Crescendo

by Phyllis Bentley

  Looking back on it all now, he saw, of course, that he had not freed himself completely from his parent’s influence either when he first left them or when they quitted life. It was not possible to eradicate any elements of one’s experience; one could only learn to recognise them and control them. That strange affair with Freda, for example, had deep roots in the relations between his mother and himself.

  For a year or two after he had left Hudley he was carried hither and thither about the provinces with various touring companies, setting up and striking scenery, painting it when he was allowed, looking after props, acting as assistant stage manager, while his ambition crystallised. At the end of one of the tours, when he had saved a few pounds, he took himself to London, and entered himself at the new Polytechnic Institute in Upper Regent Street to make good his deficiencies of knowledge in the arts of drawing and painting. When his money ran out he took a job as late-night-shift porter at Kings Cross, and managed to keep himself that way—his great physical strength made him useful and even popular, for he was always ready to tackle a heavy crate to help a friend.

  At this time he was living in mean lodgings in a back street near the station, now cleared away. He would never forget the disagreeable frisson which ran down all his nerves when, a lad in his early twenties seeking the cheapest possible room near his work, he knocked on the cracked and filthy door and it flew open and revealed Freda. He backed away at once, for above her pale plump face and pale blue eyes rose those thick smooth swathings of hair which were for ever associated in his mind with his mother, only that Freda’s massive coiffure was fair as lint—she was in fact of North Germany origin, twenty years older than Francis; large, strong and bosomy. She smiled—her lips were full and pale—at his discomfiture, and said in guttural but not unfriendly tones:

  “You want room?”

  “No. No,” said Francis, unable all the same to take his eyes from her.

  “Yes, you want cheap room. I have good cheap room empty,” said Freda, and she ushered him up the odorous stairs into a miserable little garret, which was, however, not ill lit by a skylight.

  “How much?” said Francis gruffly.

  The woman looked at him and named a price within his range.

  “Well,” said Francis consideringly. He sat down on the narrow bed, which was covered with a thick red lumpy quilt, to test whether it was strong enough to bear his weight.

  To his astonishment he felt a pair of massive arms come round his shoulders; his head was pulled back against Freda’s breasts and her pale lips fastened avidly on his mouth. He was astonished and at first revolted, but then his mood changed. This was positively the first genuinely loving caress he had received in his life. Why not accept it? He threw himself back against Freda with such force that the woman, who had one knee on the bed, tumbled against the pillow, then turning over her he stretched up his hands and tore at her hair so that it came down in great yellow veils about his head and shoulders. He had never had a woman before but he took her with fierce enjoyment, and Freda’s eyes gleamed and her pale mouth writhed with satisfied lust.

  They remained lovers—the emotion between them could hardly be called love but there was no other term for their condition, reflected Francis, running his mind over translations in various languages—for some three months. Then he became aware that their embraces, though no less ardent, took place less frequently; and he began to guess that he was sharing Freda’s favours with another man. He was not surprised; he did not need to be told the kind of woman Freda was, there were other men in the house and he had heard their gossip. He made Freda no reproaches, but simply refrained from asking her for meetings, though when she invited him he continned to accept; he had no claim on her fidelity; her lovers were her own affair; he would certainly never intrude where he was not wanted. He speculated occasionally with mild cynicism on the identity of his rival and was eventually assured of it by an old fellow-lodger: it was a young sailor, a fellow countryman of Freda’s, with fair curly hair, recently come to the house, who had succeeded him.

  “Her old man being a sailor, she has a fancy for them, I daresay,” said Francis’s informant, sniggering.

  “She really had a husband, then?” said Francis, who had imagined Freda’s prefix to be a mere courtesy title.

  “Still has, dearie,” said the old Cockney. “He’s sailing the Seven Seas somewhere at this very moment.”

  “Good luck to him,” said Francis grimly.

  “Ah, you may well say so,” returned the old man. “He’ll need it.”

  It was barely a fortnight after this that on approaching the house in the early morning after his night’s work at the station, Francis saw a small crowd round the open door. A dark official-looking van stood in the street and a policeman was on guard at the top of the steps. This man civilly barred Francis from entering.

  “I live here,” said Francis. “Has something happened?”

  “Only a double murder,” replied the policeman sardonically.

  He escorted Francis into the house and into the presence of a police officer of higher rank, not in uniform, who took down details of Francis’s name and occupation. The bodies of Freda and her sailor lover were just being transferred to stretchers for conveyance to the police morgue, and Francis had a full view of them. Freda’s pale face was frozen into a vicious beauty, a snarling tiger in marble, but the young sailor looked pitifully small and dishevelled. They had been stabbed repeatedly—the wounds showed a mad frenzy—in the act of intercourse, by the murderer, Freda’s unexpectedly returned husband. (Francis saw his portrait afterwards in the newspapers; a most ordinary-looking man, short, solid and respectable, a bo’sun of hitherto unblemished reputation.)

  Francis could not but reflect on his own good fortune. Had it been his night off duty, his life would now be over. He and the sailor had transgressed equally against Freda’s husband. But the sailor lay horribly dead while Francis was vigorously alive. It was most unfair; Francis hated to benefit from such injustice, a burden of guilt seemed laid on his shoulders. The only relief was, and he accepted it with sober thankfulness, that no action of his own had placed the sailor in Freda’s bed that night instead of himself. Had it been otherwise, had some change in plan, some convenience to himself, even some resentful cooling on his part towards Freda, caused the substitution, he would have felt morally responsible for the boy’s death, and—as he had said to Peter only yesterday evening—such responsibility would be very hard to bear. As it was he could reject any direct feeling of responsibility; that the sailor had died instead of himself was a matter in which Francis had played no deliberate part. He pondered this, discovered the deep interconnection of all human activity, and never forgot this lesson; it was one of the formative experiences of his life.

  The steps of his gradual advancement up the artistic ladder, from his first engagement as stage hand after the completion of his Polytechnic course to the position of one of the most sought-after scenic designers in London, though thrilling at the time, were (surprisingly) rather vague in his recollection. He remembered only the moment when a management had at last entrusted him with the designs of a stage production. They had given the job to him because—he had no illusions—he was unknown and therefore cheap; the play was a worthless little farce that he despised. Nevertheless the appointment was his chance, and as such he recognised it. He walked down the corridor from the theatre office at the close of the interview in his usual strong measured tread, but he raised his hands to shoulder height and snapped his fingers in exultation. Turning a corner he found himself face to face with a door-keeper, who gaped and seemed inclined to snigger.

  “Laugh—why don’t you?” said Francis, confronting him with hands uplifted.

  The door-keeper lost his smile and shook his head.

  “Discretion is the better part of valour,” said he in his Cockney accents. (His striped shirt-sleeves rolled above his elbows, his unbuttoned drooping waistcoat, his pale bald head with the wisp of soft
hair across it, were as vivid to Francis today as then, nearly fifty years ago.)

  “Then come out and have a drink with me,” said Francis, laughing and digging him in the ribs. “We’ll celebrate together.”

  This story became part of the legend which presently grew round the name of Francis Freeman. So did the occasion a few years later when, a better-known artist having delayed and dallied and finally turned the commission down, and Francis been invited to provide designs in a hurry as a stopgap, he set to work and produced ground plans, elevation colour sketches and stiff-paper scale models for the three settings of the play, between Friday afternoon and Monday morning. They were good settings too, by the standards of the day, and Francis never lacked work thereafter.

  But it was not till after the first world war that he became really famous. During the war, for which he volunteered immediately Belgian neutrality was violated, he declined to rise above the rank of private, and therefore had a very long experience of the trenches, a thorough training in all the wretched variations of blood and mud. He saw men live in reckless anticipation of death, become wounded, blinded, be torn to shreds and suffer agony, die; he saw men giving orders and receiving orders, he saw men carrying out stupid orders, he saw men failing from stupidity to carry out well-conceived plans. That deep acceptance of everything from the basest to the noblest of human activity as natural and to be expected, which was his innate attitude to life, was strongly confirmed; when he emerged from the Army in 1919, unscratched, perfectly sound in wind and limb and more muscular than ever, he felt that nothing ever could or would surprise him. His mind was now mature, his technical skill after a few months’ practice appeared stronger and firmer than before; some grim and powerful settings for a war play brought him real fame.

  Now he was no longer Francis Freeman, a promising young theatrical artist, but Freeman the celebrity, whose designs had box-office value, whose doings and sayings were the subject of countless anecdotes related in both the gossip and the serious columns of the press. Scenery and Costumes by FREEMAN appeared frequently, and always with prominence, on theatre, ballet and opera programmes; he was sought after; he had more commissions than he could execute; he had no time for leisure, only for swift and hectic pleasures. His designs were bold, flamboyant, sinister; the landscapes of his childhood—the interlocking hills, the soaring mill chimneys, the grim industrial terraces, of Hudley—influenced their form, while in colour they displayed strange, sometimes violent, but often strikingly beautiful juxtapositions. His work and his personality suited the new post-war world, he expressed it and moved at ease in it. Those tricks of the upper classes, clothes and manners, he picked up easily, without giving them much thought. His feeling for line and colour enabled him to dress well, in a colourful but never foolish style; while perhaps thanks to his Irish father, his English was always good and fluent, his accent, though not that of Oxford, neutral of dialect, his vowels pure. His deep strong voice could produce as required a warm caressing tenderness or a turbulent bellow.

  In temper, he had learned with mild amusement, he was regarded during this period as difficult—a proud, strong, touchy man, who was apt to think himself insulted when nothing of the kind had been intended. His rage then was thunderous. Or sometimes his anger would show itself in another way: he was capable of the most prodigious sulks, declining to speak a word for several days. At such times his blunt swarthy face (which admirers likened to that of Beethoven) wore a scowl truly formidable. Or again, he might suddenly fling away from the theatre and vanish, under the mistaken impression that his work was not really respected. He had once been caught, on such an occasion, by the stage manager and leading man of the New York theatre concerned, climbing the gangway of a transatlantic liner. The resulting scene was quite terrific, even for the United States; the newspapers and press photographers had a field-day. The two New Yorkers besought Freeman almost with tears in their eyes to return to the theatre, making offers of quite large additional sums if he would do so. Freeman listened scowling at first, but gradually, as he came to believe no slight on his work had been intended, his expression softened and he melted into a childlike smile of pleasure. Finally they all walked down the dock slapping each other on the back, and the liner sailed without Freeman.

  He had discovered in later years that the world of the theatre sometimes supposed his rages, his awful silences and his sudden disappearances to be calculated, “put on” in order to make himself valued and implored. This hurt him, for they were not in the least calculated, but as genuine as his talent. It was a fundamental tenet of his being never to stay where he was not wanted, never to presume on a welcome, never to expect or assume love. Not for him the weakness of trusting an affection which no longer, or perhaps never, existed; see things clearly, cut your losses, never ask for anything, for nothing is of value unless freely given. In money matters he was known as driving a hard bargain, and this too amused and slightly hurt him; the fact was, if he were offered insufficient reward for his designs, he believed at once that they were not really wanted. He was too proud a man to work under such conditions, and therefore, careless whether he needed the money or no, promptly turned the offer down.

  It was the combination of these qualities—in fact it was the whole man, Francis Freeman himself—which won him Fiammetta.

  Fiammetta had all the characteristics demanded of a prima donna: a magnificent voice well trained, an extremely beautiful person, a temperament passionate, fearless and headstrong. In body she was small, so that one marvelled such a superb volume of voice could pour out of such a fragile vessel—she was not in reality fragile, however, but brimming with a restless vitality, healthy, tough. Italian by birth, with an abundance of dark hair and huge dark eyes (grey or violet? Freeman never knew) which by some unusual coloration of iris and pupil had at times a silvery and starry appearance, Fiammetta dressed with the most exquisite taste; in ordinary life extremely neat, elegant, sophisticated, on the stage she could wear the flaunting costumes of operatic heroines with all the savage verve they required.

  She was to sing the tide-rôle in a production of Carmen for which Freeman was designing fresh costumes and scenery. Freeman considered this opera “old hat,” but had been assured by those in charge that he was employed especially to give freshness and originality to a somewhat stale theme. He had accordingly let his imagination gallop; the glowing result pleased him, and when he heard Fiammetta sing at rehearsal, his pulses quickened with delight. It appeared, however, that Fiammetta wished to sing in yellow instead of the traditional scarlet. Freeman was summoned to a conference on stage and informed of this desired change in an imperious tone. A new design for the dress would of course be needed.

  “It can be done if you postpone the opening night for a month or two,” said Freeman with a smile.

  “You require two months to design one dress?” said Fiammetta haughtily. (Her Italian-English, uttered in one of the finest contraltos of the century, was delicious.)

  “By no means. But if the colour of Carmen’s dress is changed, all the other costumes and the scenery must also be changed, or she will not appear the main character.”

  “That is nonsense. Never have I heard such nonsense.”

  “I think you’re being a little unreasonable, Freeman,” said the stage manager anxiously.

  Freeman shrugged his shoulders.

  “If the signora wishes to be a mere blur against the background, let it be so by all means, but take my name off the programme.”

  “Now, Freeman!”

  “What is that, a blur? I do not understand this word,” said Fiammetta, looking round the group angrily.

  Nobody ventured to enlighten her, and there was an uncomfortable pause.

  “Something so beautiful a Carmen should never be,” said Freeman eventually, laughing.

  Fiammetta gave him a glance in which, as Freeman clearly saw, disdain was mingled with calculation. He was not surprised therefore when she suggested that they should lunch to
gether and talk over the matter, not surprised when he presently found himself alone with her in her suite at the hotel. He was not surprised, because her intention to use the power of her beauty to get her own way about the dress was throughout sufficiently obvious.

  Sure enough, she began to flatter and soothe him, to gaze up into his eyes with that expression of admiring interest which is always so seductive, so apt to lead a man into those intimate confidences which place him in the power of their recipient. Freeman had had sufficient experience, in various preceding amourettes, of this enticing look, to know exactly what it meant; he therefore watched Fiammetta with a smile—he had no objection in the world to being seduced, but nothing would induce him to yield about the yellow dress. Fiammetta, it seemed, felt this, for she grew angry.

  “You do not think me beautiful, Mr. Freeman?” said she, her wonderful eyes sparkling with rage.

  (They really sparkled, thought Freeman, surveying them admiringly; in her case the cliché was literally true.)

  “On the contrary, signora,” he replied pleasantly: “I think you the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”

  “Then why do you remain so cold? Come, kiss me! Do not be afraid.”

  “I am not afraid,” said Freeman in an easy tone, laughing: “But it is only fair to tell you that I am capable of taking many kisses and yet not making you a yellow dress.”

  He rose and gave her a little bow, to take his leave.

  “And yet you call yourself an honourable man?”