Chapter V: June 29th, 1914

“... We’re putting up to-night in rooms above a pastry-cook’s shop ... wonderful rooms. I know you’d love them. I’ve been taking for your benefit an inventory of the sitting-room furniture. There are yellow faded family-photographs on the walls, and wedding-groups with bridesmaids wearing hats with quills all pointing the same way. There’s a dusty wooden shelf with mugs that are all Presents from the Seaside, or else symbols of the Jubilee, the Coronation or other events of national unimportance. There’s a red plush anchor with shells round it; there’s a cardboard model of a ship under a glass bell; there’s a slippery horse-hair sofa, upon which Crispin is now reclining, fast asleep. And chiefly, there is a piano with a green silk front and a yellow keyboard so short that I find myself clawing the air if I venture too far away from the central C. There’s such a funny foreign look about the way the houses here grow in a square round the market-place. They are painted all different colours, too; there’s a bright blue one just opposite, with a tiny salmon pink one, half its height, leaning confidingly up against it; ours is a modest saffron yellow, with red bars under the window-ledges. There’s a pump in the middle of the market-square, and around it the most delightful mixed assorted collection of dogs doze in the sun. I’m going to fetch one of them in to talk to me when I’ve finished this letter. We don’t quite know if he’s meant to be a bull-dog or a spaniel, but he’s long and slobbery and brindled and adorable, and he’s going to lie across my lap, while I whisper absurdities into his long soft ears.

I can’t get rid of the impression that this is a little foreign town. Between the houses are narrow passages that are spanned by tiny stone archways, dazzling white against an Italian blue sky; and from each archway flutter boldly the coloured banners of somebody’s washing. And the hotel, painted brownish pink and built round a triangular court planted with shrubbery, is just such as you might find in a small place in Switzerland.

No, I think I’ve got it now: it’s not a foreign place, in fact it isn’t a real place at all.... It’s just a toy village that you’re allowed to take out of the nursery cupboard and play with, when you’ve been good.

Please won’t you come and play with my toy village with me? I’ll be awfully nice about it, and even let you work the pump and hang up the washing when I’m tired of doing it myself.

No, it isn’t a toy village either: it’s just a dream-place. I knew that, the instant we came in sight of it this afternoon. We’d been walking over the moors to the accompaniment of a tearing wind that swept magnificently up and down the scale, as it drove great lumpy golden clouds over the edge of the horizon, and roared in our ears and muttered in the hedgerows. And then suddenly the white road began to dip down and down into a hollow in which lay this handful of coloured roofs. And the sound of the wind became softer and softer, as if whoever was conducting the orchestra, had hushed all the brass-instruments. And by the time we reached the village-street, after a last faint murmur there was no sound at all, only the most wonderful thick sunny silence you’ve ever listened to. And I want you here in my dream-place. You belong in it. I may tell you that, mayn’t I? Besides, you know. Of course you know ... don’t you?”

July 5th.

“... You want my village for keeps? I’m afraid you can’t have it, because if I packed it in my suit-case to bring home to you, the water from the pump might get loose and make my collars damp. I’m sorry! I’m sending you a nice fat tin of cream instead, which will no doubt upset your grandmother—morally, of course. She must be a delightful old lady, according to your descriptions, and I look forward to making her acquaintance on my return.... We’re staying in quite a different sort of village this time; it has an old-world triangular village-green, planted with giant oak-trees, and enclosed on two sides by dear little thatched cottages with trim little gardens; and it has an ivy-clad church and the usual combination of Post Office and all-sorts shop, in which you may revel in the complex odour of boots, cheese, liquorice, soap, sawdust, biscuits, Fry’s chocolate and warm humanity. And best of all, this village of ours boasts an absolutely authentic Idiot, Vicar, Oldest Inhabitant, Lady of the Manor and Village Belle—I expect she’ll lose some of our socks, as she happens to be the laundress in private life—and they all come on and speak in character when the strings are pulled. Unfortunately, the Wicked Squire is lacking from the set; he must have been mislaid. But I hear they’ve got a Squire of sorts some miles away, and for the sake of tradition let us hope that his morals are infamous and his jowl unshaven and blue.

We had a long tramp to get here from Chagford, and at every farm we encountered on the way, we halted so that Crispin might still his insatiable appetite for bread and cheese and beer. And while he sat and gorged in state in the parlour with the best antimacassars and the coloured prints of the Royal Family, I prowled round the farm-buildings, and had much speech with velvet-eyed calves, and watch-dogs straining at their chains, and sleepy kittens, and ducks sailing proudly on the pond in the orchard. I loved all their quacking and purring and barking and lowing, and the excited flutter in the poultry-yard and the rich deep sounds from the pig-sty. And oh, the farm-smell of earth and damp straw and clover and animals and hay....

The fields are brown and red and green, and brown again; and scattered in the hollows, or perched on the hillsides are villages—mere clusters of whitewashed and pinkwashed cottages—gleaming in the sun. But even the tiniest cluster has its battered grey church-spire. The smoke from the gorse-fires floats in heavy blue clouds above the Tors, and I do so badly want someone to share it all with me...! Crispin? Yes, he’s a dear good sort and I like being with him. He’s so restful because he takes me so for granted; doesn’t ask questions; and there’s never the least strain between us. I believe Crispin is really wedded, heart and soul, to his Bechstein grand at home. Whilst I—Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps some day I’ll be able to tell you....

I’m afraid we shall have to push on very quickly from this perfect spot, as Crispin has succeeded in getting us into trouble. We’ve got no piano here, and he was told on enquiring that the only one in the neighbourhood is up at the Manor. I had to restrain him forcibly from marching straight in and taking possession of the instrument. I put it to him that it couldn’t be done—no, not even if he pretended to be the piano-tuner.... So very morosely, he gave way, and consoled himself by borrowing the key of the church from the vicar, and playing the organ. That was all very nice, of course, but Crispin, from force of habit, locked himself in; and that afternoon there was to be a christening ... and he didn’t take the slightest notice when they came and hammered on the church-door; merely thundered away, louder than ever, on his wheezy old organ. The christening procession had to wait outside, with the baby catching cold, till Crispin got hungry, and came out to have his tea.... Of course they might have entered by another door, but that spoils my story....

I’m writing you such a lot of nonsense; you don’t mind, do you? If you only realised how difficult it is to stop writing to you! I want to go on and on and on, and tell you things—but they are just the things you know already.... You seem very near to me to-night. Perhaps you were thinking about me just a little, and have come here in a dream. I believe you’re beside me now, only if I turn to look you’ll vanish....”

July 7th.

“... It’s nice of you to ask about my opera. I haven’t worked at it much lately. I’ve been so lazy and happy, just walking and dreaming and eating and sleeping, and writing to you. But as regards the opera—do you remember Andersen’s fairy-tale, ‘Karen and the Red Shoes’? A friend of mine, Neil Barnaby, has turned it into a three-act play, and I’m writing the music for it. It’s the first time I’ve attempted anything quite so big. We want to have it put on with an entirely modern impressionistic setting—perhaps next opera-season at Covent Garden. Perhaps.... To-night I can almost believe that it will be so, and that the work that is nearest and dearest to my heart will actually be played before hundreds and hundreds of people. Perhaps they’ll acclaim it, go mad over it, as I’ve seen them go mad, and gone mad myself over the Russian Opera. And I know I shall have a ridiculous desire to cry, and there won’t be an ounce of conceit in me, because after all it’s just my child they’ll be making the fuss about—not me. And I’m glad that it should be like that, for I hate being taken notice of, and always want to run away and hide. But the child is different. The child, I think, is going to be strong. And I love it so.... And all the pleasure that my music may bring to the people who listen to it, won’t nearly equal some of the top-moments of joy I’ve had in creating it. Yes, to-night I can believe that the opera will be a success; to-night I can believe even more than that; to-night I can believe—anything, Antoinette.

When I was at school, I was terrified of my musical gift; I hated it, and did my utmost to suppress it, because I thought it was that which made me different from the other boys. I loathed being ‘different’; it made me feel so alone, so I played hard games with the others, and tried to make friends with the others, and tried to forget that there was something inside my brain that turned everything I felt and experienced into music, which clamoured to be released, and which I refused to release, because I knew that if I did so, it would widen still more the gulf between me and the others. I built barrier upon barrier to shut in the fragments of music that sang in my ears all day and all night; I was powerless to keep them from entering, but at least I would give them no chance to escape. I wouldn’t take music-lessons at school; that would have been too dangerous; old Harper, the piano-master, was a pretty shrewd person, and might have spotted me. I resented having this thing to hide, and envied my brother Clive and the other boys, for not having to wage this perpetual war against part of their own selves. There were times when I did long so badly just to give in.... And if I did that, I could never again keep up the pretence of being like the others. Somehow, that pretence seemed the all-important thing: there was safety in it.

When I was sixteen, a Jewish boy called Eric Rubenstein came to Westborough. He was clever as they’re made, but ugly and undersized, and appallingly sensitive; he had a rotten time of it. Everything about him seemed to lay him open to being ragged—his looks, his name (they called him Little-by-Little ‘for short’) and the way his people kissed him before the whole school, and brought him pineapples and grapes when they came down to see him. He used, for some unfathomable reason, to follow me around with his great intelligent eyes, that were like the eyes of a dog that expects to be kicked; but I didn’t even try to befriend him. You see, I realised that young Eric was likely to be dangerous too: he played the violin, and he played it like an artist....

He fagged for a great loutish Sixth Form chap called Burnley, who did his best to make Eric’s life a misery. I was in Burnley’s study one Saturday afternoon, and he and some of his pals were banging away on the piano. Someone suggested that the Jew-boy, who was toasting muffins by the fire, should play his violin.... The Jew-boy refused, and I was glad that he had refused to play to them. Then I saw that Burnley was looking at him with a very evil gleam in his heavy eyes. The next instant the storm broke. ‘What—you won’t? Is there any law in your benighted religion to prevent you playing the fiddle on Saturdays?’

Eric blazed out: ‘My religion’s as good as yours!’ and then relapsed into his usual attitude of defence.

‘Oh, no, it isn’t, Ikey,’ Burnley grinned, ‘don’t make any mistake about that; you’re a Jew, that’s what you are, a dirty Jew ... ugh!’

They went on badgering him about his religion and about his father, who was supposed to have kept a fried-fish shop before he got rich. And they threatened him with lickings, and with red-hot pokers down his back if he wouldn’t play.... I daresay most of it was bluff, but he must have had memories of previous tortures, for he turned absolutely white, and tried to hide his funk under a rather sickening smile.

He kept on looking to me for help, but I just sat there, with the palms of my hands getting hot and sticky, and didn’t move. They forced him finally by threat of sheer physical violence, and I felt that it was indecent that he should play before those boys who didn’t really want to hear his music, and only wanted to make a mock of him; and indecent that I should be listening. But I had to stop and listen. I hadn’t interfered to protect him, but I couldn’t leave him quite alone while he played.... And then I realised that Eric wasn’t really giving himself in his music; he seemed to be withholding himself from expression. I was terribly afraid that as he went on he’d overstep the borders of his reserve, but he didn’t. His playing was correct and polished; and absolutely soulless.

When he had finished, I was unthinkingly whistling the Russian song he’d played; and he looked up and came across to me, seeing that the others were all busy round the piano. ‘Yes, of course that’s how it ought to have been played, but I couldn’t do it like that—could I—for them.’ I had to take care not to let him guess how heartily I agreed with him, so I said off-handedly: ‘I don’t see why not!’

‘Oh, yes, you do,’ he persisted, ‘you _know_.... You must have a wonderful ear to be able to whistle it straight off like that. Don’t you love Wieniawski? I do....’ He was no longer the cringeing little Fourth Form fag addressing a senior boy; he was speaking as man to man, or as one artist to another. But I had to shut him up; told him I didn’t ‘know,’ and hadn’t any ear at all, and hated Wieniawski and all other kinds of music, and advised him to stow his cheek.... Oh, I could talk the vernacular right enough! He just gave me one look, half reproachful and half apologetic; then he blurted out, under cover of the song that the others were bawling in chorus: ‘I—I suppose you thought me an utter worm just now—I know I am, but it makes me sick—pain does—even the idea of it—and being helpless and knowing that it isn’t going to stop—and it comes over you in waves each a bit more ghastly than the last. It isn’t what they do, though that’s bad enough sometimes.... It’s what they might do ... and you know exactly what it would feel like, and you lie awake at night and think about it, and wait——’

It was all too horrible for words. I longed to shut him up again, but I saw that he’d reached the limits of his endurance, and simply had to talk.... He went on to tell me about his people at home. ‘My father thinks I’m ever so happy here, and popular, and good at games and all that—he’s so absurdly proud of me, you see—so in the holidays I have to keep it up—fib about cricket matches I’m supposed to have played in, and invent stories of practical jokes in which I figure as the hero instead of the victim ... and he drinks it all in, and loves it, and I can’t bear to let him know.’

He said that, when I suggested that he should get his parents to take him away from Westborough. Plucky, wasn’t it? And heartbreaking. He was such a kid.... I had an insane desire to be nice to him, to make up for what the others were doing to him. But after that one outburst, I avoided him more than ever. With his subtle Jewish instinct he’d discovered well enough that I _was_ different from the others; but he never again attempted to speak to me about music, although he must have known all along. I was grateful to him for that; the barriers I had built were getting weaker and weaker; and I had the almost superstitious conviction that they would only stand firm as long as I didn’t tell anybody about myself, or let them give me the sympathy and understanding I craved for. I dared not let myself get fond of Eric, or I might have been swept away to heaven knows what headlong flights of—‘differentness.’ So the desire to be nice to him had to be fought down as well....

And then one day—it was the half-term holiday, and pouring with rain. I went up to the practice-room at the top of the house to fetch something I’d been sent for—and the piano was open—and no one was about—and I thought I’d just see if I could remember one of the absurd pieces Clive and I had been taught by our nursery-governess.

I don’t know how it happened: I had started by picking out ‘The Merry Peasant,’ but a while after, without realising what I was doing, I was finding chords that began to release, bit by bit, some of the music that was imprisoned inside my head, and that seemed to be spurring me on, impatient of my clumsy fingers that groped so slowly for the magic formula that would set it free....

Later on, I was out on the Downs, running away from what I knew I should never be able to escape, now that I had let _it_ escape me ... given the thing that was in my mind a separate existence, by putting it outside myself. It was just that—putting it outside myself—that had swept me right over my own barriers. I knew then that come what might, I’d got to be a musician, even if it did mean being different and being lonely. I knew I’d got to suffer, and by suffering—create. I determined that the one person who should share that knowledge with me, should be Eric. I looked forward to being able to be decent to him at last....

I wandered about for hours in the wind and rain, and when I got back, there was a little knot of boys whispering in the hall. ‘I say, have you heard?’ ‘No, what?’ ‘About the Jew-boy—appendicitis—awful agony, the Matron says, quickest case she’s ever heard of—_scream_—you should have heard him, fair blood-curdling, I can tell you.’ ‘It’s awfully quiet now; his people have come.... Will they take him—take _it_—away...?’

That was the end of Eric, who dreaded the idea of pain.

... After that, I didn’t make any attempt to crawl back behind my barriers; they weren’t strong enough anyway to stand against the flood-tide that had broken out. Everything that I felt about Eric would set itself to weird horrible music that drummed unceasingly in my ears, and demanded expression, and I was dead tired of choking it back. So I had to let myself become a musician. But I put up an awfully hard fight against it. It’s queer to think of it now....

I don’t know how it is that I can talk to you like this. I’ve never told anyone else about Eric, and I know I couldn’t do it so easily if you were really here. But being miles away from you, there’s nothing to frighten me into shutting myself up, nothing to destroy my conviction that you _do_ understand.

Good-night, dear. I’ve enjoyed talking to you....”

July 12th.

“We’re zig-zagging about the country in the most amazing style. And I wish I could collect all the things I’ve loved most, and bring them back to you. There’s the early-morning smell—such a foreign smell, too—of pines, and fresh-cut grass, and stone walls and burning wood. And there are the evenings when the scent of the earth and the trees after the day’s heat is so strong and sweet and poignant that it hurts you; and there’s a glamour over the whole world; and the lights begin to show in the cottage-windows; and a great golden moon swims up over the hard black edge of the moor.... Yesterday we found a river, gleaming silver in the depths of a forest—such a river.... It rushed onward at a tearing rate, hurling itself down over great moss-grown boulders, working itself into a white frenzy of foam as it fretted its way between them, and swirled around the outstanding tree-roots. And, oh, the colours of the water—crystal and gold where the sun touched it, clear amber and brown and green where it was flecked by the shadow of the branches. You’ve never heard such a wonderful orchestra of bird-voices: the low clear note of the blackbird as soloist, and all the warbling, trilling, chirping and whistling that went to make a harmonious accompaniment, together with the soothing monotone of the bees, and the hurry, hurry, hurry of the river—but what’s the good of trying to tell you about it in words? Perhaps I’ll put it into music for you some day. There’s such a lot to be done ‘some day,’ isn’t there? When I get back, you must come to Covent Garden with me. And there’ll be concerts, too. It’s a regular feast of good music in London this season. We’re taking the train to Exeter to-morrow, and I may be coming straight home from there, unless Crispin lures me on into Cornwall. I’m too sleepy and drunk with the air to make up my mind definitely to-night. But I’ll let you know to-morrow.

Good-night....”