable Rodney is rowing straight into Portland Race. I have been reading these stories since I was a kid, I had to read them to my granny because she could not read though she never owned to it, and I know that tomorrow we will be told how he got across Portland Race and made his way to freedom, because the warders dared not follow him into the Race, and wicked rubbish that is. My father always said no craft was ever built that could live in Portland Race, and that stands to reason. Why, to look down on it from the distance is terrible. The sea boils there like the water in that kettle, only it is colder than ice, the current fetches up from the bottom the cold stuff that has never felt the sun, and draws it down before it’s warmed, so when the poor man’s boat capsizes the waves will worry him like a dog and free
ze him to death, and that’s a frightful way for a poor man to die who has been sent to prison for no fault, and I won’t read of it.’
‘But that won’t happen,’ said Mary. ‘You’ll see, Kate, the writer won’t kill him. You said yourself you knew that he would be saved in the next instalment.’
‘He cannot be saved,’ said Kate, ‘not if he gets caught in Portland Race.’
‘But this is only a story,’ I said. We were concerned, for though she was speaking quietly she looked as she had done when her eldest brother’s ship had been posted overdue for forty-eight hours, and she did not know he had been left ashore sick at Lisbon. ‘The convict is not real.’
‘Portland Race is real enough,’ she answered obstinately.
‘Well, it says in the Bible that in the end there shall be no more sea,’ said Richard Quin, who was with us in a mud-stained jersey, his cheeks bright with the cold and one of the games he played.
Kate went down on her knees to help him off with his heavy football boots, but would not let him have it his way. ‘True enough,’ she said, ‘but it will be a great pity and nothing gained, for two wrongs do not make a right.’
‘Don’t worry, it is probably a mistake in the translation, and the right text is that there shall be no more Portland Race, and some half-gales for the sake of excitement, but no whole gales, and just the sea left with all its wickedness taken out,’ said Richard Quin, and took the bun that Mary had just put on her plate.
‘Pig,’ she said, ‘I meant that for myself.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Richard Quin, ‘but he for God only, she for God in him.’
‘Don’t dare say that beastly impudent line even in fun,’ I said.
‘It’s a nice line really,’ said Richard Quin. ‘It sounds just like a flowery compliment if you say it in pidgin English.’ Bowing, he laid his hands on his chest and narrowed his eyes and squeaked the words, and they did sound good Li Hung Chang. ‘But you girls are wrong about Milton. I’ve meant to speak to you about it for quite a long time. I know he was frightful to his wives, and what I think is just as bad is that he kept on writing his friends poems which showed he didn’t care a rap about them, he had nothing to say about them, Lawrence of virtuous father virtuous son, Cyriack whose grandsire on the Royal Bench, Fairfax whose name in Arms through Europe rings, and all that touch; and as for Lycidas, you couldn’t write about a real friend’s death that way, there isn’t any horror of death. But all the same Milton knew all about words, on words he was all right, he really was.’
