Читать книгу Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles) - Katherine Mansfield - Страница 38

Mr. Robert Parker taught Kathleen pianoforte for two years. Vera was the better musician, the better student of music; but even thirty years later he remembered Kass— “Well … very well. I can see her sitting there at the piano … her very attitude. It is remarkable how she noticed details at her age. The pale picture of Rubinstein (there it is) did hang above the mantelpiece, though there was no inscription; and the picture of Solitude was over the piano. She has the room down exactly in that — what shall I call it? — that very sentimental little piece about me in The Wind Blows.”

But Mr. Parker was renowned for sentiment. He leaned over a little as he talked, rubbing together those pale, slim, well-groomed hands. His slightly stooped shoulders seemed bent rather from hovering above his guests — so courteously, so solicitously — than from any stoop of age. His beautiful long hair was brushed smoothly back. It gleaned with its own light. His features, aquiline; his mouth, full and a trifle loose; but it was his eyes — the meaning glance in them. In the “quiet cave” of his studio, a music lesson with Mr. Parker could be a sedative, it could be a cocktail. Unimportant the composition:

“ ‘Nellie Bly

Caught a fly

Put it in her tea!”

“This exquisite morceau was in my pianoforte Tutor, words and all. Who could have composed it?”

He had the rare power of transmitting his own delight in music; and music was his life — taught at Miss Swainson’s School. He was on the staff until he was nearly eighty years old; even then he was as courtly as ever; and even after that his own students still felt that his look had some special meaning, some significance for them, alone.

Miss Mary Swainson herself took music lessons from him for years; and she sang to his accompaniment at St. Paul’s. The girls even told how the sexton had overlooked them when they were rehearsing one evening and locked them in the Cathedral.

If her singing class dragged, the girls wished Mr. Parker would look in, for then all lessons stopped; and they could have a little chat while the Mistress swept forward with her best outside-of-school smile. Kass glanced sideways at Diddy, when she saw the door open; but Diddy looked back at her, smiling pleasantly and raising her brows in a question:”What do you mean?” Mary looked discreetly down her nose.