PAGE 24
In A London Garden
by
But as he raised the glass to his lips he heard something so unexpected that the glass crashed to the floor. In the music-room overhead someone was playing the piano. Who could it be? No servant of his had that skill, and besides, hours before his servants had gone to sleep. It was divine music, entrancing, uplifting.
For a moment he hesitated, and then the desire to know overcame his fears. He went up the stairs, and in the passage outside the music-room he noted that a light showed under the door. Someone had switched the light on then. Was it the carelessness of a servant? “Quite possibly,” he said to himself. “Quite possibly.”
He opened the door and entered, and his eyes flew to the piano. No one was seated there, but the notes moved and the touch was human. He shrank back from the piano and stood in the farthest corner of the room, listening intently. When at last the music ceased, he had a great desire to say something, and yet could choose no words. And, as he hesitated, there was a sudden click and the lights were switched off. He fled from the darkness down the stairs to the brightly lit room below. For a while he was too overcome to be able to do anything; and then, for he had a musician’s memory, he took paper and wrote down the music that he had heard.
A few days later it chanced that a great lady asked him what new music he would play before the King.
“I have decided,” said the master, “to play a composition of mine that–if one must give these things names–I shall call ‘The Sylvan Sonata’.”
“Sylvan? How delightful. It represents scenes in the wood then.”
The master shook his head. “Music represents nothing,” he said. “Music is music. It is not an imitation of a sylvan scene, or church bells heard in the distance, or any other rubbish. I call this music ‘The Sylvan Sonata’ merely because it has in it different phases of woodland feeling. You understand me? It is the kind of music that might occur to the mind of a musician when he was walking through a wood.”
“But how that reminds one,” said the great lady. “It was in the wood that your favourite pupil died.”
“I prefer,” said the master sternly, “not to speak of that.”
He preferred also not to think of it. The piano which had been bequeathed to him was kept closed and locked now, and it was on another instrument in another room that he prepared himself for the great occasion. He was a fine executant, as not every composer is. He tried to cheat himself. He said again and again to himself that what he had seen and heard in the music-room that night was illusion. The notes had not really moved. His brain had been over-wrought with worry and anxiety. The music was really his own. But the attempt to cheat himself was idle, for he knew too much of the characteristics of a promising young composer who was now dead. No one else but him could have written that.
The evening came and the occasion found him equal to it. His playing of “The Sylvan Sonata” was as near perfection as a man may attain. When he had finished there were a few seconds of silence before the audience could get back to the world again and begin their applause. And when that had died away, many came up to congratulate him, and a critic of music spoke.
“I am ashamed of myself,” said the critic. “I confess that I had thought, in company with many others, that you declined in power, maestro. You have given us to-night something more superb than we have ever heard from you before. You are at your very highest at this minute.”
The master did not seem to hear, did not seem to see the hands which were stretched out to him. He sat looking intently before him, as at some presence not visible to the others. And when he was summoned to speak to the King, he rose stiffly and moved mechanically, looking now and again over his shoulder, as at someone who followed him.