CHAPTER XIV

Next morning I got a rowing up from my father. Indeed, as soon as I saw my face in the glass, I knew it would be quite useless to try to hide what had happened, and I told him frankly I had been fighting. Fortunately, it was not necessary for me to say anything about our club, nor did I even mention Sam’s name. I simply told him that the fight had taken place at night to prevent its being stopped, and after that held my peace. My main feeling, in spite of my father’s lecture, was that I was extraordinarily glad it _had_ taken place, for I had come out of it victorious, even though I was pretty sure I had received more punishment than I had given. My state of mind absurdly resembled that of a young cock who gets up on a wall to crow, and nothing my father could say had the least power to damp my spirits. My face――especially all round my forehead and temples――was beautifully and variously marked, yet there was nothing I more ardently desired than that Katherine should see me in this condition. I even felt amicably disposed towards Gerald, who, after all, couldn’t help being a coward. Perhaps he would come round this morning to see how I had fared.

But nobody came, and in the afternoon I determined to go up to Derryaghy. Willie Breen, who now regarded me in the light of a hero, accompanied me. When I left him at the lodge-gate, instead of going to the hall-door, I went round to the back of the house, hoping to find Katherine on the terrace. She was not there; nobody was there but Miss Dick, who cried out at once on seeing my battered condition. Her tone was certainly far enough removed from that of Willie Breen to have cooled my conceit had such a thing been possible, but fortunately she was too much occupied with a letter she kept folding and unfolding to bestow any very lengthy attention on my appearance. “My sister, Mrs. Arthur Jenkins,” she began, not because I was worthy of her confidence, but because there was nobody else, “wants me to go and stay with her. I don’t know what to do. Mrs. Carroll may not be able to spare me; though I haven’t been there for a long time.”

“Oh, you ought to go,” I said easily. “Where is everybody?” I looked round, preparatory to making my escape. Miss Dick regarded me doubtfully.

“The last time I was there the youngest child had croup. They were very anxious about him; indeed the doctor almost gave him up; though he managed to pull through in the end, and is quite strong now. Not that any of them are actually what you would call robust. They really take after Arthur, Mr. Jenkins that is, though Sissie, that’s my sister, always says _he’s_ stronger than he looks. I’m sure I hope so, for he looks wretched. The whole family, you know, the whole Jenkins family I mean, are vegetarians, and vegetarians, whatever they may feel, invariably _look_ ill. When I say that to Sissie she always gets cross, as if I could help it! But that’s what people are like. Arthur wants to bring up the children in the same way, which is silly, and, to my mind, trifling with their lives. Besides, it’s so difficult when you’ve only one maid who has to do everything: and they only give fourteen, and what can you get for fourteen nowadays, even in the country? You certainly can’t expect a girl like that to cook two dinners a day, because, you see, Sissie eats meat.” She stopped suddenly, as if she had lost the thread of her discourse. “We’re all going to a garden-party at Castlewellan. I’m just waiting for the others. Except Gerald――he won’t come. You’ll find him over there,”――she waved her left hand. “He’s put up a hammock and he’s been sleeping in it all day. He’s dreadfully lazy. He won’t even practise. And though he’s so polite and gentlemanly, I must say he’s really rather irritable: he got quite cross at lunch. I don’t think Katherine understands him. People with very artistic feelings, I’m sure, _are_ more easily annoyed than others. It’s not as if he were just an ordinary person like you or me.”

Whether I was an ordinary person or not, I didn’t relish being told so, even by Miss Dick, and I decided, as I had frequently decided before, that she was a stupid creature, and that I didn’t like her. I left her referring to the epistle from Mrs. Arthur Jenkins, or Sissie, or whatever she was called, and went to look for Gerald.

He had heard me coming, for when I found him he had swung himself out of his hammock and was standing beside it.

“Are the others gone yet?” he asked.

“They’re just starting. I only saw Miss Dick.”

“They’re going to some party, thank the Lord!”

“Yes; she told me.”

A pause followed, for I didn’t know what to say, and he himself kept silence. What I had intended to do was to put him at his ease, to let him know that it was all right about last night, but my magnanimity and sympathy were evidently quite superfluous, and I was annoyed at this.

We strolled back slowly to the house. “Wouldn’t it be rather a good time to play to me?” I said. “You promised to, and now we have the place to ourselves.”

“If you like.”

We entered by the open window, and pulling the sofa over beside it, I lay down in supreme laziness among a heap of coloured cushions. Gerald went at once to the piano.

“What sort of music do you care for?” he asked me. “Or shall I just play anything?”

“Yes; whatever you feel in the mood for.”

His head was bent a little over the key-board, and he seemed to be thinking of what he should play. I watched a tendril of clematis that waved softly over my head, and every now and again I breathed in the sweet scent of a stalk of mignonette I had gathered in passing. My thoughts floated away through the quiet afternoon, and I began to wonder what things were like when there was no one there to be conscious of them.

I know now that it was the fifteenth Prelude, but at the time I had never even heard the name of Chopin, and all I was aware of was that a soft, very delicate tune, was coming to me across the room, with a curious pallor, suggestive of the whiteness of water. I half closed my lids and lay absolutely still. Even in my ignorance I knew that the beauty of Gerald’s playing was extraordinary. It may have had many faults; he may have been incapable of doing all kinds of things that professional pianists can do; he may have been, and probably was, deficient in power: I do not know. He seemed to caress the notes rather than to strike them, he seemed literally to draw the music out, and the whole tone had a kind of liquid, singing quality, such as I have never heard since save in the playing of Pachmann. As I listened, the music gathered force and sombreness, growing louder and darker in a heavily marked crescendo, and then once more it passed into the clear soft tune with which it had begun.

The sound had stopped. I said nothing; I simply waited. The cool, pleasant summer afternoon had become full of lovely voices which flickered, like waves of coloured light, across my senses. Pensively, a little shyly even, a simple, drooping melody breathed itself out on the air with a strange hesitation and indecision, rising and falling, faltering, repeating itself, resting on the “F” with a kind of desire that gathered intensity as the note swelled and died away, sinking back into “D.”

Listening to Gerald playing that sixth Nocturne, listening to him playing all that followed it, you would have thought he was a youth of the deepest feelings, yet I could never find any trace of those feelings at any other time. Somewhere, I suppose, they must have been, somewhere below the surface, but I was never able to discover them. It was as if his soul only came into being when he sat down at a piano. When he played you could see him listening to his own music, you could see him drinking it up as if it were the perfume of my mignonette, as if there were some finer echo audible only to himself. And his playing would alter, would grow gayer, or a kind of weariness would creep into it. I offer these only as the impressions I received at the time; what I should receive now I cannot tell. Yet I find it hard to believe I was utterly mistaken. It was never my fortune to hear him in later years, when I had heard many famous pianists――and I suppose I have heard practically all those of my time――but I cannot help thinking he might have been among the greatest had he not chosen to be something else, something I last saw at a café in Berlin. The puffed, horrible face, the glazed, sodden eyes――no, there was no music there. Or if there was, it was hidden, buried, lost for ever in that desecrated, half-paralysed body, buried alive, like a lamp burning in a tomb. Now, I have nothing to go upon save those first impressions of a boyish, uncultivated taste, and the fact that in after years the playing of Vladimir de Pachmann brought back sharply to me the memory of that afternoon.

He played on for nearly two hours. In the end he stopped abruptly and got up from the piano, while I thanked him. I knew that he knew he had given me a tremendous pleasure, and there was no need to say much. He told me the music I had been listening to was all, or nearly all, by one composer.

“And that last thing?” I asked.

“That was one of the Studies――the one in A flat. I can’t play anybody else. I don’t mean that other things are more difficult, but they don’t suit me.” He was silent, until he added, “I may as well tell you that I’m not as good as you think.”

“I haven’t told you yet what I think,” I answered, smiling, for I was still under the glamour of his mood, and indeed at that moment I could have hugged him. I did not want to talk of ordinary things. The music had wakened in me a feeling of melancholy, like a memory of some delicious thing that had happened long ago, and would never happen again.

I tried to explain my very tenuous ideas to Gerald, but they did not interest him. And already I felt our relation altering. When he was at the piano he had seemed to me a kind of angel; now that other element, that element of latent antagonism, was beginning to re-awaken in me.

Tea had meanwhile been laid for us upon the terrace. Tony, who had been asleep outside in the sun, threw off drowsiness like an outworn garment, and sat up beside my chair, with raised head, and beautiful, dark eyes that watched every movement I made, especially those which happened to convey a piece of bread and butter or cake into my mouth. When I looked at him he instantly gave half a dozen quick wags of his tail, and then resumed his former attitude of motionless expectation, to which attention was attracted by a variety of queer little highly expressive noises he produced from somewhere in his throat. Nobody being there to prevent me, I gave him about half the cake, piece by piece, each of which he swallowed almost whole, and with a wag of the tail to show how he appreciated this delicate pastime.

“Did you get much hurt last night?” Gerald asked me suddenly.

The question was unexpected, for I looked upon the whole incident as closed. I glanced up from feeding Tony. “No; not much,” I answered.

“And the other――I forget his name――Sam something?”

“Oh, Sam’s all right.”

“Do you think I should have fought him?”

“One was enough,” I said carelessly.

“Did you think I was afraid?”

I looked away. His question seemed somehow to be all wrong. “I didn’t think about it,” I answered, after a slight pause.

“It must have looked as if I were afraid,” he went on. “I thought so afterwards.”

I couldn’t imagine what he was trying to get at. I wanted to stop him talking like this. It was even less to my taste than his funking Sam last night had been.

“Are you working at anything besides music?” I asked him, jerkily.

He shook his head. “Not very much. I have a tutor. Why won’t you talk about last night?”

“What is there to talk about? I’m sorry it turned out that way, but I can’t help it, though of course it was my fault for taking you without letting the others know. I should have told them beforehand.”

“I’m not afraid of that lout, anyway. If I see him again――――”

“Oh, well, what’s the use of worrying about it?” I interrupted, disgusted with his persistence.

The pause that followed was an uncomfortable one. If he had deliberately tried to efface the impression his music had made upon me he could not have succeeded better.

He gave a strange little laugh. “I see you don’t believe me.”

“No: I don’t believe you,” I answered bluntly, “and I don’t know why you should want me to.”

“I suppose you think it is pleasant to be taken for a coward?”

“I’m sure it isn’t pleasant; but I can’t imagine that it matters greatly to you what I think.”

“Of course, if I hadn’t done what I did, you wouldn’t have had _your_ particular little swagger!”

“Isn’t that rather a rotten sort of thing to say?” I answered as I got up. “I think I’ll move on. Come, Tony.”

Gerald began to apologize.

“Oh, it’s all right,” I said, coldly, leaving him there.