Читать книгу In a Yün-nan Courtyard - Louise Jordan Miln - Страница 13

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Because there was diphtheria in one of the cottages Brent was allowed to spend his two weeks of Christmas holiday with Dick. At Easter Dick visited Brent. Luckily Sir Raymond approved young Wentworth heartily. After that no home-bar was put up against the boys’ growing intimacy. They were as inseparable as Juno’s swans, and did one another a deal of good, egged each other on to healthsome bodily achievements, spurred and restrained each other in several useful ways. Dick was the sturdier, had more of the splendid salts of aristocratic commonplaceness and of bounding humour. Perhaps Brent was the sweeter, certainly in his own quiet way he was the more determined; at once the more easily moved and the less to be influenced or swayed. Both were sunny, healthy boys, sound young animals, thoroughly nice boys. The Wentworths were as glad to welcome Brent as the General soon grew to welcome Dick.

Brent had been at Hurstcroft two years—two school years—when General Gayford first visited him there. Sir Raymond did not believe in butting in on another man’s job. No one ever had been allowed to butt in on his. And he took as good as he gave every time; that he did was characteristic of him. Too, he had no great enjoyment of educational establishments. They bored him; if they did not even embarrass him. Possibly he was not altogether unconscious that he did not show to his best advantage in a school environment.

But at the break-up concert of the boy’s second and last year of the preparatory school the old soldier appeared as a matter of honour, an act of loyalty to the grandson. A score of other of Brent’s relatives both paternal and maternal attended also.

Brent received three prize-books; one more than Dick did. And Brent played a solo—on a fiddle! Dick led the applause. “Bless my soul!” said the General. Herr von Schultz watched the grandfather as the grandson played, and avoided being presented to his favourite pupil’s “governor” a little later.

But on the whole Gayford was more amused than annoyed. It was a rum joke, he decided. And when the boy had to play “The Spring Song” again, in spite of “No encores” on the much too long programme the General put it all down to his child’s personality, and not for a moment to any budding gift as a music-maker. So, too, did all but one of all the other Gayfords and Brents sitting there—all very pleased to see how soldierly their boy bore himself, how calm, how well he stood, and how popular he was. His men would love him when he was Subaltern, Captain, and Colonel. That was splendid. His men would follow him anywhere—his aunts and cousins put it; “through hell-fire” was the General’s proud reflection—the fine old soldier whose three sons had died in battle’s hell-fire.

Lady Sarah, Brent’s great-aunt—a spinster at sixty-two, who disliked Raymond Gayford almost half as much as Sir Raymond hated her—read it differently; an exceptionally shrewd old woman, as musicless as the rest of them, but who knew distinction when she met it, and had a lifelong talent that approached genius for reading between lines—even faint lines. She looked at the General with a glint of malicious amusement in her hard agate eyes. But her always hard thin lips pressed each other sourly, harder than usual. Her father (except Brent and Brent’s mother), the one creature, the only thing, she had loved in all her thin life, had been a distinguished soldier. She would approve of an organ-grinder in the family as little as the General. But she saw how the boy’s slight hands loved the fiddle and its bow, saw their adolescent mastery; and while she winced, she rejoiced tartly to think of what Raymond Gayford, in her opinion, was going to be up against, if he lived a few years longer—which she had no doubt he would; all the Gayfords were tough. She might be mistaken, but she wasn’t often. Oddly enough, the woman, with no germ of art in her soul or body, in some inexplicable way, usually could sense the essential difference between an artist and an amateur.

Lady Sarah saw what she saw—or thought she saw. But she kept her counsel; it was her way. No one ever heard her say, “I told you so”; for she never had told them. The woman squandered as few words as she did smiles; silent and tart, but a grande dame for all that. Brent “rather liked” her. But the boy liked most people, if he thought of them at all. He was very fond of his grandfather. His love was all for Dick—and fiddle.

After Hurstcroft, Eton.

The boys both liked it, and did a modest amount of work, and made more than a creditable record at games. If he did not overwork himself at Latin or at maths, Brent worked enthusiastically at his music. Dick pursued with entire impartiality the various paths of learning imposed upon his attention. They all were tommy-rot, and all of them were Greek to him, he said. In saying that, he did himself some injustice, claiming more indifference and density than were his; that he did was characteristically boyish. He understood quite a little of what he worked at—when he worked. And once he handed in History Q’s that gave his tutor genuine pleasure and some little encouragement. But Brent worked harder at his music than Dick worked at all his studies, many times harder than Dick Wentworth ever would work at anything all his life through, and, take him all in all, Wentworth was no shirker. “Book learning” did not fascinate him, but there were other industries that did, and he served them not too meanly; for boy and man he was manly.

Musical Eton discovered Brent at once. His flute-like voice was charming; the violin was his instrument, but not his only one. Only his one master knew that timidly and shyly he began to compose—little tentative scraps, stray bars, of harmony. The boy’s soul was soaked in music.

The English musician—no mean one—often wondered how it would end. He did not realise as fully as von Schultz, centuried in the best Continental musical culture, had how intensely and greatly musical the lad was. And Mr. Kennedy not only knew that Brent, come from two races of soldiers, was dedicated to the Army, but he knew General Gayford—knew his quality and the set of his jaw, and he knew the pull and force of “family” in the caste to which English Brent belonged.

The Austrian musician knew how it must end. He knew little, and had seen less of General Gayford. But that was not why von Schultz knew while Kennedy only questioned. Von Schultz was confident that the boy’s art-bent was stronger than the boy, stronger than environment or any pull, however strong, of family, family prearrangements, or circumstance of future years. Mr. Kennedy thought that Brent might go far, Herr von Schultz knew that he must, knew that he inevitably would work out and follow his vocation, because it was vocation and because he must—unless only some woman perhaps should dam or shatter it. Only a woman ever could fetter or kill the artist, divert or poison the welling genius of Brent Gayford, the Viennese was sure.

But no one else suspected; least of all the Gayfords or the Brents—unless Lady Sarah ever recalled what had passed through her startled thought when her little grand-nephew, holding his fiddle as if he loved it, drawing his bow as if were self, a better, defter, dearer limb, had played “The Spring Song” at Hurstcroft.

None of the other boys knew. They were not a deeply musical crew. Among them there were a few good voices, a score that were not bad, a number played the piano prettily or with vigour. There was a boy in Brent’s house, another in his form, who played the banjo tunefully, and there was a fellow in Pop who was a wonder at it. But music was not an obsession with Brent’s Eton mates, and those of them who cared for it most said nothing about it except among themselves.

Dick Wentworth, who knew most other things about Brent, whom he loved even as Brent loved him, thought his friend’s fiddle, fiddle, fiddling a rather feeble joke, and always had. Dick had a musical gift of his own though; he whistled delightfully, with blackbird tunefulness. “The Boating Song” was at its best when Wentworth whistled it. “Land of Hope and Glory” (loved for him who wrote its lyric) sounded an affectionate anthem when Dick whistled it.

Brent was as popular at Eton as he had been at Hurstcroft. His music did not segregate or cloister him; it did not even mark him—among the boys. He was straight always. And he had charm—charm the other boys were quick to feel, although none of them knew he had it, or could have given it a name. And he had magnetism. He was powerful at footer, he was a beautiful cricketer. That marked him.

General Gayford came to Eton oftener than he had gone to the preparatory school. Eton did not embarrass him. He himself had spent a few riotous, unscholarly “halfs” there. But there! Every relative goes to Eton who can. Even ducal fathers and ones that are Cabinet Ministers are proud, perhaps a little vain, of having a boy at Eton, and like to be seen there with him. Who looks proudest and happiest at the Eton and Harrow match? Not the boy!

And at Eton, as at Hurstcroft, Sir Raymond made no comment at music-swollen bills. There was plenty of money. Brent was all he had. His own Eton bills had not been small, he remembered. When Brent asked for a new and better violin—the boy was not afraid of the old martinet, the General had taught him not to be; they were friends, and they understood each other well—the General laughed throatily, and bought the violin. It was a very good one. So long as he didn’t have to hear it played too often, its cost did not matter at all.

When Brent had proffered his request he had spoken of the new instrument he asked for as a “fiddle”—quite accidentally. Possibly, had he said “violin” the General might have gibed, even refused. “Violin” has a musician-sound, there is more than a smack of art—and serious art, at that—about it. General Gayford distrusted all art, would have scoffed at it, and sternly disallowed it as a soldierly attribute. But “fiddle” has a rollicking, barrack-room, camp-fire sound about it, not too inappropriate to an officers’ mess, in a lonely hill-station, especially after the C.O. has gone home for the night and the subalterns are left alone to amuse themselves with their own monkey-tricks. Teddy Charmichael, who had lived to earn his Cross and carry his baton, had played a banjo often at Simla, Jack Giles had had and mouthed a Jews’ harp at Gib, and Jack had died a General. Brent was welcome to his fiddle, and the grandfather scarcely had noticed that it cost more than an A 1 polo pony. He was used to footing preposterous bills for Brent, as he’d been to footing them for Brent’s father and uncles, and as his own father had been for him.

His grandson’s fancy for music struck him as the rummest thing he’d ever known. But Brent would have to do his turn at foreign service, of course. The General had no parlour tricks, nor any use for them. But he knew how jolly usefully they came in in Simla. Many a subaltern had owed promotion and his Colonel’s wife’s warm favour to creditable performances in the Simla A.D.C. Let the youngster fiddle at Simla if he liked. And since he wished for a new fiddle, it should be a particularly good one. Nothing was too good for the youngest, perhaps the last, of all the Gayford soldiers. The General thanked God that the boy was manly and clean, and paid the swelling Eton bills and paid for the costly “fiddle-thing” as cheerfully as he knew he’d pay presently for gorgeous waistcoats and other items of Sandhurst mufti—paid for the new violin and forgot all about it.

Eton days are swift. They went all too soon. Boys that were leaving choked at the old Eton Boating Song. The biggest, brawniest fellow in Pop buried his face in his handkerchief, and didn’t give a damn who saw him do it. Wentworth went up to Cambridge. Brent went to the Priory to spend a few weeks with his grandfather before he went to Sandhurst.