P.G. Wodehouse - "Uneasy Money"

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Charles Kingsley - "The Hermits"

P. G. Wodehouse - "Love Among the Chickens"

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Books: Maurice Guest

H >> Henry Handel Richardson >> Maurice Guest



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MAURICE GUEST






Part I


S'amor non e che dunque e quel ch'io sento?
Ma s'egli e amor, per Dio, che cosa e quale?

PETRARCH



I.



One noon in 189-, a young man stood in front of the new Gewandhaus in
Leipzig, and watched the neat, grass-laid square, until then white and
silent in the sunshine, grow dark with many figures.

The public rehearsal of the weekly concert was just over, and, from
the half light of the warm-coloured hall, which for more than two
hours had held them secluded, some hundreds of people hastened, with
renewed anticipation, towards sunlight and street sounds. There was a
medley of tongues, for many nationalities were represented in the
crowd that surged through the ground-floor and out of the glass doors,
and much noisy ado, for the majority was made up of young people, at
an age that enjoys the sound of its own voice. In black, diverging
lines they poured through the heavy swinging doors, which flapped
ceaselessly to and fro, never quite closing, always opening afresh,
and on descending the shallow steps, they told off into groups, where
all talked at once, with lively gesticulation. A few faces had the
strained look that indicates the conscientious listener; but most of
these young musicians were under the influence of a stimulant more
potent than wine, which manifested itself in a nervous garrulity and a
nervous mirth.

They hummed like bees before a hive. Maurice Guest, who had come out
among the first, lingered to watch a scene that was new to him, of
which he was as yet an onlooker only. Here and there came a member of
the orchestra; with violin-case or black-swathed wind-instrument in
hand, he deftly threaded his way through the throng, bestowing, as he
went, a hasty nod of greeting upon a colleague, a sweep of the hat on
an obsequious pupil. The crowd began to disperse and to overflow in
the surrounding streets. Some of the stragglers loitered to swell the
group that was forming round the back entrance to the building; here
the lank-haired Belgian violinist would appear, the wonders of whose
technique had sent thrills of enthusiasm through his hearers, and
whose close proximity would presently affect them in precisely the
same way. Others again made off, not for the town, with its
prosaic suggestion of work and confinement, but for the freedom of the
woods that lay beyond.

Maurice Guest followed them.

It was a blowy day in early spring. Round white masses of cloud moved
lightly across a deep blue sky, and the trees, still thin and naked,
bent their heads and shook their branches, as if to elude the gambols
of a boisterous playfellow. The sun shone vividly, with restored
power, and though the clouds sometimes passed over his very face, the
shadows only lasted for a moment, and each returning radiance seemed
brighter than the one before. In the pure breath of the wind, as it
gustily swept the earth, was a promise of things vernal, of the tender
beauties of a coming spring; but there was still a keen, delightful
freshness in the air, a vague reminder of frosty starlights and serene
white snow--the untrodden snow of deserted, moon-lit streets--that
quickened the blood, and sent a craving for movement through the
veins. The people who trod the broad, clean roads and the paths of the
wood walked with a spring in their steps; voices were light and high,
and each breath that was drawn increased the sense of buoyancy, of
undiluted satisfaction. With these bursts of golden sunshine, so other
than the pallid gleamings of the winter, came a fresh impulse to life;
and the most insensible was dimly conscious how much had to be made up
for, how much lived into such a day.

Maurice Guest walked among the mossgreen tree-trunks, each of which
vied with the other in the brilliancy of its coating. He was under the
sway of a twofold intoxication: great music and a day rich in promise.
From the flood of melody that had broken over him, the frenzied storms
of applause, he had come out, not into a lamplit darkness that would
have crushed his elation back upon him and hemmed it in, but into the
spacious lightness of a fair blue day, where all that he felt could
expand, as a flower does in the sun.

His walk brought him to a broad stream, which flashed through the wood
like a line of light. He paused on a suspension bridge, and leaning
over the railing, gazed up the river into the distance, at the horizon
and its trees, delicate and feathery in their nakedness against the
sky. Swollen with recent rains and snows, the water came hurrying
towards him--the storm-bed of the little river, which, meandering in
from the country, through pleasant woods, in ever narrowing curves,
ran through the town as a small stream, to be swelled again on
the outskirts by the waters of two other rivers, which joined it at
right angles. The bridge trembled at first, when other people crossed
it, on their way to the woods that lay on the further side, but soon
the last stragglers vanished, and he was alone.

As he looked about, eager to discover beauty in the strip of landscape
that stretched before him--the line of water, its banks of leafless
trees--he was instinctively filled with a desire for something grander,
for a feature in the scene that would answer to his mood. There, where
the water appeared to end in a clump of trees, there, should be
mountains, a gently undulating line, blue with the unapproachable blue
of distance, and high enough to form a background to the view; in
sumer, heavy with haze, melting into the sky; in winter, lined and
edged with snow. From this, his thoughts sprang back to the music he
had heard that morning. All the vague yet eager hopes that had run
riot in his brain, for months past, seemed to have been summed up and
made clear to him, in one supreme phrase of it, a great phrase in C
major, in the concluding movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. First
sounded by the shrill sweet winds, it had suddenly been given out by
the strings, in magnificient unison, and had mounted up and on, to the
jubilant trilling of the little flutes. There was such a courageous
sincerity in this theme, such undauntable resolve; it expressed more
plainly than words what he intended his life of the next few years to
be; for he was full to the brim of ambitious intentions, which he had
never yet had a chance of putting into practice. He felt so ready for
work, so fresh and unworn; the fervour of a deep enthusiasm was
rampant in him. What a single-minded devotion to art, he promised
himself his should be! No other fancy or interest should share his
heart with it, he vowed that to himself this day, when he stood for
the first time on historic ground, where the famous musicians of the
past had found inspiration for their immortal works. And his thoughts
spread their wings and circled above his head; he saw himself already
of these masters' craft, their art his, he wrenching ever new secrets
from them, penetrating the recesses of their genius, becoming one of
themselves. In a vision as vivid as those that cross the brain in a
sleepless night, he saw a dark, compact multitude wait, with breath
suspended, to catch the notes that fell like raindrops from his
fingers; saw himself the all-conspicuous figure, as, with masterful
gestures, he compelled the soul that lay dormant in brass and strings,
to give voice to, to interpret to the many, his subtlest
emotions. And he was overcome by a tremulous compassion with himself
at the idea of wielding such power over an unknown multitude, at the
latent nobility of mind and aim this power implied.

Even when swinging back to the town, he had not shaken himself free of
dreams. The quiet of a foreign midday lay upon the streets, and there
were few discordant sounds, few passers-by, to break the chain of his
thought. He had movememt, silence, space. And as is usual with
active-brained dreamers, he had little or no eye for the real life
about him; he was not struck by the air of comfortable prosperity, of
thriving content, which marked the great commercial centre, and he let
pass, unnoticed, the unfamiliar details of a foreign street, the
trifling yet significant incidents of foreign life. Such impressions
as he received, bore the stamp of his own mood. He was sensible, for
instance, in face of the picturesque houses that clustered together in
the centre of the town, of the spiritual GEMUTLICHKEIT, the absence of
any pomp or pride in their romantic past, which characterises the old
buildings of a German town. These quaint and stately houses, wedged
one into the other, with their many storeys, their steeply sloping
roofs and eye-like roof-windows, were still in sympathetic touch with
the trivial life of the day which swarmed in and about them. He
wandered leisurely along the narrow streets that ran at all angles off
the Market Place, one side of which was formed by the gabled RATHAUS,
with its ground-floor row of busy little shops; and, in fancy, he
peopled these streets with the renowned figures that had once walked
them. He looked up at the dark old houses in which great musicians had
lived, died and been born, and he saw faces that he recognised lean
out of the projecting windows, to watch the life and bustle below, to
catch the last sunbeam that filtered in; he saw them take their daily
walk along these very streets, in the antiquated garments of their
time. They passed him by, shadelike and misanthropic, and seemed to
steal down the opposite side, to avoid his too pertinent gaze. Bluff,
preoccupied, his keen eyes lowered, the burly Cantor passed, as he had
once done day after day, with the disciplined regularity of high
genius, of the honest citizen, to his appointed work in the shadows of
the organ-loft; behind him, one who had pointed to the giant with a
new burst of ardour, the genial little improviser, whose triumphs had
been those of this town, whose fascinating gifts and still more
fascinating personality, had made him the lion of his age. And
it was only another step in this train of half-conscious thought,
that, before a large lettered poster, which stood out black and white
against the reds and yellows of the circular advertisement-column, and
bore the word "Siegfried," Maurice Guest should not merely be filled
with the anticipation of a world of beauty still unexplored, but that
the world should stand to him for a symbol, as it were, of the easeful
and luxurious side of a life dedicated to art--of a world-wide fame;
the society of princes, kings; the gloss of velvet; the dull glow of
gold.--And again, tapering vistas opened up, through which he could
peer into the future, happy in the knowledge, that he stood firm in a
present which made all things possible to a holy zeal, to an
unhesitating grasp.

But it was growing late, and he slowly retraced his steps. In the
restaurant into which he turned for dinner, he was the only customer.
The principal business of the day was at an end; two waiters sat
dozing in corners, and a man behind the counter, who was washing
metal-topped beer-glasses, had almost the whole pile polished bright
before him. Maurice Guest sat down at a table by the window; and, when
he had finished his dinner and lighted a cigarette, he watched the
passers-by, who crossed the pane of glass like the figures in a moving
photograph.

Suddenly the door opened with an energetic click, and a lady came in,
enveloped in an old-fashioned, circular cloak, and carrying on one arm
a pile of paper-covered music. This, she laid on the table next that
at which the young man was sitting, then took off her hat. When she
had also hung up the unbecoming cloak, he saw that she was young and
slight. For the rest, she seemed to bring with her, into the warm,
tranquil atmosphere of the place, heavy with midday musings, a breath
of wind and outdoor freshness--a suggestion that was heightened by the
quick decisiveness of her movements: the briskness with which she
divested herself of her wrappings, the quick smooth of the hair on
either side, the business-like way in which she drew up her chair to
the table and unfolded her napkin.

She seemed to be no stranger there, for, on her entrance, the younger
and more active waiter had at once sprung up with officious haste, and
almost before she was ready, the little table was newly spread and
set, and the dinner of the day before her. She spoke to the man in a
friendly way as she took her seat, and he replied with a pleased and
smiling respect.

Then she began to eat, deliberately, and with an overemphasised
nicety. As she carried her soup-spoon to her lips, Maurice Guest felt
that she was observing him; and throughout the meal, of which she ate
but little, he was aware of a peculiarly straight and penetrating
gaze. It ended by disconcerting him. Beckoning the waiter, he went
through the business of paying his bill, and this done, was about to
push back his chair and rise to his feet, when the man, in gathering
up the money, addressed what seemed to be a question to him. Fearful
lest he had made a mistake in the strange coinage, Maurice looked up
apprehensively. The waiter repeated his words, but the slight
nervousness that gained on the young man made him incapable of
separating the syllables, which were indistinguishably blurred. He
coloured, stuttered, and felt mortally uncomfortable, as, for the
third time, the waiter repeated his remark, with the utmost slowness.

At this point, the girl at the adjacent table put down her knife and
fork, and leaned slightly forward.

"Excuse me," she said, and smiled. "The waiter only said he thought
you must be a stranger here: DER HERR IST GEWISS FREMD IN LEIPZIG?"
Her rather prominent teeth were visible as she spoke.

Maurice, who understood instantly her pronunciation of the words, was
not set any more at his ease by her explanation. "Thanks very much."
he said, still redder than usual. "I . . . er . . . thought the fellow
was saying something about the money."

"And the Saxon dialect is barbarous, isn't it?" she added kindly. "But
perhaps you have not had much experience of it yet."

"No. I only arrived this morning."

At this, she opened her eyes wide. "Why, you are a courageous person!"
she said and laughed, but did not explain what she meant, and he did
not like to ask her.

A cup of coffee was set on the table before her; she held a lump of
sugar in her spoon, and watched it grow brown and dissolve. "Are you
going to make a long stay?" she asked, to help him over his
embarrassment.

"Two years, I hope," said the young man.

"Music?" she queried further, and, as he replied affirmatively: "Then
the Con. of course?"--an enigmatic question that needed to be
explained. "You're piano, are you not?" she went on. "I thought so. It
is hardly possible to mistake the hands"--here she just glanced
at her own, which, large, white, and well formed, were lying on the
table. "With strings, you know, the right hand is as a rule shockingly
defective."

He found the high clearness of her voice very agreeable after the deep
roundnesses of German, and could have gone on listening to it. But she
was brushing the crumbs from her skirt, preparatory to rising.

"Are you an old resident here?" he queried in the hope of detaining
her.

"Yes, quite. I'm at the end of my second year; and don't know whether
to be glad or sorry," she answered. "Time goes like a flash.--Now, look
here, as one who knows the ways of the place, would you let me give
you a piece of advice? Yes?--It's this. You intend to enter the
Conservatorium, you say. Well, be sure you get under a good man--that's
half the battle. Try and play privately to either Schwarz or Bendel.
If you go in for the public examination with all the rest, the people
in the BUREAU will put you to anyone they like, and that is disastrous.
Choose your own master, and beard him in his den beforehand."

"Yes . . . and you recommend? May I ask whom you are with?" he said
eagerly.

"Schwarz is my master; and I couldn't wish for a better. But Bendel is
good, too, in his way, and is much sought after by the
Americans--you're not American, are you? No.--Well, the English colony
runs the American close nowadays. We're a regular army. If you don't
want to, you need hardly mix with foreigners as long as you're here.
We have our clubs and balls and other social functions--and our
geniuses--and our masters who speak English like natives . . . But
there!--you'll soon know all about it yourself."

She nodded pleasantly and rose.

"I must be off," she said. "To-day every minute is precious. That
wretched PROBE spoils the morning, and directly it is over, I have to
rush to an organ-lesson--that's why I'm here. For I can't expect a
PENSION to keep dinner hot for me till nearly three o'clock--can I?
Morning rehearsals are a mistake. What?--you were there, too?
Really?--after a night in the train? Well, you didn't get much, did
you, for your energy? A dull aria, an overture that 'belongs in the
theatre,' as they say here, an indifferently played symphony that one
has heard at least a dozen times. And for us poor pianists, not a
fresh dish this season. Nothing but yesterday's remains heated
up again."

She laughed as she spoke, and Maurice Guest laughed, too, not being
able at the moment to think of anything to say.

Getting the better of the waiter, who stood by, napkin on arm, smiling
and officious, he helped her into the unbecoming cloak; then took up
the parcel of music and opened the door. In his manner of doing this,
there may have been a touch of over-readiness, for no sooner was she
outside, than she quietly took the music from him, and, without even
offering him her hand, said a friendly but curt good-bye: almost
before he had time to return it, he saw her hurrying up the street, as
though she had never vouchsafed him word or thought. The abruptness of
the dismissal left him breathless; in his imagination, they had walked
at least a strip of the street together. He stepped off the pavement
into the road, that he might keep her longer in sight, and for some
time he saw her head, in the close-fitting hat, bobbing along above
the heads of other people.

On turning again, he found that the waiter was watching him from the
window of the restaurant, and it seemed to the young man that the
pale, servile face wore a malicious smile. With the feeling of
disconcertion that springs from being caught in an impulsive action we
have believed unobserved, Maurice spun round on his heel and took a
few quick steps in the opposite direction. When once he was out of
range of the window, however, he dropped his pace, and at the next
corner stopped altogether. He would at least have liked to know her
name. And what in all the world was he to do with himself now?

Clouds had gathered; the airy blue and whiteness of the morning had
become a level sheet of grey, which wiped the colour out of
everything; the wind, no longer tempered by the sun, was chilly, as it
whirled down the narrow streets and freaked about the corners. There
was little temptation now to linger on one's steps. But Maurice Guest
was loath to return to the solitary room that stood to him for home,
to shut himself up with himself, inside four walls: and turning up his
coat collar, he began to walk slowly along the curved
GRIMMAISCHESTRASSE. But the streets were by this time black with
people, most of whom came hurrying towards him, brisk and bustling,
and gay, in spite of the prevailing dullness, at the prospect of the
warm, familiar evening. He was continually obliged to step off the
pavement into the road, to allow a bunch of merry, chattering
girls, their cheeks coloured by the wind beneath the dark fur of their
hats, or a line of gaudy capped, thickset students, to pass him by,
unbroken; and it seemed to him that he was more frequently off the
pavement than on it. He began to feel disconsolate among these jovial
people, who were hastening forward, with such spirit, to some end, and
he had not gone far, before he turned down a side street to be out of
their way. Vaguely damped by his environment, which, with the sun's
retreat, had lost its charm, he gave himself up to his own thoughts,
and was soon busily engaged in thinking over all that had been said by
his quondam acquaintance of the dinner-table, in inventing neatly
turned phrases and felicitous replies. He walked without aim, in a
leisurely way down quiet streets, quickly across big thoroughfares,
and paid no attention to where he was going. The falling darkness made
the quaint streets look strangely alike; it gave them, too, an air of
fantastic unreality: the dark old houses, marshalled in rows on either
side, stood as if lost in contemplation, in the saddening dusk. The
lighting of the street-lamps, which started one by one into existence,
and the conflict with the fading daylight of the uneasily beating
flame, that was swept from side to side in the wind like a woman's
hair--these things made his surroundings seem still shadowier and less
real.

He was roused from his reverie by finding himself on what was
apparently the outskirts of the town. With much difficulty he made his
way back, but he was still far from certain of his whereabouts, when
an unexpected turn to the right brought him out on the spacious
AUGUSTUSPLATZ, in front of the New Theatre. He had been in this square
once already, but now its appearance was changed. The big buildings
that flanked it were lit up; the file of droschkes waiting for fares,
under the bare trees, formed a dotted line of lights. A double row of
hanging lamps before the CAFE FRANCAIS made the corner of the
GRIMMAISCHESTRASSE dazzling to the eyes; and now, too, the massive
white theatre was awake as well. Lights shone from all its high
windows, streamed out through the Corinthian columns and low-porched
doorways. Its festive air was inviting, after his twilight wanderings,
and he went across the square to it. Immediately before the theatre,
early corners stood in knots and chatted; programme--and text-vendors
cried and sold their wares; people came hurrying from all directions,
as to a magnet; hastily they ascended the low steps and disappeared
beneath the portico.

He watched until the last late-comer had vanished. Only he was left;
he again was the outsider. And now, as he stood there in the deserted
square, which, a moment before, had been so animated, he had a sudden
sinking of the heart: he was seized by that acute sense of desolation
that lies in wait for one, caught by nightfall, alone in a strange
city. It stirs up a wild longing, not so much for any particular spot
on earth, as for some familiar hand or voice, to take the edge off an
intolerable loneliness.

He turned and walked rapidly back to the small hotel near the railway
station, at which he was staying until he found lodgings. He was tired
out, and for the first time became thoroughly conscious of this; but
the depression that now closed in upon him, was not due to fatigue
alone, and he knew it. In sane moments--such as the present--when
neither excitement nor enthusiasm warped his judgment, he was under no
illusion about himself; and as he strode through the darkness, he
admitted that, all day long, he had been cheating himself in the usual
way. He understood perfectly that it was by no means a matter of
merely stretching out his hand, to pluck what he would, from this tree
that waved before him; he reminded himself with some bitterness that
he stood, an unheralded stranger, before a solidly compact body of
things and people on which he had not yet made any impression. It was
the old story: he played at expecting a ready capitulation of the
whole--gods and men--and, at the same time, was only too well aware of
the laborious process that was his sole means of entry and fellowship.
Again--to instance another of his mental follies--the pains he had been
at to take possession of the town, to make it respond to his forced
interpretation of it! In reality, it had repelled him--yes, he was
chilled to the heart by the aloofness of this foreign town, to which
not a single tie yet bound him.

By the light of a fluttering candle, in the dingy hotel bedroom, he
sat and wrote a letter, briefly announcing his safe arrival. About to
close the envelope, he hesitated, and then, unfolding the sheet of
paper again, added a few lines to what he had written. These cost him
more trouble than all the rest.

ONCE MORE, HEARTY THANKS TO YOU BOTH, MY DEAR PARENTS, FOR LETTING ME
HAVE MY OWN WAY. I HOPE YOU WILL NEVER HAVE REASON TO REGRET IT. ONE
THING, AT LEAST, I CAN PROMISE YOU, AND THAT IS, THAT NOT A DAY OF MY
TIME HERE SHALL BE WASTED OR MISSPENT. YOU HAVE NOT, I KNOW,
THE SAME FAITH IN ME THAT I HAVE MYSELF, AND THIS HAS OFTEN BEEN A
BITTER THOUGHT TO ME. BUT ONLY HAVE PATIENCE. SOMETHING STRONGER THAN
MYSELF DROVE ME TO IT, AND IF I AM TO SUCCEED ANYWHERE, IT WILL BE
HERE. AND I MEAN TO SUCCEED, IF HUMAN WILL CAN DO IT.

He threw himself on the creaking wooden bed and tried to sleep. But
his brain was active, and the street was noisy; people talked late in
the adjoining room, and trod heavily in the one above. It was long
after midnight before the house was still and he fell into an uneasy
sleep.