Short Stories 1927-1956 (66 page)

Music

Music
*

The worn-out rickety gig had all but see-sawed its way along the damp sandy track, between its moonlit outcrop of rocks and boulders. Its
substantial
occupants were perched up tight together above its splashboard and their horse’s stumpy tail. Apart from an occasional grunt of encouragement from the driver, a prolonged silence had fallen between them. The immense night had cupped them in.

‘How much further now?’ his passenger at length inquired.

‘Better part of a mile, maybe.’

‘The old mare goes well.’

‘Ay.’

‘It’s fortunate you brought the gig. Few of my patients telephone me until there is urgent need; and wet sand over rocks makes risky going for a car. You can snap an axle that way … Telephones appear not to be very
fashionable
hereabouts?’

‘The master doesn’t care for cars. Or telephones neether. He has no need for them. As for the going, it’s a sight better here than it may be nearer home.’

There was no surliness in the voice, only a kind of tired patience.

‘Well,’ said the other, glancing seawards, ‘I am not familiar with this coast-track. You’d suppose no mortal creature had ever visited it before. Nor had I a notion that the dunes were so steep and lofty here. It’s like some outlandish desert. Strange.’ It seemed he might have been talking to
himself
.

‘Ay,’ came the answer. ‘So it is to most. We lie out of the way, like. And well worth while – if there’s not too much of it.’

‘Have
you
been here long?’

‘With where I am? About fifteen years. And this will be the last of them.’ The tone had become muffled, as though the speaker were uncertain to add, Thanks be! or precisely its opposite.

‘You are leaving Dr Brandt, then? It
was
“Doctor”, you said?’

No sound followed the question for a while except the swish of the descending sea-wet sand from the rims and spokes of the high wheels, and the hiss of the incoming tide. A few stars were shining between the thin flat layers of cloud in the sky.

‘He’s leaving
me
, is Dr Brandt,’ came the answer at last. ‘There’s no hope for him.’

‘You didn’t tell me that when you rang the house-bell some little time ago. Was there “hope” do you suppose
then
?
This afternoon?’

The driver drew his head a little further down into his coat collar. ‘I wasn’t bid come then … Dr Brandt
asked
for you. That’s not his way, and that’s why I came. But to my thinking he doesn’t really want you. Unless, maybe, to say his last. He’s used to being ill. He knows. He’s old – and tired. I’ve nothing to say against him; far from it. He’s a bit queer, though; just now. It’s this music-stuff that’s on his mind. He thinks of nothing else; he broods on it. And so, I suppose, he can’t die easy.’

His passenger ignored a good deal in these remarks that might have tempted anyone less professionally reticent.

‘I see. It’s music then that is Dr Brandt’s hobby? A composer, I suppose?’

‘Yes; if that’s what you call them. A composer. Music. There are rows and rows of these books of his in the house. Funny-looking stuff. Scribbled along lines, and, most of it, without a word of writing from cover to cover.
Though there
may
be words too now and then. Songs, I suppose. In the old days he’d sit for an hour or more together, or longer; without a finger
stirring
– until his pen was dry.’

‘What does he do now, then?’ inquired his passenger, as if he were a little apprehensive of intruding too much, although he had had time to think his question over before asking it.

‘He’s always listening.’

‘“Listening?” What does he listen to?’

‘To everything … Because of this music.’

‘But you haven’t said what music,’ replied the doctor, without revealing the irritability he might be feeling, his eyes peering out to the horizon-line over the waste watery hummocks of the sea. ‘I don’t follow you.’

‘Well, listen then …
Whoa
!’

The creaking wheels slowly ceased to revolve, and, with their human
burden
, came to a standstill. The clock-like hoof-beats ceased. And a vast
mellay
, as though of shouts, cries, multitudes, at once filled to overflowing the spaces around them, like the bubbling and simmering of a gigantic pot of broth. So multitudinous and continual was the clamour of the leaden-grey mass of water, stretching out here to the rim of the globe, it would seem that earthly night could never be silent. And this was accompanied by
immense
mutterings and echoings out of the starry vacancies above it. The mare, with a cough and a shudder, suddenly shook her whole ramshackle body so violently that every metal buckle of her worn-out harness rang and rattled again.

‘Oh, that,’ said the doctor, as if in sudden enlightenment. ‘The roar, the rocks, the billowing breakers. You call
that
“music”, then? Surely, that could not delude or distress anyone accustomed to it – well or ill! The whistling and siffling of wind and sand over the dunes, the tide washing and ruckling in the shingle. Is
that
Dr Brandt’s trouble?’

The driver shrugged his rounded shoulders.

‘’Twasn’t me that made any mention of “trouble”,’ he replied flatly, ‘that’s your word.’ And once again they fell silent – and listened in a brief lull in the noise of wind and water to the barking of a dog from some
inland
farmyard, and the faint blast of a ship’s siren far out to sea.

‘That,’
he went on ironically, ‘was the old retriever bitch at Farmer Hallows’s, that was. And the ship is making for Kellsay Harbour.’

‘You have good ears.’

‘Ay, and need them.’

‘You listen
too,
then – to this “music”, as you call it?’

‘You’d be stone-deaf not to
hear
it. And there are many as are. I
listen
only because I’m told to. What you seem to be talking of is not the “music” neether. Not what Dr Brandt finds in it, anyway. He says that even this
criss-cross 
hullabaloo that’s all around us has a meaning to it, if one could give it a name. What he’s after is different. And there I’m useless. Nor wishing to be anything else … Why, you can listen to your own ears, in a manner of speaking. But you’d better not give heed to fancies – to what as like as not, isn’t there. There are some who say they hear “voices”. You wouldn’t, p’raps,’ he added slyly, ‘wish me to share them I suppose … Come up, lass.’

The sea-foam swept as though furtively a little nearer to the track, and the gig lurched slowly forward on its melancholy journey. The doctor drew up the collar of his great-coat.

‘Much further now? … It’s coldish. What does your Master
say
about this music? He is gravely ill, I understand.’

‘“Ill”,’ his companion echoed dryly. ‘I keep a-telling you, he’s all but past it. Not, mind you, that I wouldn’t do the best I can for him. But you have to make a stand somewhere. For his own sake. He says it’s in the air. But then he could tell you the name of any bird – land-bird or sea-bird – you might have heard warbling, or screeching, why, half a mile off. He can hear a fly crawl over the wall. He can watch even a trace of a lie in your mouth before a syllable comes out of it, as easy as a cat catches mice. Things said to him and meant only for kindness, I mean. The truth is, under the sheets, sometimes, he dreads – he is afeard – of this music. You’d almost think he was hiding his eyes to escape from it. That’s the truth. Sometimes. Not always. Mostly, it’s meat and drink to him – and no living soul to share it.’

‘In the air, you say?’ repeated the doctor. ‘He maintains that this music is in the air, does he? Nothing connected with fancies about wireless, I suppose?’

‘“Wireless!”’ muttered the driver derisively, and spat sideways out of the gig. ‘What would he be doing with that stuff. God help us, do you mean what they call this jazz? Try a race-horse with musty offal. No, not that. It’s his
own
music; wherever that comes from. Whether it’s what they call
audible
or not. Travellers say, he once told me, there’s something of the sort to be heard even in the middle of these great empty deserts they tell of. Out in the East, there. Harps, drums, dulcimers and the like. Others say it’s caused by the heat and the shifting of the sands. After a hell-hot day or when the wind’s in the driest quarter. You’ll never fail of finding a wise-acre these days who couldn’t tell you whether your eyes are shut or not when you’re asleep!’ He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand; and smiled. ‘I expect they learn it in these books!
He
listens; ay, his lips moving perhaps, and a smile on his old face like a child asking for a slice of bread and sugar. Or he used to. It’s in all such lonely god-forsaken parts as these, he says. Ay, and those out of the ship-tracks. And it’s not of this earth at all. That’s what he says. And that, off and on, he has been waiting for it –
listening – all his life. And I shouldn’t wonder if it has got into those music books of his, either. All lines and squiggles – like this Persian and Chinese. The truth is, the poor gentleman’s gone a bit crazy in his wits; that’s the truth. Bats in the belfry –
and
bells. But as calm and pleasant about it all as a baby in its cradle. And a gentleman if ever there was one. And sweeter in temper, and less hasty than he used to be …’

He broke off suddenly. They had turned a little inland, round one of the dunes, then out again towards the sea and the rocks.

‘There’s the house!’ he bawled in the tumult that followed, pointing with his whip. ‘Over there, where the moon is shining.’

‘Gad! Is it!’ muttered his companion. ‘You’re right.’ He continued for a while to stare at the glass-panes of its windows, shot with the blaze of the moon … ‘A solitary place, and no mistake. Curious. With that silvery shining glitter on the slates it is hardly distinguishable from the sand
themselves
. Are there other servants? A nurse? Many relatives?’

‘Servants? – no. Ten or a dozen rooms, I suppose, all told. Some of them all but empty. And then there’s the kitchen and those parts … There’s a brother. He never comes this way now, though. As I’ve said, except for the woman who does for the old gentleman from the village, all he has is me. And you may well say, solitary. When extra high water swims up all around us here – we are marooned, as they say. He
began
this music-talk months – ay, years ago. It gets on your nerves in time. You wouldn’t, else, I guess, catch your
self,
listening too. And as often as not in the dark.’

His companion – his head turning slowly sidelong – scrutinized his
features
ruminatingly. ‘Well, I’m glad
you’re
not another patient. You must have been a great and constant help to Dr Brandt. This trouble which we now call “nerves” is the folly of the age. It’s the froth of the life we lead; and none too wholesome at that … Does Dr Brandt ever describe these illusions? To others? We are most of us subject to something of the sort. Every city in the world has its own voice you might say. Every wilderness and churchyard too; every human memory is haunted by
some
voice. Or by silence.’

The driver treated his passenger to a prolonged stare.

‘You ask me, “Does he say what it’s
like
?”
Well, you’d suppose at times he heard the angels singing. And at other times,
not
the angels. By God, no. Brassy trumpets, horns, cymbals, kettle-drums, and the like. With all those bookfuls of his own music, it’s nothing but his own imaginings and fancies, I tell him. To keep him quiet … Crazy, poor gentleman, or not, he won’t be forgotten. I’ll lay you that. Sometimes, to humour him, I say it’s all out of the past. Hollows in the air. Relics, as you might call them. Why not? There’s a full-sized church under the sands over yonder. When my
grandfather
was a boy he used to listen to its bells. Now, when there’s a winter
sea riding in, it’s like an army of cavalry, cannon and shouting. Of a soft summer night, too, he’ll lie there, quietly smiling to himself. Mermaids, p’raps! Like as if he was a child again and his nannie telling him stories and combing his hair. For people cooped up in towns and suchlike, such things are merely book-stuff nowadays; and these lying cheapjacknewspapers.’

The old mare’s hoofs steadily and hollowly thudded on with an
occasional
spark struck by a shoe from a half-hidden flint. He brooded a while.

‘Mind you,’ he went on, ‘you get your ears sharpened – listening. There are three dogs hereabouts, all within whistle, though you wouldn’t think it. And I could tell you which of them’s howling down the moon, with a
horsecloth
tied over my head. And the cocks bawling at midnight, near and far: you can hear ’em fading out half across the county. You get – well, as you might say,
open
to it, by trying. And Dr Brandt, he’s
wide-
open
to it. That’s the only difference; or near it. And then you begin fancying …
Whoa,
Nancy, girl! She shies and stumbles at that lump of rock every time we passes it. P’raps she
sees
things. And here we are. I’ll tie her up for the time being. You won’t have to be long, I reckon. Perhaps a look’ll be enough. I’ll go in first and turn up the lamp, though there’s moon enough for a funeral.’