But if this forest stood like some illimitable sculpture in wood, intermittently lit and polished, there was much that was in motion. Across the seething water from one islet to another flew macaws and parrots, their apparent absence of neck making them blunt-headed as moths or owls. Kingfishers skimmed like bolts of electricity from a rotten trunk on an island to a flowering shrub on another shore. The Hildebrand’s passing disturbed ducks and egrets, the dull mechanical sound of her engines was given back by the walls of vegetation. And off it all blew the smell of the forest’s glands: the oils and gums, the orchids and fungi, wild peppers and spices and gaseous decay. If the sight was both entrancing and sobering (since it reminded all aboard of their insignificance in the middle of such wild immensities) the smell was chilling in its primaeval purity. It told of aeons, of geological eras, of incomprehensible stretches of time. It was unmistakably the smell of the planet before man ever set foot on it, while dinosaurs still browsed and coal was being laid down. It, too, announced that nineteen twenty-three was nothing, the fraction of a second, a ring in a tree-trunk. It breathed into each passenger the seductive perfume of futility. And as often in such cases a few responded by experiencing the piercing pleasure of melancholy, being those curious souls who are reassured by reminders of their own annihilation. Among them was Edward, who for many hours would sit watching the details stream past him until they merged into a continent, an unknown and unknowable land across whose surface would flit images from his own past, the incidents of a life, emotions wearing mortals’ faces. It became a dream: the watcher in the deck-chair, the vegetation, the memories which slid about between. Only the sun seemed real, and then only as the source of the bright daze in which alone such a pageant might take place.
At times a detail would briefly emerge from the dream like a snag, unravelling a thread of his attention: a scent, an alligator on a sandbar, the cry of a bird. Once or twice he even resumed jotting quavers and crotchets on the pad he held, for although if anyone had asked him he would have said music was dead (viewing a landscape inimical to art and innocent of mankind’s cultural tomfooleries) something came insistently to him in dribs and drabs which out of a lifetime’s habit he could only notate. The unknown figure on its tower proceeded with its wordless song but the context was still unclear. A solitary scena, maybe, or – he looked up with a start – part of a Mass? A Mass of Life suggested itself at the very moment he crossly told himself that Delius had already thought of that. But a secular oratorio or Mass might be the answer. It would offer opportunities for many of the effects with which he had first made his mark: dazzling passages for full orchestra, grand choral blazes, a cappella numbers with the sketchiest accompaniment, quiet meditations for a soloist with maybe a single gracile obbligato instrument (oboe? clarinet?) winding its figurations in the manner of Bach but in the mode of Elgar … He laid aside his pad and propelling-pencil. No, this was quite definitely not going to be the third part of the trilogy. That project was dead. The Apostles and The Kingdom hadn’t worked in terms of popularity, he could now admit it. They contained much of his own favourite music but they lacked that inner dramatic compulsion which made Gerontius so electrifying. What was that phrase Beethoven had used about his op. 22 piano sonata? Hat sich gewaschen. How he recognised that tone of proud assurance, of absolute knowledge that what he had just finished worked and was first-rate. It seemed a long time since he himself had felt the same certainty, an elation which made one almost ribald, content to describe one’s new work with a piece of offhanded or heavy humour like Brahms referring to the massive second movement of his B♭ piano concerto as ‘a little wisp of a scherzo’. Well, Gerontius hatte sich gewaschen, the oratorios hadn’t: they’d all too obviously been texts set to music. So forget about Judgements and Judases; he didn’t believe in the one and the human drama of the other was too contrived. Archbishop Whately’s version was a nice idea but it was literary and brought with it a mustiness of ancient heresy which no longer mattered.
This figure on the tower whom he still couldn’t see with any clarity – it had possibilities. It had sprung from his mind and not from some book and came accompanied by a fragment of music which, for all it was aching and bleak, had a distinct freshness. Who was it? Zoroaster? Irritating that Richard Strauss had done him even if for orchestra alone. Whoever this was had renounced the world – or had been deserted by it – but what was left was positively no idyll. This was no Worcestershire lad who preferred dreaming among the bullrushes; this was somebody with no memories in the midst of a naked reality … He gave up. Sooner or later the picture would become clearer or simply fade away as so often before.
During the first day or so of the voyage upriver – which is to say from the Narrows to the tiny settlement of Monte Alegre – the majority of the Hildebrand’s passengers spent much time at the rail simply watching the panorama as it passed. Whether at dawn with the ghostly layers of mist arising with water-birds or at noon with its steep heat or at nightfall with its fireflies and monkey-cries, the Amazon seemed to fulfil most people’s dreams of the exotic and untamed. Then gradually they began to tire of what they saw as the repetitive scenery, the unbroken walls of jungle, the impression that the ship was eternally rounding the same bend to disclose two islands on the right no bigger than tennis-courts with a large grey heron on each. Surely they had seen them only an hour ago, as well as that group of huts on the bank standing on spindly legs with motionless figures watching apathetically as the ship went by?
‘Caboclos,’ Steward Pyce informed anyone who asked. ‘Half-breed rubber gatherers. Half-Indian, half-Portuguese. A miserable lot.’ He was a fund of facts.
Bit by bit people drifted away from the rail back to their cards, drinking, backgammon, knitting. (Several women were implacably knitting layettes for babies back home as they had recently knitted socks for the Boys at the Front. These would have the distinction of having been made south of the Equator and up the Amazon. By such things were local reputations enhanced.)
After the Narrows, which effectively separated the great Island of Marajó from the main body of Brazil, the Hildebrand turned west into the main stream of the Amazon proper. And now the banks on either side retreated as if some threshold had been crossed. The ship was more generally in midstream than not and often well over half a mile of tawny water flowed between it and the nearer bank. There were fewer of the caboclos’ huts, too, and the line of jungle seemed darker and still more unbroken. Once over this threshold Edward was astonished by the one thing he had never expected to be impressive: the sky. As the banks diverged everything broadened and fell away leaving enormous spaces overhead. This sky would have struck any sensitive traveller by its vastness and the majesty of its cloudscapes. It was quite unlike the celebrated skies of East Anglia or of the Dutch landscape masters. Those had a quality of luminous emptiness even when filled with clouds and they lacked completely the energy of the Amazon skies. To Edward the clouds over Holland or Suffolk always gave the impression of having drifted in from elsewhere and, provided he watched for long enough, would eventually drift out again unchanged as beyond the edges of an invisible picture frame.
But here it was clear to him that the appalling forest they had entered was exhaling the sky even as it slept. A million square miles of this organism’s lungs were sending up pillowy tons of moisture, convections of breath, megawatts of energy. Because the movement of these cloud-masses was so noticeable they gave the sky an extraordinary quality of height which the gentler, more static skies of northern Europe lacked even when flecked with wisps of uttermost cirrus. Here, prodigies of cauliflowers, sacks and cities boiled up and up, turning in upon themselves with wild shifts of colour and texture, dark bruisings, frosty streaks, reaching far overhead to where, at noon and in the late afternoons especially, massive thunderstorms would take place at altitudes so high that not a whisper of sound reached the ears nor drop of rain struck the Hildebrand’s decks. From cloud-mass to cloudmass the vivid lightnings crazed, some
times running from a single point like trickles of liquid down each side of the sky. People held their breath. Nothing. The silence unnerved them: it was not natural. The cathartic order of steamy heat relieved by a violent thunderstorm was withheld. The lightning whirled and jabbed in silence, the steamy heat persisted.
At dusk the colours were stupendous and again the sensitive among the passengers had no doubt that this was how the primaeval skies of the planet would have been. An enormous orange sun, swelling as it fell to the surface of the forest, would set ahead of the ship and flare the river into molten substances across which birds skimmed. Hoatzins, with their wispy crests and peculiar breastbones more like pterodactyls than birds, flapped in silence away from the river heading towards their private lost worlds. The extreme tranquillity seemed even to mute the sound of Chief Stanford’s engines and the steady rush of water became louder. The dawns, too, were calculated to make any observer think of pre-history although not many were up in time to notice since most had found sleep difficult on account of the heat and still lay like logs with pads across their foreheads soaked in long-evaporated cologne.
VIII
In Amazonas at any rate it’s easy to believe Time’s ever-rolling stream flows backwards. We’re being borne into prehistory. It helps one’s memory – not just for the details but the atmosphere (sounds/smells/tastes) – of one’s own past.
The real awfulness of becoming an ‘official’ & public figure is that by a long series of lies, biographical evasions, over-simple explanations for people who don’t understand artists – one gradually falsifies one’s own life. I look at these stupendous clouds now in a way which reminds me how little I’ve properly observed the sky for years despite my insistence to everyone (& myself ) on my ‘outdoor’ habits. This afternoon I watched a bronze and vermilion city paved with pearl pass across the ‘Hildebrand”s bows for the best part of half an hour. Just like a child I walked its dissolving streets, entered alleys as they formed, climbed a hillock which overlooked a palace until suddenly the palace began overlooking the hillock. I subsided with bridges and was wafted to fraying pinnacles. I burst painlessly through mushy ramparts. And all the time there was that sound – why not call it sound? – a sense of inaudible music which accompanies such things & is heard as tho’ beneath the open windows of a veiled mansion. It always was like that except once the music wd. make itself properly heard. Now it reminds me sadly of how I felt & so for a moment I forget I’m supposed to be an old master & become an apprentice once more, all ears & full of longing.
How at any age can one make any sort of decent terms with this longing? At fifteen one did it by thinking those marvellous tunes would – as soon as the ‘craft’ had been ‘lerned’ – fit together into sthg. which had never before been done. One carried them about like a collection of diamonds sewn into a traveller’s belt for use when the exact needy moment arrived. But after enough years next to the skin they began to feel like uncomfortable liabilities, likely to be losing their value through some vagary of the marketplace. (The longing, however, persisted undulled.) As for the diamonds … That damned Trio of P&C no. 1 – when the King asked me how I’d dreamed up such a ‘corker of a tune’ (HM’s phrase) – I told him quite truthfully I’d been carrying it around for twenty years, which puts it at 1880ish. I can’t remember its genesis, of course – maybe it was sawing wood or perh. the rhythm of an exultant tramp up the Sugar Loaf. Or maybe it was what the clouds were moving to one afternoon as I lay flat on my back in a field. But when I was actually orchestrating the march in 1901 I remember writing to Nim saying sthg. like ‘Gosh, man, what a tune I’ve got in my head’ as if it had just dropped on me that afternoon. But of course it hadn’t – an excellent example of an implied fib. It was simply time to ‘go public’ with an old diamond so I was just being a good salesman to give Novello’s & myself confidence.
Well, 1880, those were good days for music-making. To read the asses now you’d think I’d spent the time walking around like Beethoven in those Lyser sketches, hands behind back, frock coat billowing, furrowed brow raised 4square to heaven, trying to work out a way of putting England on the musical map of Europe. Too silly. England. I didn’t care a hoot about ‘England’ – who at that age wants to bother himself with his own nation? – there was only this marvellous landscape into wh. I’d been born & wh. exuded music. Schumann, Dvořák, Tschaik., they’d all of them looked around at their own landscapes & then written themselves. They hadn’t the least interest in writing ‘German’ or ‘Bohemian’ or ‘Russian’ music. As Schumann himself said: ‘Being a man, and humane, is much more than being a German and Germanic.’ I read and played them all – especially Schumann. No mistaking what they were about.
Like many of the others Edward himself found the heat at night made it hard to sleep. When he wrote an entry in his Journal his forearm stuck to the page. He was pleasantly surprised by the absence of mosquitoes since he had heard the adage repeated as a litany by even the least experienced travellers aboard: ‘Behind every leaf an insect; in every flower at least one ant.’ He lay on his bunk with the light off. A muted glow penetrated the curtains from the shelter deck outside. Footsteps and voices passed now and then. At a great distance the band was intermittently audible until midnight. The faint sounds seemed to reach him from across millennia, now as if he were overhearing the last revels in Babylon, now as if they were fragments of something more mysterious. He remembered the Piper at the Gates of Dawn in The Wind in the Willows, whole passages of which he knew practically by heart. How had the Rat put it? ‘Dance-music – the lilting sort that runs on without a stop – but with words in it, too – it passes into words and out of them again – I catch them at intervals – then it is dance-music once more, and then nothing but the reeds’ soft thin whispering.’
He roused himself enough to pad into the bathroom, drink copious draughts of water and swallow a dose from his blue bottle. Bit by bit the potion which quietened horses lulled him and sent him into a sleep deep enough for a sudden commotion at three in the morning to wake him to a drifting, semi-conscious state which precluded curiosity. Far away a bell was clanging, the engines’ massive purr changed to a shudder. Steel creaked. Footsteps ran down carpets outside and drummed on naked iron overhead. Maybe there were shouts, too, but Edward was waiting for the purring to begin again and consciousness ebbed away.
Going to breakfast the next morning he met the Purser and it was not until the man greeted him and trusted he hadn’t been disturbed by the noise during the night that he dimly remembered having been woken.
‘The fact is, Sir Edward, there was a tragedy last night.’ The Purser had a discoloured look about him and his voice was low as if he were entrusting a true version of events to a senior man who would know better than to pass it on to juniors. ‘Dr Ashe has gone.’
‘How do you mean, gone?’
‘I know it’s incredible but he simply jumped overboard and vanished. Quite by chance he was seen by two of the people you share your table with – Miss Air and Mr Fortescue. I believe you know them both?’
‘Certainly I do. I’d think they, if anyone aboard, would make admirable witnesses. What happened?’
‘Just that,’ said the Purser, who kept glancing aside at the floor as if fresh consequences were only just striking him. ‘They were up on deck, looking at the stars and so on – you know. They noticed Dr Ashe come past but assume he didn’t see them since they were in the shadow of some davits. But they saw his face in the deck-lights and swear he didn’t look crazed or drunk in any way. He moved off down the deck about twenty feet away, climbed over the rail and simply dropped into the river. They were so astonished it took them a few seconds to react. Of course we stopped and made a thorough search with every light we could muster but the wretched fellow was gone.’
‘Good God. How do you reckon his chances?’
‘Slim, frankly. We were a good couple of cables – that is, about three-quarters of a mile from the nearest bank and the
current was treacherous enough to deter the Captain from prolonging the search. I expect you’ve gathered, sir, that Captain Maddrell’s not a man who deters easily but when it comes to the safety of his ship and the passengers, well.’
The Purser left it there but the unspoken verdict was clear. Nobody walked deliberately overboard in the middle of the night, sure of being unobserved, without wishing to do away with himself. The doctor would not have surfaced. Whatever the alligators or piranhas had left might fetch up on a sandbar or bump against the rotting stilts of a caboclo’s hut, but the mortal Dr Ashe had undoubtedly ceased.
Gerontius Page 21
