Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (26 page)

‘And then when he had finished, there was quite an outbreak from the audience – boos; hisses even; applause, too; little murmurs and cheerings; several people in tears from their emotional reactions. The booings and hisses were for the composer; not for Mattaloni! He sat there and looked around at us, and smiled, inscrutably. That was all.

‘Then he went on with his program; a very fine one. Everybody was delighted with it and it got very favorable notices in all the next morning’s newspapers.

‘But, here is the odd part of it, Mr Canevin: I “went behind”; Sylvia Manners, who was with me, and I; and I said to him: “There is a question I wish to ask you, Orféo. Tell me: had you those images – I named them all – or, if you do not mind my asking you, were you merely playing it, as Schönberg wrote it down, with that inimitable technic which is yours alone?”

‘That pleased Mattaloni. He said: “I am very glad you have asked me that, Marie. No, not at all. No ‘images’. I ‘see’ nothing; nothing whatever in them; no pictures. And, believe me, I have studied the things adequately – months of work and thought and consideration upon that little
suite
which requires only four minutes to play through, and which gives you ‘sketches’ as you say;
and
, which gave part of this audience what they think is reason to hiss Arnold Schönberg! It is curious, is it not? No, they mean nothing, nothing whatever to Orféo Mattaloni, except – perhaps, because of their technical construction
– a set of little children’s plaything-puzzles
!” ’

As for me, I could only shake my head over this account of Miss Boutácheff’s experience. I appreciate the Moderns: Ravel, Stravinsky, Schönberg, Debussy; and the others. And yet, I should be the same as Signor Mattaloni. I do not, I fear, often understand what they mean to convey. It naturally interested me to learn that so great a musician as Mattaloni felt the same way about such compositions.

After a slight pause, and meaning merely to make conversation, I remarked, ‘You know Mattaloni well, then, Miss Boutácheff?’

Miss Boutácheff forgot her convalescence. Her delicate, rather beautiful face lighted up with a sudden animation. She looked straight into my eyes.

‘He is a very great artist,’ she said. ‘Yes, Mr Canevin, I know him very well.’ Then at once she began to speak of Rachel Manners’s remarkable work, a long series of highly-colored, florid, glowing canvases, drenched with light, made that winter under the dazzling West Indian sun; paintings which have since brought her fame.

It was not until I had had the opportunity somewhat to digest this peculiar susceptibility of Miss Boutácheff’s for ‘musical images’ that she told me about the effect which another musical composition always had upon her.

This was Maurice Ravel’s
Pavane
. The Ravel
Pavane
is a well-known composition, though rarely performed at concerts; and I think I need say no more about it here than that it is a very ‘modern’ musical treatment of an antique Italian dance. It is, to me, very beautiful. I imagine most audiences like it, even though it must be classed as purely intellectual music.

Marie Boutácheff said that one movement of this composition – the final movement which follows the
Grave Assai
, the suspended pause occuring on page six of the standard Schirmer edition
– she had never, really, heard
with what might be called her outward ears. When that movement began, that is, with anybody else playing the
Pavane
, and she listening, she ‘passed out,’ and, instead of hearing anything, got instead the mental
sensation of seeing a picture
. Near the conclusion of this particular movement, this ‘picture’ would disappear out of her consciousness, and she would again ‘hear’ the very end of the composition in a perfectly ordinary and normal manner.

She knew what were the musical
sounds
involved in this portion of the
Pavane
. She had played it herself many times and had studied it intensively. She always ‘heard’ every note clearly when she played it herself. So far in her career she had only practiced it. She had never included the Ravel
Pavane
in any of her own programs.

She knew, mentally, when hearing it played by somebody else, the precise sequence of the notes and chords, but, even when playing it herself, despite being able to hear every note, she nevertheless in some curious fashion ‘passed out’ in the same place and ‘came to’ in the same place.

Also – and here I could perceive the really
strange
element in the phenomenon
– the seeing impression was a growing and an increasing one
.

In other words, every time Marie Boutácheff ‘saw’ the picture which that particular section of the Ravel
Pavane
brought into her mind, that picture was more intense, clearer in its details, more real.

The ‘picture’ began with her outside the arched doorway which led into a vast ballroom in which the
Pavane
was being danced. She stood on a smooth marble flooring of square black and white tiles, looking in at the dancers.

Repetition had made it possible for her to get a clear and detailed idea of the appearance of the dancers; and every time she ‘saw’ the
Pavane, she was a trifle nearer the entrance-way
.

She had never been able to see all the dancers; only those just inside the arched doorway. But – there were other persons inside the ballroom around the corner, to her right, of whose presence there she was, somehow, certain.

Of the presence of those others she was thoroughly convinced. Delicate little snatches of conversation, in quaint, antique Italian, came out to her from the grouped dancers, as they made their formal bows to each other there inside the ballroom. Even
odors
as of some long-forgotten perfumes, floated out to her; scents of camphire and of bergamot. There was, too, in this composite set of sensations evoked by this portion of the
Pavane
, the feeling of a light, warm breeze, stirring the curtains of the gracious room; a little breeze which wafted itself out into the hallway where she stood looking in; entranced; breathless
with an ever-increasing, almost heart-breaking longing to get into the ballroom
– standing outside there on the cool, smooth, black and white marble tiles.

I have mentioned that Ravel’s
Pavane
is rarely performed in public. But, not long after I got back to the Continental United States that Spring, having been on the lookout for its possible inclusion in some belated, end-of-the-season program, I discovered that Harold Bauer was to play the Ravel
Pavane
at his last concert, and I bought a ticket and went to Carnegie Hall for the particular purpose of hearing it.

It was a delightful, although a somewhat startling, experience!

Of course I had a certain psychological preparation for what happened. I was prepared, after what Marie Boutácheff had told me, to get mentally some kind of an ‘image’. I got one! The little pause, noted in the musical score as
Grave Assai
, did, actually, give me a mental picture. I could ‘see’ it, intellectually, as it were (I had no clearly-defined visualization which could be literally described as a picture); four couples, dancing, as though at some distance; whether distance in space or time I can scarcely say. There were eight of the dancers in my ‘picture’; four demure ladies, all young; four cavaliers attending them through the dance; handing them about the square figures of those sedate, grave measures, with a distinctively mediaeval courtesy; with gallant, studiously languid, bows.

Bauer gave a magnificent performance throughout. In the
Pavane
he accentuated the rhythm, bringing out, as Ravel clearly intends, the sense of an orchestra. I could clearly distinguish the violins, sawing along through the dignified cadences of the mellow old dance-measures. I was sure I could hear, too, in those marvellously harmonized dissonances wherein the composer speaks to the intellect in overtonal groupings of notes, the
viola da gamba
, gravely sobbing out the measured beats of melodic
ictus
– óne, two, thrée, four; óne, two, thrée, four.

It was a very interesting experience. I understood after it very much more clearly what Marie Boutácheff had meant to convey to me.

Very soon after the Bauer concert Marie Boutácheff, her health now greatly improved, came back to New York.

She called me up the day after her arrival, about ten in the morning. The New York musical season was over. It was well along in June, and those persons who, like myself, were for any reason lingering in the great city, were complaining of the heat. Marie asked me to come to tea at her studio the next day. When I got there, about four o’clock, several other people had already arrived. More came in after me. The tone of the gathering was congratulatory. These were Marie’s friends, and they were outspokenly glad to see her so greatly restored. I, even, came in for a measure of their approval, as a person somehow associated with the place which had wrought such a salutary change.

Orféo Mattaloni was one of her guests. He was, it came out, to sail for Europe on the third or fourth day following.

At Marie’s suggestion, hastily imparted between two admirable musical performances – and somewhat to my surprise, for I was only one of her new friends as compared with all these older and more intimate ones – I remained after the others had gone. She came back to me after seeing her other friends out of the studio, to where I sat on an enormous divan placed along the west wall of the big room. She was smiling and holding out her hands impulsively, as though I had only that moment arrived.

‘O, Mr Canevin, it is indeed good to see you!’ she cried, and settled herself beside me. Then at once she put into words what was in her mind, and I understood why she had asked me to remain.

‘Do you know,’ she said, eagerly, and turning an illuminated face towards me, ‘I’ve had the most remarkable experience! It was only a day or so after you had sailed from St Thomas. There was an entertainment for the Municipal Hospital, a benefit. Probably you saw the notices before you left. They asked me to play. It was rather short notice, but I was quite willing, very happy indeed, really, to do that for them. I was feeling very well, you see. There was no program, no precise list of what was to be played. It was of course a very informal affair.

‘I played several things; things I imagined the audience would appreciate. They liked them, and I was requested, near the end, to play again.

‘
I played the Ravel Pavane
, Mr Canevin.’ She paused, her eyes like stars.

‘Mr Canevin – it was remarkable – extraordinary!!

‘I was giving especial attention to emphasizing the rhythm – it suggests strings, you know: violins, a viola-like instrument or two, a harp, or perhaps a clavichord, accompaniment; when you analyze it, I mean. Everything went very well until that pause on page six of the manuscript; you know, the
Grave Assai
– we looked at it together there in St Thomas you remember, Mr Canevin – and then – then
I lost consciousness sitting there at the pianoforte
. I “came to” only at the somewhat abrupt ending; if you remember, there are merely a few concluding chords.

‘I had played on, mechanically; played on, somehow, to the end. My mind carried me on, I suppose! Nobody noticed anything out of the ordinary. I suppose I gave no outward sign of any kind. There was applause. But – when I left the piano this time, I remembered clearly what I had seen. It was all there, chiselled sharply into my memory.

‘I had been standing there outside the ballroom, as usual; only this time I felt a distinct sensation of anxiety. I wanted, oh, so acutely, to be inside the ballroom; to know if a certain person were also inside there; around the corner where I could not see. And, Mr Canevin,
I actually managed to walk several steps towards the doorway
. I was just on the very threshold when the
Pavane
ended.

‘It was all clearer; more
alive
, somehow. There were the ladies; the cavaliers in their velvet cloaks and their slashed sleeves, and their rapiers – worn even while dancing; only, as I’ve said, it was vivid now, pulsing with life – it
was
life, Mr Canevin; and I was a part of it; and yet, somehow, not quite a part of it. And over it all was that consuming anxiety to know.

‘I wanted to know if I – another self, so to speak, yet myself also – were inside there, and with someone else. It was harrowing while it lasted. The impression remained with me for days. It is not wholly gone even now. Everything depended on my knowing. Otherwise, I could not tell which of two courses to pursue. It was a question of all my happiness, Mr Canevin. I cannot describe how acute it was, how extremely vital to me.’