Читать книгу The Chord of Steel - Thomas B. Costain - Страница 7

Table of Contents

Alexander the Third, or perhaps it would be more to the point to call him Alexander the Great, was a Bell in many respects but in the most important aspect he went far beyond the others. To the rest of the family the teaching of proper speech was an end in itself. To the third of the line it was no more than a means to an end. In addition to his share in the family preoccupation, he was perhaps more deeply interested than the rest in music, art, and poetry. But the point of drastic departure was that his mind, even as a boy, had begun to explore the dim and far removed lanes of science.

This interest was instinctive and in no sense a result of his education. Mrs. Bell undertook the teaching of her three sons and it is certain she made no effort to open their eyes to the strange and hidden forces which govern the world. Had she done so, she would have been a real pioneer; for the schools of the day had not come to recognize science in any of its branches as a compulsory subject. She taught them regularly at home and even continued the classes during the summer, when they went to a small house in the suburbs which was called Milton Cottage.

It was not until young Aleck was ten that he started to attend a private school in the city, where he remained for one year only, afterward going to the Royal High School for two years. His graduation from the high school at fourteen was normal enough but he had not distinguished himself as a scholar. This is easily understood. It takes an all-round student to stand at the head of his class but this general proficiency does not always lead, sad to relate, to an outstanding career. On the other hand, the spark of genius, which may not manifest itself in the early years and probably would be neither detected nor encouraged by teachers, limits the interest of the possessor to the one field. Only because it is demanded of him does he labor through the rest of the curriculum.

The third of the Alexanders showed early the direction in which his mind tended. He kept a museum, collecting the bones of small animals and classifying them carefully and intelligently. His interest in botany was great. He studied the stars with intensity and awe.

He had inherited a love of music from his mother and she was eager to have him develop what seemed to be a real gift. Beginning at a quite early age, he took lessons from the best music teacher in Edinburgh, a Signor Auguste Benoit Bertini. The teacher found much understanding and sensitivity in the boy and took a particular interest in him. Young Alexander enjoyed his musical tuition so much that at one stage he decided he would devote his life to music. His mother, needless to state, encouraged him eagerly in this desire. She was becoming hard of hearing (an ironic twist of circumstance that a member of the Bells should suffer in this respect) but she did not permit this to interfere with her absorption in music. She continued to play the piano with a rather pathetic insistence, even after she was not capable of hearing the notes her fingers produced. When Signor Bertini died, she gave young Aleck lessons herself and she undoubtedly was disappointed when his early ambition to be a musician receded in favor of a far more gripping purpose.

Although it seemed that everything necessary was being done to give him a proper education, the family (and young Master Aleck himself) was to receive a shock when he was sent for a year to live with his grandfather in Harrington Square. There had always been a close bond between grandfather and grandson, and the year previous the boy had displayed his feeling by writing a poem to his progenitor which began with these lines:

I am thirteen years old, I find;

Your birthday and mine are the same.

I want to inherit your mind,

As well as your much honored name.

The boy was impressed with Harrington Square. It was lined with tall houses, rather severe and dark and decidedly formidable. In the center there was a park surrounded by a high wrought-iron fence. Only the owner or tenant was allowed a key, so that the use of the park was limited to those who lived in the tall, dark houses, together with their children, their friends, their dogs, and their cats. But Harrington Square, as represented by his grandfather, was not as well impressed with the boy. Alexander had arrived in a suit of rough tweed, the coat showing some signs of wear and the trousers baggy beyond belief. The Scottish ideal of tailoring seemed to be that the durability of the cloth was more important than the success of the fitting. The old man looked him over. He was getting old, seventy-one years, and he had been living alone since the death of his second wife. The house, moreover, was large and empty, and he had been counting on having his namesake with him. But there was still in the old man a hint of the actor and dandy. After one glance he decided that something would have to be done about the boy.

So he took him to a firm of fashionable tailors and had him fitted out in proper style, even to a top hat and cane. Young Alexander’s first reaction to this unaccustomed grandeur was one of dismay. He would have to wear the clothes when he returned home (for a suit, even with a growing boy, must last for more than a year) and he shuddered to think what his old friends would say of him, dressed up thus like a monkey. One is disposed to believe, however, that underneath everything he felt a secret pride in being thus arrayed like all the boys of his age who made appearances in the park below. When he went out, no doubt, he wore his glossy top hat at the proper angle and gave his cane a fine flourish. Boys, it may be added, always secretly like to be well dressed.

A second discovery followed, quite as disconcerting as the first. The boy’s education had been sadly neglected. He was almost completely ignorant of Latin and Greek and did not know his way about in the classics. The outward guise of the youth had been a small matter and one easily corrected; but this was serious. “If he wants to inherit my mind,” the old man said to himself, remembering the poem, “we must do something drastic about this.” Certainly young Alexander must be given a better grounding in the classics as rapidly as the library at 18 Harrington Square would allow.

It was a gloomy room (All proper libraries are dark. I would think nothing of one with sunlight streaming through it and full of comfortable chairs of the modern overstuffed variety), with high french windows and somewhat funereal drapes. But the books it contained were inviting and exciting. The old man took a deep interest in his progress and introduced him to the kinds of reading which would do him the most good. To his delight the boy found that the library seemed to have everything that had been written on the allied subjects of hearing and acoustics. His interest was fired at once. He found himself, inevitably, immersed in an article entitled “Principles of the Science of Tuning Instruments with Fixed Tones.” This would enchain his attention, for it dealt with certain vague ideas which he had been carrying about in his own head. Perhaps he took it to his grandfather and asked if the writer, whose name was Stanhope, had been one of the family for whom Harrington Square was named.

From what is known of the grandfather, it seems certain that such a query would result in a panegyric on the writer of the paper, that stout liberal peer (one of the most neglected great men in English history) who had been known once as Minority Stanhope because he often stood alone in the House. The Stanhope family, however, was a large one and an illustrious one, and different branches of it had held no less than three earldoms, that of Stanhope, Chesterfield, and Harrington. The authority on tuning instruments, a remarkably diversified inventor, had belonged to the Stanhope peerage.

It was, in fact, a richly useful year in every way that Alexander the Third spent with the old man, who had been forced into affluence by circumstances which had prevented him from following his own bent. Young Aleck had learned one thing he would never forget. Music could not be anything but a pleasant and genteel minor interest. The path was clear ahead. There were secrets to be learned about the manipulation of sound which nature was keeping hidden away. He must discover what they were.

He was a thorough Scot in one respect: he kept such ambitions and longings to himself. It is doubtful if his grandfather, condemned by his departure to more long years of loneliness in the dark emptiness of his fine house, was given any inkling of the strange fancies his grandson was carrying away with him.