The Fountain Overflows (56 page)

17

W
HEN WE GOT
to the Panmure Hall, Mr. Kisch, who was very old and had a grey pointed beard and wore a black velvet skullcap, kissed Mamma on both cheeks and told two young men who were just going away that this was the great Clara Keith, who had retired far too young and had played the Mozart Concerto in C Minor and Schumann’s
Carnaval
better than any other woman who had ever lived. Then he looked at us in a manner indicating that it had occurred to him also that perhaps Mamma thought we could play the piano only because she loved us. Then he took up the list of our repertoire which she had written out for him, and raised his eyebrows and asked, “Have they really got all this music off the notes?” Quite disagreeably he told first Mary and then me to play some Chopin Etudes. He asked Mary for the second Etude in F Minor, which puts you through the hoop of maintaining
staccato
and
legato
in the same hand, and he gave me the first of the Grandes Etudes, Opus 10, Number 1, because it is a fiend to play at the proper tempo, and you need wide oscillation of the wrist. And he gave her the “Revolutionary” one and me the “Black Key” one, and after that it turned out that it was all right.

But neither then nor at any of the lessons did we get the sort of reassurance we desired. It had seemed to us certain that if Mr. Kisch thought that we were really good he would burst out about it and be pleased. But of course in the practice room we said good-bye forever to praise, which is the prerogative of the amateur. At every point of the professional’s life it vanishes when it is within sight. A teacher must dwell on the faults and not the merits of any pupil whom he recognizes as an artist, and once the pupil becomes a public performer he develops a double personality and becomes teacher and pupil. The favourable notice, the flowers in the artist’s room, the applause, the crowds, are evidences of success, but they are not praise. They cannot wipe out the self-censure for the lifeless cadenza, the smudged introduction of a theme. But there was some consolation as we found ourselves accepted members of a friendly tribe. There was a day when we stood with half a dozen of Mr. Kisch’s other pupils while he played us passages from the Beethoven sonatas as he had heard Liszt play them long ago in Budapest, and nobody seemed to think we had no right to be there. Another day we went to hear Saint-Saëns give a recital of his own piano-music, and by chance we sat next to the red-haired girl who came to Mr. Kisch the hour after we did, and we had tea together afterwards, and she did not seem to be waiting to ridicule what we said. This was innocent living after the long criminality of school. It was not, of course, that our schoolfellows and our teachers had belonged to an inferior breed of human being; it was that the horrid necessity of a general education must needs inflict on most children so many boring hours, when they are taught the subjects which do not interest them, that they must find refuge in spite, while their teachers grow irascible through teaching bored children. But here our studies were also gratifications of a passion. The young men and women standing round Mr. Kisch’s piano had no time to think of malicious comment on one another because they were absorbed in watching the flail-like movements of his arms by which he drew from his piano a Dionysiac brilliance such as Liszt and his contemporaries gave their audiences, not to be achieved by the singing and relaxed technique of our time. The red-haired girl and Mary and I were not so much aware of one another as we were of the astonishing crystalline purity of Saint-Saëns’ touch, which so denatured the instrument on which he played that the lush ornament of his own music vanished beneath his icy fingertips and became austere as frost patterns on a window-pane. We were to learn, of course, at a later date, that the world of music is not without its petty jealousies and resentment, since though musicians practise and contemplate a noble art, they are, like schoolchildren, confined within a competitive world. But it is never so bad as school, and when we entered the world of happy apprenticeship we thought ourselves in heaven.

It was a pity, of course, that at home Cordelia was giving, with much more intensity, her performance in the character of a young genius preparing for a scholarship. Mamma was not alarmed by this. She had visited Signor Sala at his daughter’s home in Brixton and had returned full of a persuasion that he was part of a comic dream of the Creator, and that laughter was to be his only effect. She found his musical attainments no better than she had feared, and she did not believe his story of having been a professor of Milan Conservatoire, but she was ready to forgive much to the old humbug because he had received her sitting in a high-back gilt throne, obviously part of an opera set, with two panels of machine-made tapestry on the wall behind him, one representing Verdi and the other Mascagni, rather larger than life-size, each at his country-house. She was not frivolous in her amusement. Because she thought him a rogue, she could not believe Miss Beevor’s story that he was teaching Cordelia for nothing. She was sure that Miss Beevor was probably paying him substantial fees in secret, and while this set her the problem of how she was to sweep aside the pretence and repay her, it also made her certain that the bad old man would advise Cordelia not to try the scholarship that year, but to take lessons from him for another twelvemonth.

“It will be all right,” she said, in the words we children had so often used. “And I do not know why you two, Mary and Rose, should get so angry with Cordelia. What harm does she do you, playing her violin with that old rogue? You are nowhere near her for the most of the day, when you should be working she is not even in the same house. When she is playing the violin in Brixton, how can it prevent you playing the piano in Lovegrove?”

“As I play the piano here in Lovegrove, or even in Wigmore Street,” said Mary, holding her temples, “I can feel Cordelia playing the violin in Brixton.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” sighed Mamma. “It is like genius. Like the way that everybody all over Europe could feel Paganini playing or Rachel acting. Only it is the opposite of genius. But you should have pity on her.”

“Rose and I have a right to pity too,” said Mary.

“Do not be absurd,” said Mamma, she hesitated awkwardly. “Something will happen,” she said faintly.

We realized that it had occurred to Mamma, as it had occurred to us at the Thameside Town Hall, that Cordelia was very pretty and might get married. But that now seemed to us a vain hope, her dedication had become so extreme. At school prayers we still stood on the floor of the hall, while she was with the highest class on the platform, ranged on each side of the headmistress’s lectern; and we noted that she appeared among the other girls as a nun among the laity, so deeply was she disciplined by determination to polish her repertoire of Wieniawski and Chaminade to the highest degree of perfection, so different from her companions’ adolescent dreaminess was the precise anticipation in her neat small features. But in the spring we saw a sudden change. One evening she left the house with Miss Beevor, not so tense with the effort of impersonation as was usual when she was to fulfil a professional engagement, because the evening was to be something of a party for her. She was to play at a banquet held by a volunteer regiment in a neighbouring suburb, Ringwood, and the colonel of the regiment, a banker, had an Italian wife who had been an opera singer, a coloratura soprano, named Madame Corando, and she was going to be there. Mamma and she had known each other in their young days, and when she met Cordelia at local charity concerts, of which she was often a patroness, she always made a great fuss over her. So before this concert Cordelia had dressed with special care, and had gone away looking very lovely in a cherub style, with her pert nose looking perter because she was wearing a little wreath of white flowers and green leaves, set rather to the back of her head. At supper we spoke of her happily, knowing that she would be living part of that evening easily, not as the taut slave of her obsession, but as a pretty girl. But long before we expected her she was with us again; and it was a cab, not a car, that had stopped at our gate, so Madame Corando and her husband had not brought her home, as they usually did. She came into the sitting room and stared at us absently, absorbed in some remote calculations, and we stared back at her in wonder, for she was not the same. She had taken off her wreath and was slowly turning it in her hands, and her face was heavy as if she were brooding on something with such fierce concentration that she had no energy left to keep her muscles taut. As she drew off her coat, she was thinking so little of what she was doing, so much of something else, that she might have been a sleepwalker, her sleep disordered for a great cause.

Mamma said mildly, “Your dress looks very nice, dear.”

Cordelia started, looked down at her skirt, and ran a disparaging hand down it. She did not answer.

“Did it go well?” asked Mamma.

“Very well,” said Cordelia, “they asked for a second encore, but I did not give it to them.”

“And how was Madame Corando?” asked Mamma.

After a pause Cordelia said, “She talks too loud,” and added coldly, “She is a very common woman.” A flash of triumph irrelevant to what she was saying passed across her face.

“So are many excellent musicians,” said Mamma. At this Cordelia made a slow, impatient gesture, and turned from us, and went out of the room, still moving like a sleepwalker.

“Now, what does that mean?” pondered Mamma, but without much anxiety. Cordelia had spirit, if something disagreeable had happened at the dinner, her sturdiness would have been up in arms to defend her pride. But it seemed more probable that she was entranced by some prospect which had opened before her, so novel that she did not know how to speak of it to us, who represented the familiar in her life. Mary and I spoke with perplexity of the change that night when we were undressing in our room, which we no longer shared with Cordelia, who had been given Papa’s room. After we had put out the light, and were lying side by side in our beds, Mary said, “Do you think that she can have fallen in love with someone at that dinner? We are almost old enough for that sort of thing, I suppose.”

The darkness seemed hostile and unexplored. I broke the silence by saying, “Anyway she is, we might be too young, she isn’t. Lots of people in Spain and Italy are married at her age.”

“But would she meet anybody at a Territorial Army dinner in Ringwood that she would want to marry?” Mary wondered.

“Well,” I said, “if the colonel of the regiment was good enough for Madame Corando to marry, there might be someone else in it who would do for Cordelia.”

“Please God, please God,” said Mary, “let it be that she has fallen in love with somebody, and let him fall in love with her, and let them get married soon.”

“No, no,” I said. “Stop, Mary, please. Of course you wouldn’t get a prayer answered if it was wrong, but still we ought to remember that Cordelia might not be happy, she is young to make up her mind, and she can’t have seen him more than once.”

“Well, lots of people have fallen in love like that,” said Mary, “and anyway she is sure to be happy for a time.” She was silent and I felt she was going on praying in the darkness; and was a little worried about it till I fell asleep. Cordelia took things, I realized, less passionately and more seriously than we did.

It appeared possible that Mary’s prayers had been answered. Cordelia’s aspect at school prayers, when she stood with the girls of her class on the platform beside the schoolmistress and we watched her from the floor, was now completely different. Now she no longer looked like a nun among the laity, she looked wilder and more passionate than the girls beside her, and she did not prevent herself from looking radiant even in the middle of the most melancholy Lenten hymn. But what was giving her that radiance had not happened yet, she had the bloom on her that comes of expectation. Also, if it had happened there would not have come those other moments when she forgot to bow her head in prayer, because she was staring straight in front of her, terrified lest what she hoped for would never be hers. All this corresponded with what we had read of love in books. But I was not so happy over this as Mary was, for it seemed to me that I recognized at times the bright falsity, the glittering misjudgment, which often shone about her when she played the violin.

But there was much to confirm our suspicions. One night at supper Cordelia asked Mamma sleepily if she could go up to London on Saturday morning with Rosamund to choose a new coat and skirt. She added, when she had been given permission, that it was going to be a grown-up coat and skirt. Mamma said, “Well, I have seen things in the shops ready for Easter, though it seems early yet to buy for the summer, and all this summer you will still be at school. But it is your own money, and of course you will certainly be leaving school by the autumn, and if you get something really good it will last. But remember that it is not sensible to buy before you need, for you get interest on your money so long as it is in the post office.”

Cordelia did not reply, as we would have expected her to if she had been the same as she used to be, by pointing out, impatiently, how little that interest was. She simply continued to live in a trance; and a few days later she walked into the sitting room wearing the new coat and skirt. At this period the scissors had suddenly got to work on women’s clothes. We were still not fully enfranchised from the load of textiles that our sex had been condemned to wear, but we were transformed, so far as the weight we had to carry and our agility, from cows to the heavier kind of antelope. Skirts were still long, but they were tubular, and were slit up the hem. The narrowness of Cordelia’s skirt turned her into a walking pillar, slender and rounded and strong, built of some warm stone with the light shining on it, for the cloth was a pale golden fawn; and on her short red-gold curls she wore a round brown hat wreathed with creamy flowers. She was carrying her head high, her short nose, so exquisitely drawn, with its tiny triangular flatness between the point and the nostrils, was literally turned up and her pure rounded chin was raised. In her hand she carried her violin bow as if it were a sceptre. “Do I look all right?” she asked carelessly, but she listened fiercely to our answer. Up till now she had always been confident that her appearance was good enough to help her win applause from her concert audiences, and that had been her only interest in it; but now she evidently hoped to buy with it some object on which she herself set a higher price. She stayed in the room for some time, standing upright, for narrow skirts crushed easily; but was far from us, even in another season of the year, for though Lent was still cold about us, she was carrying about her a private springtime, glowing in her thin clothes under some sun we could not see.