CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Margaret Kennedy
Dedication
Title Page
Introduction
BOOK ONE
Sanger’s Circus
BOOK TWO
Nymphs and Shepherds
BOOK THREE
The Silver Sty
BOOK FOUR
Three Meet
The History of Vintage
Copyright
The Ladies of Lyndon
Red Sky at Morning
The Fool of the Family
Return I Dare Not
A Long Time Ago
Together and Apart
The Midas Touch
The Feast
Lucy Carmichael
Troy Chimneys
The Oracles
The Wild Swan
A Night in Cold Harbour
The Forgotten Smile
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Epub ISBN 9781448192038
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Published by Vintage 2014
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Copyright © Margaret Kennedy 1924
Introduction copyright © Joanna Briscoe 2014
Margaret Kennedy has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann in 1924
Vintage
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099589747
The years have not been kind to The Constant Nymph. Though the novel in itself has aged notably well, this oddly titled work has suffered from neglect, slipping from public awareness as its author has fallen perilously out of fashion. Nymphs themselves, as a concept, are hardly in vogue.
Yet The Constant Nymph was a runaway bestseller of the 1920s, shifting one million copies in its first five years, inspiring a play starring Noël Coward and John Gielgud and three films. It was praised by critics from J. M. Barrie to Walter de la Mare and Cyril Connolly. Most importantly, it is a hugely enjoyable novel, both entertaining and psychologically profound.
Margaret Kennedy was of her time, but in vital respects very much before her time. Published in 1924, The Constant Nymph is startlingly modern in its outlook, the bohemian world it conjures being in many ways more progressive than the society we find ourselves inhabiting almost a century later. Its central theme, however, is more unpalatable today. A girl of just fifteen elopes with a man she has loved throughout her childhood: a suitor twice her age, who is her father’s friend. While the status of the similarly disturbing masterpiece that is Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita remains intact, this is obviously a problematic premise and may have contributed to The Constant Nymph’s fall from grace. Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat and Hervey Allen’s Anthony Adverse, huge bestsellers of the 1920s and ’30s that were also filmed, are now virtually unknown. Tastes change. But then they change again.
Margaret Kennedy seems to have experienced the type of respectable English life that she observes so objectively. Born in 1896 in Kensington to an upper-middle-class family, her father a barrister, she was brought up in Kent and educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College followed by Somerville College, Oxford, which produced a rich seam of female novelists: her contemporaries were Vera Brittain, Dorothy L. Sayers and Winifred Holtby. Kennedy’s first publication was a history textbook, then her novel The Ladies of Lyndon, followed by The Constant Nymph in 1924, which made her name. She married a barrister, had three children and worked as a novelist and playwright all her life, dying in Oxfordshire in 1967.
Her first novel, The Ladies of Lyndon, is a fine piece of work, but only sold in any quantity after the success of her second. In The Constant Nymph Kennedy’s command of her material is apparent from the opening page. With a perfectly distanced irony, reminiscent of Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm, she satirises public attitudes towards a composer, neglected in his homeland during his lifetime, but posthumously lauded: ‘his idiom … discovered to be Anglo-Saxon’. British society thus delicately skewered, she moves on to the real story behind the national treasure.
Albert Sanger has spent most of his life in exile, gathering wives, children and minions with little regard for much, beyond his music, as he travels about, regularly dragging ‘his preposterous family’ to a chalet in the Austrian Tyrol. Having produced at least seven children who are ‘ignorant of obedience, application, self-command or reverence’ by two wives and a mistress, he proceeds to neglect this rabble known as ‘Sanger’s Circus’, while passing on a legacy of chaos, freedom and musical ability.
The towering character that is Sanger dominates the novel, to the point where it is easy to fail to notice that he doesn’t appear in person for the first fifty pages, and then makes only one further entrance. The ‘scandalous legends which collected round his name’ are colourful enough for us to understand his impact. With barely sufficient room or food for the family, the house attracts a stream of guests and hangers-on who are willing to visit Sanger on an Alp that is accessible only by train, hotel stay, lake and then a considerable climb. It is fascinating and utterly delicious to read about this ramshackle family running free about the mountains, squabbling, singing and disappearing as they wish. Widely thought to be inspired by Augustus John and his family, the bohemian pandemonium seems genuine – neither viciously mocked nor idealised, but presented for what it is. Unmanipulated, all senses fed, the reader can but revel.
As in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, where the early Transylvanian section remains in the mind although much of the action occurs elsewhere, the most memorable scenes here are those set in the wildness of the Tyrol. As in Dracula, the first section sets the tone for the whole novel, and although Chiswick and its environs are well described later on, and later scenes in Brussels are bathed in drama, it is those chill mountains that one associates for ever with The Constant Nymph. These are joyful chapters, their humour, acute observation and beautiful prose showing Kennedy – who was only twenty-eight when this, her second novel was published – at her very finest. The mountains are evoked with poetry and simplicity: ‘The air of the snowfields, sharp and cool, came in puffs through the warm, heavy smell of chestnut blossoms … the shouts of the herd boys echoed across the clear dark air in the valleys.’ Merely the mention of a cowbell sounding in the distance, cold air lifting the hair, or shadows on the mountains is enough to transport the reader.
Above all Margaret Kennedy is clear-sighted. She is blind neither to the ‘dreadfulness’ of the household nor to its delights, but refuses to romanticise, despite her achingly romantic setting and love story. One of its most interesting qualities is that this is in many aspects an anti-romantic romance. The protagonists, Lewis Dodd and Teresa Sanger, are both described as ‘plain’; Lewis has a ‘thin, rather cruel mouth … and unmannerly ways’, and in fact Kennedy never shies away from describing her male hero’s considerable faults – he is no Heathcliff, a romanticised brute, but rather an interestingly and sometimes alarmingly imperfect character, who is so cross, rude, shabby and selfish but brilliant that we want to know more about him. It is Teresa’s understanding and acceptance of ‘this savage youth’ that is the key to their love.
When the novel starts, with old family friend Lewis Dodd and typical admirer Trigorin climbing the mountain to visit the legendary Sanger, the identity of the nymph in question is unclear. The likeliest candidate seems to be the beautiful older sister Antonia, who has run off with a man and scandalously lost her virginity. Again Kennedy spurns the obvious, and Teresa has no apparent nymphic qualities in the Nabokovian sense. Daringly, she is ‘the least attractive of them; in feature and person she might almost have been called ugly’, with none of the talent so apparent in her siblings; but she has an integrity, transparency and natural wildness of spirit that Lewis appreciates and has always loved. Teresa is no obvious heroine; in fact we have no clear picture of her, whereas Sanger, Lewis and Florence are more fully drawn. But she is no tabula rasa, or underdog, for the reader to champion, either. What she possesses, as the title states, is constancy. Teresa is ‘an admirable, graceless little baggage … unbalanced, untaught, fatally warm-hearted’. She is essentially unknowable: we are, to an extent, told what to think of her, and her love for Lewis is whitewashed to appear entirely innocent – ‘the constant simplicity of her young heart … her love was as natural and necessary to her as the breath she drew’.
Kennedy’s main theme, one that preoccupied her in other work, comes into play with the arrival of refined cousin Florence, who arrives to rescue the penniless Sanger orphans once their father has died. In her many novels Margaret Kennedy writes of women’s desires, and of how they can be crushed as duty and social expectation constrain lives. Teresa represents the opposite of this, though her path doesn’t lead to happiness, either. But Kennedy, here and elsewhere, is interested in the rebels, the free spirits, the brave outsiders who know themselves – though later novels concern the very domestic and social intrigues that she was satirising in The Constant Nymph, and are generally less well rated. She reintroduced the Sangers in The Fool of the Family in 1930, but without success.
Florence develops as a character, but not in any positive sense. She is beautiful, well dressed and animated when she first sets foot in the Tyrol, only to encounter the naked Sangers swimming in the lake. In the first flush of her romance with Lewis she appears prepossessing, though the signs of her controlling nature are there. Here Kennedy shows the danger of a romantic imagination: Florence idealises and adores the very flea-bitten lifestyle she will later so despise.
Ignorant of just how protected her upbringing has been, she has, she fondly thinks, had enough of ‘clever young men’, and is fascinated by the savagery of Sanger’s Circus: ‘Dressed like peasants, they looked wilder than the wildest mountain people.’ But what she is seeing is a glaringly utopian version, as she blithely ignores the dirt, hunger, immorality and at times brutality at play in this apparent Shangri-La upon which she has stumbled. ‘I’m so much intrigued by all these queer friends,’ she trills. To her father, they are ‘the sweepings of the earth’. To her brother, Lewis is ‘A shoddy Bohemian! One of these bad-blooded young ruffians who defy decency and call it art.’ Of course, the truth lies somewhere between their opposing visions.
As in Elizabeth Taylor’s 1968 novel The Wedding Group, a commune-like community ruled by a selfish patriarch, the illusion of free choice, early marriage and the artefacts of bohemia are superbly portrayed and are reminiscent of a later era. The Sanger girls’ bedroom could be a 1960s hippie pad: ‘a large barn of a place with very little furniture … the entire wardrobe of the other young ladies lay about permanently in heaps on the floor amid books, music, guitars, cigarette ends, cheery stones, and dust’. Florence, the innocent abroad, is dangerously attracted to all she finds, and there’s a terrible Schadenfreude at work as the reader watches her falling straight into a trap of her own making.
One female protagonist – Teresa – is conditioned to desire a creative barbarian, her male role-model Albert Sanger; the other – Florence – imagines this is what she wants. She is determined to marry Lewis, and she tends to get what she aims for. This is a knowing portrait of civilised society’s fascination with the concept of the noble savage and the dissonance that results.
Lewis is so obviously Sanger’s replacement, and Freudian echoes ring through the story. There is an inevitability to the attractions and their outcomes. Not only does Teresa love a version of her father, but Florence’s respectable aunt had run off with the scoundrel Sanger, giving birth to four children who included Teresa. History repeats itself in concentric circles.
Above all, Kennedy is a superb psychologist. As Anita Brookner so accurately says, ‘she knows the ways of men and women very well indeed’. Few writers are quite so psychologically astute, their characters’ thoughts so wincingly and exhilaratingly universal. This, again, is where the supposedly romantic writer bolts from categorisation, and her characters’ emotional lives are multilayered, complex and contradictory. They can make for uncomfortable reading. For example, when the love-struck Lewis’s proposal is accepted by Florence with far greater celerity than expected, he feels the chill of the reversal of his feelings, the immediate heart-sinking knowledge of what the marriage will mean.
Florence sends the orphaned Sangers to school and attempts to civilise her feral lover by caging him in the house that he refers to as ‘the silver sty’, so that she may launch him upon musical society. This is exactly what Lewis has run away from, and what Florence thinks she has rebelled against. Once the children, ‘strange oaths’ intact, have escaped from school and Teresa is left to suffer between the warring Dodds, the pace of the novel undeniably flags. The theme begins to be repeated, as we are shown Establishment versus anarchy; ‘cultured provincialism’ stifling art; ‘the people who would chain [Lewis] and his labour to the chariot wheels of a social structure’ in conflict with the noble savages down from their mountain.
Kennedy’s portrait of the English as a race is admirably clear-sighted. What is less admirable is the shocking and seemingly casual anti-Semitism that runs through the novel; this was in evidence in her first novel, and is here attached to the figure of Jacob Birnbaum, Antonia’s husband, whom the Sangers insist on calling ‘Ikey Mo’ and generally racially insulting. The Russian Trigorin is also a stock object of ridicule with his flourishes and enthusiasms, and Roberto the Italian is no more nuanced; but it is the portrait of Birnbaum that is truly offensive.
Having married Florence without recognising that it is Teresa he really loves, Lewis has to understand what his nymph, with her unwavering devotion, has known all along. Her love is supposedly about innocence, predestination and childhood attachment rather than passion. But even so their romance and elopement are full of hitches, and the ending is both a shock and a staggering disappointment. To a contemporary reader, the conclusion may seem inexplicable as a plotting device, but for Kennedy this was an almost obligatory compromise, and it can only be read in context. The nymph could not be seen to have sex, so the solution had to be dramatic.
If there is any message in this novel, it is that we should be true to ourselves. But even then there were punishments for authenticity, in an era in which unmarried sex could not be condoned. Kennedy was, like so many of her characters, constrained by her time; but her profound understanding of the perennial essence of human behaviour is her great achievement. She maintains an exquisite distance on the shenanigans of her players, but can plunge into their secret psyches with ease. This is a strange, wonderful and unforgettable novel. As a study of human nature, The Constant Nymph is ageless.
Joanna Briscoe, 2014
TO MR AND MRS ROLF BENNETT
At the time of his death the name of Albert Sanger was barely known to the musical public of Great Britain. Among the very few who had heard of him there were even some who called him Sanjé, in the French manner, being disinclined to suppose that great men are occasionally born in Hammersmith.
That, however, is where he was born, of lower middle class parents, in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The whole world knew of it as soon as he was dead and buried. Englishmen, discovering a new belonging, became excited; it appeared that Sanger had been very much heard of everywhere else. His claims to immortality were canvassed eagerly by people who hoped soon to have an opportunity of hearing his work. His idiom, which was demonstrably neither Latin nor Gothic nor yet Slav, was discovered to be Anglo-Saxon. Obituary columns talked of the gay simplicity of his rhythms, an unmistakably national feature, which, they declared, took one back to Chaucer. They lamented that yet another prophet had passed without honour in his own country.
But for this the British public was not entirely to blame; few people can sincerely admire a piece of music which they have not heard. During Sanger’s lifetime his work was never performed in England. It was partly his own fault since he composed nothing but operas and these on a particularly grandiose scale. Their production was a risky enterprise, under the most promising conditions; and in England the conditions attending the production of an opera are never promising. The press suggested that other British composers had been heard in London repeatedly while Sanger languished in a little limbo of neglect. This was not quite the case. The limbo has never been as little as that.
Sanger, moreover, hated England, left it at an early age, never went back, and seldom spoke of it without some strong qualification.
Appreciation, though tardy, was generous when it came. A special effort was made, about a year after Sanger’s death, and the Nine Muses, an enterprising repertory theatre south of the river, undertook the production of ‘Prester John’, the shortest and simplest of the operas. The success of the piece was unqualified. All the intelligentzia and some others flocked to hear, and proved by their applause how ready they were to appreciate English music as soon as ever they got the chance. There were no howls of rage such as had arisen when ‘Prester John’ was produced in Paris; no free fights in the gallery between the partizans and foes of the composer. The whole thing was as decorous as possible and the respectful ardour of the audience, their prolonged cheers at the end, left no doubt as to Sanger’s posthumous position in his own country. They were not unlike the ovation accorded to a guest of honour who arrives a little late.
Having renounced his native land, Sanger adopted no other. He roved about from one European capital to another, never settling anywhere for long, driven forwards by his strange, restless fancy. Usually he quartered himself upon his friends, who were accustomed to endure a great deal from him. He would stay with them for weeks, composing third acts in their spare bedrooms, producing operas which always failed financially, falling in love with their wives, conducting their symphonies, and borrowing money from them. His preposterous family generally accompanied him. Few people could recollect quite how many children Sanger was supposed to have got, but there always seemed to be a good many and they were most shockingly brought up. They were, in their own orbit, known collectively as ‘Sanger’s Circus’, a nickname earned for them by their wandering existence, their vulgarity, their conspicuous brilliance, the noise they made, and the kind of naptha-flare genius which illuminated everything they said or did. Their father had given them a good, sound musical training and nothing else. They had received no sort of regular education, but, in the course of their travels, had picked up a good deal of mental furniture and could abuse each other most profanely in the argot of four languages.
They seldom remained more than three months consecutively in the same place, but they had, as a matter of fact, one home of their own, an overgrown chalet in the Austrian Tyrol, where they were accustomed to spend the Spring and early Summer. Sanger liked Alpine scenery of a moderate kind and chose to have some place where he could entertain his friends. He invited all the world to come and stay with him, disregarding grandly his poverty and the want of proper sleeping accommodation in his house. His habitual sociability was unbounded; he was constantly picking up new acquaintances and these always got an invitation to the Karindehütte. The chalet was often full to overflowing and, to make room for the swarming guests, the children were sent out to sleep at neighbouring farms. Odd strangers of all classes and nationalities, people whose very names had been forgotten by Sanger, would turn up unexpectedly. No visitor could be sure what queer companion might be thrust into his room, or, indeed, into his very bed. Everybody was welcome.
These tumults and discomforts were endured by the guests for Sanger’s sake. In his prime the enchantment of his convivial presence drew them to the house in the mountains as often as ever they were asked. The place had a spell which no one who had been there could forget. In after years it became a legend. It was the nearest approach to a home built by this wandering star, and, dying there, he was buried under the gentians and primulas in the pleasant alp before his door.
Visitors to the Karindethal were generally obliged to spend the night at a little town in the valley of the Inn, for the last stage of the journey was long and slow. Persons coming from a distance usually arrived at this place late in the evening, and, if they could afford it, went to the Station Hotel. Not that the Station Hotel was costly, being, indeed, quite a humble little public-house; but Sanger’s guests were sometimes very poor and travelled fourth-class, all among the mothers and babies and market baskets.
Among them and under them. Lewis Dodd, travelling up the Innthal one night late in May, got so far buried beneath the other fourth-class passengers that he found it difficult to leave the train at the right station and was very nearly carried on to Innsbruck. Disengaging himself in the nick of time, he got stiffly down on to a waste of railway lines, shouldered his knapsack and made for the Station Hotel, following an elderly porter who carried two large, beautiful leather suitcases. These belonged to a first-class passenger who had left the train without difficulty some five minutes earlier and was already established at the inn.
They crossed the station yard, a small gravelled enclosure surrounded by chestnuts all in bloom, like Christmas trees, with their thick spiky candles. Tall arc lamps among the tree trunks splashed the darkness here and there with pools of white light, and pointed inky shadows among the brilliant leaves. Hidden in the night, all round the little town, were the mountains. The air of the snowfields, sharp and cool, came in puffs through the warm, heavy smell of chestnut blossoms. The first-class passenger, remarking it, had taken off his hat and wiped his forehead and murmured something about the heavenly-beautiful bergluft, before going in to his supper. Lewis also lifted up his face to the hidden ranges which, on clear nights, shut out the stars from the valley towns. He was very glad to be going back again to the lovely mountain Spring and to his friend Sanger.
Both these travellers were on their way to the Karindehütte, but they did not discover each other until next morning, when they breakfasted at adjoining tables in the bare little coffee-room. Here they waited for the eggs they had ordered and observed one another suspiciously. Their mutual impressions were so little favourable that for some minutes they hesitated glumly on the brink of conversation.
The first-class passenger was a fat fellow who spoke fluent German with a French accent. He was probably a great deal younger than he looked. His clothes were impressive. He wore a magnificent suit, cut very square on the shoulders and a trifle too big for him. There was a good deal of unobtrusive but valuable jewellery about him, and a soft black hat lay on the table at his elbow. His figure was heavy and unagile. He had thick white hands, much manicured, and wore his dark hair en brosse, a style which ill-suited the full, fleshy curves of his pale face. His eyes, which should have been bold and greedy, were strangely unhappy and disclosed, in their direct gaze, an unexpected diffidence, an ingenuous modesty, entirely out of keeping with the rest of him. Of this he was aware; he seldom looked full at those people whom he wished to impress, but sometimes in his eagerness he forgot himself. His general air was excessively urbane, and he looked oddly out of place in the Bahnhof coffee-room.
Lewis Dodd, on the other hand, was a lean youth, clothed in garments so nondescript as to merit no attention. He wore several waistcoats and had a yellow muffler round his neck. He, too, was pale with the kind of pallor that goes with ginger hair. Loose locks straggled across his bony forehead and hung in a sort of fringe over the muffler at the back of his neck. His young face was deeply furrowed, nor was there any reassurance to be found in his thin, rather cruel mouth, or in light, observant eyes, so intent that they rarely betrayed him. His companion, distrusting his countenance, found, nevertheless, a wonderful beauty in his hands, which gave a look of extreme intelligence to everything that he did, as though an extra brain was lodged in each finger. Their strength and delicacy contradicted the harsh lines of his face, and it was this contrast which determined the stranger to make a conversational plunge. He observed, as a cock crowed boastfully in the garden outside:
‘An egg has been laid. It is, perhaps, the event for which we wait.’
Lewis made an abrupt statement in such execrable German that he was not understood. He repeated it in French:
‘Cocks don’t lay eggs.’
‘Tiens!’ exclaimed the other in surprise. ‘One never supposed that they did.’
‘Hens,’ pursued Lewis, ‘don’t crow.’
‘Tiens!’
Lewis, inspired, began suddenly and with skill to demonstrate the noise of a hen who has laid an egg. His companion started violently. The landlady, hearing the din in the kitchen and understanding it as a reproach, put her head in at the door and declared that the eggs ordered by the highly wellborn gentlemen were already in the frying-pan. Whereat Lewis left off clucking and began to play spillikens with the wooden toothpicks on the table.
His companion, who had never seen toothpicks put to so paltry a use before, raised his eyebrows, shrugged his shoulders, and turned away. From the leather portfolio beside him he took a fountain-pen, very much mounted in gold, a small notebook and a roll of manuscript music. This he began to cover with annotations and strange hieroglyphics, referring occasionally to the notebook. As he worked his large mobile features writhed continuously; he frowned, blinked, snorted, smiled and raised his eyebrows in a kind of frenzy.
His activities were observed with melancholy attention. Lewis abandoned the toothpicks and regarded him closely, seized by the unpleasant idea that they were to be fellow-guests at the Karindehütte. This fat person must be going to stay with Sanger; there was no other explanation for him. For the rest of the journey they would be compelled to travel together. They might even have to share the spare room unless Kate could be persuaded otherwise. Kate, the eldest of Sanger’s daughters, was the only person in the household who ever wrestled with the problem of guests and beds. She was kind and thoughtful.
The odious possibilities before him depressed Lewis very much. He was too easily persuaded that he should not like people. His own appearance was not conspicuously prepossessing and he had no business to be so critical. While he sat wondering how long it would be before they were betrayed to each other, the landlady, bringing in the eggs, did the deed. She knew him well for an intimate of the Sangers and lingered genially to enquire after his health and send her compliments to the family, for whom she had a great liking since they brought so many guests to her house. They had only been up in the Karindethal a fortnight, she told him, and she believed that they had come from Italy. One of the young gentlemen had got lost on the way. Getting out of the train at a wayside station in the middle of the night, he had been left behind. His loss was not discovered for some hours as his family were all asleep. They had arrived in a great way about it. Fräulein Kate had wanted to go back, but Herr Sanger said that the child was old enough to look after itself. Fräulein Kate had wept and said that the poor little one had no money and no ticket. Gnädige Frau said that it served him right. They had argued most of the night about it, in this very room, sometimes in one language and sometimes in another, but in the end they decided to let the affair alone and went on to the Karindethal next day. The boy had turned up later.
Lewis listened and mumbled indistinct comments, aware that she had given him away. His fellow-traveller was listening eagerly, and enquired when they were alone:
‘You are going to visit Mr Sanger?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ach! I also!’ The gentleman observed Lewis afresh from his yellow muffler to his ragged socks. ‘My name,’ he said, ‘is Trigorin. Kiril Trigorin.’
He made a sort of little bow in his place where he sat. Lewis made another exactly like it. The name awoke vague echoes but he could not place it. Kiril Trigorin! The man had a box-office look, and his jewellery was of the presentation order. Possibly an operatic tenor. He became aware that the situation required something from him. He said hurriedly:
‘My name is Dodd.’
‘Dodd? You are English?’
‘Yes.’
‘Dodd! Is it possible that you are Mr Lewis Dodd?’
Trigorin became radiant and turned full upon Lewis his innocent, humble gaze, crying:
‘Can it be … can it be that I am at last to have the pleasure, the privilege, of meeting so gifted a composer? One for whose genius I have always …’
‘Yes, my name’s Lewis.’
Trigorin got up, clicked his heels, and made a really deferential bow. Lewis nervously did the same but was unable to avert a flood of polite felicitations upon his work, talents and future. He learnt that Mr Trigorin had watched his career with attention; that he was, of all the younger men, the most promising and the most likely to stand by Sanger’s side; that his least popular work, the ‘Revolutionary Songs’ for choir and orchestra, was indisputably the finest and showed a great advance upon his better-known Symphony in Three Keys; and that he must not be depressed because the public was taking a long time to discover him. With all original work, said Mr Trigorin, this must be the case. The critics have always persecuted young genius. The plaudits of the herd are as nothing to the discerning appreciation of a small circle. Lewis found that his hand was seized and that he was being tearfully besought to rise above his own unpopularity.
‘I should not mind it if I were you,’ ended Mr Trigorin with great simplicity,
Lewis was not as grateful for this encouragement as he should have been. He disengaged his hand with a venomous look. It was not for the appreciation of people like this fat Slav that he had written the ‘Revolutionary Songs’.
‘In future,’ went on his friend, ‘we shall speak English. It is more better practice for me.’
‘All right,’ said Lewis.
‘You have stayed at the Karindehütte before? But that is natural. You are the dear friend of Mr Sanger.’
‘Am I?’
‘It is well known. And what a privilege …’
And he was off again, undaunted by the limitations of his English. How great a genius was Sanger! Colossal! Nobody like him in the world! Lewis scarcely listened, for he had begun to remember who the fellow was. Surely his name suggested a famous ballerina. Irina Zhigalova! Of course! This was her husband, and a person of some ability if it was true that he designed all her ballets. But what on earth was he doing here?
From Trigorin’s conversation an explanation of sorts was emerging. It seemed that he had arranged a ballet in the Autumn for Sanger’s opera ‘Akbar’, and had got this invitation on the strength of it.
‘Never before have I visited here,’ he ended confidentially.
This was evident; the odd thing was that he should have been invited now.
‘This moment, you can imagine, my dear sir, is for me a very great one. I go to visit Mr Sanger; I meet Mr Dodd. I find myself in the company of two most distinguished men all in the one time. I am amazed.’
Lewis thought that he would be more amazed when he got to the Karindehütte. But he said nothing.
‘Of what,’ demanded the innocent creature, ‘does the family consist?’
‘Who? The Sangers? You’ve not met them all?’
‘Only Mr Sanger. At Prague he was alone. I think it is a large family.’
‘Oh … well … yes … pretty big.’
Trigorin wished for more details which Lewis was most reluctant to give. At last he said:
‘Well, there’s Madame.’
‘Madame?’ said Trigorin dubiously. ‘You would say … Mrs Sanger?’
‘Yes,’ exclaimed Lewis, as though he had suddenly discovered a relieving explanation for Madame. ‘And then there are the children.’
‘Many children?’
‘Oh, yes. A lot of children.’ After a pause for thought he stated: ‘Seven!’
‘Seven! And all the children of Madame?’
‘Oh, no! Not all.’ There was another pause and then Mr Dodd repeated: ‘Not all. Only one.’
‘Ach! Then the other six … they have had another mother?’
‘Mothers.’
‘Mothers?’
‘He’s been married several times.’
‘So!’
‘The first wife,’ said Lewis very glibly, ‘had two; the second four; and the third one. That makes seven.’
‘Please? Not so quick!’
Even when it was repeated more slowly Trigorin took some minutes to assimilate it. Then he said:
‘And this Karindethal? How do we come there? By the road?’
‘By the mountain railway,’ said Lewis. ‘It takes us up to the lake, where we get the little steamer across to Weissau. From there we drive four or five miles up the Karindethal to the foot of the pass. Then we get out and climb.’
‘Climb!’ cried Trigorin, sweating a little at the mere thought of it. Lewis grinned and said with energy:
‘Oh, yes. It’s quite steep; several hundred feet. Too rough for driving.’
‘Ach! And our gepacks? We must carry them?’
‘Quite so. I hope you travel light, for your own sake.’
‘And the train? When does it go, Mr Dodd?’
‘Oh, in about an hour. I’ll meet you at the station. I have to go into the town to buy a … a razor …’
And Lewis made his escape, rather pleased to have got off so easily. Trigorin finished his breakfast and strolled out into the garden which was full of little tables under the chestnut trees. He sat down at one of them and began a letter to his wife, writing in French which was most commonly used in his household. He described his journey, as far as it had gone and observed:
I sit here amid the most exquisite scenery. Spring has already come to this charming valley, and the meadows round me are full of …
He had a look at the meadows round him, but could not determine what it was that filled them. There were a lot of blue flowers and some yellow, but as these were neither camelias nor gardenias he could not put a name to them. He compromised:
… full of a thousand blossoms of every colour.
With an oath he brushed a chestnut flower off his page. They drifted down everywhere, settling on his straight, upstanding hair and on the backs of the hens pecking about in the grass. They were a plague. He continued to write.
Around me, on every side, rise the mountains, still crowned with Winter. Behind these grim ramparts, nursing his genius in solitary grandeur, dwells The Master. I go to him by the train in an hour’s time.
He knew that his wife would not really find this very interesting. But he was suffering from such an épanchenunt de cæur that he had to write it all to somebody and there was no one else. He described his meeting with young Dodd:
Need I tell you that something in the air of this savage youth immediately attracted my attention? I studied him secretly, as yet unaware of his identity. Here, I said, is genius!
I divine it in every gesture. Presently he introduces himself in his simple English way. He is Lewis Dodd!
At that moment the savage youth himself strolled round the corner of the house. Catching sight of Trigorin he retreated hastily and went to talk to a man who was watching a cow graze in a field. He was less afraid of this kind of person than of any other, and was almost affable to it. The conversation lasted until it was time to catch the train.
Trigorin was a little surprised that any gentleman should desert him for a cow-herd, but he was not resentful, since this was Lewis Dodd and The Great have queer ways. He wrote:
Lewis Dodd travels like one of the people, his knapsack on his back. He is even now talking to a poor peasant with the greatest cordiality. With me, I must confess, he was a little abrupt (un peu bourru), but I set it down to nervous sensibility. I did not let it trouble me.
This was a good thing since Lewis was not the first of his kind to snub Mr Trigorin. They often did. But he did not deserve it. Indeed, he merited their pity, if all were known.
He had entertained in his early youth an ardent desire to compose music. He could imagine no keener joy. But his gifts were not upon a scale with his ambitions. He could write nothing that was at all worth listening to, and, being cursed with unusual intelligence, he knew it. So he gave it up and took to arranging ballets, a business at which, almost against his will, he was eminently successful. He had a choreographic talent which hardly fell short of genius, and which was at first something of a consolation to him; though it was poignant work interpreting the music of other men. Falling in with La Zhigalova he designed for her a series of surpassingly beautiful ballets. She was a fine dancer, but no artist, and it was he who discovered to her the full possibilities of her own person and talents. Out of gratitude she married him, a little to his astonishment, and secured his services for life.
While thus saddled with a profession which he had not entirely chosen, Trigorin still thought sadly sometimes of his dead hopes, worshipped his flame in secret, reverenced deeply all composers who came in his way and persisted in seeking the company of musicianly people. Unfortunately they seldom took to him, regarding him as something of a mountebank and undeniably vulgar. They were deceived by his air of metropolitan prosperity; he looked too much like the proprietor of an Opera House. They could not see into the humble, disappointed heart beneath his magnificent waistcoats, or guess how sacred was the very name of music in his ears. Moreover, he was never at his best in their company; he lost all his impressive urbanity in his eagerness to be liked, talked too much, and, betrayed by his ardent heart, often appeared ridiculous.
Sanger, however, had reason to be grateful to him. They had met in Prague, in the preceding Autumn, while the composer was staging his opera ‘Akbar’ and driven to the verge of insanity by the stupidity of producers. He confided his difficulties to Trigorin. He had intended to present the dawn of Eastern history, young, primitive and heroic, in contrast to the splendour of its mysterious decay. Nobody could be made to see this; the ballets were languid and decadent with a stale aroma of the Arabian Nights. Conventional odalisques were introduced everywhere, even into his spirited hunting scenes. Could Trigorin help him? Trigorin could. He designed dances and a décor which caught that inflection of buoyancy suggested by the music. Sanger was charmed. He borrowed fifty pounds from his new friend and invited him to the Karindethal next Spring.
The delight of Trigorin was unbounded. This was the first advance ever made to him by a composer of importance. He accepted in a passion of gratitude. When the Spring came he had some difficulty in persuading his wife that he must be allowed to go, for she rated musicians a little lower than dressmakers. She would only permit it on condition that he would make Sanger write a ballet for her. Though doubtful of his ability to make such a request, he was so anxious to go that he was really ready to promise anything. He now added a postscript to his letter:
Rest assured, my angel, that I am not forgetting your ballet. But it is better that I do not immediately importune Mr Sanger with these requests. It is not that I forget but that I am tactful.
Lewis found the journey up to Weissau better than he had expected. His companion was indeed horribly talkative, making intelligent comments upon the grandeur of the scenery all the way, but in the choice of his topics he showed a certain respect for Mr Dodd’s nervous sensibility. They agreed that the chestnut and oak of the valley had now given way to pine woods, and discussed the names of some of the peaks towering above them. As the little train panted its way into the Alpine pastures, Lewis was even so affable as to point out several waterfalls to his companion.
After a stiff ascent the line ended by a lake and they found a little steamer waiting for them. Mr Trigorin said that the expanse of water lent an agreeable perspective to the mountains rising sharply on the other side. Mr Dodd said that it was so, and that when they got across they would find the same thing to be true of the mountains on this side. Mr Trigorin said he supposed so, and became a little silent and unhappy. They crossed the lake without further conversation.
When they had almost reached the hamlet of Weissau, Lewis exclaimed suddenly:
‘There they are, some of them!’
‘Please?’ said Trigorin anxiously.
‘Two of Sanger’s children. On the landing-stage.’
He pointed to the little group of peasants waiting for the boat. Two young girls, standing rather apart from the crowd, had already recognised him and were waving vehemently. As soon as he got off the boat they flung themselves upon his neck, kissing him with eager delight.
‘Oh, Lewis!’ exclaimed the smaller. ‘We never expected to see you at all. Only some one is probably coming by this boat so we thought we’d come in and buy some sweets and get a ride back.’
‘Yes,’ said the other. ‘Sanger got a letter to say this person was coming. And you should hear how he goes on about it. He says he never …’
‘I expect it was Trigorin,’ interrupted Lewis.
‘O—oh, yes! That was the name Sanger said, wasn’t it Lina?’
‘Well then, this is your man. Mr Trigorin. Miss Teresa Sanger; Miss Paulina Sanger.’
Trigorin put down his suitcases and bowed low, beginning:
‘I am most delighted …’
But Teresa cut him short.
‘Lewis! Have you got … you know what?’
‘What? Oh, I know. Yes. I have it in my knapsack.’
‘That’s all right. We’d have lynched you if you’d forgotten. But you’ve been the hell of a time fetching it We’ve only got three days; his birthday’s on Thursday. And he won’t like it unless it’s properly done.’
‘Three days will do if we work hard,’ Lewis assured her. ‘Look! Have you ordered a cart or anything? Because, if not, one of you must leg it up to the hotel and ask for one.’
‘Oh, we’ve got it It’s just behind the shop. It’s got a pig in it that Kate told us to bring up. It’s quite a quiet pig. It’s dead.’
Teresa looked at her sister and they both giggled.
‘Can he eat bacon?’ whispered Paulina in an audible aside, with a glance at Trigorin, who was waiting patiently beside his suitcases until somebody should take notice of him. ‘He looks a little like a Jew. We had an awful time once when Ikey Mo’s uncle was staying with us and we had nothing in the house …’
‘If he can’t eat bacon, there’ll be nothing else for him to eat,’ said Teresa, She turned to Trigorin and enquired baldly: ‘Are you a Jew?’
‘No,’ he said, a little stiffly. ‘I am from Russia.’
‘Well, there are Jews in Russia, aren’t there?’ she argued.
‘They are not as I,’ Trigorin told her.
‘Really?’ she said derisively. ‘We’ve all got something to be thankful for, haven’t we? You have got a lot of luggage. I hope there’ll be room for us all in the cart as well as the pig.’
‘It’s a very heavy pig,’ supplemented Paulina, exploding again into suppressed laughter. ‘Tessa and I had to drag it all the way from the slaughter-house.’
They turned towards the little village shop which stood close to the landing-stage. Lewis walked in front with a girl hanging lovingly on either arm; Trigorin toiled in the rear with his suitcases. Behind the shop they found a very small carriage shaped something like a victoria, and, at the sight of it, the mirth of the children became almost hysterical. They had hoisted the gutted carcase of the pig into an upright position on the back seat Draped in a tartan rug and crowned with Teresa’s straw hat, it was a horrible object but not unlike a stout German lady, when seen from a distance. The children, who thought it irresistibly funny, demanded eagerly if Lewis did not see a resemblance to Fräulein Brandt, the celebrated contralto.
‘Perhaps,’ said Lewis. ‘But do you expect us to sit on these cushions? They are all over pig.’
‘Your clothes won’t spoil, darling Lewis.’
‘They are all I have, darling Tessa. And what about Trigorin? He’s a gentleman.’
‘I shall go on high with the driver,’ stated the gentleman firmly.
‘Then,’ said Paulina, ‘Lewis and Tessa can sit on the back seat, and I on Lewis’s knee, and we’ll put the suitcases in front of us with Fräulein Brandt on top.’
With some difficulty they were all packed in, and the little cart started off up the valley at a great pace. Soon the village was left behind and their way lay through pine woods, along a rough, green track. In front of them a straight wall of stony mountain shut out the sky, and they seemed to be driving to the very foot of the barrier.