Gerontius

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Molly and Fortescue were not at breakfast. He assumed they were in their cabins, too shaken by what they had witnessed to feel like eating. Indeed as he took his seat he found his own appetite had vanished and drank a cup of coffee in a sort of solemnity while thinking back on his meeting with the unfortunate doctor. The more he thought about it the more uneasy he became. There had been something indelicate about that conversation and their schoolboyish pact. Underneath the doctor’s manner, he now saw, had run a current of murkiness, destructive and desperate. Yes, and he himself had … During these reflections he became aware the ship had stopped and through a nearby window he could see an olive-skinned man in a uniform climb over the rail. Not a pilot, he thought, and shortly afterwards Molly and Fortescue appeared with the Captain and all four moved out of sight. But the ship remained hove-to for barely ten minutes and as she got under way once more he caught a glimpse of the official’s cutter heading back towards a settlement on the bank trailing a white plume of smoke above its curling wake.

  The news travelled quickly around the ship, gathering lurid details as it went. The orderly with the red moustache was so distraught he had to be sedated in his quarters. A hasty search was made of the passengers for a qualified doctor and two retired family practitioners were unearthed who, together with a nurse on the Hildebrand’s crew and Molly Air herself, would probably prove equal to most medical emergencies. There was also a vet who had practised in Africa.

  The incident had clearly enraged the Captain. He stayed away from his table and was only occasionally seen, dark-faced, about the ship. That morning he appeared in his own day cabin after knocking.

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Sir Edward.’

  ‘My dear fellow, this is your cabin.’

  ‘I gather the Purser told you about last night’s little episode?’

  ‘He did, yes. I can only say I’m extremely sorry. A tragic business.’

  ‘It’s that all right, but I really came to apologise to you. Puts the Company in the devil of a position. However one sympathises with the wretched – with the poor man, his act has caused endless … Do I make myself clear? I suppose not.’ And Captain Maddrell went to glare at the river.

  ‘Did he leave any indication? A note?’

  ‘Not a thing. No, it’s obvious he had deep-rooted problems about whose nature I should frankly not care to speculate. The point is he should never have been taken on: the man was quite unstable. Turns out he was rude and aggressive towards some of our passengers. His own patients,’ the Captain thumped the rail. ‘That’s what I can’t forgive … I trust he was never rude to you, Sir Edward?’

  ‘I can’t say I ever had reason to consult him as a patient,’ said Edward guardedly. ‘I’ve been as right as a trivet so far. But I did chat to him on a couple of occasions and I must admit he did strike me as oddish. For a doctor he certainly had an unconventional manner. I seem to have reached the age, though, when I sometimes find unconventional people more tolerable than the right-thinking herd.’

  ‘Very liberal of you sir, I’m sure,’ said the Captain bitterly. ‘However, I fear that as far as the Company and its doctors are concerned we set the highest possible value on propriety. I’m sorry the poor devil was off his chump but that’s no excuse for gross dereliction of professional standards and nothing whatever can excuse the sheer cowardice of such an act. Taking one’s own life …’ The Captain inspected the glittering waters with honest incredulity before simply shaking his head once abruptly like a dog trying to dislodge something in its ear and leaving.

  Edward was obscurely surprised by the Captain’s reaction which struck him as being at odds with his expressions of concern a week or so previously over the fate of the migrant workers he was taking to Brazil. Of course there was every difference between the evils which beset humanity and the private problems of a man who was thought to have let himself down, but … Strangely it was Fortescue who seemed the most upset, who with that last glimpse had read in the doctor’s face an untroubled casualness. ‘Like somebody boarding a bus,’ was all he would say, but he said it repeatedly. ‘Like somebody boarding a bus.’

  For the rest of that week much of the ship’s gossip had to do with Dr Ashe’s presumed suicide and sensational reasons were promoted by bored topers claiming inside information. Several passengers, all of them women, admitted to having had the most extraordinary consultations with him and several outrageous bons mots circulated as authentic Asheisms. Young men with polished hair would gleefully pick up the carving knife and fork to tackle the cold buffet (which was now set out at luncheon in place of the table d’hôte) with a curt ‘What d’you want cut off?’ to their lady friends, evoking peals of laughter. The roaring cad who had kept bouncing into Molly, leaving a little Guerlain on the air, giggled a lot with his friends and snatches of their conversation could from time to time be heard rising like acrid thistledown above the hum of the restaurant. ‘Ah, Lady Bugloss. Those little lumps around your neck. What? Going to have to remove ’em.’ ‘Oh no, Doctor, they’re my pearls. Over my dead body.’ ‘Happy to oblige, m’Lady. What?’ The Captain, chancing to be present, ground his teeth.

  But although Dr Ashe’s dramatic passing became itself swept away – since once Manaos was reached there were plenty of new things to gossip about – it did leave behind a legend which endured. On four subsequent trips, the last being in 1929, passengers reported seeing a man step overboard in the middle of the night. It was always at the same spot in the river and on each occasion the ship stopped and searched without finding anything. The man was always identically described, wearing the same clothes and with the same cadaverous face. The fifth and final sighting occurred in the early Thirties aboard the Hilary, the Hildebrand’s new sister ship (the original Hilary having been sunk in 1917).

  Such phenomena lay in the future, however. The incident upset Edward for reasons he could not have confided to the Captain. The memory of having colluded with the Doctor was something he preferred not to dwell on and his guilt extended to wondering anxiously whether before he vanished the man might not mischievously have told Steward Pyce of their little plot. Did Pyce know? It was a question which bothered him in a minor way until the end of the voyage.

  And why had he not interceded on the dead man’s behalf when Maddrell had charged him with cowardice? Maybe there was such a thing as cowardice in war; but if a man were at war with himself and lost, why might that despairing act not be seen as both dignified and brave? No-one could ever know what went on in another man’s mind, nor could they presume to judge another’s mental suffering. It had always struck him as the final horror that attempted suicide was a criminal offence and if the person trying to do away with himself failed and was physically saved he was likely to face prosecution and even imprisonment, a prospect which seemed cold-bloodedly designed merely to ensure that any further attempt would be more efficiently executed.

  He had no difficulty in remembering the passages in his own life when he had seriously thought about killing himself. The nearest he had come to it had not, strangely, been after the greater disillusionment set in during the lowest points of the war or after Alice’s death. It had been at the turn of the century, following the infamous fiasco of the Birmingham première of Gerontius when the fate of his art seemed perfectly reflected in the accounts he drew up for Jaeger which showed a net loss of £21 in getting Cockaigne performed by the Philharmonic Society who had commissioned it. He had also reckoned that, to date, Engima had earned him £2. 9. 11d. There was no future for a musician in England. The pigs weren’t interested in proper music and that was that … He entered a pact with himself that if he failed to make a go of some other kind of profession, then rather than making an abject return to teaching he would kill himself despite the appalling stigma for his family. Composition was so obviously a dead end in England he would have done with it and go into trade. Without telling anybody he wrote to a coal company in Malvern and on one of his visits to London walked through the ve
ry city streets he had just set so splendidly to music to knock on the door of a brokerage firm whose name he had come across.

  Staring now at a pao d’arco tree on the distant bank whose brilliant yellow flowers provided a dab of colour amid the sombre green he could not even manage an ironic smile at the recollection. He had presented himself as Edgar Wardle, the sleight effacement of his own name having given him a moment’s grim pleasure in the train, but it was immediately clear that whatever name he had gone under he would not have been employed. They had been polite, even respectful, but firm. What it boiled down to was that at forty-four he was far too old to be taken on in any capacity since he came without evidence of employment in other brokerage houses. At that age a gentleman would long since have aspired to a seat in the Boardroom … On the instant Edgar Wardle vanished and in his stead a penurious composer went out down the front steps. He lacked even the energy to look up at the heavy ironwork arms holding between them a white glass globe which at night no doubt sent a gaseous beacon of brokerage hope across the tangling sea of City traffic.

  Perhaps the most painful of Alice’s relics were her diaries which since her death he had opened once or twice at random and then miserably closed after reading a line or two. An entry he had found dated from this time in 1901. She had confided to the page an awful anxiety that he would actually carry out what were obviously almost daily threats. That immediate crisis had eventually passed. Less than three years later he was Sir Edward Elgar – still rat-poor, but even at the time he must have recognised that the chances would have been slender indeed of his having become Sir Edgar Wardle, plutocrat, in the same short span.

  IX

  If at some future date I shd. chance to re-read this balderdash & wonder why it looks as though I have wept on it the answer is – SWEAT. Pyce knowingly informs me that it’s wonderfully cool at present aboard this ship on account of the effects of bowling along at however-many-miles-an-hour-it-is over water. I shd. just wait until we tie up in Manaos, he says with ill-concealed glee. He still brings me samples daily so I can’t grumble. Despite its colour the river appears remarkably clean under the microscope. Virtually no bacteria, only a certain amount of suspended vegetable matter. This morning I spilled the last of my eosin, damn & blast. I suppose there might be a supply in Manaos; I’ll have to make up to a scientist. I shd. have bought a trunkload of glass beads/ trinkets/test-tubes.

  On a flat morning (yesterday) I found in the library & read Richard Jefferies’ novel ‘After London’. Good idea – viz, after some unspecified disaster London’s wiped out, most of southern England’s beneath a gigantic lake, jungle & jungle law are everywhere taking over & making a green & unpleasant land. Hard to imagine what cd. possibly bring about a disaster of such magnitude – socially, that is; after the recent war we none of us need to be convinced about man’s technical destructive powers … (How the images still haunt one: that Belgian town reduced to acres of rubble-heaps neatly gridded with cobbled streets which a ragged man is sweeping.)

  But here I keep looking up at that fecundity, the blind burgeon of it all & am chilled. Maybe this is a vision of where we’re heading, steadily at Full Steam Ahead into a new Dark Age. I think it is my own country on this boat; England on its long voyage backwards to oblivion. What was that unguarded phrase I used to describe the A♭ Sym? ‘Massive hope in the future’? H’m. That’s a goner at any rate. The young ladies aboard twitter, the young men prance (some of ’em). They foxtrot & charleston & tango to all hours without a care in the world. My contemporaries drink & snooze & lay down all the laws they never obeyed themselves. Almost no-one seems overwhelmed by what we’re sailing into. An ex-Indian Army man (Cuthbertson?) fetched up at the rail beside me this afternoon, looked long & blinkingly through b-&-s fumes at the distant prospect & said with memorable aplomb: ‘Gad sir, can’t see the trees for the wood,’ but then went & ruined what was probably the first witticism of a lifetime by adding, ‘Should be the other way around, that.’

  Finally I suppose there’s good reason for despair. The ‘massive hope in the future’ did after all refer as much to my own career as to anything more general since the concerns of Humanity at large seemed less pressing (I bet that never crossed Walford Davies’ mind, tho’ – not that it was intended to). But now after the best part of a generation has been reduced to bonemeal what do we see all around but ineffable mediocrity. Nobody any longer has the least idea of the solid, the noble, the hard-won. Everything must be easy, palatable, undemanding & preferably dusted over with jiggy little jazz-noises. Where are men’s aspirations now? Why are they all so scared of the least difficulty? That dreary sniveller Beecham, not content fourteen years ago with having cut the Sym to ½ hour (when he cd. be induced to play the thing at all) still cuts the malign influence out of Sym II, apparently. Someone must have held a gun to his fat head to make him include the thing in one of his progs. A little too raw for poor Bowdler-Beecham, I suppose. Oh Edward what a stupid doltish ass you’ve been to waste your life on the idea that art – in its small way – can make the least difference to things. The greater the art the less it has to say to the mediocre & there’s no getting around it. The human race will just go on stumbling blindly across an endless battlefield ’cos it don’t really mind physical pain & destruction: it’s thinking & being moved & having to change it can’t bear. So it deals with art by guzzling down the sugar & imagining any bitter lumps are the artist’s culinary oversights, evidence of Homer nodding in his chef ’s hat. Of course the public’s greatest revenge is not to ignore a work of art, nor even to amend it like Beecham but to turn it into a classic. Those great works conceived on the edge of darkness are most easily tamed by being made classics because almost by definition classics don’t disturb. You can no longer see classics (the ‘Mona Lisa’) or hear them (Beethoven’s 5th & 9th). What was it that professor said recently of ‘Jude the Obscure’? ‘Some of us will feel he rather overdoes the gloom.’ Perfect. An astonishing & painful work of the imagination reduced by some rancid little twerp to an offence against good taste by not being cheerful enough. That’s England all over & above all when dealing with its own artists. Good taste, fair play & the amateurish reign supreme. Anything really great or awkward or uncongenial is simply beyond the British capacity to cope. Imagine ‘King Lear’ being published today – the field-day of the Mediocracy: ‘Repulsively violent’, ‘Dreadfully depressing’, ‘Unrelieved gloom’, ‘Quite absurd’.

  Not that the great British Public haven’t been set by the ears of late, what with some of the modern noises being chucked at it. I can certainly remember the furore of Schönberg’s ‘Five Orchestral Pieces’ when they got their first perf. at the Proms in 1912. It was the British equivalent of the Paris première of Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’ the following year. I never heard it myself, being otherwise occupied, but it was clear that neither players nor audience knew what had hit them. Ernest Newman wrote sthg. about the work being so destitute of meaning the audience laughed audibly all through the performance & hissed vigorously at the end, while ‘The Times’ said it was like a poem in Tibetan which made me laugh drains. Since then one has heard a good deal more of Herr Schönberg & while I still don’t know any of his music & have not much desire to I do think he writes sympathetically in his own defence. He’s caustic & intransigent & I’m quite old enough to like that in an artist, especially when that artist says congenial & sensible things such as he wishes he were as popular as Ts-chaikovsky only rather better & that people ought to forget everything they’ve heard about his music & just listen to it. I recognise that. I read somewhere that he claims every note he writes conforms to the logic of the heart & I like that too. No accidents, just accidentals. Well, while his ‘Orchestral Pieces’ were being done for the first time so were the Music Makers up in B’ham and they were from the heart, too.

  Later

  How wonderfully bad-tempered I’ve become! Re-reading the above I come across apoplectic phrases like ‘dreary sniveller�
� & ‘ineffable mediocrity’. But how else other than in private rant can one sound off about anything as blithely unstoppable as a new Age? Things really have changed from top to bottom, even one’s oldest friends are not immune to rot setting in. Those awful people Frank Schuster seems to have around him nowadays – his new ‘set’ – oh, it’s not like it was in the dear old days at Bray. Even The Hut isn’t the same – full of Bright Young Things or whatever they call themselves, all of them things, some of them young & none of ’em bright. Frank keeps on introducing a series of more or less dubious youths as his ‘nephews’ – he must be an uncle 80 times over – am I a fool? Does he really think I don’t know & if so can he imagine I care a jot? I suspect it was that which poor Alice didn’t like about him, he was too luxurious & exotic for her, Chosen Race & wealthy & – in that single respect – not comme il faut. But he was – is – the gentlest, kindest of men, has always championed me & was as instrumental as anyone in getting me into ‘Society’ when I needed someone in influential circles to pay some attention or I wd. have gone off & shot myself in despair.

  But even ‘Society’ seems all to have changed now. The Court of those days is no more, all the dear King’s racy bohemians & Jews & wits, all those Keppels & Sassoons – proper Europeans with a love of the arts & good gossip & decent horseflesh gone. And to think I used to complain of their philistinism! Now look at it – the grey, lifeless mediocrity of the Windsors – purged of the last thing vibrant or funny. The House of Windsor – how that says it all. With a stroke of the pen Saxe-Coburg is transformed for reasons of patriotic embarrassment into Windsor. Why not Reading? Why not The House of Molesey? (Why not Philistia-on-Thames?) At any rate Europe has given way to the Home Counties and it shows. Dull, bourgeois propriety & they say the Prince of Wales’s brother’s virtually a cretin. The rumour now is the King wants to do away with the Mastership – imagine, that ancient post of Master of the King’s Musick abolished overnight. I’d take the wretched thing if only to keep it alive tho’ God knows it’s at its last gasp under the dead hand of Parratt. An organist. For pity’s sake. But doing away with the post – it’s very revealing about the new Britain & its sense of priorities. I don’t think.