The hand holding the propelling-pencil made a few meaningless marks in the margin of the notebook while the eyes remained fixed on the sea. What had it been for? Again and again this stupid question. On his side there had been the power of his intentions. For several years such clarity of vision, such unerring setting down that it was his proud and very nearly truthful boast that he never needed to alter a note when he first heard an orchestra play what he had written. And on the other side had come immense acclaim, and not by any means principally from England. It was the Germans who had first recognised him: men like Hans Richter and Richard Strauss who first used the unqualified word ‘genius’. At long last Henry Purcell had found a successor; England’s musical renaissance had arrived …
For some years the accolades had grown, from people whistling in the street to the King knighting him and going to the Races with him. Nor had it taken long, either. In 1899, the year of the first unequivocal masterpiece, Enigma, ten of his compositions were played at Queen Victoria’s command in the private chapel at Windsor. Within five years he was Sir Edward Elgar, within thirteen he had completed practically all his important works. In that brief span he had walked with kings and had been cheered by crowds, but more to the point had been praised and befriended by fellow-artists and composers from all over the world. He was discreetly mobbed and indiscreetly swooned over. Distinguished people he had never met wrote him expressions of their deepest gratitude. He was everywhere made much of. The only thing he was not given much of was money; but between them his closest friends patched and hired him through a succession of suits marking his honours, and Alice moved him through a series of ever grander houses. This went on until even the lack of money had seemed unimportant beside the lack of silence.
But what nature of a triumph had it been which led to this: an ageing man in a deck-chair four thousand miles from home in a desolate waste of sea-water, almost-empty notebook on his knees, a single rented berth down below? Baffling that it all could have drained away and left such nothingness. The glory had been real, the love and affection in his life quite genuine. What he had written he had written whether they played it or not and whether those who had once thought it worthy to stand beside Beethoven had given way to those who now cried ‘Pompenstance!’ and derided what they called Edwardianism.
But the ones who thus dismissed his music, was not their injustice exceeded only by their ignorance? For his marches had merely been the bread-and-butter music of their day, and their day was not even his own. Strange indeed how the first dozen years of the century were now almost wilfully mis-remembered. Even those who should recall them perfectly well looked back as to a lost antediluvian land of innocence and plenty. Another of the war’s abominable mischiefs. Not only had it ruined the world after it but it had falsified the one before.
Very slowly his hand wrote the figures ‘44’ in the margin of the notebook. ‘I was forty-four when the Queen died,’ he told the ocean inaudibly. ‘I’m not an Edwardian.’ And because he had worked as he did there was a sense in which he had already written his life’s work before the century ever turned. The ideas had come in their profusion in boyhood, in the Seventies and Eighties and Nineties, filling notebook after notebook with jottings, fragments and themes. It was only when he turned them into finished works that the praise had come, but by then the original inspirations had often been in his mind for twenty years. He was a Victorian in heart, spirit, essence.
The passion of this internal monologue must have remained undimmed for some hours. At dinner, in response to an unwitting ‘Ah, those were the days, eh?’ from Captain Maddrell apropos the prewar popularity of Booth’s South America run, Edward replied with a churlish ‘Oh no they weren’t.’
‘I only meant, Sir Edward …’
‘In no sense were they “the days”. I sometimes think people must be suffering from collective amnesia, or whatever it is these alienists call it. Does nobody here remember that feeling of being on a butter-slide?’ He glared belligerently around the table.
‘Well, politics were sometimes a little unsettled,’ ventured Kate, ‘but then aren’t they always?’
Edward fixed her as he listed the unsettlements and their gravity: Tariff Reform, the rise of Union power and Socialism, the demands of women for emancipation and the Vote, the decline of Britain as a manufacturing country and – as if those weren’t enough – Home Rule in Ireland. ‘Were we really supposed to let a band of Fenian yahoos simply annex a part of Great Britain? In 1914, at any rate, it was a monstrous piece of treason. And though as a matter of principle I think artists and musicians ought to hold themselves aloof from being used in political affairs I did indeed join with Kipling and Lord Roberts in signing the British Covenant to support Carson in Ulster. But it wasn’t a pleasure by any means, for all that a lot of powerful people told us it was our duty to sign and set an example. In any case if that’s your idea of a golden era in the nation’s history you may well have considered the War a minor skirmish when it came.’
Hoping perhaps to divert attention from the dubious taste of this remark while trying to pacify his distinguished guest the Captain mildly asked ‘Might you explain to us, sir, your theory of the decline of Britain as a manufacturer? I was under the impression that as a trading nation we were second to none. At least, at that time.’
‘Unfortunately we were second to several even by the time the old Queen died. It’s just something the British go on refusing to believe with their normal ostrich-like behaviour, but it’s nevertheless true.’ And he maintained at some length that the real turning-point in the country’s fortunes – the moment when decline had inexorably set in – was when those nations on whom Britain had stolen a march with her industrial revolution caught up and passed her. Somewhere around the 1870s, he guessed, when the German steel industry began producing more steel or foreign exporters started to eat into Britain’s dominance and capture her erstwhile markets.
Mulling it over afterwards in his cabin, where he had retreated, he thought how there had probably been an actual instant – a sunny morning in May, perhaps, while he was demonstrating the fingering of a violin passage to some schoolgirl in the music-room of The Mount in Great Malvern – when a contract was signed in Essen or Brussels or even New York which, all unbeknownst, had toppled Britain over into descent. Of course there was a long ironic lag. Imperceptible at first beneath the global pageantry of Empire, the slide gathered speed as the century expired. But those with feeling had already felt it: the sensation of something drawing to a close, the hollowness of hymns, the hubris of ‘never, never, never’ bawled out as if at a party in full swing but held in one of those new-fangled lifts going down, down, down. It was intuited well before Kipling wrote ‘Recessional’ so that the general celebrations in 1900, pivoting as they did around Victoria’s near-mystical survival, were nonetheless shot through with national unease.
And as with a nation so with an individual, he thought. When public acclaim finally grew and gave an artist his due he might already have passed – one sunny morning in May – some quiet internal zenith, a calamitous instant which went unrecognised amid the din of recognition. Maybe he himself had intuited it, too, with that stabbing ‘They don’t want any more’ as the OM was conferred, as purple descended, as audiences rose. That was the reality of popular esteem, of course. By its very nature it was always premature or too late. There was finally not the slightest connection between the public’s trumpetings and the private soul, nor could there ever be.
Thirty feet away and a deck lower Dora Bellamy and Kate Hammond were having one of several celebratory rounds of drinks to mark the last night of their voyage. They shared them with certain acquaintances, one of whom was wondering what life at the Captain’s table was like with so famous a man as Elgar among the company. Kate was still smarting.
‘I can tell you – it’s like dining with a time-bomb,’ she said. ‘It’s up to you to guess when it’s due to go off.’
‘He is a genius,
’ said her friend emolliently.
‘A bloody rude one.’
‘You have wide experience of the type, of course,’ said Dora. ‘But as far as I’m concerned he’s a genius and that’s that. It’s funny – you know I mentioned I’d sung at the first performance of The Apostles?’
‘You did let it drop once. Or twice.’
‘Well,’ continued Dora unperturbed, ‘we saw him a bit during the last rehearsals and then at the actual performance, of course, but we none of us got any closer to him than between this table and …’ she looked around the confines of steel bulkheads disguised as fumed oak panelling ‘… golly, I should imagine the bridge. You know how big those concert halls are and the chorus was stuck up on tiers on either side of the organ console and beneath us was the entire orchestra and then Sir Edward on a little podium with a brass handrail. I mean to say, miles away. But what’s funny about it is that he hasn’t changed at all even though it’s twenty years ago. Of course he looks older – grey hair and a bit stouter and so on – but as soon as we all sat down to dinner our first evening aboard I recognised him.’
‘Astonishing,’ said Kate. ‘The man’s probably never been photographed more than twenty thousand times and even I, who am tone deaf and wouldn’t greatly mind if I never heard another note of music, even I had heard of Sir Edward Elgar VC, KCVO and Bar, Master of the King’s Own Mounted Sackbuts.’
‘Kate, darling, you know that wasn’t exactly what I meant, don’t you, sweetness? It’s the gin,’ she confided to the others in dramatically lowered voice. ‘Have you noticed how obtuse it makes certain people? What I meant, Katie dear, is that I recognised his presence at once. He never said much at all during those rehearsals – he just sort of smouldered and now and again clapped a hand to his brow when someone did something silly. Actually I rather think he once turned his back on the lot of us when we missed an entry and various people had to trot up to pacify him and turn him round.’
‘That part at least sounds like our passenger,’ Kate said.
‘But that isn’t the part I mean. When the actual performance was going well and we all had that feeling, you know? – as if nobody can put a foot wrong? – he was extraordinary. That little figure on the podium in the distance looked apart in some way but at the same time we realised he was controlling the lot of us. We were all completely in his service and for as long as we could give ourselves up to his spirit or his musical vision or whatever it was the whole thing became absolutely magnetic. By the end we all felt exalted, too. Personally I never slept a wink that night. And from then until the other day I never clapped eyes on him. Yet when we were introduced it was that odd quality which hit me at once and even after so long I remembered it. I can’t explain it better than that.’
‘I’ll allow he has a certain something about him,’ admitted Kate, ‘but in all honesty I don’t know whether that isn’t just because I know who he is. One’s unfairly disposed to detect all sorts of qualities in the famous simply because they’re famous, while all they might actually have done was invent a mutton extract for a South Polar expedition.’
‘Exactly,’ said an Acquaintance. ‘Or dissolve a wife or two in a bath of acid.’
‘One thing you can say about him – he looks like nobody’s idea of a composer.’
‘I suppose not,’ said Dora. ‘But I’m not sure how a composer should look. That Beethovenesque romantic hero – you know, tousled hair, wind-tattered cloak, shaking his fist at lightning and generally living in squalor – that would frankly look pretty silly in Nineteen twenty-three, wouldn’t it?’
‘Granted. But even so you don’t expect him to look like a retired general full of equine anecdotes about linseed oil and skimmed milk and ante-post betting.’
Dora said: ‘I still don’t think there’s any point in applying ordinary standards of behaviour to completely extraordinary people. Look at all that music he’s given the world which they’ll still be playing long after we’re forgotten. You can teach even quite stupid children to say please and thank-you and hold doors open for ladies and generally ape being a good little social animal, but who can you train to write The Dream of Gerontius or even Land of Hope and Glory?’
‘I still think it hurts nobody to be moderately polite.’
‘Dora’s got a point,’ said another Acquaintance who had so far not spoken. ‘Surely a genius is someone whose gift is so commanding, so overwhelming that there’s no space or energy left over for bothering with niceties. Most of the geniuses one can think of were pretty odd in one way or another. You’d have said they were half crazy if they hadn’t been writing or painting or composing works which were obviously of greater importance than the unconventional private life of the man who created them. Look at Van Gogh.’
For a while they looked at Van Gogh while on the deck above them the genius who had caused all this tipsy speculation snored slightly in the well-appointed steel box he had rented. Beside him on the bunkside table stood a ribbed blue bottle containing a sleeping draught formulated especially for him by a retired Royal Physician. Edward had been much taken by the man’s having invented it originally to give the King’s horses in order to render them docile before travelling by rail. His own supply was somewhat weaker, perhaps, and taken in smaller quantities; but he was quite content to entrust himself to a medicine with so reassuring a pedigree.
While his passengers were thus variously engaged Captain Maddrell was earnestly in conversation with the Purser who, at this late hour, had brought him disturbing news.
‘As I say, she’s distraught. Frankly, between you and me she’s pretty tiddly and something tells me she mightn’t have said anything about it had she not been. What do we do?’
‘Let’s get it straight. Did she actually accuse the doctor of anything worse than foul language?’
‘I suppose not, if “worse” means you’re thinking of what I’m thinking.’
‘I am,’ said the Captain.
‘In that case, no. She says she called him with a legitimate complaint – won’t specify what it was and of course I didn’t ask – but it was sudden enough to warrant attention at eight o’clock in the evening. She absolutely agrees it was an inconvenient time but she says bodies are inconvenient things and anyway what the hell are doctors paid for?’
‘She sounds a forthright sort of lady.’
‘Indeed. My impression is that drunk or not she’s very much to the point and hardly the sort to invent things. Anyway it’s such an unlikely thing to invent, isn’t it? You and I know from bitter experience that some women will accuse doctors of the most awful indecencies when it turns out to be utter nonsense and the poor wretch is like as not ruined even though cleared. But this time it’s nothing like that. She simply claims he swore at her and then laughed. It was his attitude which upset her as much as the language, apparently. She says she can overlook brusqueness if a doctor’s first-rate; what she can’t overlook is his refusing to take her symptoms seriously. She claims he said – among other things – that he would only consider treating her if she agreed to immediate surgery.’
‘Good God. The man’s a lunatic. I’ve never heard … But go on.’
‘That’s it.’
The Captain thought for a moment. ‘No witnesses, of course.’
‘One assumes not.’
‘I’ll see the lady now and then I’ll see the bloody doctor.’
‘It’ll have to wait till morning. She’s gone to bed.’
‘A thousand times I’ve wished Bill Barnard hadn’t retired. This is the thousand and first.’
‘What a man. Next layover I’m for going down to – Godalming, isn’t it? – just to shake him by the hand. This Ashe is a non-starter. Odd, though: he came with the highest references.’
‘Of course he did, he’d hardly be working for Booth’s if he hadn’t. But Bill was ex-Army too. You couldn’t wish for a greater contrast. Well, I must admit Ashe didn’t strike me any too favourably when I first saw him but it’s not f
or me to say who I sail with. It’s not me who’s employing him, after all. I can damn well have him off my ship after this, though. It’s incredible. His first trip and everything. Man hasn’t been on board more than a fortnight. As far as I’m concerned he walks the plank at Pará.’
‘Better if we could hold out until Manaos. We might be able to filch a medic from the Iquitos run.’
‘Mr Gates, the voice of reason.’
Next morning Edward woke early; the draught of horse-dope had given him many hours of dreamless sleep. After breakfast, which he took practically alone, he went up on deck to find the sea had changed. No longer was it the purple which would lighten to deep blue as the sun rose to set aglow its uppermost sixty feet. It was now a yellowish-green colour ridged with small waves which slapped at the Hildebrand’s forefoot as if she had been a yacht changing tack before an oncoming tide. The sight filled him with the disquiet of estuaries. But an even more convincing sign of change was the smell of the wind. The crispness of pure ocean breath was overlaid now by a soft reek of rot: the exhalation of a hundred million arboreal lungs, the thrilling perfume of the tropics full of unknown oils bled off untold golden leaves by a heavy sun. It was the scent inseparable from torrential distillations of water and the river had carried it faithfully like a familiar far out into the Atlantic where at a dishevelled boundary each passed into a larger diluent.
‘Your first sight of Brazil, sir?’ It was Pyce with a starched white cloth over one forearm in mid-bustle between points of dutiful activity.
And only then did Edward look properly at the horizon and notice the low stain between sea and sky.
‘So that’s it, is it?’
‘That’s Brazil, sir. Unless the Captain’s made an error.’
‘Of course.’
‘An error of course.’ For a peculiar instant the two men nearly smiled at one another. ‘But he never has yet, sir. In any case you can smell it. Can’t mistake a smell like that. The land you can see over there’ll be Mary-Jo island. It’s right in the mouth of the Amazon and they say it’s about a hundred and seventy miles across.’
Gerontius Page 18
