Читать книгу Time's Door - Esther Meynell - Страница 12

His next lesson took place the following morning.SECOND VIOLIN LESSON It was a shining day after the storm, and Paganini sent him to explore the country near by. Himself, he was weary—he looked it, being of an extraordinary sallow colour in the strong morning light—he had not slept, he would dispose himself again upon the sofa and breathe the balmy air through the opened casement. He stretched out his bony limbs as he spoke and waved Giovanni away with his hand.

“Stay an hour, two hours, while I take a small siesta,” he commanded, “Then maybe we will look at a fiddle together.”

On his return from his pleasant wanderings Giovanni found him as he had left him. As the boy entered Paganini motioned to the case on the table wherein reposed the Guarnerius which was the inseparable companion of all his travels. With trembling excitement Giovanni opened the case and took the violin to Paganini—to hear Paganini play, alone, no one there save himself and the Maestro! Paganini took the violin, but declined the bow with a small sardonic smile.

“Sit down,” he said, “I will now practise for a little while.”

To Giovanni’s surprised disappointment he put the fiddle to his chin, and proceeded to stalk silently up and down the finger board with his gaunt and lengthy fingers, measuring intervals as though they were mathematical problems. The smile faded from his face, he was absorbed, oblivious of the boy whose eyes so intently watched his every movement. At last he ceased, laid the violin across his knees, and turned to Giovanni.

“That was a good practice,” he said, smiling in a teasing manner at the puzzled face before him, “But you do not seem to appreciate it, Giovanni. You look as do the orchestra when I rehearse a concerto with them. When we come to my cadenza and they are all ready to lay down their instruments and listen to me with open mouths, I bow to them with great courtesy and say ‘Gentlemen, we will omit this unimportant section and proceed!’ ”

Enjoyment of his little trick flickered over his face.

Then he turned to Giovanni and went on more seriously, “That silent practice is usually enough for me nowadays. But when I was your age I practise in a different manner altogether, from sunrise to sunset, with both my hands and all my strength—and the stick of my father across my shoulders! My thin carcase was the fiddle on which he practise! It was die, or be the greatest of all the fiddlers. Well, I do not die, though I come near to it—when I was quite small I was wrapped in my shroud to be put in the grave—but I work till my bones nearly come through my skin. I have lessons from some great teachers, but mostly I teach myself. I experiment, I investigate, I play tricks with the fiddle. The great teachers they treat the violin as if she were a Madonna in some dark church. You must do this and so, never that way. You are careful with your bow, and you tune your first string at E, and then you go down the steps to A, and then D, and land safely at G”—Paganini sang the intervals in a queer croaking voice—“and you keep most carefully to all you ought to do, and it is most safe and pretty. But I,” he flung out one arm in a violent gesture, “I do quite other things, I tune my strings as suits me, and if one string breaks I play on three, and if two break I still have two left, and if they all break, why then I would play on a hair from my head! I make my violin not one instrument but many. She is a harp, a flute, an oboe. I fly up the harmonics right into the air, where no fiddler has flown before. They are not notes, they are a dream!”

He was suddenly silent, his enormous eyes in their cavernous sockets staring out of the window. Giovanni hardly dared breathe. After a minute Paganini turned to him and laid the Guarnerius gently on his knee.

“A violin is a mystery,” he said, “Look at it andMYSTERY OF A FIDDLE always remember that—think of that as you play your scales and arpeggios which are the staircase to the stars. Out of that little shell of wood you can draw anything, into it you can pour everything. The human hand and mind have never invented another instrument like the fiddle and never will. It grows to you like your own bones, I would as soon lose my hands as this Guarnerius. It was given to me years past by a generous friend at Leghorn. I had been forced to pawn my Stradivarius—which I had won by playing at sight a concerto considered monstrously difficult—so this lovely Guarnerius was loaned to me, and when the owner had heard me play upon it tears streamed from his eyes, and he said ‘You shall keep it. Never again will I profane the strings that have known your fingers. It is to you and not to me that my violin belongs.’ As he wept to give so I wept to receive, for I knew the sacrifice, but I could do no other than accept—when my fingers went round her neck, when my bow fell on her strings, I knew my Josef del Gésu and I were born for each other!”

Paganini at times would talk like this to Giovanni, telling the boy of his own strange childhood, expressing his feelings and ideas with simplicity and kindness. At other times he would utter hardly a word except to complain that his throat hurt him and his mind was a desert. He would not talk and he would not teach, and Giovanni had to do his practising well out of his master’s hearing. Leave it undone he neither dared nor desired, for at any moment Paganini might come out of his dark mood and demand from him transcendent efforts and achievements. In adjusting himself to Paganini, in watching and waiting upon him, in realising that life could be very strange and broken and uncertain, Giovanni rapidly grew to a wisdom beyond his years. He adored Paganini and was sorry for him. He knew him for an unhappy, almost a haunted, man, though what was the cause of the sorrow he had no knowledge.