‘It is impossible,’ he exclaimed. ‘I cannot sing.’
‘Everybody has got to,’ said Lewis. ‘You needn’t be a Caruso. No! None of your modesty! Here, sing this!’
He played the opening bars of Scaramello’s song. Trigorin stood, fat and mute, spreading out hands of deprecation.
‘I cannot,’ he repeated.
‘Sing this then,’ commanded Lewis, playing the first bar.
Trigorin produced a voice so small and reedy that Teresa and Paulina rolled on the floor with laughter.
‘No, you’re quite right, you can’t sing,’ said Lewis crossly. ‘But who is to take the part then?’
‘I could play?’ suggested Trigorin diffidently. ‘Then you, perhaps, shall sing.’
‘Play? I doubt it. It’s all in pencil and vilely written at that. It would be sheer guess work.’
‘To me it will be clear,’ Trigorin assured him. ‘Often I must read such scores.’
And, sitting down, he began to play the little overture with great smoothness and spirit, interpreting the scrawls which stood for chords without much difficulty. Lewis listened impatiently and then said:
‘Yes, that’ll do. But don’t play it as if it was Chopin!’
Trigorin began to play much louder, as the only amendment he could think of. Teresa, who had been admiring the excited agility of his fat hands, put an arm round Lewis’s neck and drew his head close down to hers.
‘Lewis,’ she whispered, derisively confidential, ‘sometimes, you know, you talk … poppycock!’
He pulled her ears and called her something unrepeatable, but he went over to Trigorin and told him how much obliged they all were for his timely skill in playing for them. Trigorin beamed and played louder than ever.
‘Now,’ said Lewis. ‘I’ll be Scaramello. So we needn’t rehearse the opening song. Where’s Roberto?’
‘Please?’ said Roberto, who had been waiting politely by the door until called for.
He was a small, thin Italian, clad invariably in blue linen overalls. He had a brown, good-natured face, with a little beard and moustache. He was devoted to all the Sangers. He did the whole work of the house and undertook any odd job that turned up, darned Sanger’s socks, prepared Linda’s bath, and interviewed the Press. Sanger asserted that he had once acted as accoucheur when Sebastian arrived rather unexpectedly into the world, but this was so long ago as to be almost legend.
‘Listen, Roberto,’ said Lewis. ‘Can you act?’
‘Scusa!’
‘Which of you girls can talk Italian? Tony! You explain to him what he’s got to do. You, Trigorin, play him his tune. Get him along to Lucrezia’s entrance. It’s marked on the score, there. Where’s Kate? I want her. She must be Lucrezia.’
‘Oh, Lewis! Let me be!’ cried Antonia. ‘Kate can’t act.’
‘She can sing. I won’t have my music spoilt. No, Tony.’
He went to the door and shouted for Kate.
‘But she’ll ruin the part, Lewis.’
‘Not a bit of it.’
‘She can’t interpret. She’s got no temperament.’
‘All the better,’ said Lewis drily. ‘Temperament is like vinegar in a salad; a little goes a long way. I’d sooner have none than too much. Kate! Where are you?’
‘Oh, Lewis, do let me be. I can sing! I can really! Everybody says I’ve come on a lot.’
‘They may, Tony. I don’t say you sing badly. But Kate sings better.’
‘Oh, well then! I hope she’ll spoil your silly old play. Standing stuck in the middle of the stage looking like a sofa cushion like she always does. I never heard anything funnier in all my life than Kate trying to act Lucrezia Borgia.’
‘Birnbaum as Pope will be much funnier. No! Kate must be our diva. You must be her victim; a beautiful creature who is poisoned and dies writhing. You’ll like that won’t you? You can work off a temperamental contrast to Kate’s stolid villainy.’
‘Oh, well,’ said Antonia, somewhat mollified. ‘But what will Tessa and Lina be?’
‘Tessa must be the confidential waiting maid and Lina and Sebastian are to be pages. They’ve a duet.’
‘And what about Suzanne? Had you forgotten her? Oh, that doesn’t matter. We don’t want her.’
Lewis clapped a hand to his head in dismay and exclaimed:
‘If I hadn’t forgotten Soo-zanne. Will your father …’
‘Sanger won’t mind her being left out,’ Paulina assured him. ‘He nearly is sick when she sings and so are we.’
‘Very well. There isn’t time to alter it, anyhow. Kate!’
‘She cook supper,’ volunteered Roberto. ‘She say she come after or you get nothing to eat.’
‘What a plague! Well, I’ll take her later, and Caryl too. He is our heavy bass. We must do what we can now without them. Come, Tessa! You and I have a love scene together. If you’ll come down to the end of the room with me I’ll hum you the tune and we’ll concoct the words, while Trigorin coaches Roberto.’
They went and sat in a distant window, composing their libretto with a good deal of hilarity. She supplied the rhymes, while he attended to the metre, and they soon became very ribald indeed. Presently Roberto, who was getting hold of his part, struck a tremendous attitude and burst into his first air. As he sang he stalked about the stage with fiery Italian gestures.
‘There,’ said Lewis. ‘That is exactly what I want. You will all of you observe that this is a very Latin piece. This fellow does it to perfection. Copy him and you’ll please me. That’ll do, Roberto. Up with you, Tessa, and we’ll sing our duet.’
They mounted the dais. Trigorin’s hands softened on the keys as Teresa’s little treble and Lewis’s inconspicuous baritone rose through the room. Neither had much voice but they sang with spirit, and it was obvious that Teresa was straining to do her very best In that house she could do no less. Music there was a sacred thing; perhaps the only sacred thing. Even in an absurd charade like this it might not be cheapened by carelessness or economy of effort. The Sanger children were ignorant of obedience, application, self-command or reverence save in this one cause. And of Lewis the same thing might have been said.
He was looking wild and weary. His red hair, damp with sweat, was pushed up into a crest on the top of his head. He had flung aside all his waistcoats and the muffler and was directing the rehearsal in his shirt sleeves. Having Teresa in his arms, he was making love to her with a business-like competence which showed that he had quite forgotten for the moment who she really was. He was busy listening to the effect of the duet and considering the sequence of this song with the next; in his preoccupation he hardly remembered that she was not the Roman waiting wench for whom he had written the part. His eyes were grave and intent, and saw nothing at all, but in voice and gesture he was using the absent-minded mastery of a practised lover. Teresa did not like such handling; she was no actress and could not throw herself into her part sufficiently for its demands. A certain stolidity in her, an absence of the invariable response, brought him to himself with a start; he remembered that he had got poor little Tessa and not the full-blooded contadina he had framed. He laughed at her reassuringly, and finished the scene with a kind of bantering gaiety which put her at her ease.
They worked away until Susan, sidling round the door, told them that supper was ready. Very hungry and happy they all trooped into the hall, where Kate, flushed and dishevelled, was helping soup from an enormous tureen. Linda, already seated at the table, had begun her meal. She raised her eyes contemptuously to look at the musicians, but at the sight of Antonia she remained fixed in a stare.
‘Oh!’ she said slowly. ‘So you’ve come back?’
‘Yes. I’ve come back. What soup is it, Kate?’
‘We mayn’t ask where you’ve been, I suppose,’ asked Linda.
‘I’ve been on a visit.’
‘Oh, indeed! I hope you enjoyed yourself.’
‘Very much, thank you.’
‘You never know,’ murmu
red Linda thoughtfully. ‘Sometimes girls don’t enjoy visits as much as they think they will. Sometimes they come back … quite changed.’
‘Will Sanger be down to supper, Kate?’ interrupted Lewis hastily.
‘Yes,’ said Kate. ‘Jacob Birnbaum is with him. I went up to tell them and they are just coming down.’
‘Jacob,’ stated Linda, ‘came the same time Tony did. You’ll tell me, I suppose, that you didn’t travel together.’
Antonia took no notice and began to eat her soup.
‘She’s been stopping with ’im,’ piped Susan. ‘I heard her telling Tessa and Lina. Ah … oh … Mammy! Tessa pinched me!’
‘Oh, God! Will you leave the child alone!’ exclaimed Linda, angrily leaning forward to box Teresa’s ears. ‘Come here, Suzanne, and tell us what you heard.’
‘Tessa and Lina was eating cherries and they wouldn’t give me any and shut me out of the room. So I climbed up into the balcony and listened to everything they said to spite them. And Tony came in and said she’d been stopping at Ike’s flat …’
‘Yes? Be quiet, Lewis, please! I want to hear this. Kate! I wonder at you, interrupting in that rude way. You can tell Mr Trigorin about the landslide afterwards. Just all of you be quiet and let me hear this. Go on, lovey! What next?’
‘She’s a filthy little liar!’ burst out Antonia. ‘I never said anything of the sort, did I girls?’
‘No!’ asserted her sisters loyally.
‘Didn’t you? We’ll see. When Suzanne’s finished telling me all she heard she can repeat it over again to your father.’
At that moment Sanger appeared at the head of the stairs, an enormous, infirm figure. His son Caryl supported him. Jacob Birnbaum strolled thoughtfully along the passage behind them and peered over their shoulders at the scene going on in the hall below. Linda rose and pointed at Antonia.
‘Look at her, Albert!’ she bawled. ‘Just look at her. She’s come back, if you please. D’you want to know what she’s been up to?’
Sanger descended the stairs with difficulty, leaning heavily on Caryl’s arm and preceded by Gelert, his boarhound. Birnbaum, looking a trifle nervous, brought up the rear of this procession. Lewis and Trigorin forgot Antonia and her troubles in the shocked surprise with which they viewed their host. In the months that had elapsed since they saw him last, disease and decay had made rapid advances. His huge frame looked shrunken: the flesh sagged heavily on a face half hidden by grizzled hair. The splendid vitality of the man was gone, leaving this mountainous wreck, blinking at them with dim, bloodshot eyes.
When he reached the hall his mistress began to upbraid him and Antonia, calling them by every discreditable name in her very extensive vocabulary. Lewis and Birnbaum, used to these scenes, greeted each other with long faces and tried to create a diversion by announcing that the corkscrew had been lost. But Sanger paid no heed to any of them; he continued to stare at his daughter as if waiting for her to speak. She had gone very white, but was steadily drinking her soup as if nothing had happened.
‘Well, my girl,’ he said at last. ‘I had intended to beat you when you got home. But it’s too much trouble; too … much … trouble. Besides, I’m hungry.’
And he collapsed into his chair at the head of the table.
‘When I’m less busy,’ he promised Linda, ‘I’ll institute a disciplinary system. I’ll thrash all the girls for half an hour every morning, including Susan.’
And he shot a ferocious look at his youngest, who shivered in her chair, though, as a matter of fact, she was the only child in the house who escaped his blows.
‘Thrash all the girls every day?’ asked Sebastian, who had joined them in time to hear this remark. ‘What for?’
‘For their incontinent behaviour,’ replied their father. ‘Beating, Sebastian, is the only remedy. You can beat Susan if you like.’
‘I would like,’ said Sebastian.
‘If the men of this family co-operate, we may manage to introduce a little order into the household. Caryl shall beat Kate.’
‘Kate doesn’t need it,’ said Sebastian gravely.
‘I daresay not. But a little undeserved beating does them no harm. Kate will be all the better for it.’
And Sanger looked affectionately into Kate’s distressed face and asked her for some soup.
‘You’d better let Jacob beat Antonia,’ said Linda sourly. ‘He’s been keeping her this past week.’
‘Is that so?’ Sanger shifted his morose regard from his daughter to his friend. ‘Is that so, Jacob?’
‘I hope that you have no objection,’ said Birnbaum, with as much effrontery as he could muster. ‘Some day, perhaps, some more of the children will come down. We amused ourselves so much. But Tony was anxious to be at home for the birthday.’
Sanger sighed gustily and said:
‘Very friendly of you, Jacob!’
At which Birnbaum looked uncomfortable. Antonia, lifting her head for the first time, looked at her father and then at her lover with stony, scornful eyes. In the uneasy pause which ensued the voice of Trigorin was heard in a speech which had gone on, unheeded, ever since Sanger appeared on the stairs.
‘There is no privilege,’ he was saying,’ which I have more desired than to be a guest at this house.’
‘Bless my soul! Trigorin!’ exclaimed Sanger. ‘I’d forgotten you were here. I must apologise. But you’re a family man yourself, I believe, so you’re probably accustomed to this sort of thing. I hope Kate is making you comfortable. Look! Have you met Birnbaum?’
But Trigorin did not want to talk to Birnbaum, who was, obviously, no musician. And Birnbaum did not want to talk to anyone. He occupied himself sulkily in pulling corks and glancing furtively at Antonia. Sanger was very silent and ate little. He sat staring at his plate in such a moody abstraction, heaving such melancholy sighs, that nobody liked to speak to him. Lewis talked to Caryl in undertones, the children giggled at their end of the table, and Trigorin was thrown once more upon the melting glances of Linda.
The gloomy meal proceeded calmly enough save for a scene in which Paulina and Sebastian were ordered from the room for spitting at each other across the table. But even this was accomplished without the tumult and gusto of other days. Sanger had lost his love of life. He was a sick man, absorbed in his last desperate struggle; too ill to resent the conduct of his children and his friends. He saw the looks which Linda cast upon Trigorin; he guessed that Birnbaum had seduced his daughter, but he could not rouse himself to any protest. Towards the end of supper, however, having drunk a good deal of the cognac which Birnbaum had brought him, he brightened up a little. He began to tease Lewis about the ‘Revolutionary Songs’, and told how at an early rehearsal the tenors had taken their first lead a bar late and how they had remained a bar late throughout the piece, whereat Lewis determined that it sounded better that way. Later in the evening he became very good company indeed and told them funny stories about Brahms. For an hour he was himself again, and his friends forgot their gloom; they caught the old sense of space and heroic joviality – felt that they were assisting at something epic and earning a sort of immortality simply by listening to Sanger and laughing with him. But as the night advanced he became less intelligible, and when Caryl and Lewis took him up to bed he was speechless. Trigorin and Birnbaum, who did not find much to say to each other, retired to the spare bedroom which they were to share.
4
Jacob Birnbaum stood behind a screen which formed one of the wings in ‘a room in the Vatican’. His intelligent forehead was smothered beneath three tea cosies, placed one upon the other, to form a papal crown. The rest of his person was muffled in an ancient Spanish cope. He made a sufficiently impressive Borgia. Upon the stage the Dodd opera was in full swing and Trigorin was rattling away at the piano. Antonia was dying in as Latin a manner as she could compass, her long hair trailing over the shoulder of Roberto, who made a most polite little cardinal, in Kate’s red dressing-gown. He supported the poisoned lady as she
swung through her final swift, suave, heart-rending air, and when she had breathed her last put her on the floor almost at Birnbaum’s feet. She lay there very pink and pleased with herself, her eyes tightly shut in an innocent attempt to look convincingly dead.
The man in the wings stared down at her sombrely, his mind ranging back unhappily over all that had befallen the pair of them since that day, scarcely a month ago, when he had looked at her picking freesias in the garden at Genoa and discovered, with a sense of dazed shock, the enchantment of her loveliness and youth. That day had been the beginning of his madness. At the thought of the havoc she had made in his peace of mind he could almost wish that she was really lying dead at his feet. If she were dead she could not be more lost to him. Should this sweet, tormenting thing, that had been his, die and be buried, be thrust away under the mould, he might forget her. But while the living, revengeful spirit which had eluded him gazed upon him with her eyes and mocked him with her tongue he could never hope for tranquillity.
Because she had seemed to promise Paradise, and because he was accustomed to get what he wanted, he had persuaded her, with promises of lavish entertainment, to come to Munich. The rest of the business had been most pitifully easy. Only, in return, she had made a fool of him; she had opened his eyes so completely to the illusion of all possession that he doubted if he should ever again enjoy anything without an after-taste of bitterness. She had given him none of the bliss he had anticipated; and long before the end of the week he knew that he had made an irremediable mistake, that his need had been for some moment of shared passion, some appeasement of his loneliness, some sign that she returned his feeling. He would gladly have relinquished his brief, unsubstantial victory, if that were possible, for some hint that he was in any way necessary to her happiness. But an implacable remorse told him that by his own folly he had lost her.
Upon the stage Scaramello, the servant, was being instructed to throw her into the Tiber. He picked her up and carried her behind the screen. When he had set her carefully upon her feet she opened her eyes with a laugh which ended abruptly, since she found herself so close to Jacob Birnbaum. Shrinking back she eyed him defiantly, and he, stung by a sudden, unendurable pain, returned her glance with a smile of deliberate insolence which sent her pale with fury. Lewis, watching them, thought that they made a pretty pair; he shuddered a little at them. He did not like to think what dark things must have passed between them at Munich that they should still choose to remain in each other’s company for the sake, apparently, of mutual torment. He turned his back on them and, since his head that day was completely in the clouds, he soon forgot them.
The Constant Nymph Page 6