Adrian Glynde (14 page)

“You haven't yet told me your … er … your name,” Mr. Heller was saying.

“Glynde, sir.”

“And your … er … your …?”

“Taylor's, sir.”

The old man straightened himself and turned to Adrian. “Let me … let me … er … see … er … your hand.”

Adrian, wondering what he meant, shyly held out his small, delicate-fingered hand. Mr. Heller took it in his own long, bony talon, kneeded it, peered at it, turned it over, and peered at it again.

“Hm, yes!” he said, releasing it. “A good … er “—he worked his own marvellously flexible, independent fingers over an immaterial piano—” a good … er … musicianly hand. A good hand for … er … for
Bach
.”

When Mr. Heller completed a sentence, when he actually uttered a word that gave the sentence meaning, he spoke that word, however commonplace it might be, with a quiet, confidential emphasis and a little jerk of the head, as if he were imparting a happy discovery. More often his sentences never achieved completion; yet in spite of this, Adrian found that it was nearly always easy to read him. Perhaps that gently, rhythmically moving hand of his really conveyed in some mysterious way a definite meaning. But it was a slower method than speech, it demanded more anxious attention in the listener, and it made Adrian even more nervous than he usually was. He was relieved when the door opened and a middle-aged woman came in carrying a tea-tray. Mr. Heller blinked at her through his spectacles.

“Mrs.… er … Mrs.…” he said, making a rhythmical picture of her name in the air; “we shall want … er … an … er … an extra … er …” He indicated Adrian, the tea-table, the invisible kitchen.

“I've brought them, sir,” said the woman. “I saw the young gentleman with you as you passed the kitchen window.”

Mr. Heller poured out tea and lifted the cover from the buttered toast, handed Adrian his cup, the sugarbasin, the toast, and then helped himself, all with a slow, courteous formality and an accompaniment of audible breathings, gaspings, and polite, inarticulate noises. It was evident that he enjoyed tea and buttered toast, for he raised a triangle of toast to his mouth and bit it into a mere crescent, chewed it till his whole face seemed to crumple up, and then took long gulps from his cup with the slow gusto of a drinking horse. Yet there was nothing boorish in the effect of this behaviour; rather a formal and leisurely dignity. Suddenly he realised the presence of a new cake, drew it towards him, and, seizing a knife, attacked it blindly but vigorously until he had reduced it to a wreckage of odd fragments.

Adrian, small, shy, and demure, sat eating and drinking, occasionally giving the old man a timid smile or replying, “Yes, please, sir “and “No, thank you, sir “to his vague hospitable noises.

When they had finished, Mr. Heller pushed his chair back and stood up.

“Well!” he said with a long breath, as if suddenly conscious that they had delayed too long and must get to business. He turned to the piano. “I'll just … er …” He slowly and rhythmically fingered a contrapuntal passage for two hands on the air of the sitting-room and Adrian gathered with a thrill of excitement that Mr. Heller was going to play to him.

The old man sat down at the piano, fumbled among the music on an adjacent chair, emerged from the struggle with a battered volume, and beckoned Adrian to bring up another chair and sit beside him. He set the volume on the music-stand, slowly and patiently found his place, then turned Donne's death mask on Adrian, blinked, and asked him: “You know the … the Waldstein Sonata?”

“No, sir.”

“Ah!” The
ah
implied that Adrian had a treat in store. The old man was now turning down the lower corners of the pages he was going to play.

“You will … er …?” He was politely requesting Adrian to turn over for him.

“I'm afraid I shan't be able to follow, sir.”

“I'll … er … I'll …” Mr. Heller indicated that he would nod his head at the critical moments. “Now!”

He faced the music, foresquare to the piano, his hands held over the keyboard with the fists clenched. He appeared to be collecting himself, gathering himself into the mood that the music demanded. Then with his right fist he slowly beat time, looking at Adrian. “You see?” he said, and then beat time again. His intention seemed to be to convey the mood of the music to Adrian. Then again he squared himself, paused, opened his hands, dropped them quietly to the keys, and began.

There was in Mr. Heller's playing everything that he lacked in manner and conversation. There was strength, precision, delicacy, a clear, rhythmical articulateness, and above all the presence of a powerful control. The piece he had just begun opened with a soft drumming, and Adrian, recalling the playing of Dr. Yardley-Tritton, was astonished at the strength and precision which Mr. Heller conveyed in that soft shimmer of sound. Teddy, he thought, would have made it sound trivial at once, the
puffing of a toy steam-engine. But there was no triviality about Mr. Heller. Piano-playing for him was not an amiable adornment but a religious act. He could be rich, mysterious, melancholy, threatening, explosive, triumphant, gay, even rollicking, but of triviality he was incapable. Adrian was carried away, thrilled to the marrow by the soft, mysterious pulsings, the terrifying crescendos, the sudden plunges into abysmal silences in that first movement. He was so enthralled that, after a few pages, he forgot to watch for Mr. Heller's nod, and was brought to himself by frantic, inarticulate noises that rose above the hurrying noise of the music and culminated in an infuriated: “B-b-b-boy!”

Adrian sprang to his feet, fumbled helplessly at the turned-up ear of the page in an agony of terror, and flapped it over at last, feeling that he had only just averted an appalling, a world-wrecking disaster. He sank back on his chair, palpitating, exhausted by the shock; but Mr. Heller was already far ahead down the next page, carried onwards, despite the unturned leaf, by the sheer momentum of the music, and in a minute he had nodded again and again Adrian had missed the nod.

Mr. Heller stopped in mid-course. He stared at Adrian with gaping mouth and poised fists conducting furiously in the air. “B-b-but … but … don't you … er … er … c-can't you … er …!” he gasped and spluttered in outraged, helpless expostulation.

Adrian sat there scarlet, terrified, covered with shame. Suddenly Mr. Heller was calm. He turned back two pages, pointed to a particular bar, glanced at Adrian, gasped like a fish in the bottom of a boat, poised himself for another start, and once more the room brimmed with music. Thenceforward Adrian kept a firm hold on himself, taking care not to resign himself again to the
rapture of the music. He concentrated his whole attention on Mr. Heller's head and on the task of turning the pages suddenly and neatly. When the movement ended there was a long pause during which the two sat silent and motionless, not wishing either to stir or speak.

Then the hands were lifted and poised again, slowly lowered, and like the slow, serene dawning of a new world, the next movement began. It was so slow that Adrian was no longer afraid of yielding to the music. He saw too that the movement changed to a rondo before the page had to be turned, and he knew that he would recognise the change when it came. It came—after a slow, secret preparation, richly satisfying in its beauty, yet persistently promising something more—on a single long note in the treble which Mr. Heller held with the pedal, his spread hands lifted above the notes, acting the pause which the pedal sustained. With hands still poised he turned Donne's death mask on Adrian and said, quietly and articulately: “The opening of the Gates of Heaven!”

Then he turned his face to the music-stand and a golden illumination of sound, soft, level, serene, flowed out into the room. It glowed for days, weeks, months, with a soft, radiant leisure, and then a thrill shook it, it became more brilliant, for a long while it quivered and sparkled, dimmed and brightened again; and then it rushed into a still greater brightness, dazzling, blinding; broke into leaping tongues of flame; grew portentously into a conflagration of sound.

The great blaze died down to a shimmer, soft and luminous. A clanging flame shot upwards and died. Another, still more fierce. And then another, volcanic, appalling, that faded, the moment after, into darkness. Adrian had resigned himself again to the music. He had discovered that by leaning back in his chair and fixing
his eyes on the back of Mr. Heller's head he could both enjoy the music and keep watch for the nod. And now once more in the darkness the Gates of Heaven were opened and, golden and softly luminous, the creation of light began again, slowly evolving through long ages; increasing, increasing to a dazzling brightness; bursting into still fiercer flames, still more thunderous explosions of fire; and so again dying down, crumbling into grey ash, and, bursting out afresh, recreated into a being more ardent, more torrential, till at its final avatar it spread suddenly, like a bursting furnace, into a quivering, softly crackling lake of fire, shaken with hurrying tremors, flinging up sudden, bright showers of sparks, and finally gathering itself up, like a waterspout at sea, into an all-concluding holocaust.

Mr. Heller sat silent, his hands on his knees, still absorbed, it seemed, in that amazing world which he had just called into existence. Then, like one emerging from a trance, he began to move, to come to himself again, and soon he turned his kindly smile, his real smile, upon Adrian. He saw the wonder and delight in the boy's eyes.

“Well, boy,” he said, “it's … it's … er … it's … ! “His gestures conveyed that the Waldstein Sonata was a sublime mastcrpicce, a miracle. Adrian thought so too. There was reason, this time, he felt that words should fail Mr. Heller. He himself had nothing to say, indeed he felt an irresistible desire to refrain from saying anything, and he was relieved to see that Mr. Heller did not expect him to speak. The old man took the volume from the music-stand, laid it on the pile of music beside him, and began to tell Adrian again that he must see his house-master about coming to him for lessons. Then they arranged between them the day and hour when he would turn up for his first lesson.

It was time for Adrian to go, for in half an hour there would be Sunday evening chapel, and he ran down the lane in a state of glowing spiritual intoxication, feeling no less than that a new realm of life had been opened to him.

He ran on, up the steps, through the copse, and along the edge of the deserted playing-field, impelled by that inner glow to a furious bodily energy.

That first visit to Mr. Heller was for Adrian the beginning of many similar experiences equally wonderful. That room with its close, spicy smell, which he ever afterwards associated in his memory with Mr. Heller, became and remained throughout his life, though five years later he went out of it never to enter it again, one of the sacred places of his spirit. There, for an hour twice a week, he had his music lesson, and there, when the lesson was over, Mr. Heller would play to him, and Adrian would gladly have listened, if there had been time, for as long as the old man cared to play. He played him ancient and modern music of all kinds, and explained the nature of every kind and the life and genius of its composers in a way that entranced Adrian. It was only, he soon discovered, in the preliminaries, the commonplaces, the brief, practical moments of conversation that the old man was so hopelessly inarticulate. When he warmed to a subject in which he was interested he could be coherent and eloquent enough.

“It's your duty, Glynde,” he would say, beating time softly with a clenched fist on Adrian's shoulder, “to make yourself acquainted with every composer of good music. I am a narrow and prejudiced old man, and I consider I have every right to be, because I've given them all a fair trial and I've chosen my gods. My narrowness, you see, comes of breadth. But you have no business to be narrow. A narrowness that comes of inexperience is quite unwarrantable,
quite
… er … unwarrantable.” He emphasised his
quite
with a heavier
punch on Adrian's shoulder. “I shall try to prejudice you, but you must not listen to me. You must listen to the music, not to me, and choose what you like best, regardless of what I may say. Don't ask me who are the best composers. If you do, I shall try … I shall try very hard … not to tell you. You may perhaps notice that I play a lot of Beethoven, a great deal of Bach, Byrd, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Brahms, a little of Chopin, Debussy, Ravel, almost none of Schumann or Scriabine or Mendelssohn. You may notice that, and you may begin to draw conclusions. Well, all I can do is to forbid you to draw conclusions; or, if you insist, if your mind
will
put two and two together, then don't allow your conclusions to affect your own choice. Remember that your master is a narrow and prejudiced old man—worse, an old man who glories in his narrowness and prejudices.”

Adrian's early lessons were, of course, very elementary; but Mr. Heller had fired him with a fever to play, and he practised with immense diligence. Sometimes Mr. Heller played him tunes of extreme simplicity by Bach, Haydn, or Mozart, and those pieces, under his hands, became exquisitely carved crystals, perfect in every curve. Adrian saw with surprise that he approached each with the same solemn initiatory pause with which he had approached the Waldstein Sonata, as though even such simple things demanded of him the same seriousness and respect as the most complex.

One day he played a Bourrée by Bach with such irresistible beauty that Adrian begged him to play it again. He did so, and then, turning to Adrian, he asked: “Do you … er …
like
that one especially?”

Adrian, with a sigh of overflowing satisfaction, said that he did.

“Then,” said Mr. Heller, “you had better learn it.”

“Learn it?” said Adrian. “
Could
I?”