Part 3 (1/2)
For ever on the trapeze of sound, his life, the life of his reputation, risked whenever he went through his performance before the public; yes, he was only a kind of acrobat, doing tricks with his fingers.
As he looked fairly at all his imprisonments, dreading the worst, the no longer solitary imprisonment, he realised that he had no outlook, that he would never be able to look through the bars. 'I have only felt,' he said to himself, 'I have never thought, and I have felt only one thing very acutely, music.' He was almost frightened as he saw, in a flash, within that narrow limits this one interest, this exercise of one instinct, caged him. Other men were curious about many things; the world existed for them, not only as substance, but as a matter for thought; there were all the destinies of nations and of mankind to think about, and he had never thought about them. He wondered what people meant when they spoke about general interests. Were they a kind of safety valve, for the lack of which he was bound, sooner or later, to come to grief?
Occupied more and more nervously with himself, shutting himself up for days and nights, almost without food, in an agony of attack on some difficulty hardly tangible enough to be put into words, he let Rana Vaughan drift away from him, with an unavowed sense of failure, of having lost something which he could not bring himself to take, and which might yet have saved him. She parted from him, at the last, angrily, her pity worn out, her admiration stained with contempt. He remembered the look of her face, flushed, indignant, as, withdrawn now wholly into herself, she said good-bye for the last time. With her went his last hold on the world.
Gradually sound began to take hold of him, like a slave who has overcome his master. The sensation of sound presented itself to him continually, not in the form of memory, nor as the suggestion of a composition, but in a disquieting way, like some invisible companion, always at one's side, whispering into one's ears. He was not always able to distinguish between what he actually heard, a noise in the street, for instance, which came to him for the most part with the suggestion of a cadence, which his ear completed as if it had been the first note of a well-known tune, and what he seemed to hear, through noise or silence, in some region outside reality. 'So long as I can distinguish,' he said to himself, 'between the one and the other, I am safe; the danger will be when they become indistinguishable.'
He had realised a certain danger, always. He felt that he was a piece of mechanism which was not absolutely to be trusted. There had been something wrong from the beginning; the works did not wear evenly; one part or another was bound to use itself up before its time; and then, well, not even a shock would be needed to set everything out of order: it was only a question of time.
He began to watch himself more closely, to watch for the enemy; and now a kind of expectant uneasiness came of itself to suggest otherwise imperceptible pains and troubles of sound. He was always listening, with a frequent precipitation of pulses, to nothing, to something about to come, to the fancy of music. The days dragged, and yet some feverish idea seemed always to be hurrying him along; he was restless whenever his fingers were not on the keys of the piano.
One day, at a concert, while he was playing one of Chopin's studies, something in the curve of the music, which he had always seen as a wavy line, going on indefinitely in s.p.a.ce, spreading itself out elastically, but without ever forming a pattern, seemed to become almost externally visible, just above the level of the strings on the open top of the piano. It was like grey smoke, forming and unforming as if it boiled up softly out of the pit where the wires were coiled up. It was so distinct that he shut his eyes for a moment, to see if it would be there when he opened them again. It was still there, getting darker in colour, and more distinct. He looked out of the corner of his eyes, to see if the people sitting near him had noticed anything; but the people sitting near him had their eyes fixed on his fingers, from which he seemed, as usual, to be quite detached; they evidently saw nothing. He smiled to himself, half apologetically; the piece had come to an end, and he was bowing to the applause; he walked boldly off the platform.
When he came back to play again, he looked nervously at the top of the piano, but there was nothing to be seen. He sat down, and bent over the keyboard, and his hands began to run to and fro softly. When he looked up he saw what he was playing as clearly as he could have seen the notes if they had been there: but the wavy line was upright now, and drifted upwards swiftly, vanis.h.i.+ng at a certain point; it swayed to and fro like a snake beating time to the music of the snake-charmer; and he looked at it as if it understood him, and nodded his head to it, to show that he understood. By this time it seemed to him quite natural, and he forgot that there had ever been a time when he had not seen the music like that.
On his way home after the concert, it occurred to him that something unusual had happened, but he could not remember what it was. He dined by himself, and after dinner went out into the streets, and walked in the midst of people, as he liked to do, that he might take hold of something real. But he could not concentrate his mind, he seemed somehow to be slipping away from himself, dissolving into an uneasy vacancy. The people did not seem, very real that night: he stopped for a long time at the corner of the pavement, near Piccadilly Circus, and tried to see what was going on around him. It was quite useless. The confusing lights, the crush and hurry of figures wrapped in dark clothes, the noise of the horses' hoofs striking the stones, the shouts of omnibus-conductors and newsboys, all the surge and struggle of horrible exterior forces, seeming to be tightened up into an inextricable disorder, but pus.h.i.+ng out with a hundred arms this way and that, making some sort of headway against the opposition of things, brought over him a complete bewilderment. 'I can see no reason,' he said to himself, 'why I am here rather than there, why these atoms which know one another so little, or have lost some recognition of themselves, should coalesce in this particular body, standing still where all is in movement.' He looked at the horses pulled back roughly at a cross-current, and tossing back their heads as the hind-legs grew convulsively rigid, and he felt sorry for them, and wondered why the driver was driving them and why they were not driving the driver. Some one ran violently against him, and apologised. The shock did nothing to wake him up; he noticed it, waited for the effect, and was surprised that no effect came.
'Decidedly,' he said to himself, 'I am losing my sense of material things, for, slight as it always has been, I have always resented being pushed into the mud.'
He went home, and opened the piano; but he was afraid of it, and shut it up, and went to bed. He slept well, but he dreamed that he was on the island of Portland, among the convicts; there was a woman with him, who seemed to be Rana, and they had tea at a farm, high up among trees; and then he went away and forgot her, and found himself in a lonely place where there were a number of cuc.u.mber-frames on the ground, and several convicts were laid out asleep in each, half-naked, and packed together head to heel. Then he remembered the woman, and went back to the farm where he had left her; but she was no longer there, she had gone to look for him, and he thought she must have lost her way among the convicts.
He was greatly distressed, but he found he was walking with her along Piccadilly, and she told him that she had been waiting for him a long time in an omnibus which had stopped at the corner of the Circus.
When he awoke in the morning he was relieved to find that his brain seemed to have become quite clear, surprisingly clear, as if the fog that had been gathering about him had lifted; and he sat at the piano playing for many hours, and when he had finished playing he heard still more ravis.h.i.+ng sounds in the air, a music which was like what Chopin might have written in Paradise. Tears of delight came into his eyes; he sat listening in an ecstasy. Now everything had come right; all the trouble and confusion had gone out of the sounds; they no longer teased him with their muttering, coming and going elusively; they were all about him, they flooded the air, they were like pure joy, speaking at last its own language.
And for days after that he went about with a strange, secret smile on his face, more than reconciled to his new companion, enamoured of him; and at last he could keep the secret no longer, but had to tell every one he met of this miracle that now went with him wherever he went. When he stopped listening, and played the music that he had known before this new music spoke to him, he seemed to play better than he had ever played before. Only, when he had stopped playing, he sank back sleepily into his ecstatic oblivion, not distinguis.h.i.+ng between those he talked with in his dream (the Chopin out of Paradise) and the few remaining friends, who now came about him pityingly, and tried to do what they could for him. Their coming awakened him a little; he awoke enough to realise that they thought him mad; and it was with a very lucid fear that he waited now for the doctor who was to decide finally whether he might still keep his place in the world.
Five years later, when Christian Trevalga died in the asylum at ----, some loose sc.r.a.ps of paper were found, on which he had jotted down a few disconnected thoughts about music. They are, perhaps, worth giving, for they are more explicit than he ever cared, or was able, to be when he was quite sane; and, fragmentary as they are, may help to complete one's picture of the man.
'It has been revealed to me that there is but one art, but many languages through which men speak it. When the angels talk among themselves, their speech is art; for they do not talk as men do, to discuss matters or to relate facts, but to express either love or wisdom. It is partly the beauty of their voices which causes whatever they say to a.s.sume a form of beauty. Music comes nearer than any other of the human languages to the sound of these angelic voices. But painting is also a language, and sculpture, and poetry; only these have more of the atmosphere of the earth about them, and are not so clear. I have heard pictures which spoke to me melodiously, and I have listened to the faultless rhythm of statues; but it was as an Englishman who knows French and Italian quite well follows a conversation in those languages. He has to subst.i.tute one sound for another in his mind.
'When I am playing the piano I am always afraid of hurting a sound. I believe that sounds are living beings, flying about us like motes in the air, and that they suffer if we clutch them roughly. Have you ever tried to catch a b.u.t.terfly without brus.h.i.+ng the dust off its wings? Every time I press a note I feel as if I were doing that, and it is an agony to me. I am certain that I have hurt fewer sounds than any other pianist.
'Chopin's music screams under its breath, like a patient they are operating upon in the hospital. There are flowers on the pillow, great sickly pungent flowers, and he draws in their perfume with the same breath that is jarred down below by the sc.r.a.ping sound of the little saw.
'Chopin always treats the piano like a gentleman. He never gives it a note that it cannot sing, he is always scrupulous towards its whims, he indulges it like a spoilt child. Schumann comes back cloudily out of a dream, and sets down the notes as he heard them, upon paper; then he leaves the piano to make the best of it.
'Most modern music is a beggar for pity. The musician tries to show us how he has suffered, and how hopeless he is. He sets his toothache and his heartache to music, putting those sufferings into the music, without remembering that sounds have their own agonies, which alone they can express in a perfect manner. He forgets also that joy is the natural speech of music, and that when he comes to sound for the expression of his joy he is asking it to sing out of its own heart.
'I remember I once heard a Siamese band playing on board the yacht of the King of Siam. It played its own music, of which I could make nothing; and also pa.s.sages from our operas. How can the same ears hear in two different ways? And how far behind these Eastern musicians are we, who cannot even understand their music when it is played to us! Some day some one will dig down to the roots, and turn up music as it is before it is tamed to the scale.
'It is strange, I never used to think about music: I accepted it by an act of faith; I was too near it to look all round it. But lately, I do not know why, I have been forced to think out many of the things which I used to know without thinking. It all comes to the same thing in the end; one form or another of knowledge; and does it matter if I can explain it to you or not?'
THE CHILDHOOD OF LUCY NEWCOME.