Peter Ibbetson Part 15

My sweetest recollections of this period of my life (indeed, the only sweet recollections) are of the music I heard, and the places where I heard it; it was an enchantment! With what vividness I can recall it all! The eager antic.i.p.ation for days; the careful selection, beforehand, from such an _embarras de richesses_ as was duly advertised; then the long waiting in the street, at the doors reserved for those whose portion is to be the gallery. The hard-won seat aloft is reached at last, after a selfish but good-humored struggle up the long stone staircase (one is sorry for the weak, but a famished ear has no conscience). The gay and splendid house is crammed; the huge chandelier is a golden blaze; the delight of expectation is in the air, and also the scent of gas, and peppermint, and orange-peel, and music-loving humanity, whom I have discovered to be of sweeter fragrance than the common herd.

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The orchestra fills, one by one; instruments tune up--a familiar cacophony, sweet with seductive promise. The conductor takes his seat--applause--a hush--three taps--the baton waves once, twice, thrice--the eternal fountain of magic is let loose, and at the very first jet

"_The cares that infest the day Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs, And as silently steal away_."

Then lo! the curtain rises, and straightway we are in Seville--Seville, after Pentonville! Count Alma-viva, lordly, gallant, and gay beneath his disguise, tw.a.n.gs his guitar, and what sounds issue from it! For every instrument that was ever invented is in that guitar--the whole orchestra!

"_Ecco ridente il cielo_....," so sings he (with the most beautiful male voice of his time) under Rosina's balcony; and soon Rosina's voice (the most beautiful female voice of hers) is heard behind her curtains--so girlish, so innocent, so young and light-hearted, that the eyes fill with involuntary tears.

Thus encouraged, he warbles that his name is Lindoro, that he would fain espouse her; that he is not rich in the goods of this world, but gifted with an inordinate, inexhaustible capacity for love (just like Peter Ibbetson); and vows that he will always warble to her, in this wise, from dawn till when daylight sinks behind the mountain. But what matter the words?

"Go on, my love, go on, _like this_!" warbles back Rosina--and no wonder--till the dull, despondent, commonplace heart of Peter Ibbetson has room for nothing else but sunny hope and love and joy! And yet it is all mere sound--impossible, unnatural, unreal nonsense!

Or else, in a square building, decent and well-lighted enough, but not otherwise remarkable--the very chapel of music--four business-like gentlemen, in modern attire and spectacles, take their places on an unpretentious platform amid refined applause; and soon the still air vibrates to the trembling of sixteen strings--only that and nothing more!

But in that is all Beethoven, or Schubert, or Schumann has got to say to us for the moment, and what a say it is! And with what consummate precision and perfection it is said--with what a mathematical certainty, and yet with what suavity, dignity, grace, and distinction!

They are the four greatest players in the world, perhaps; but they forget themselves, and we forget them (as it is their wish we should), in the master whose work they interpret so reverently, that we may yearn with his mighty desire and thrill with his rapture and triumph, or ache with his heavenly pain and submit with his divine resignation.

Not all the words in all the tongues that ever were--dovetail them, rhyme them, alliterate them, torture them as you will--can ever pierce to the uttermost depths of the soul of man, and let in a glimpse of the Infinite, as do the inarticulate tremblings of those sixteen strings.

Ah, songs without words are the best!

Then a gypsy-like little individual, wiry and unkempt, who looks as if he had spent his life listening to the voices of the night in Heaven knows what Lithuanian forests, with wolves and wild-boars for his familiars, and the wind in the trees for his teacher, seats himself at the great bra.s.s-bound oaken Broadwood piano-forte. And under his phenomenal fingers, a haunting, tender, world-sorrow, full of questionings--a dark mystery of moonless, starlit nature--exhales itself in nocturnes, in impromptus, in preludes--in mere waltzes and mazourkas even! But waltzes and mazourkas such as the most frivolous would never dream of dancing to. A capricious, charming sorrow--not too deep for tears, if one be at all inclined to shed them--so delicate, so fresh, and yet so distinguished, so ethereally civilized and worldly and well-bred that it has crystallized itself into a drawing-room ecstasy, to last forever. It seems as though what was death (or rather euthanasia) to him who felt it, is play for us--surely an immortal sorrow whose recital will never, never pall--the sorrow of Chopin.

Though why Chopin should have been so sorry we cannot even guess; for mere sorrow's sake, perhaps; the very luxury of woe--the real sorrow which has no real cause (like mine in those days); and that is the best and cheapest kind of sorrow to make music of, after all!

And this great little gypsy pianist, who plays his Chopin so well; evidently he has not spent his life in Lithuanian forests, but hard at the key-board, night and day; and he has had a better master than the wind in the trees--namely, Chopin himself (for it is printed in the programme). It was his father and mother before him, and theirs, who heard the voices of the night; but he remembers it all, and puts it all into his master's music, and makes us remember it, too.

Or else behold the chorus, rising tier upon tier, and culminating in the giant organ. But their thunder is just hushed.

Some Liliputian figure, male or female, as the case may be, rises on its little legs amid the great Liliputian throng, and through the sacred stillness there peals forth a perfect voice (by no means Liliputian). It bids us "Rest in the Lord," or else it tells us that "He was despised and rejected of men"; but, again, what matter the words? They are almost a hinderance, beautiful though they be.

The hardened soul melts at the tones of the singer, at the unspeakable pathos of the sounds that cannot lie; one almost believes--one believes at least in the belief of others. At last one understands, and is purged of intolerance and cynical contempt, and would kneel with the rest, in sheer human sympathy!

Oh, wretched outsider that one is (if it all be true)--one whose heart, so hopelessly impervious to the written word, so helplessly callous to the spoken message, can be reached only by the organized vibrations of a trained larynx, a metal pipe, a reed, a fiddle-string--by invisible, impalpable, incomprehensible little air-waves in mathematical combination, that beat against a tiny drum at the back of one's ear. And these mathematical combinations and the laws that govern them have existed forever, before Moses, before Pan, long before either a larynx or a tympanum had been evolved. They are absolute!

Oh, mystery of mysteries!

Euterpe, Muse of Muses, what a personage hast thou become since first thou sattest for thy likeness (with that ridiculous lyre in thy untaught hands) to some Greek who could carve so much better than thou couldst play!

Four strings; but not the fingerable strings of Stradivarius. Nay, I beg thy pardon--five; for thy scale was pentatonic, I believe. Orpheus himself had no better, it is true. It was with just such an instrument that he all but charmed his Eurydice out of Hades. But, alas, she went back; on second thoughts, she liked Hades best!

Couldst thou fire and madden and wring the heart, and then melt and console and charm it into the peace that pa.s.seth all understanding, with those poor five rudimentary notes, and naught between?

Couldst thou, out of those five sounds of fixed, unalterable pitch, make, not a sixth sound, but a star?

What were they, those five sounds? "Do, re, mi, fa, sol?" What must thy songs without words have been, if thou didst ever make any?

Thou wast in very deed a bread-and-b.u.t.ter miss in those days, Euterpe, for all that thy eight twin sisters were already grown up, and out; and now thou toppest them all by half a head, at least. "Tu leur mangerais des pet.i.ts pates sur la tete--comme Madame Seraskier!"

And oh, how thou beatest them all for beauty! In _my_ estimation, at least--like--like Madame Seraskier again!

And hast thou done growing at last?

Nay, indeed; thou art not even yet a bread-and-b.u.t.ter miss--thou art but a sweet baby, one year old, and seven feet high, tottering midway between some blessed heaven thou hast only just left and the dull home of us poor mortals.

The sweet one-year-old baby of our kin puts its hands upon our knees and looks up into our eyes with eyes full of unutterable meaning. It has so much to say! It can only say "ga-ga" and "ba-ba"; but with oh! how searching a voice, how touching a look--that is, if one is fond of babies! We are moved to the very core; we want to understand, for it concerns us all; we were once like that ourselves--the individual and the race--but for the life of us we cannot _remember_.

And what canst _thou_ say to us yet, Euterpe, but thy "ga-ga" and thy "ba-ba," the inarticulate sweetness whereof we feel and cannot comprehend? But how beautiful it is--and what a look thou hast, and what a voice--that is, if one is fond of music!

"Je suis las des mois--je suis d'entendre Ce qui peut mentir; J'aime mieux les sons, qu'au lieu de comprendre je n'ai qu'a sentir."

Next day I would buy or beg or borrow the music that had filled me with such emotion and delight, and take it home to my little square piano, and try to finger it all out for myself. But I had begun too late in life.

To sit, longing and helpless, before an instrument one cannot play, with a lovely score one cannot read! Even Tantalus was spared such an ordeal as that.

It seemed hard that my dear father and mother, so accomplished in music themselves, should not even have taught me the musical notes, at an age when it was so easy to learn them; and thus have made me free of that wonder-world of sound in which I took such an extraordinary delight, and might have achieved distinction--perhaps.

But no, my father had dedicated me to the G.o.ddess of Science from before my very birth; that I might some day be better equipped than he for the pursuit, capture, and utilization of Nature's sterner secrets. There must be no dallying with light Muses. Alas! I have fallen between two stools!

And thus, Euterpe absent, her enchantment would pa.s.s away; her handwriting was before me, but I had not learned how to decipher it, and my weary self would creep back into its old prison--my soul.

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Self-sickness-_selbstschmerz, le mal do soi!_ What a disease! It is not to be found in any dictionary, medical or otherwise.

I ought to have been whipped for it, I know; but n.o.body was big enough, or kind enough, to whip me!

At length there came a day when that weary, weak, and most ridiculous self of mine was driven out--and exorcised for good--by a still more potent enchanter than even Handel or Beethoven or Schubert!

There was a certain Lord Cray, for whom Lintot had built some laborers'

cottages in Hertfordshire, and I sometimes went there to superintend the workmen. When the cottages were finished, Lord Cray and his wife (a very charming, middle-aged lady) came to see them, and were much pleased with all that had been done, and also seemed to be much interested in _me_, of all people in the world! and a few days later I received a card of invitation to their house in town for a concert.

At first I felt much too shy to go; but Mr. Lintot insisted that it was my duty to do so, as it might lead to business; so that when the night came, I screwed up my courage to the sticking-place, and went.

That evening was all enchantment, or would have been but for the somewhat painful feeling that I was such an outsider.

But I was always well content to be the least observed of all observers, and felt happy in the security that here I should at least be left alone; that no perfect stranger would attempt to put me at my ease by making me the b.u.t.t of his friendly and familiar banter; that no gartered duke, or belted earl (I have no doubt they were as plentiful there as blackberries, though they did not wear their insignia) would pat me on the back and ask me if I would sooner look a bigger fool than I was, or be a bigger fool than I looked. (I have not found a repartee for that insidious question yet; that is why it rankles so.)

I had always heard that the English were a stiff people. There seemed to be no stiffness at Lady Cray's; nor was there any facetiousness; it put one at one's ease merely to look at them. They were mostly big, and strong, and healthy, and quiet, and good-humored, with soft and pleasantly-modulated voices. The large, well-lighted rooms were neither hot nor cold; there were beautiful pictures on the walls, and an exquisite scent of flowers came from an immense conservatory. I had never been to such a gathering before; all was new and a surprise, and very much to my taste, I confess. It was my first glimpse of "Society;"

and last--but one!

There were crowds of people--but no crowd; everybody seemed to know everybody else quite intimately, and to resume conversations begun an hour ago somewhere else.