Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches

M >> Maurice Baring >> Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches


"The first song he sang was the call of a home-going shepherd to
his flock on the hills at sunset, and when he sang it he brought the
largeness of the dying evening and the solemn hills into the elegant
throne-room. The second song was the cry of a lonely fisherman on the
river at midnight, and as he sang it he brought the mystery of broad
starlit waters into the taper-lit, gilded hall. The third song was the
song of the happy lover in the orchard at dawn. And when he sang it
he brought the smell of dewy leaves and grass, the soaring radiance
of spring and early morning, to that powdered and silken assembly. The
Court applauded him, but they were astonished and slightly disappointed,
for they had expected something grand and complicated, and not
three simple tunes. But the nobleman who had educated Franz, and his
Kapellmeister, who were among the guests, wept tears in silence.

"Albrecht followed him. The swarthy singer sat down to the instrument
and struck a ringing chord. He had a pure and infinitely powerful tenor
voice, clear as crystal, loud as a clarion, strong, rich, and rippling.
He sang a love-song he had composed himself. He called it 'The Homage of
King Pan to the Princess.' It was voluptuous and vehement and sweet
as honey, full of bold conceits and audacious turns and trills, which
startled the audience and took their breath away. He sang his song with
almost devilish skill and power; and his warm, captivating voice rang
through the room and shook the tall window-panes, and finally died away
like the vibrations of a great bell. The whole Court shouted, delirious
with applause, and unanimously declared him to be the victor. A witty
courtier said that Marsyas had avenged himself on Apollo; but the
nobleman and his Kapellmeister snorted and sniffed and said nothing.
Albrecht was given the prize and appointed Kapellmeister to the Court
without further discussion.

"When the ceremony was over, Franz, who was indifferent to his defeat,
went to the chapel of the palace, and lighting a candle, walked up into
the organ loft. There he played to himself another song, a hymn he had
composed in honour of Princess Kunigmunde. It was filled with rapture
and a breathless wonder, and in it his inmost soul spoke its unuttered
love. He had not sung this song in public, it was too sacred. As
he played and sang to himself in a low voice he was aware of a soft
footstep. He started and looked round, and there was the Princess,
bright in silk and jewels, with a pink rose in her powdered hair. She
took this rose and laid it lightly on the black keys.

"'That is the prize,' she said. 'You won it, and I want to thank you. I
never knew music could be so beautiful.'

"Franz looked at her, and said 'Thank you.' He had risen from his
seat and was about to go, but the light of his candle caught Princess
Kunigmunde's brown eyes (which were wet with tears), and something
rose like fire in his breast and made him forget his bashfulness, his
respect, and his sense of decorum.

"'Come with me,' he said, in a broken voice. 'Let us fly from this
Court to the hills and be happy.'

"But the Princess shook her head sadly, and said: 'Alas! It is
impossible. I am betrothed to the King of the Two Sicilies.'

"Then Franz mastered himself once more, and said: 'Of course, it is
impossible. I was mad.'

"The Princess kissed her hand to him and fled.

"At that moment Franz heard a noise in the nave of the chapel; he looked
over the gallery of the organ loft, and saw sidling away in the darkness
the dim figure of a deformed man.

"That night Princess Kunigmunde had a strange dream. She thought she was
transported into a beautiful southern country where the azure sky seemed
to scintillate with the dust of myriads and myriads of diamonds, and to
sparkle with sunlight like dancing wine. The low blue hills were bare
and sparsely clothed with delicate trees, and the fields, sprinkled
with innumerable red, yellow, white and purple flowers, were bright as
fabulous Persian carpets. On a grassy knoll before her the rosy columns
of a temple shone in the gleaming dust of the atmosphere. Beside her
there was a running stream, on the bank of which grew a bay-tree.
There was a chirping of grasshoppers in the air, a noise of bees, and a
delicious warm smell of burnt grass and thyme and mint.

"Near the stream a man was standing; he was an ordinary man, and yet he
seemed to tower above the landscape without being unusually tall; his
hair was bright as gold, and his eyes, more lustrous still, reflected
the silvery blue sky and shone like opals. In his hands he held a
golden lyre, and around him a warm golden cloud seemed to rise, on a
transparent aura of light, like the glow of the sunset. In front of him
there stood a creature of the woods, a satyr, with pointed ears, cloven
hoofs, and human eyes, in his hairy hands holding a flute made out of a
reed.

"Presently the satyr breathed on his flute and a wonderful note trembled
in the air, soft, low, and liquid. The note was followed by others, and
a stillness fell upon Nature; the birds ceased to sing, the grasshoppers
were still, the bees paused. All Nature was listening and the Princess
was conscious in her dream that there were others besides herself
listening, unseen shapes and sightless phantoms; a crowd, a multitude of
attentive ghosts, that were hidden from her sight. The melody rose and
swelled in stillness; it was melting and ravishing and bold with a human
audacity. As she listened it reminded her of something; she felt she had
heard such sounds before, though she could not remember where and when.
But suddenly it flashed across her that the music resembled Albrecht's
song; it was Albrecht's song, only transfigured as it were, and a
thousand times more beautiful in her dream than in reality. More
beautiful, and at the same time as though it belonged to the days
of youth and spring which Albrecht had never known. The satyr ceased
playing and the pleasant noises of the world began once more. The
shining figure who stood before him looked on the satyr with divine
scorn and smiled a radiant, merciless smile. Then he struck his lyre and
Nature once more was dumb.

"But this time the magic was of another kind and a thousand times more
mighty; a song rose into the air which leapt and soared like a flame,
imperious as the flashing of a sword, triumphant as the waving of a
banner, wonderful as the dawn and fresh as the laughing sea. And once
more Princess Kunigmunde was aware that the music was familiar to her.
She had heard something like it in the chapel that evening, when in the
darkness Franz had played and sung the hymn that he had composed in her
honour. Only now it was more than human, unearthly and divine. As soon
as he ceased an eclipse seemed to darken the world, a thick cloud of
rolling darkness; there was a crash of thunder, a flash of lightning,
and out of the blackness came a piteous, human cry, the cry of a
creature in anguish, and then a faint moaning.

"Presently all was still, but the dark cloud remained, and she heard a
mocking laugh and the accents of a clear, scornful voice (she recognised
the voice, it was the voice of Albrecht), and the voice said: 'Thou hast
conquered, Apollo, and cruelly hast thou used thy victory; and cruelly
has thou punished me for daring to challenge thy divine skill. It was
mad indeed to compete with a god; and yet shall I avenge my wrong and
thy harshness shall recoil on thee. For not even gods can be unjust with
impunity, and the Fates are above us all. And I shall be avenged; for
all thy sons shall suffer what I have suffered; and there is not one of
them that shall escape the doom and not share the fate of Marsyas the
Satyr, whom thou didst cruelly slay. The music and the skill which shall
be their inheritance shall be the cause to them of sorrow and grief
unending and pitiless pain and misery. Their life shall be as bitter to
them as my death has been to me. Their music shall fill the world with
sweetness and ravish the ears of listening nations, but to them it shall
bring no joy; for life like a cruel blade shall flay and lay bare their
hearts, and sorrow like a searching wind shall play upon their souls
and make them tremble, even as the scabbard of my body trembled in the
breeze; and just as from that trembling husk of what was once myself
there came forth sweet sounds, so shall it be with their souls,
shivering and trembling in the cold wind of life. Music shall come from
them, but this music shall be born of agony; nor shall they utter a
single note that is not begotten of sorrow or pain. And so shall the
children of Apollo suffer and share the pain of Marsyas.

"The voice died away, and a pitiful wail was heard as of a wind blowing
through the reeds of a river. And the Princess awoke, trembling with
fear of some unknown and impending disaster.

"The next morning Franz, as he walked into the chapel to practice on
the organ, was met by two soldiers, who bade him follow them, and he was
shut up in the prison of the palace. No word of explanation was given
him; nor had he any idea what the crime might be of which he was
accused, or of his ultimate fate. But in the evening, when the gaoler's
daughter brought him his food, she made him a sign, and he found in his
loaf of bread a rose, a file, and a tiny scroll, on which the following
words were written; 'Albrecht denounced you. Fly for your life. K.'
Later, when the gaolers had gone to sleep, the gaoler's daughter stole
to his cell. She brought him a rope, and a purse full of silver. He
filed the bars and let himself down into a narrow street of the city.

"By the time the sun rose he had left the city far behind him. He
journeyed on and on till he passed the frontier of the Emperor's
dominions and reached a neighbouring State. By the time he came to
a city he had spent his money, and he was in rags and tatters;
nevertheless, he managed to earn his bread by making music in the
streets, and after a time a well-to-do citizen who noticed him took him
into his house and entrusted him with the task of teaching music to his
sons and of playing him to sleep in the evening. Franz spent his leisure
hours in composing an opera called 'The Death of Adonis,' into which
he poured all the music of his soul, all his love, his sorrow, and his
infinite desire. He lived for this only, and during all the hours he
spent when he was not working at his opera he was like a man in a
dream, unconscious of the realities around him. In a year his opera was
finished. He took it to the Intendant of the Ducal Theatre in the city
and played it to him, and the Intendant, greatly pleased, determined to
have it performed without delay. The best singers were allotted parts
in it, and it was performed before the Arch-Duke and his Court, and a
multitude of people.

"The music told the story of Franz's love; it was bright with all his
dreams, and sorrowful with his great despair. Never had such music been
heard; so sweet, so sunlit in its joys, so radiant in its sadness. But
the Arch-Duke and his Court, startled by the new accent of this music,
and influenced by the local and established musicians, who were envious
of this newcomer, listened in frigid silence, so that the common people
in the gallery dared not show signs of their delight. In fact, the opera
was a complete failure. Public opinion followed the Court, and found no
words, bad or strong enough to condemn what they called the new-fangled
rubbish. Among those who blamed the new work there was none so bitter
as the citizen whose children Franz had been teaching. For this man
considered himself to be a genius, and was inordinately vain, and his
ignorance was equal to his conceit. He dismissed Franz from his service.
All doors were now closed to him, and being on the verge of starvation
he was reduced to earning his bread in the streets by playing his pipe.
This also proved unsuccessful, and it was with difficulty that he earned
a few pence every day.

"At last he burnt all his manuscripts, and went into the hills; the hill
people welcomed him, but their kindness came too late; his heart was
broken, and when sickness came to him with the winter snow, he had no
longer any strength to resist it. The peasants found him one day lying
cold and stiff in his hut. They buried him on the hill-side. The night
of his funeral a strange fiddler with a shining face was seen standing
beside his grave and playing the most lovely tunes on a violin.

"The name of Franz was soon forgotten, but although he died obscure and
penniless he left a rich legacy. For he taught the hill-people three
songs, the songs he had sung at Court in honour of Princess Kunigmunde,
and they never died. They spread from the hills to the plains, from the
plains to the river, from the river to the woods, and indeed you can
still hear them on the hills of the north, on the great broad rivers of
the east, and in the orchards of the south."




A CHINAMAN ON OXFORD

"Yes, I am a student," said the Chinaman, "And I came here to study the
English manners and customs."

We were seated on the top of the electric tram which goes to Hampton
Court. It was a bitterly cold spring day. The suburbs of London were not
looking their best.

"I spent three days at Oxford last week," he said.

"It's a beautiful place, is it not?" I remarked.

The Chinaman smiled. "The country which you see from the windows of the
railway carriages," he said, "on the way from Oxford to London strikes
me as being beautiful. It reminded me of the Chinese Plain, only it is
prettier. But the houses at Oxford are hideous: there is no symmetry
about them. The houses in this country are like blots on the landscape.
In China the houses are made to harmonise with the landscape just as
trees do."

"What did you see at Oxford?" I asked.

"I saw boat races," he said, "and a great many ignorant old men."

"What did you think of that?"

"I think," he said, "the young people seemed to enjoy it, and if they
enjoy it they are quite right to do it. But the way the older men talk
about these things struck me as being foolish. They talk as if these
games and these sports were a solemn affair, a moral or religious
question; they said the virtues and the prowess of the English race were
founded on these things. They said that competition was the mainspring
of life; they seemed to think exercise was the goal of existence. A man
whom I saw there and who, I learnt, had been chosen to teach the young
on account of his wisdom, told me that competition trained the man to
sharpen his faculties; and that the tension which it provoked is
in itself a useful training. I do not believe this. A cat or a boa
constrictor will lie absolutely idle until it perceives an object worthy
of its appetite; it will then catch it and swallow it, and once more
relapse into repose without thinking of keeping itself 'in training.'
But it will lie dormant and rise to the occasion when it occurs. These
people who talked of games seem to me to undervalue repose. They forget
that repose is the mother of action, and exercise only a frittering away
of the same."

"What did you think," I asked, "of the education that the students at
Oxford receive?"

"I think," said the Chinaman, "that inasmuch as the young men waste
their time in idleness they do well; for the wise men who are chosen to
instruct the young at your places of learning, are not always wise. I
visited a professor of Oriental languages. His servant asked me to wait,
and after I had waited three quarters of an hour, he sent word to say
that he had tried everywhere to find the professor in the University who
spoke French, but that he had not been able to find him. And so he asked
me to call another day. I had dinner in a college hall. I found that the
professors talked of many things in such a way as would be impossible to
children of five and six in our country. They are quite ignorant of
the manners and customs of the people of other European countries. They
pronounce Greek and Latin and even French in the same way as English. I
mentioned to one of them that I had been employed for some time in the
Chinese Legation; he asked me if I had had much work to do. I said yes,
the work had been heavy. 'But,' he observed, 'I suppose a great deal of
the work is carried on directly between the Governments and not through
the Ambassadors.' I cannot conceive what he meant or how such a thing
could be possible, or what he considered the use and function of
Embassies and Legations to be. They most of them seemed to take for
granted that I could not speak English: some of them addressed me in a
kind of baby language; one of them spoke French. The professor who spoke
to me in this language told me that the French possessed no poetical
literature, and he said the reason of this was that the French language
was a bastard language; that it was, in fact, a kind of pidgin Latin.
He said when a Frenchman says a girl is 'beaucoup belle,' he is using
pidgin Latin. The courtesy due to a host prevented me from suggesting
that if a Frenchman said 'beaucoup belle' he would be talking pidgin
French.

"Another professor said to me that China would soon develop if she
adopted a large Imperial ideal, and that in time the Chinese might
attain to a great position in the world, such as the English now held.
He said the best means of bringing this about would be to introduce
cricket and football into China. I told him that I thought this was
improbable, because if the Chinese play games, they do not care who
is the winner; the fun of the game is to us the improvisation of it as
opposed to the organisation which appeals to the people here. Upon which
he said that cricket was like a symphony of music. In a symphony every
instrument plays its part in obedience to one central will, not for its
individual advantage, but in order to make a beautiful whole. 'So it is
with our games,' he said, 'every man plays his part not for the sake of
personal advantage, but so that his side may win; and thus the citizen
is taught to sink his own interests in those of the community.' I
told him the Chinese did not like symphonies, and Western music was
intolerable to them for this very reason. Western musicians seem to
us to take a musical idea which is only worthy of a penny whistle (and
would be very good indeed if played on a penny whistle!); and they
sit down and make a score of it twenty yards broad, and set a hundred
highly-trained and highly-paid musicians to play it. It is the contrast
between the tremendous apparatus and waste of energy on one side, and
the light and playful character of the business itself on the
other which makes me, a Chinaman, as incapable of appreciating your
complicated games as I am of appreciating the complicated symphonies of
the Germans or the elaborate rules which their students make with
regard to the drinking of beer. We like a man for taking his fun and
not missing a joke when he finds it by chance on his way, but we cannot
understand his going out of his way to prepare a joke and to make
arrangements for having some fun at a certain fixed date. This is why
we consider a wayside song, a tune that is heard wandering in the summer
darkness, to be better than twenty concerts."

"What did that professor say?" I asked.

"He said that if I were to stay long enough in England and go to a
course of concerts at the Chelsea Town Hall, I would soon learn to
think differently. And that if cricket and football were introduced
into China, the Chinese would soon emerge out of their backwardness and
barbarism and take a high place among the enlightened nations of the
world. I thought to myself as he said this that your games are no
doubt an excellent substitute for drill, but if we were to submit to so
complicated an organisation it would be with a purpose: in order to turn
the Europeans out of China, for instance; but that organisation without
a purpose would always seem to us to be stupid, and we should no more
dream of organising our play than of organising a stroll in the twilight
to see the Evening Star, or the chase of a butterfly in the spring. If
we were to decide on drill it would be drill with a vengeance and with a
definite aim; but we should not therefore and thereby destroy our play.
Play cannot exist for us without fun, and for us the open air, the
fields, and the meadows are like wine: if we feel inclined, we roam and
jump about in them, but we should never submit to standing to attention
for hours lest a ball should escape us. Besides which, we invented the
foundations of all our games many thousand of years ago. We invented and
played at 'Diabolo' when the Britons were painted blue and lived in
the woods. The English knew how to play once, in the days of Queen
Elizabeth; then they had masques and madrigals and Morris dances
and music. A gentleman was ashamed if he did not speak six or seven
languages, handle the sword with a deadly dexterity, play chess, and
write good sonnets. Men were broken on the wheel for an idea: they were
brave, cultivated, and gay; they fought, they played, and they wrote
excellent verse. Now they organise games and lay claim to a special
morality and to a special mission; they send out missionaries to
civilise us savages; and if our people resent having an alien creed
stuffed down their throats, they take our hand and burn our homes in
the name of Charity, Progress, and Civilisation. They seek for one
thing--gold; they preach competition, but competition for what? For
this: who shall possess the most, who shall most successfully 'do' his
neighbour. These ideals and aims do not tempt us. The quality of the
life is to us more important than the quantity of what is done and
achieved. We live, as we play, for the sake of living. I did not say
this to the professors because we have a proverb that when you are in a
man's country you should not speak ill of it. I say it to you because I
see you have an inquiring mind, and you will feel it more insulting to
be served with meaningless phrases and empty civilities than with the
truth, however bitter. For those who have once looked the truth in the
face cannot afterwards be put off with false semblances."

"You speak true words," I said, "but what do you like best in England?"

"The gardens," he answered, "and the little yellow flowers that are
sprinkled like stars on your green grass."

"And what do you like least in England?"

"The horrible smells," he said.

"Have you no smells in China?" I asked.

"Yes," he replied, "we have natural smells, but not the smell of gas and
smoke and coal which sickens me here. It is strange to me that people
can find the smell of human beings disgusting and be able to stand the
foul stenches of a London street. This very road along which we are now
travelling (we were passing through one of the less beautiful portions
of the tramway line) makes me homesick for my country. I long to see a
Chinese village once more built of mud and fenced with mud, muddy-roaded
and muddy-baked, with a muddy little stream to be waded across or
passed by stepping on stones; with a delicate one-storeyed temple on the
water-eaten bank, and green poppy fields round it; and the women in dark
blue standing at the doorways, smoking their pipes; and the children,
with three small budding pigtails on the head of each, clinging to them;
and the river fringed with a thousand masts: the boats, the houseboats,
the barges and the ships in the calm, wide estuaries, each with a pair
of huge eyes painted on the front bow. And the people: the men working
at their looms and whistling a happy tune out of the gladness of their
hearts. And everywhere the sense of leisure, the absence of hurry and
bustle and confusion; the dignity of manners and the grace of expression
and of address. And, above all, the smell of life everywhere."

"I admit," I said, "that our streets smell horribly of smoke and coal,
but surely our people are clean?"

"Yes," he said, "no doubt; but you forget that to us there is nothing so
intolerably nasty as the smell of a clean white man!"




VENUS

John Fletcher was an overworked minor official in a Government office.
He lived a lonely life, and had done so ever since he had been a boy. At
school he had mixed little with his fellow school-boys, and he took no
interest in the things that interested them, that is to say, games. On
the other hand, although he was what is called "good at work," and did
his lessons with facility and ease, he was not a literary boy, and did
not care for books. He was drawn towards machinery of all kinds,
and spent his spare time in dabbling in scientific experiments or in
watching trains go by on the Great Western line. Once he blew off his
eyebrows while making some experiment with explosive chemicals; his
hands were always smudged with dark, mysterious stains, and his room was
like that of a mediaeval alchemist, littered with retorts, bottles,
and test-glasses. Before leaving school he invented a flying machine
(heavier than air), and an unsuccessful attempt to start it on the high
road caused him to be the victim of much chaff and ridicule.