The Dangerous Years (14 page)

“It's turning round,” cried the child suddenly. And Sturm realised that the delicious little melody was being inverted, and re-woven into the ground pattern still rolling along from that over-worked left hand.

“Well! Well!” murmured the American from time to time, his lips working vainly.

When the improvisation was finished, Adrian sat looking at his uncle along the instrument.

“That's how my boat sails,” he said quietly, still unsatisfied with this translation.

“I don't trust myself there,” said Mr. Sturm, coming forward and putting his pudgy hand on the child's shoulder. “You know, I don't yet speak that pirate's language.” He struggled with himself, trying to reach across some mental or perhaps emotional gap to the colonel. “Now, just you see here, Colonel. Let me ask Adrian to play a piece that I can recognise; something that I have heard other artists play. Now that's a fair request. You see, I was not inclined to believe my ears just now. That sort of thing is not quite possible … not quite possible. At least, it has not come within my experience, Colonel. If this boy …” but he could say no more. Beads of sweat stood on his forehead.

He fumbled for a match, and lit his cigar, before trying to express himself again. He was painfully moved. The child watched him with interest, and studied the cloud of blue smoke that rose from the cigar. He seemed physically exhausted by that bout of composition, and made no effort to climb down from the piano-stool. He had, perhaps, bemused himself.

“Now this is a fair proposition. Let me ask him to play a Mozart Sonata.”

Mr. Sturm was arguing with the colonel as though they had been at it, hammer and tongs, for an hour or more. He seized the volume of Mozart Sonatas lying on the piano-top, fumbled through it violently, as though to point his plea, and held out the open volume to the colonel, who stared at it mildly, completely bewildered by such an unexpected display of combativeness.

“I'm quite agreeable …” he began; but the American
was not willing to accept this acquiescence. He wanted to have to fight for this wonderful thing which had come within his ken. Approaching the child as though worshipping at a shrine of Buddha, he held out the book, hardly daring to look up for fear of being blinded by an excess of light.

“It's like this,” he began, trying to address the boy, and at the same time to drop the words out of the corner of his mouth, as a wise aside to the colonel. “You can be taken in by improvisation. Though God knows I never heard the like of … But you can be taken in. It's naïve stuff. It's all innocence, and he'd lose that at one whiff of a box office. But listen here, Colonel, I'll ask him to play something with bones in it. Now look, sonny; I liked to hear about your boat. You can play to me about that again to-morrow, and the next day. But I want to hear what you can do with this. Just this one little sonata, sonny, written by a boy like you, who liked to play games and go sailing, and get up to all kinds of mischief. Now you let me hear what
he
has to say, just as he said it a long time ago.” He was speaking with a thin, ingratiating whine, that made the child stare at him round-eyed. His head was on one side, the book held at arms-length, and he trod gingerly towards the small pianist, gingerly and mincingly. He hovered in reverence, and then the music was on the reading-desk, and he had retreated backwards, a pace or two, just enough to let him follow the music. The colonel, expressionless and silent, remained at the other end of the instrument.

Adrian began, not even pausing to examine the opening bars. The room filled with the pattern of this marvellously-shaped music, a pattern robbed of some of its deeper quality; but so clear, so perfect in miniature, that once again the worldly, experienced old impresario drooped, his mouth falling open, while he surrendered himself supinely to his own recognition of the child's art. Toward
the middle of the sonata, where Mozart gives a foretaste of the genius of Schumann, Adrian paused for a moment, slowing down, and falling into a legato that might have been justified by the strange emotional nostalgia (the Schumann prophecy), but was likely to be condemned by a critic or a teacher. It did not affect Mr. Sturm that way. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, snatched out his handkerchief and dabbed at his eyes, which were full of tears, turned as though to speak to the colonel, made a gesture of hopelessness, and fixed his attention savagely once more on the music-page. He was making tiny noises as he breathed, that might have been construed into oaths, prayers, expletives, or the snores of a man asleep under a burden of nightmare.

Then the finale gathered momentum, became childish and shrill with laughter, dancing toward the end. And the end came, suddenly, as a shower ends in April, with a rainbow flick and a burst of sunshine. Adrian began to wring his hands, and broke into a peal of happy laughter, an echo of what he had been playing a moment earlier with grave deliberation, and such astonishing ease.

“Now, sir,” said Mr. Sturm, addressing him. “Now, sir. Wouldn't you like to play that, just like that, even so, with the legato, with a fine big audience to listen to you, in a concert hall, in Paris, in London, in New York, in …”

The child was vastly amused. He laughed again, and bounced on the seat each time he named the places mentioned by Mr. Sturm, shouting them at the top of his voice, “Paris! London! New York!”

The elderly maid entered with a trolley laden with tea-things.

“Now,
petit
,” she said, severely, “you are getting too excited.” She looked accusingly at the colonel. “You should tell monsieur that
le petit
must not be allowed
to over-reach himself, or he will have a temperature again, and not sleep. That is what the doctor fears. …”

The doctor himself appeared as she mentioned him. He opened the door slowly, and glanced round as slowly, taking in all that had been happening.

“What do I fear?” he asked, quietly, speaking to his brother.

The maid stood aside, humbly, as she saw him enter the room. But Mr. Sturm was not to be quelled by this oracular serenity. He jumped forward, and shook the doctor by the hand, which he had been forced to pick up from its inert position of rest. The doctor stood, as always, in a posture of relaxed ease, as though his shoulders were passive supports for all the rest of his person. It gave him the character of reserve, of being content to await the turn of events. He was like that now. He looked at the American in surprise, and at his own hand which had been grasped so extravagantly.

“Now look you, Dr. Batten, I will not say much while the child is here. But I would like to point out the very great responsibility which you and your good wife have in this regard. I have been hearing your son play. He has given us an improvisation, and a sonata of Mozart which I selected. And I am able to tell you, Doctor, that this boy will …”

“Not yet, Mr. Sturm.” The doctor spoke gravely, almost regretfully. He turned to his brother. “Did you make that clear to your friend, Tom? We have discussed this often enough.”

“But it's madness, Luke!” said the colonel, suddenly coming to life. But he gave the impression of speaking desperately, and with enough exasperation in his voice to reveal a determination to go some other way toward his purpose, if his argument should not prevail. “For the boy's sake, you must see what the possibilities are. I have said all along that a great career and a fortune are there.
We've got to live in this world, and there is the future to think of. What else is there for him, other than some humdrum career?”

“Time for your tea, Adrian?” said the father to the boy, who had joined him, and was listening with detached curiosity to the argument of these grown-ups, as he would have listened to a political conversation. But he was interested, nevertheless, and when his father spoke to him he cried out, and the curious thing was that he spoke in French.

“Papa, I'm going to play in Paris here, and in London and New York. Where is New York, Papa? And shall I go in a ship there, and talk to the captain?”

His father did not answer. He handed him to the maid, with a glance of severity that made her hustle the child from the room.

“You see, Tom. That is the danger. The boy is febrile in temperament. A fire now will be a fire of straw. I am willing enough for him to be a musician, for his gift is obvious. We are fated parents, his mother and I. We might have preferred something more solid, more comprehensible. But there it is, though we cannot understand where it comes from. There is a lot we cannot know.”

He paused, and turned to Mr. Sturm, while the colonel, with a gesture of impatience, began to put out the tea-things and to pour the tea. “You see, the responsibility of which you speak is not neglected.” He smiled gently, and handed a plate to the visitor, taking a tiny sandwich and munching it. “But I am wholly against a premature appearance in public. I believe it is neither good for his art, nor for his nervous health. He is really a quiet child, perhaps of a low vitality. I don't know. But the fact that he is too easily excited, too suggestible, is enough warning for me. I shall see that he is properly taught, and gradually taught, alongside his school work.”

Mr. Sturm was impressed by this cool determination. But he was not defeated.

“I respect that, Doctor. But you know, there is a danger of holding back a faculty which I know to be genius. And I say that advisedly. I do not use that word easily, Doctor. I have been too long in the world of publicity, and especially of the arts. If ever I saw genius, I see it in that boy of yours. And I know this too, I know something which I believe with all the force of my religion—and believe me, Dr. Batten, I am a religious man. I know that where the good God gives a burden of responsibility such as this, He gives a compensating mind and vitality to carry it. I have watched that child launch his boat, and rig its sails. Those hands are capable; they are the hands of a craftsman, and that means a cool temper and a balanced brain. We shall see that lad at the head of his profession, and the sooner he makes a start on a career in which he will become a master, the better for his whole nature. I believe that, under God's will!”

He placed his hand on the doctor's sleeve, as they sat opposite each other.

“I look at the matter more practically, as a doctor. You business men are all romantics, with money and fame as your mythology. I think of health; the balance and sanity of the mind, the body, and if you like, the soul. These are the first and last responsibilities, and the mystery. I do not understand the human body, Mr. Sturm, but I have learned to respect it, almost to worship it. I intend to see that my son is able to keep that balance, so far as I am able, by inducing good health, mental and physical, by ensuring that he shall not be forced in any special direction before he has passed the danger of growing warped.”

“That is theoretical, Luke,” said the colonel. “If he were to be a soldier, we should think of putting him to the right school very soon. And in this matter of special
ability, especially in music, the time to begin, it seems to me, is from the cradle.”

The doctor flashed out, his grey eyes smouldering.

“Like a performing dog, I suggest!”

“Now, now! Sir!” expostulated Mr. Sturm; but at that moment, the door opened and Mrs. Batten entered, with the little girl Jeannette, who rushed forward, and leaped into her father's arms.

Mary Winterbourne walked slowly through the Rue Campagne Première and across the Boulevard Raspail to the door of the hotel, behind the plane trees. She was anxious to get back to find out what Joan had been doing, and what she would say about having been left alone for the afternoon: but there were other thoughts and feelings which outweighed that urgency.

She was surprised to find that she had stopped, to look into the courtyard of a block of studios, rather squalid and unattractive. She wondered why she should pause thus, and the answer was instant. She wanted to sort out some of the impressions made upon her consciousness during the two weeks since she and her daughter had arrived in Paris. Was it possible, she asked herself, that within so short a time such unexpected, even unbelievable changes, could have come into her life?

She walked on, dragging this burden of contemplation, and stopped again at the window of a small hand-laundry, staring so intently at the bundles of washing that the woman inside stared back, curious to know what interested the charmingly handsome lady, so well dressed that she must be an American. Mary hardly noticed this inspection, nor its benevolence touched with malice. Resuming her way along the narrow pavement, she reached the main boulevard and stood waiting for the traffic to pass,
before she crossed the road. And while standing at the kerb, she was suddenly stricken by the truth. She felt the blood hot in her cheeks. She was blushing—a woman of fifty, and one used for many years to a self-discipline so strict that she hardly dared to look back over that sterile period. The devotion to Joan appeared, by contrast to this new sensation, to be almost anæmic. She was assailed by guilt. The meaning of it came home so harshly that she looked round with a furtive glance. But she was safely alone. Could she face this thing? The query set her breathing rapidly, and again the blood stung her cheeks. What am I to do? she asked herself, before that dreadful insistence of the silent monitor within. She let herself imagine what she would like the answer to be. What she wanted to do was to run back down that narrow street, to cry after Colonel Batten, like a love-sick girl. It was ridiculous. She must dismiss this madness.

The traffic thinned for a moment, and she hurried across the road and into the hotel. Standing in the lift, she felt the misgiving of confronting Joan. What could she say? She decided to conceal herself behind a headache. But play-acting was foreign to her, and she feared that the pretence would fail.