From Back Cover…
The pianist Lewis Freemont had dashed all Antoinette's hopes of being a professional pianist herself, and she could not forgive him. Then fate cruelly turned the tables when Antoinette herself was the unwitting cause of destroying his career.
When Love Is Blind
by
Mary Burchell
CHAPTER ONE
"I could have borne the disappointment of failure. At least, I think I could." Antoinette stared unhappily at her friend, Rosamund Heal, who was all attention and full of sympathy. "What I simply cannot bear—and what I'll never, never forgive—is the way he blasted my hopes. So—so brutally, so callously."
"I always said he looked a beast. It was hard luck you had to have him for one of the examiners. If it had been nice old Sir Horace Keen or Dr. Bankes or even—"
"Well, it wasn't," cut in Antoinette sharply, her overstrained nerves rebelling at every form of comfort. "It had to be Lewis Freemont himself. And to think how unspeakably thrilled and happy I was when I first heard he was coming!"
"Naturally," said Rosamund loyally. "If one's a serious artist of course one wants to be heard by someone who is the tops. At least—" she glanced doubtfully at her friend—"I suppose you still think he is the tops, even if he didn't appreciate you?"
"Why, of course!" Antoinette laughed shortly. "The fact that he called me a clever automaton without a glimmer of the divine spark doesn't make him any less of a genius when he plays. His judgment may be cruel. Even—" she hesitated as though about to utter blasphemy "—faulty. "But of his own standing as a pianist there isn't a shadow of doubt."
"Perhaps," suggested Rosamund tentatively, "after another six months or a year you'll be nearer the standard he sets. You can always try again and—"
"No!" Antoinette's rejection of that was almost violent. "I'll never try again. Never, after what he said."
"Oh, Toni, you'll feel better presently."
"I shan't. What he said just killed my belief in myself. I wouldn't have thought it possible. But that's what he did to me."
She rubbed her hands together as though they had suddenly grown cold and stiff, while Rosamund watched her in growing dismay.
"If he'd said my technique was faulty or my execution below standard or that my facility wasn't equal to my artistic conception—anything like that—I could have swallowed my disappointment and started again. Those are things that endless work can set right. And I've never minded how hard I worked, have I, Rosamund?—have I?" A rather piteous note crept into her voice, and Rosamund shook her head wordlessly.
"But what he said meant one thing only. That it wasn't worth while my going on, because I'd never have more than the outer shell. The real pearl of price just wasn't there."
"Even the greatest authorities can be mistaken," said Rosamund after a heavy pause.
"I shall never know," replied Antoinette tragically. "I shall never know."
"Oh, Toni, don't be so defeatist!" Rosamund, who was ebullient and optimistic and, as she often told herself thankfully, entirely free from the artistic temperament, spoke as bracingly as she could. "You can't turn it all down on the word of one man only."
"On the word of that particular man I can. His was the opinion I valued above all others. To me he's the last word in pianists. If he says I'm wasting my time—"
"He didn't say quite that," objected Rosamund in the interests of accuracy. "And anyway, I tell you—he may be wrong."
"That isn't enough." Suddenly Antoinette was sadly resigned rather than angry. "Without the absolute conviction that one day I would make the grade I couldn't go on with those hours and hours of work and practice. I didn't mind anything—not any grind or sacrifice—so long as I could see the shining goal of the concert pianist before me. But I—I can't see that light any more, Rosamund. He's put out the light for me."
And suddenly the tears were running down her cheeks and deep sobs of disappointment and disillusionment shook her. For though most people would have thought that at twenty and with all her talent Antoinette Burney had the world in front of her, she knew that half her heart and all her hopes had been blighted by the chill, almost casually spoken verdict of Lewis Freemont.
By him, of all people! That was what was unbearable.
Antoinette simply could not remember a time when music had not been the greater part of her life. Her mother had been an accomplished pianist and her father a good amateur organist. She herself had known her notes before her letters, and it seemed to her now that she could not have been more than six when her mother first started saying to people:
"Toni's going to be the real musician in the family. Oh, I'm quite good and her father adores it, of course. But just look how that child stretches her little hands, and the accurate way she picks out her notes even now. She's going to be something, I tell you. We'll make a concert pianist of her one of these days and be proud of her."
Antoinette liked the sound of that. When she was still at an age to have a wide blue sash tied round her small middle she used to imagine herself sweeping on to a platform in a long gown while a large and admiring audience applauded her.
Day dreams of this sort faded somewhat in the realistic light of her schooldays. But deep down inside her Antoinette never relinquished that early dream. Her music lessons remained far the most important thing in her life, and no one ever had to drive her to the piano-stool to complete her daily practice. On the contrary, she was prepared to neglect most other things in favour of it.
"I never knew another child like her," declared the junior music mistress at her school. "She's the only one who positively likes practising. She's at it all the time."
"Yes. She hardly gives herself time to enjoy it, does she?" replied the senior music mistress, who was a singularly perceptive woman.
"At that age! Would one expect it?" The younger woman looked doubtful. "Isn't it enough that she is ambitious to perfect her technique?"
"Perhaps. I'm not criticising. But—" the senior music mistress frowned—"I could wish that she were rather more of a music-maker for the sheer joy of it and less of a determined performer."
This was not the view of Antoinette's mother, who never ceased to rejoice in the crisp accuracy of her playing, the quite remarkable technique she displayed, and the precocious standard of her performance. Everyone said it was hard indeed that she did not live to see the success she so confidently expected for her child. She died when Antoinette was seventeen, from a bout of pneumonia brought on because she insisted on going out on a bitter winter's night to hear her daughter in a school concert when she should really have been at home nursing a heavy cold.
Her death was a fearful blow to Antoinette and her father, for Mrs. Burney had been the dominating one in the household. But—incredibly as it seemed to her—Antoinette's father found consolation less than a year later in marriage to someone twenty years younger than himself.
Meriel, the new Mrs. Burney, was quite pleasant to Antoinette, without going out of her way to make her welcome in her own home. But it was something of a relief to everyone when, six months later, Antoinette went to London, primarily to complete her musical training, but also because it had become urgently necessary to break up a domestic situation which had proved completely unworkable.
Her father, whose enthusiasm for her piano-playing had never been in the same obsessive class as her mother's, suggested that Antoinette should at the same time study a foreign language or take a secretarial course which would fit her for some kind of a career if her music failed her. And although at that time Antoinette could not even entertain the idea of anything but success, since her father was paying her fees and maintaining her, she felt it was only fair to devote
part of her time to this idea of his.
In London she was tremendously happy, much happier than she had been since her mother died. For she found herself among other students and companions to whom music meant everything in the world. She went to concerts, happy to queue for hours for a cheap seat. She discovered opera. She discussed, argued, followed form and once more dreamed dreams.
Few of the students around her cherished ambitions as high as hers, so mostly she kept her hopes to herself. Only to Rosamund was she really frank.
This was probably because Rosamund had no connection with the musical world. Antoinette had met her at the business-training college where she spent part of each week in deference to her father's rather vaguely expressed wishes.
To Rosamund a good solid secretarial post seemed a much more sensible proposition than any musical ambitions. But she thought Antoinette clever and courageous and quite special. And she honestly thought no one else could play the piano so well.
She seldom accompanied Antoinette to concerts, even after they decided to share a small flat together, because, as she said without offence, "enough was enough" for her so far as music was concerned. But she yielded good-humouredly to Antoinette's insistence that she should at least come and hear the famous Lewis Freemont.
"You must!" Antoinette said. "He's playing the Brahms First and Warrender is conducting, which is unusual for him as he nearly always conducts opera. I want you to hear Freemont because there is, quite simply, no one like him."
So Rosamund obligingly accompanied her friend to the Festival Hall, sat through a concert overture which she frankly found dull, and then was considerably fascinated by the piano concerto which followed. She thought Lewis Freemont not only astonishingly good-looking, in a cool, authoritative sort of way, but also about the most exciting performer she had ever heard in any medium. (Which would have caused the conductor some sardonic amusement if he had known, since he regarded himself as pretty good in his field too.)
Afterwards Antoinette demanded eagerly to know what she had thought of it all.
"It was very exciting," Rosamund said slowly. "He's exciting, in some indefinable way. Not very nice, I should say, but—" she groped for another word, but finally could only repeat—"exciting. I liked the last movement. It had a good strong tune, and he gave one a terrific sense of power."
"But the slow movement," exclaimed Antoinette dreamily. "That's where his real genius shows. Didn't you adore the slow movement?"
"No. I lost the thread," said Rosamund candidly, "and began to think about that new dress I can't quite afford."
"You're hopeless!" cried Antoinette. But she laughed a good deal, because Rosamund's down-to-earth outlook was a wonderful antidote to some of the airy-fairy nonsense which was sometimes talked in her own circle.
She made no further attempt to take Rosamund to hear Lewis Freemont. But she never missed a concert of his herself. Sometimes she would get a seat right on the platform, so that she could watch those strong, clever hands at really close quarters, and study his fantastic technique. She didn't yearn over him in the tiresome way some of the more romantic students did, and nor did she ever ask him for his autograph. That was not the way it took Antoinette. But he gradually became in her mind and world the almost symbolic figure representing her art and her ambition.
She knew Rosamund was probably quite right when she said he was exciting but not very nice. There was something almost contemptuous in the set of his mouth, and his unusually light hazel-coloured eyes could look coldly right through an over-enthusiastic audience which started its applause a fraction of a second too soon. Indeed, once when she had gone to the stage door to see him come out, she saw him thrust his way through the crowd and heard him say impatiently to his companion, "I never did suffer fools gladly."
But to all these little foibles he was fully entitled in Antoinette's estimation, so long as he played like an angel. And like an angel he played. Even the crabbiest and least zestful of the music critics admitted that. Though one of them did once add that there was a touch of the avenging angel about him.
In a half romantic, half amused way Antoinette sometimes indulged in daydreams in which she met him. The fantasy took various forms. Sometimes she just ran into him at a party and he said, "Who is that interesting-looking girl with the lovely grey eyes? With those hands she simply must play the piano." And sometimes, in her more ambitious moments, she substituted for him at a concert and afterwards he said, "My God, I couldn't have done it better myself."
When, therefore, she found that he was to be one of the judges at a very important end-of-term examination at her music college she was excited and thrilled as she never had been by any challenge before. She practised with iron determination. Nothing was too much for her and inevitably her dreams took on a brighter and brighter glow.
She knew she was good. It would have been disingenuous of her to pretend anything else, and her teacher was highly complimentary in the final run-through.
Only when it came to the actual trial itself did the curious idea come to her that something almost outside herself—something other than the real Antoinette, hidden deep down in her soul—was responsible for those tripping scale passages, those faultless arpeggios. So practised was she by now that she could do it almost without thinking about it, and in some extraordinary way she could almost watch herself performing, with a cool detachment that left her free to ask herself, "What is he thinking of it?"
At the end, Lewis Freemont unexpectedly called her over to the desk where he was sitting making a few notes. And looking up at her with those extraordinarily penetrating eyes that she had never seen so close before he said,
"Miss Burney—" he glanced down at some papers to verify her name, as though it were not sufficiently interesting to remain in his mind otherwise—"what is your exact musical ambition?"
"To be a successful concert pianist," she told him without hesitation.
"I see. Not just to—make music?"
"Well, that too, of course." She smiled at him, but received no smile in answer.
"That is the first requisite of the true musician, you know," he said drily. "That—and to serve the composer one is privileged to interpret."
She thought it affectation for such an obviously arrogant man to advocate such humility. But she said, "I understand that."
"No, I don't think you understand it at all," he replied coolly. "Nothing in your extremely facile playing suggests it for one moment. Your execution is practically impeccable; you might make a good teacher, I suppose. But if you really have any idea of being the link between great music and the eager listener, dismiss it from your mind." And then he made the unforgivable, never-to-be-forgotten remark about her being a brilliant automaton without a glimmer of the divine spark.
If he had slapped her in the face she could not have been more dismayed and astounded. She flickered her long lashes in that moment of shock, and then she turned away without a word. She thought the other examiner said something in kindly protest about harsh standards. But Lewis Freemont said quite distinctly:
"No, no. She hasn't got the root of the matter in her. And batting her eyelashes at me won't make me think anything different!"
Antoinette walked home, hardly even seeing anything or anyone she passed, and failure and fury walked with her. If the one chilled her beyond belief, the other raised her temperature to fever heat.
Fortunately Rosamund had just come in so that she was able to pour out the story into the most sympathetic ears. But nothing Rosamund or anyone else could say made any difference. The ambitions and hopes of a lifetime lay in ruins.
After a while Antoinette began to ask herself why she was so willing to accept the verdict of one man, however distinguished, however much admired by herself. Others had praised her often enough—her dexterity, her application, her unceasing hard work. More than once she had carried off high honours in various examinations. She was the nearly perfect stud
ent. It was only now—now, when for the first time she came up against a great artist rather than an academic authority, that she had failed absolutely.
And, to her chagrin and dismay, the answer came back at her with dreadful certainty. She accepted Lewis Freemont's cruel dictum absolutely because she knew in her heart that he was right!
It was a shattering discovery, and at least half of her struggled angrily against the realization of the truth. But irresistibly it was dawning upon her that somewhere along the line from the precocious little performer to the ambitious adult she had lost the indefinable contact between her soul—the essential inner her—and the music.
She would always dazzle some people with her skill, but her heart would never speak to the hearts of her audience. She would never transport them; she would only surprise and intrigue them. And that, she thought contemptuously, any conjuror could do.
During the next week or two Antoinette made drastic changes in her life.
In spite of protests from Rosamund—and even more emphatic ones from her teacher—she renounced what had been virtually a full-time training, giving as her irrefutable reason that her financial position had changed and it had become necessary for her to start earning her living immediately.
She almost violently rejected any suggestion that she should teach music (though even Lewis Freemont had said disparagingly that he supposed she might make a good teacher). Instead, with her unusual capacity for concentrated hard work, she launched into a crash course in secretarial training, which brought all her slightly haphazard knowledge in this line to a remarkably high pitch. Then she joined the agency for whom Rosamund worked.
She told herself that she was content to have things this way. She did, it was true, derive a certain satisfaction from finding that she could now maintain herself without any aid from her father. While he, on his side, knowing nothing of the events which had precipitated his daughter's decision, wrote to say he was glad she was applying herself to something practical and financially rewarding, but "hoped she was keeping up her music for her own pleasure."
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