We all called her Madame, save in exasperation and affectionate derision, when she became Muddarm, in imitation of the loyally Britannic pronunciation of the mathematics mistress whose French accent could be cut with ease by any one of Scotland Yard’s blunt instruments, and who on one wet morning, making the weather excuse for her unpunctuality to prayers, exclaimed, ‘Eel ar ploo tootle-a nuit, ay la boo, voo savvy, Muddarm! Ay mong bicyclette … !’
Madame was a dear, a caution, a volcano, a waterspout, a kind, unreasonable despot fairy-godmother. She was, in short, a force. Not a sparrow fell to the ground without her and precious few would have dared to attempt the feat in her company.
Four foot ten in her shoes, she resembled an elderly Geisha without Portfolio, although she couldn’t have been more than forty-eight when we first met her, with her blue-black hair brushed back to its little coronel. Her command of the English language was, and remained, fluent and incorrect, and her high-necked gowns were in sorrowful colours ranging from manure to mulberry.
Madame is evidently a woman who invites adjectives, a sin that my father would have deplored (giving reasons).
Once a week Madame received in her double-drawing-room, which was plushy and palm’d and slightly gilded and dark and rather suggested the foyer of the Kingsmarket Theatre.
Her two grown-up daughters, in plaid silk blouses, appeared, and sometimes Léonore sang to us (she was star soloist in most of the school plays) and sometimes Irène recited. Irène was quite a good actress, but her choice of recitation was apt to be ambitious and not in keeping with her dramatic and downright character, and rather ran to poems of the romantico-Tennysonio type which, on one occasion, caused mother to murmur to Mrs. Field that Irène must learn to lance a little if she sought to lance a lot, at which, as usual, tears of reproachful merriment poured down Mrs. Field’s cheeks.
At these functions, Madame spoke alternate French or incorrect English, her daughters fluent and ambitious English slang with a French accent, and ourselves incorrect French with an English accent. Now I come to think of it, I don’t remember ever seeing Madame eat one crumb of anything; she seemed to exist on ipecacuanha lozenges whose aroma she blew into the face of all-comers when, little hand tapping their own to emphasize a point, she put her face into theirs.
‘OCH! (lozenge) she is a darrling gairrl’, when referring to a new boarder, or, on the subject of myself becoming a pupil:
‘When she has ten years, you shall send her (lozenge), n’est ce pás, Bébé?’ Sometimes as a special favour the cream of the boarders themselves would be skimmed from the linoleum’d and gaslit dining-room where they munched stacks of bread and butter that Madame, in English-speaking vein, called ‘tartans’, and very shyly would be dotted about the drawing-room to enjoy her wonderful cakes which she sent for to Rumpelmayer’s in St. James’s Street. Quite often, with superb favouritism, she would lean over a boarder’s plate and twitch its contents off to give to me. ‘Bébé likes ze liddle kek wiz glaze.’ And quite suddenly her face would change from the lemon of good-nature to the orange of fury at a giggle or a dropped pencil-box in the hall, and she would scutter out to give the culprits hell, upon which Irène or Léonore would say to mother or Mrs. Field, ‘I do weesh mother wouldn’t do thatt! She is so offal!’ or, ‘I bet zat is Margairie, she’s frrightfully notty but a rripping good sort’.
3
I never became a Mayvale pupil, but my lessons with Miss Abernethy were supplemented by classes at Madame’s. Besides the dancing classes there was a weekly gymnasium, with no apparatus except dumb-bells and indian clubs, which occasion somehow always seemed to invite lugubrious weather and wind-tossed shrubs tapping at the windows. I can’t remember the feel of one sunny gym afternoon! We seemed, in retrospect, to march and double and bend and sway to an eternal thunder shower and prematurely lit lamps!
The gym mistress, Miss Withers, was, like Miss Anson, a visiting one and I don’t know where she came from even now, unlike Miss Anson, who confessed to us to a house at Sutton. Miss Withers never for a moment suggested her profession, being spectacled and scholastic looking, precise and spare and agile. Her directions she would call out in a prim, rhythmic sing-song.
‘One two and sink-the-heels, one two and sink-the-heels’, or
‘Arms upwards-stretch-and knees forward bend, one two!’
It was, I found, impossible not to make verses about her as one bent and marched. I was the smallest and youngest in the class and she called me ‘Trotty’. (Trotty! Yet for some reason, I neither resented nor realized it.) On one deathless day she announced to us all when we’d failed to master some figure, ‘Now, tired as I am I am going to skip round with you’, and this gave me a hymn as well that I called Tired As I Am.
Tired as I am I will skip round with you
Bright is my voice though my feet are as lead,
Washed in the blood of the lamb I forgive you
All the long hours I am kept from my bed.
To which Mell added:
And when it comes to the Great Resurrection
Secrets of hearts all examined and known,
I will remember you all with affection
Tired as I am, while I skip round the Throne.
Back in the Fields’ nursery we would all sing it, Daisy and Primrose faithfully imitating our imitations of The Withers Voice, while Clover’s large eyes filled with appreciative tears, as her mother’s did. Mr. Field heard us at it one day, listened to our explanation, grinned guiltily (for was he not a sidesman of St. Anselm’s?), took us all down to the music room and there and then composed a setting for Tired As I Am (it was, he told us, in F natural, and included a fugue-like prelude). He exonerated himself completely and in the handsomest way over the whole business on the grounds that so much good music was wasted on trashy words.
I went to Madame herself for French in her study, and did pretty well, as her kindness and generosity were infinite, when she chose. It was a bad afternoon when one wasn’t dismissed with at least one present, and her Swiss Dujas chocolates that we called ‘mud’ in allusion to their consistence were a dream. For a while I was partnered at the lessons by the little Raymond girl (of the dolls’ dinnerparty), but the least bad weather affected her, whereas I tramped in my rubber Wellingtons in rain or snow to Mayvale. La Boo, vous savvy, Muddarm, never worried me. And then, too, Madame had a stimulating habit of awarding me illegitimate ‘prizes’, as might a dear animal out of Alice in Wonderland, as I alone constituted the class and there were no examinations.
When one was bored or stumped for the third person plural of an irregular verb there was always the garden to watch: large, dotted with monkey-puzzle trees, its turf worn bald in patches by tennis shoes, and a strolling mistress, or groups of released classes talking and exchanging glass pens, and what, to my acclimatized eye, looked fatally like picture postcards of favourite actors and actresses.
For a flurried space I learnt the violin. Mell was always far more adept than I, but at one period it looked as though I was headed towards a new phase of Ninetta Crummledom, what time I could execute simple little solos. The threat of instrumental fame in Addison was mainly due, I think, to my height, which was little taller than two violins, and was happily scotched for ever when my fiddle was stolen at the time we left Evenfield. I hated the lessons and the strings hurt my fingers; you couldn’t take liberties with that instrument nor did it offer the smallest scope for error or illegal effects, or even original composition, at which it inexorably croaked its protest, its raucous voice telling one of deficiencies at every turn. Mell approached it without ambition, hope or aim, and quelled the brute through sheer indifference, thus graduating to a place in the St. Anselm’s orchestra, where her subordinate but correct scroopings harmed nobody.
And then I began to go to Mr. Field for piano tuition, and when I say that he taught me all I know, that is at once not only a lie and a gross reflection on that true musician, but is an inner truth that wouldn’t appeal to the puri
st. For if he accomplished little with me technically, he did much of secret burrowing into my mind, sorting, translating, illuminating the apparently lightless and unlightable, flying into gusty tempers which never seriously upset me, as he spoke as man to man, sweepingly including my own crassnesses with those of a surprising number of established eminents, both conductors and executants.
My ear, he said, was remarkable, my sense of modulation and rhythm no less so, and my touch instinctively sensitive. But we just couldn’t make use of it, or harness it to the donkey-work. He said once that my musical instincts were as old and sure as Handel and my execution barely fledged and below even the small measure of my years.
But over the thorny hedge of staves and crotchets, Arnold Field and I could at least see each other. In patches, such as affairs of phrasing, I sometimes fluked into his esteem; at other times his backhanded reward took strange forms.
‘Yes … you played that exactly as Adela Verne does, with that exact wrongheadedness. What neither of you will see is that this recurrent motif is like a sentence in brackets, a sort of aside, and not a self-contained statement. Here …’ and he edged me off the stool. Or (as I battled through a Schubert march):
‘Ah! ah! ah! Landon Ronald, Landon Ronald! One two three four! Perfect time. Horrible. You aren’t beating carpets. Even a march can have swing. Not that Schubert ever ought to ’ve written that nonsense. Suppose he was unusually hard up, poor soul. Italways makes me think of a dustmen’s annual outing to Chingford.’ And, ‘You’ve got more music in you than my three put together. Even Clover knows what a demisemiquaver is and has no more real idea of the piano than my boot.
‘You have things you want to express and can’t: most people haven’t much to express, and do. If your mother’ll let you, read the Lives of the great composers, it may at least help you not to hate their work. (When I have time, I shall write the best Biography, by which time you’ll have taken up the bassoon.)
‘I’m not going to advise you to go off to concerts and hear all the best stuff because to your sort that isn’t necessary, except for prigs’ parties. You’ve got all the essentials, already: but I do insist that you try and learn the scale of D, for instance, and the meaning of a tied note. Your technique is past praying for, at present, but that may come. As it is, you contrive to give a false value to what you can play through your natural gift that you haven’t worked for.
‘If I ever stooped to your methods of improving upon the work of my betters because I couldn’t read a chord and carrying it off with an air I’d probably be a howling success. As it is, I’m the best amateur interpreter of Bach in England, and who thanks me? Half of ’em wouldn’t know if I skipped a page. But at least I give ’em the foursquare gospel according to St. Sebastian, and don’t fob ’em off with Arnold Field.’
Sometimes, when we were more than usually disgruntled with each other, Mr. Field would refresh himself in unorthodox ways; it took the form of confirming him in the faith of my involuntary musical intelligence; we got a lot of laughs out of it and were so able to send each other away temporarily consoled. It was a game to me, the more fascinating because he took it seriously.
Sitting at his piano (a baby grand, and a lovely, singing Lipp, the best in the world, I think), he would play over here a bar and there a phrase or fragment or two, and ask me what it suggested. ‘And think before you say it. Don’t try and impress me, or be clever.’ And down would come those cushioned hands which looked so misleadingly inept for the shining oblongs of the keys.
I was shy at first, fearing to offend his gods, but that soon went. It was a horrid tune that he played. I considered.
‘Um …’ Jiggety, babyish, not worth the humming. ‘It’s rather stupid’, I ventured, ‘it’s about people who don’t know much about anything.’
‘Good girl.’
‘And they’ve got behinds like our cook.’
He chuckled. ‘I shouldn’t wonder. It is the dance of the Mädchen from Fürth of The Mastersingers. That is Wagner’s idea of silly music, and in my opinion he succeeded perilously well … and this?’
‘It’s green’, I said, quite sure of my ground this time. ‘Moss, I think, and it smells good.’
‘Nice … nice … but I cheated, there. It’s a passage for woodwinds, and their chords are always green or brown or silver. Chiefly brown. You can’t convey it on the piano. That was the adagio from The Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture, a very pleasant thing. You get your moss from the wood near Athens.’
Over portions of Bach fugues I was uncertain, beyond the fact that I connected them with decimals and the engine-room of a river steamer into which I once had fearfully peered, and said so. ‘It’s not exactly music, is it?’, I apologized.
‘Hark at her! But I know what you mean. The fugue is the exact equivalent of the artists’ exercises in perspective and foreshortening. Or if you like, it’s a proposition in Euclid, and as exact. It even takes in your steamer’s machinery, and your decimals which recur in the same way, and that’s why so many people can’t stand up to Bach, because they can’t perceive anything beyond monotony. All art is one and has basically the same laws. It’s fascinating.’
When he alluded to some famous composition in A flat or to ‘Number Three’ I turned blank at once, but he had but to hum the opening bar and I could usually do the rest, probably adding with surprise, ‘Oh, is that what it’s called?’ Every now and then he would play something with chords deliberately but slightly wrong, telling me to stop him when he made his mistakes, and over this test, granted that I had heard the piece before, I scored one hundred per cent of successes though I hadn’t one single correct expression with which to justify myself; I sensed the wrong effect at once but could only express it by going to the piano myself and selecting and testing notes until I had made the chord. Here my score was about eighty-five per cent of success and Arnold Field’s interest grew with his despairs. As for the time question, that I was never to learn from any printed score or teacher, though with the tempo of a piece once heard I could never go wrong. From astonishment, exasperation and incredulity Mr. Field refuged at last in pity, as though I were deformed – he became, so immense was his rancour at my imbecility, positively sympathetic!
‘If I could only find out what your difficulty is with notes and time! Why, Primrose knew her notes and made reasonably good shots at ledger lines when she was eight. But then she thinks The Merry Peasant a pretty tune, so there you are. (Never have daughters.’)
I faltered, ‘Miss Abernethy tried to show me, too: she makes me count “Tar-tay” and “taffa-teffé” instead of “One-two” and “three and-four’”.
‘Nonsense. Waste of time. It’s simply taking away your old problem and giving you a new one. If you can’t three-and-four you can’t taffy or whatever it is, either. The thing is that you don’t know what you’re doing or why you’re doing it.’ He plunged his hands into that velvet smoking-jacket of his. ‘Let’s go into the garden.’ And together we pottered quite happily. The Field’s garden wasn’t as large as ours, or so various, but over it hung an atmosphere immensely right, as right as poor Mrs. Jasperleigh’s would be eternally wrong, and it was warming as the sun to come suddenly round a corner in the summer and see a book of Daisy’s face downwards on a seat, and odd to be in the garden without her or her sisters and Mell and to know that they were together in Mayvale classrooms half a mile up the road. Sometimes the pomposity of this thought so overcame me, as it had with Aggie Drumhead after the dolls’ dinner-party, that, holding a rhubarb leaf for a sunshade if I thought I was unnoticed (in which case I should have thrown it away at once) I became for swift unnatural seconds a caller at an At Home day with ruched chiffon parasol and mother-of-pearl card-case like Mrs. Domrémy’s and once actually enquired of Mr. Field, ‘Do you enjoy the growing of these blooms?’ Luckily he, stooping over the tieing up of some gladioli, didn’t hear. And gradually I found that his preoccupations left me safe to practise these character impersonations, a
nd became by turn a famous composer exhausted with composition and taking his ease in the grounds, or Little Nell to the Grandfather of Mr. Field, who said very ungrandfatherly things when he found slugs or wireworms in the borders, or a musical protégée, penniless and with consumption but of incredible genius, and quite often Evie Green in the first act of The Country Girl (that would be the year that mother made me sunbonnets to match all my frocks). The musical comedy was dangerous, because even thinking of sonsy Evie Green set up a train of association which led to the singing of the music and oblivion of Mr. Field and of his overhearing. One day, I was well into ‘Hark to the sound of Coo’ when he did hear, and without even turning round he grunted, ‘You seem to have got every nasty effective trick in the bag’.
‘She sang it that way’, I said, hastily defensive. Hadn’t Mell and I come home steeped in it, sulky with concentration in the Waterloo train, out of sympathy with life and Addison and Evenfield and even our family because they didn’t move and have their being under sun-steeped apple-boughs by Hawes Craven and solos backed by a rural chorus?
‘Glad of it.’
I wondered a little what he meant, but without anxiety, for I sensed that Mr. Field was licensed to be queer just as some people are licensed to sell wines and spirits … of course I see now what was working in him: relief at my deliberate apeing of a model that cleared me of any meretriciousness which would clash with his assessment of my musical nature.
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