Veronica was a poor diplomat, and she had small relish for the task before her; but she had undertaken it on behalf of her husband, and she decided that the best thing was to jump in with both feet, and get it over.
“Monica—I hope you don’t mind me calling you Monica—Solly and I want to ask a favour of you. A large favour, and it isn’t easy to ask. But—we’re terribly hard up. And we wondered if you could possibly lend us some money.”
Monica looked up, not appearing to best advantage with her mouth full. This was one development she had not foreseen.
“I know it must seem strange to you, but I suppose you have heard about the conditions of my mother-in-law’s will?”
Monica shook her head. “Not a whisper,” said she.
“You must be one of the few people who hasn’t heard something. But of course you’ve been out of the country. Still, I thought your—some of your relatives might have written to you about it. It seems to us—to Solly and me—that everyone knows about it. Well, it’s complicated, but it comes to this; the Trust which supports you has all Mrs Bridgetower’s money for its funds. When she died, my husband was left one hundred dollars, and that was all. It was a blow; I know you’ll understand that. But it wasn’t as though he was free. The money may come to him; it will come to him if we have a male child. Had you not heard anything of that?”
“Nothing,” said Monica, and felt suddenly cold in the warm little room.
“Yes. If we have a male child, the Trust automatically ends. But till that time all the money goes to you. We had a child, you know—you didn’t?—well, we had a son, but he was born dead. It was a sore disappointment. Not wholly, or even mostly, because of the money but—you do understand, don’t you? We don’t hold ill-will against you. After all, it might have been somebody else—anybody with talent. But we’re chained to this house, which costs a terrible lot to keep up, even when the Trust undertakes to keep it in repair. And my husband is still only a lecturer, and even with Summer School fees, and what he can get by writing now and then for the radio, and so forth, we can’t keep our heads above water. We’re not merely broke; we’re terribly in debt. Now, of course Solly knows that the Trust has just made over $45,000 of surplus funds to you.—I hate saying this, but under other circumstances that would have been our money. I’m asking if you could let us have ten thousand, to tide us over?”
Monica looked, but could not speak.
“You see, we have hopes. We hope for another child. But suppose it isn’t a boy? Suppose there is never another boy? I don’t want to let myself talk about my mother-in-law, but it’s so cruel! If we could get free of the house, we might snap our fingers at the whole thing, but we can’t—at least we haven’t quite gone so far as to sacrifice all hopes in order to get out of this net. And meanwhile—you understand, don’t you, that I’m talking to you as a friend, and I’m not trying to wring your heart, really I’m not—I only want you to know how things are—our marriage is being twisted out of shape. Solly is a drudge, and I’m a baby-factory, bound to go on and on, until we have a son. It’s a horrible vengeance—because she hated me—because I took her son—”
Veronica was not a weeping woman, but her mute distress was more terrible to another woman than tears could be.
Oh God,—thought Monica, if only I had enough sense not to always tell everything I know! I’ve told Giles I’ve got $45,000, or close to it, when the funeral’s paid for, and that’s what he’ll be counting on. If I go back with less—I couldn’t explain it to him, ever. These people wouldn’t be real to him. Nothing’s real to him except the opera, and I’m real because I’ve been able to support him while he wrote it, and can help to pay to get it on.
But what can I tell Veronica? Tell her that an artistic venture demands every cent of this money, when she and her husband think of it as theirs? What could a plan like that mean to people who are in this sort of mess? Tell her my lover must have every penny I can get, like a tart giving her earnings to her pimp, for fear of a black eye? How real would Giles seem to them? What can I say?
The silence between them was more than either woman could bear, and it was Veronica who broke it.
“It would be a loan, of course, a matter of business—we wouldn’t dream of asking more than that. I mean, we’d have to arrange a rate of interest; we wouldn’t expect you to lose by it.”
Monica was frozen with discomfiture and pity, but she could not find anything to say. Veronica could not be silent, now; anything was better than silence. She continued:
“I know, of course, that what I’m asking you to do is quite illegal. Solly has tried to get loans out of the funds from Mr Snelgrove, and it can’t be done. If you let us have some money, we might all end in jail, I suppose. Or at best it would look terrible if anyone found out.”
Monica had to speak.
“I wouldn’t care how illegal it was, if I could help you,” said she. “I just can’t. There’s a very good reason—I swear to you that it’s a good reason—why I can’t, but at present I’m unable to explain it. I will explain as soon as I can, and as fully as possible. But you must believe that it isn’t greed, or stinginess, or because I don’t admire you and your husband very much, and want you to think well of me. But I can’t do it.”
“I thought that would be your answer,” said Veronica, without rancour; “Solly said you had spoken of a plan of some sort to the Trustees. But you see that I had to try, don’t you?”
The noise of the party mounted to them, and Solly came to fetch his wife and Monica. A quick glance told him what he most wanted to know, and he did not allow his obligatory high spirits, as host, to flag. To lose all hope is, in a way, to be free, and it often brings with it a lightening of mood. Downstairs they went, into a sea of compliments, of enthusiasm, of success.
Much later, as Monica lay in her bed, she thought of the party with satisfaction, and yet somewhat remotely. It had been the occasion for an outlet of the enthusiasm which her recital had evoked, and which had not expended itself in the applause at Fallen Hall. She had done her duty. She had tried at first to bring Dad into the circle of enthusiasm; he had appreciated her solicitude, but it was doubtful if he really knew any more about the affair than that Monny had, in some mysterious way, I made a hit with these big-bugs. It was not that he was stupid; he was dim, remote and, since the death of his wife, only partly alive. Aunt Ellen was quite different; it was not at all hard to find people for her to talk to; Cobbler had been very good to her. Alex and Kevin, astonishingly assured and competent at a party far above their accustomed welkin, had been kind about looking after Dad.
For Monica had not been able to do so. Everybody wanted to talk to her. One or two had liked Kubla Khan, and said so; some had spoken very kindly about the songs sung in memory of Mrs Gall. But Water Parted seemed to have impressed everybody.
Yet what strange things they found in it! “I wish I knew what was in your mind when you sang that!” Over and over again she heard that comment, differently phrased. Many, as soon as they had said it, gave her their notion of what the song had meant to her. A surprising number took it as a song of nostalgia for Canada, cherished by her during her exile abroad—an idea which had never entered her head. Some were convinced that it was a love-song.
What did it mean to her? It meant what Hiraeth meant to Ceinwen Griffiths—a longing for what was perhaps unattainable in this world, a longing for a fulfilment which was of the spirit and not of the flesh, but which was not specifically religious in its yearning. It meant her surge of feeling at the tomb of St Genevieve. It meant the aspiration toward that from which she drew her strength, and to which she returned when the concerns of daily life were set aside. It was the condition of being which lay beyond the Monica Gall who bossed Dad and Aunt Ellen into living together, who quarrelled and lost her dignity with her sister Alice, who spoke in honeyed words to the Bridgetower Trustees, who denied poor Veronica Bridgetower the money which might deliver her from a hateful bondage, who cheated
and scraped for Giles Revelstoke, and endured all his whims in return for his absent-minded and occasional affection. It lay through, but beyond, the world of music to which she was now committed—the singer’s bondage which tonight had so plainly shown to be hers. It was the yearning which had been buried in the heart of her mother, denied and thwarted but there, forever alive and demanding. It was a yearning toward all the vast, inexplicable, irrational treasury from which her life drew whatever meaning and worth it possessed. It was the yearning for—? As Ceinwen’s song had said, not all the wise men in the world could ever tell her, but it would last until the end.
12
“I trust that you will not think that I have acted unwisely, but that is what has been done with the large sum of money which you made over to me in February. I hope that the enclosed reports will persuade you that it has been well spent.” Thus ran part of Monica’s letter to the Bridgetower Trustees, which Mr Snelgrove read to them at a meeting held in the following May.
“I’m sure Mother would have been greatly surprised to know that she had partly financed the production of a new opera,” said Solly, and the others could only agree.
And such an opera! The criticisms which Monica had enclosed were all agreed that it was an extraordinary work, containing flashes of genius, but freakish in the extreme. That the principal tenor should have been transmuted into an ass, by sorcery, was part of the story. But that he should bray—musically, of course, but still undoubtedly braying—for the whole of the middle act, was certainly hard to swallow. Part of the audience had refused to take it seriously as a musical work, and had been tempted to boo. But Stanhope Aspinwall, in two long articles which he wrote about the new opera, rebuked them sharply. Here, he said, was the most original musical talent to emerge for many years, asserting itself—pulling the public’s leg, perhaps, but that was the privilege of genius. His analysis of the work contained many criticisms which, he said, he had been obliged to bring against Giles Revelstoke’s work on several occasions—lyricism at the expense of dramatic movement, conventional passages of orchestration which seemed to have been thrown together in a hurry and never revised, a sacrifice of musical to literary values in some sections—but judged as a whole, a work of splendid qualities.
All of the critics agreed that in Monica Gall, the Canadian soprano who played the small but important role of Fotis, the serving-maid turned sorceress, the world of chamber opera had gained the most gifted singer of many years. She could not act particularly well, but that could be mended. It was good news indeed that the British Opera Association had chosen this work to perform in Venice, in September, at the Festival. There was even a kindly mention of the fact that some of the money for the excellently-mounted production had been supplied by a Canadian trust fund, founded for the furtherance of the arts; thus, the British critics agreed, the dominions were returning some of the loving care and cultural dower which had been lavished upon them in their early days by the Motherland. It was to be hoped that more might follow.
“Without knowing it, we seem to have covered ourselves with glory,” said the Dean, laughing.
But Miss Pottinger and Mr Snelgrove agreed in all seriousness.
“Certainly we made no mistake when we chose Monica Gall for the first beneficiary. I wonder if we shall have to choose another. May I say that I hope not?”
They all looked at Solly. They knew that since late April, Veronica had been pregnant.
“You cannot possibly hope that as fervently as I do, Mr Dean,” said Solly, with a laugh which took some of the bite out of the remark.
It was at about that same time that Chuck Proby (as Mr Gall could not be persuaded to do it) went to the cemetery vault, where the body of Mrs Gall was identified by him, and buried in the grave which the now soft ground permitted to be dug. The law demanded it, and someone has to do these things.
Nine
1
Monica had been five full days in Venice, and so far she had seen no more of it than could be glimpsed in flittings from her hotel to the theatre, and thence to Giles’ favourite restaurant. True, she had been several times in a gondola, which might have been romantic if she had not always been accompanied by her portable typewriter, or the very heavy suitcase which contained the orchestra parts for The Golden Asse, or Giles himself in his anti-Venetian mood. The city was a tourist-trap, he told her, and its romance was spurious; the Venetians were all scoundrels; had they not launched income tax, the science of statistics, and state censorship of books upon the world? He laughed away her meek proposals that, when the long days of work were done, they might see some of the sights; he had seen the sights, years ago, and they were not worth having. They had not come to Venice to be tourists, but to work.
Monica, who had not seen the sights, would not in the least have minded being a tourist. Giles laughed still more, and said that she was provincial. Apparently this was a very dreadful thing to be, and she timidly asked Domdaniel about it.
“Giles is playing the man of the world,” said he. “You mustn’t mind. Everybody’s provincial if you put ‘em in the right spot to show it, and nobody more so than the man who won’t be impressed, on principle. When we get this mess straightened out I’ll show you the town; I know some very pleasant people here.”
The mess to which he referred was The Golden Asse, which had been undergoing revision ever since its appearance in London in May. The work had revealed weaknesses in performance, and when Revelstoke had been convinced that the weaknesses were real, and had tried to correct them, the opera had seemed to collapse; its individual parts were still good, but they could not be made to stick together satisfactorily. Domdaniel had been reassuring; the commonest thing in the world, said he; always happened when a big work wanted revision; all that was needed was patience. But patience had worn thin, for The Golden Asse was to appear as part of the current Music Festival in Venice, and revisions had gone on, minutely but tiresomely, until yesterday. Most of the tinkering had been done on the orchestral interludes which linked the many scenes of the opera; Monica had copied, and re-copied, and copied again, principally because it was convenient for her to do so, being so close at hand, but also to save the money of the Association for English Opera—money which she had herself provided in substantial but insufficient amount. There is no such thing as enough money for opera, she had discovered.
The pattern of work was surprisingly regular. Domdaniel would find fault with a passage, and suggest how it might be re-cast: Revelstoke, after argument, would re-write the passage in his own way: Domdaniel, having first said that the new version would do splendidly, was likely to find in a few hours that it was—well, not quite right, and suggest further revision, usually along the lines he had originally proposed. Revelstoke would again re-write, producing something manifestly inferior to what he had done before. Domdaniel would then suggest that the earlier revision be used—with a few changes which he could easily make himself, to spare Giles trouble. But Giles did not want to be spared trouble; he wanted the music as he had written it in the beginning. There were shocking rows.
The parts which would shortly be distributed to the music desks in the orchestra were a muddle even for musicians, who are used to muddled parts. Over the neat script of the professional copyist were gummed countless bits of paper upon which were corrections in Monica’s script, almost as neat. But over these might be further corrections, in Giles’ beautiful but minute script, or in the bold hand of Domdaniel. Further revision appeared, in Domdaniel’s hand, in red pencil. Yet, somehow, at orchestra rehearsals the players made sense of it all. Philosophical and usually patient men, they interpreted the muddle under their eyes, and brought forth beauty.
That was what made it all worth while. The Golden Asse was a thing of beauty. Giles’ libretto followed faithfully the second-century story of the unfortunate Lucius, whose meddling in magic caused him to be transformed into an ass, from which unhappy metamorphosis he was delivered only after he had achieved new wisdom. But t
he character of the music emphasized the tale as allegory—humorous, poignant, humane allegory—disclosing the metamorphosis of life itself, in which man moves from confident inexperience through the bitterness of experience, toward the rueful wisdom of self-knowledge. Where the music came from, not even Giles’ most intimate associates—and this now meant Monica and Domdaniel—could guess, for as the work had progressed he had grown increasingly freakish, his moods alternating between one of morose incivility and another of noisy hilarity. There was nothing of the serene wisdom of his music to be discerned in himself.
The journey to Venice had been, for Monica, a misery. She had travelled with Giles and the stage director, Richard Jago. Giles had insisted that wagon-lits were an extravagance, so they had slept in their seats; nor would he hear of meals in the restaurant-car—they must picnic, it would be so much cheaper and jollier. So they had eaten innumerable hard rolls into which lumps of bitter chocolate were stuffed, fruit-cake, and cheese, with occasional swigs at a flask of brandy. Monica had not liked this stodgy diet, and had bought a few pears for herself; they had made her ill, as Giles, who had an English mistrust of fruit, had predicted, and after their arrival in Venice Domdaniel had had to dose her for a couple of days with Fernet Branca.
But it was not the physical discomforts of the journey which had made it so exhausting. Giles was in one of his hilarious moods, and insisted that she and Jago sing lewd rounds with him, for hours at a time. Giles was entranced by rounds and catches, especially those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in which, as they were sung, simple-minded obscenities were revealed. And so, to the astonishment of their fellow-travellers (when they had any) they sped across Europe to the strains of—
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