CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Concerning Two Artists in a Different Sphere

I have always been puzzled by the universal tendency of democratic communities to attach the most revolting vices to those whom they have chosen to govern them. It is considered a matter of course that the King’s Speech should be composed by men in the last stages of delirium tremens. And the majority of Cabinet Ministers are, of course, devotees of such diversions as unnatural vice, unless their fingers are perpetually itching to get at a hypodermic syringe. As an entertainment, one can spend many elevating hours by fixing particular vices to particular ministers, saying, for instance, that President Wilson used to beat his wife, or that Clemenceau had a morning bath of cocaine (which would still not account for his extraordinary vitality). But when one remembers that these libels are uttered with equal assurance by members of every party in the State, the consequent reflection on representative government is not a pleasing one.

Artists are a little luckier than politicians. It is taken for granted, by the great public, that they _must_ be immoral, being artists, and their immoralities are not therefore discussed with the same relish. Instead, it is merely asserted that they are mad, a statement which does no harm to anybody.

I wish I could meet these mad artists. Time and again I have been disappointed, and found, instead of straws in the hair, brilliantine, and instead of a foaming mouth, lips pursed in eminently sane and complacent judgment on mankind.

Even when there is some apparent foundation for the stories, they are always grossly exaggerated. Pachmann, for example. The most astounding tales are constantly narrated about this great little man, how he crawls under the piano in a gibbering search for Chopin, how he is taken from a padded cell and led to the piano by a keeper. Nonsense--or so I judged when, not long before leaving London, I had the pleasure of meeting him.

I had not seen Pachmann since, as a small and evil child, I had once untied his bootlaces under my aunt’s piano, on which he used often to perform. His behaviour on that occasion might possibly have strengthened the mad legend, but on our second meeting, though one realized his behaviour was a little odd, nobody but a fool would have thought him mad. Nobody but a fool, indeed, would have failed to be absolutely charmed by his dainty little mannerisms. He danced round the room like some grey-haired Puck, waving his long white fingers on which glittered two beautiful diamond rings. He was always talking nineteen to the dozen, and never finished a sentence. Words seemed too clumsy for him and he would flick his fingers to convey the sense he wanted.

How we laughed and talked! He turned everything to music, even his wine. He held up a glass of champagne to the light, pointing at it and saying--‘Bubbles! Golden, sparkling bubbles! I show you.’ And before one could rise to stop him, he had rushed into the darkness of the next room, seated himself at the piano, and played, with magical perfection, a shimmering treble passage from Chopin’s Third Scherzo. After which the champagne tasted quite flat.

He told me, after dinner, about one of his early love-affairs, in Poland.

‘It was at --’ (some unpronounceable place) he said. ‘There was, in the same house as myself, a plump and lovely maiden, oh, so beautiful! I fell in love with her a great deal, and one day I arrange a rendezvous. But I forget all about the rendezvous, because I discover a cupboard in which the lady of the house keeps a beautiful collection of jams--I eat the jams and I forget my Louisa. Soon Louisa, she comes into the room and says--“For why have you jilted me? Do you not love me any more?” I take out a plum, and I eat it, and I look at her, and I say, “I love you, Louisa. But I love the jams still better.”’

We went into the room which contained his piano, and after a lot more prancing about he suddenly turned to me and said:

‘Do you know why I like you?’

I certainly had no idea.

‘Because,’ said Pachmann, ‘you do not ask me to play the piano.’

It would never have occurred to me to do so. But one has to observe that the criminal habit of asking artists out to dine and then expecting them to pay for half-cold entrées by playing or singing, is still quite common, even among otherwise civilized hostesses. Dame Nellie Melba told me that when she first went to New York it was almost unknown for any mere singer to be asked out to dine in any other than a professional capacity. She, of course, had already become almost a royal personage in London, but in New York she was regarded merely as a ‘singing actress.’ And when, one night, she went to dine with one of the Four Hundred (whatever that absurd phrase means) all the guests whispered: ‘What’s she going to sing?’

‘She isn’t going to sing anything at all,’ said her host.

‘Not going to sing?’

They simply could not understand that a _prima donna_ could have any place in society other than that of a _prima donna_.

All of which is a digression from Pachmann. As soon as he had made the remark about not being asked to play, he sat down at the piano and said:

‘As a reward I shall play you some Chopin. And I shall play it in two ways. First my old method. Secondly my new.’

He played one of the Chopin Études--not one of the best, but still a very lovely thing. ‘That,’ he said, when he had finished, ‘is the old way. Now listen to the new.’

He played it again. I confess that I did not notice much difference. Both were exquisitely played, both had the Pachmann magic, which no other Chopin player has ever been able to find. But that there actually was an astounding difference of technique was demonstrated when, in detail, he played over the first dozen bars. The fingering had been entirely changed, not only in the right hand but in the left.

‘That,’ he cried triumphantly, ‘is the greatest effort of my life. Nobody but Pachmann could have done that.’

He certainly spoke the truth, for nobody but Pachmann could, at his advanced age, have sat down and unlearnt all they had previously learnt, and undertaken the colossal labour of refingering the works of Chopin. It is always more difficult to revise than to attack a thing for the first time, and after sixty, most men would have shuddered at the very thought of it.

Dear Pachmann! I don’t think he was very happy in London, although he adored English audiences. London fogs and London smoke stifled him. ‘I look out of the window in the morning,’ he said, as I bade him good-bye, ‘and I weep. And the sky weeps too. And we both weep together. And then, I go and play Chopin, and I weep no more, and the sun shines.’

* * * * *

What dragons they do give the young men of Fleet Street to slay! I heard of one rather timid and bespectacled youth (not in Carmelite House) who had had literary leanings at Cambridge and decided that he would be a writer. He got a job as a reporter on one of the big papers, and the first thing they sent him to do was to ask as many members of the House of Lords as possible what they thought of kissing under the mistletoe. Sick at heart, he departed on his ignoble task, and after sitting for nearly two hours in the corridor that leads to the House of Lords, he summoned up the courage to approach a gentleman who looked harmless enough but who turned out to be the Marquess of Salisbury. He did not get the answer he expected, but the answer he did get sent him rushing down the corridor, terrified, into the open street.

But one does have to ask such very peculiar questions. I once, right at the beginning, was told to go and ask Carpentier if he found it a bore to be so good-looking. A very delicate subject, because it meant asking the complementary question, Would he have liked to be ugly? And one was hearing a great deal, at that time, of Carpentier’s straight left.

Fortunately I knew one of Carpentier’s best friends, so I routed him out, and he very kindly gave me a letter, in which he first asked ‘Georges’ to lunch, and then, as a pendant, told him what the bearer of the note desired.

Carpentier was acting in some film or other, and I had to go out to North London to catch him at the studio. After waiting for nearly half an hour in a superbly gilt room, I was led through various passages into the main studio, which rather resembled a huge barn, with a pond in the centre, from which Carpentier had just rescued some maiden who was dripping by the fire. He himself was sitting, an agreeable-looking giant, on the edge of the pond, clad in one of those dressing-gowns which tempt young men in the Burlington Arcade, of purple silk shot with yellow flowers. All round about were supers, and men with lamps, and men with megaphones, and everybody seemed in a very bad temper. Carpentier beckoned me to sit by his side.

As soon as I did so, and presented my note, I was acutely conscious that I was about to ask the heavyweight champion of Europe a very delicate question, and that I was sitting on the edge of a cold and damp pond, into which a comparatively gentle push would easily have precipitated me. The pond looked so exceedingly wet that I was on the point of changing the interview altogether, and asking him some dull question about his views on boxing when he turned and, speaking in French, asked me what I wanted.

I told him. Very badly, too.

‘Comment?’

Edging slightly away, I repeated the question. ‘Did he think good looks were a blessing?’

‘Comprends pas,’ said Carpentier.

This was terrible. In a very loud voice I said, ‘Would he rather have been born “vilain”?’

Now ‘vilain’ was quite the wrong word to use, because it applies more to the character than to the face. I knew that perfectly well, and as soon as I had said it, realized my mistake. Now, I thought, for the pond! Let’s get it over.

‘Vilain?’ said Carpentier. And then he laughed. Laughed loud and long. So did I. And when he had finished, I at last managed to convey to him exactly what I really did want.

He was extraordinarily amusing. He told me that he was bored silly by the number of females who fell in love with him. As soon as he arrived in England, showers of letters, literally hundreds by each mail, descended on him, some with photographs, some without, some written in terms of passionate adoration, some phrased more discreetly. They did not stop at letters, they spoke to him in the street, they lined up outside the studio. ‘Dames de société,’ he said, had implored Mr. Stuart Blackton, the producer, that they should be allowed even the smallest walking-on part in the film in order that they might be near their god. All of which, he said, with a charming little shrug of the shoulders, was most tiresome.

‘You see,’ he said, ‘I am married. I have my wife and I have my little daughter. Such things do not amuse me as perhaps--once--’ and he smiled in a manner which Noel Coward would describe as winsome.

‘But ugly? Oh no. I do not wish to be ugly.’

He drew in a deep breath, and stretched out his arms--so that the dressing-gown slipped down, revealing the figure which had been the cause of all the trouble. A very beautiful creature, I thought. Bodily, not facially. His face is really, when you see it close to, rather coarse. A very thick nose, caused, I suppose, by a bash on it, and a not very imposing forehead. (You see, I am a long way from the pond at the time of writing.) The time he looks best is when he smiles--and that is very often.

I think that Carpentier was quite flattered by his social success, in fact I am sure he was, for he mentioned, rather ingenuously, some places where he had been to parties. It would be interesting to know who was responsible for this, but after all, it was only natural, for everybody wanted him. But he was not always easy to get. For instance, a certain good lady who lives in Arlington Street was giving a party, and was threatened with high blood pressure because she could not get Carpentier. There arrived on the scene an old friend (older than he would like to be thought), who said that he would arrange it. I cannot tell you his name, but he is the original of Mr. Cherrey-Marvel in Michael Arlen’s _The Green Hat_. He rushed round London, first to the studio, then to an hotel, then to another hotel, and finally routed out Carpentier just as he was on the point of going to bed. Carpentier said he would not come, because he did not want to dress. ‘Don’t dress then,’ said Cherrey-Marvel, ‘but come.’

‘Would it be _comme il faut_ to come, without even putting on a smoking?’

‘Anything would be _comme il faut_ that you did,’ said Cherrey-Marvel.

And so he went to the party in a lounge suit, and was an enormous success. ‘He gives one such a thrill, doesn’t he, my dear?’ they all said. I expect he would have given them an even greater thrill if he had come in his little blue shorts.

A very charming, unspoilt, simple creature--that was my impression of Carpentier on my first talk with him, and I have not had occasion to alter it since.