Solo

Front matter

Solo

By Pierre Coalfleet

G. P. Putnam's Sons New York & London 1924

Foreword

When the last t of your novel has been piously crossed, you experience a major bliss of authorship: the interval of intellectual torpor that succeeds the creative act. Months later, in a new mood, perhaps in a different land, you your story which has, in the interval, gone to school, graduated, and come home a book—with a jacket and a price. The experience is not unlike playing for the first time a piano transcription of a familiar symphony. It sounds thin; you miss a dozen orchestral colours, despite the exciting gain in clarity and the alien timbre.

Suddenly the thought comes to you: but the public may not suspect that it is symphonic! For them it will be a sonata—and an unwieldy one. And a major chagrin of authorship is that you can't sit on the arm of your reader's chair and score in for him the parts between the lines. In the heat of writing you had taken it for granted that he was hearing what you heard, for was he not merely thousands of yous! He, you assumed, knew your people beforehand; that they were "born on Sunday, christened on Monday, married on Tuesday" and so on to the Saturday burial, because long before your day writers of fiction had recorded all the possible externals. But in this new mood, as you read impersonally what you had so personally set down, you are no longer the composer, and you see how absurd it was to think of the public as thousands of yous, when it is only a thousandth of you, just as you are a thousandth of it.

Whereupon another revelation comes to you: your story is "modern." That is only another way of saying that it has tacitly eliminated factors common to all the novels you had been brought up on—novels you had assumed your readers had been brought up on. Readers who have read many novels may catch factors in your story that you failed to "cancel out," and they will think you old-fashioned. Readers who have read few novels may not recognize your two-thirds as their four-sixths! They may consequently doubt your final product and think you over-modern. Readers who have read no novels to speak of may think you mad and your hero madder. They may not even be aware that "heroes" were cancelled out years ago and that death is not necessarily a tragedy. They may see darkness where you saw dawn, futility where you saw hope, despair where you saw transfiguration. And you can't hum in for them the subsidiary voices; the best you can do is to attempt a preface to the new edition, and you abhor prefaces.

P. C.

New York, 1924.

Part 1

Solo

Chapter 1

Section 1

Life as an endless suite of "variations on a given theme." This notion had filtered into the precocious imagination of Paul Minas, boy organist of the Baptist church in Hale's Turning, Nova Scotia, and dyed his mind as he played on and on through a favourite Bach prelude which luckily suited the mood of the "collection" interval. Solo performances rescued him from the chaos of the external world, bringing him into a mysterious intimacy with life itself. For the moment he was the melody. He felt the music as intrinsically as he felt the warmth in his body, yet his relation to it was romantically tinged with a dormant consciousness of the fact that Phœbe Meddar, seated in the pew with her mother and brother, was, perforce, listening.

The metaphor had not presented itself to him in words. His vocabulary, though fuller than that of Walter Dreer and Mark Laval, was a meagre wardrobe for the variety of rôles he was capable of performing. From a magnanimous prince to a starving poet, from Thaddeus of Warsaw to the Lazarillo de Tormes, he became metamorphosed with amazing facility. The notion of life as music had, without the agency of words, stolen into mind as he gave utterance by means of manuals, pedals and stops, to the voices which kept rising and falling, alternating and intermingling, intoning his theme in varying keys and modes, with varying degrees of passion, longing, doubt and conviction.

Each successive variation enounced the theme with accretions of character. With each recurrence, though undeniably the same entity, it was less naïve, more experienced. "Like the same person a year later," Paul might have stated it. He was far too engrossed in the sombre joy of performing to decipher whatever thoughts may have been flickering across the screen of consciousness, and it was only when a discreet "Psst!" smote his ear—thanks to Mr. Silva, the grizzled basso—that he emerged from his absorption. Then, with a surge of discomfiture, he realized he had played beyond the time limit. In the mirror above the manuals he saw that the ushers were standing with bowed heads, while the minister frowningly awaited his cue to murmur over the upraised plates a formula of thanks and consecration. With a hastily improvised modulation Paul brought the interlude to an end.

His feelings were hurt, for he had been playing with an exalted faith in the divine purport of the music and resented the anticlimax. Moreover, he imagined Gritty Kestrell and Walter Dreer tittering, and blushed—felt his neck and ears getting all red for the congregation to see.

He had been disconcerted more by the intrusion upon his private engrossment in the music than by a fear that his pride in "being organist" might have made him appear to be prolonging the offertory merely to show off. For having kept the minister waiting, he felt little or no compunction. The minister was only a prosy man with unpleasant thumbs and bad manners. As for the ushers, Paul objected to their pompousness when they made their rounds with the mahogany, baize-lined plates. They looked forward to that moment as the culminating point of the service, indeed of the whole week, for it gave them an opportunity of being conspicuous. This he guessed with an intuition sharpened by rivalry, for he himself looked forward to the same moment, for the same reason.

And he had an artist's horror of the noise made by pennies and dimes when the whole attention of the congregation should be focussed on the music with which he so fervently filled the interval. They chinked loudest of all when one reached the part that called for a hushed, "Æolian harp" effect. If he stopped to chide himself for an illicit desire to be conspicuous in the consciousness of Phœbe and Gritty and Walter—chiefly Phœbe, whose image was always before him during the tedious weekday hours of practice—he quickly came to his own defence with the reflection that, after all, he, a boy of eleven, perched on that bench, stretching down to pedals which had to be built up with pieces of board—he was obviously more important than four old men in shiny coats. Anybody could be an usher!

Those petty coins! He knew a naughty rhyme about them. Walter Dreer had whispered it to him in Sunday-school:

Dropping, dropping, dropping, dropping, Hear the pennies fall; Every one for Jesus, He will get them all!"

Section 2

At dinner, in the kitchen of the big cold house, Paul hesitated to tell Aunt Verona of the contretemps during the offertory. Much as he venerated Aunt Verona, much as he loved her in a repressed way, he was cautious with her. For, although Aunt Verona was kind and refrained from scolding or punishing, she had a habit, when he reported his lapses or when she caught him in a misdemeanour, of making remarks to herself. The remarks were often unintelligible, yet Paul dreaded them more than he would have dreaded a reprimand. They seemed to imply that some melody had gone off-key, that he had been guilty of a moral discord. And there was something haunting about her countenance when she was disappointed—all the more so in that her prescription of well-doing was never specifically set forth: one could only surmise its nature by means of the awful, muttering suspension of relations that followed any default. Yet despite its nonspecific quality, despite the fact that Aunt Verona never said "Do this" nor "Don't do that," as other grown-ups were for ever saying, there was something singularly consistent about her negative code. It became more intricate as you learned new facts, but it never contradicted itself. There were blind alleys in Aunt Verona's ethics, and she would often say, "Wait till you're a little older, child, then you'll see what I mean." But he was certain her prophecy would come true, for experience proved that the blank walls which had seemed to bar progress were in reality quite scalable fences beyond which lay inviting new fields. Growing up was largely a matter of discovering that Aunt Verona had been right about all the problems which had baffled one; consequently Paul paid blind homage to her wisdom and writhed whenever he was clumsy enough to bring a shadow across her face—whenever, as it were, he flatted.

He knew, of course, that Aunt Verona would ply him with questions about the morning service, and she was the one person in the world who was never bored when he talked about his experiments with new combinations of stops. If he told her in detail how Miss Todd had sung her solo, he did so merely because that implied a right to explain at equal length how he had played his prelude and interlude and postlude, and Aunt Verona at times fairly gloated, though she usually concluded with some such comment as, "Ah, but wait till you've mastered the new octave studies. It doesn't do to be easily satisfied. Nothing's so deadly as that."

One idiosyncrasy of Aunt Verona's puzzled him more than all the others. Ever since he had been considered big enough to march off to church she had exacted that he should memorize the text of the sermon, which she promptly wrote down on a ragged piece of brown paper and stuffed into a drawer of a cabinet on the kitchen dresser. What she meant to do with the texts, or why she collected them, Paul could not, after considerable straining of mind, imagine. Often, on Sunday afternoons, he had caught her bursting into a thin laugh and repeating one or two words of the morning text, and this day was no exception, for as she went to the stove to get the coffee he heard her muttering, with a nameless sort of relish, "Toil not—to be sure . . . spin . . . Heaven protect my wits!"

Not for worlds would Paul have ventured to inquire why Aunt Verona persisted in this rite, yet he would no more have dared forget the text than neglect saying his prayers, for if he did he knew that one of those blank expressions would come into Aunt Verona's face and she would go off to the playroom and sit for hours looking out of the window at the cherry tree, whilst he suffered inconsolable miseries of guilt at having been careless enough to let the pattern of life go "crookedy," to play a false note, as it were. Once he had forgotten, and on the spur of the moment invented a substitute, an old Sunday-school "golden" text that had leapt to his tongue as a very present help, and she had unsuspectingly written it down and stuffed it into the drawer. That had made him feel a cad all day. Even if she did nothing with the texts, it was a torture for him to know that there was one spurious text among all the genuine.

Every Sunday morning, immediately after breakfast, Aunt Verona took him to the playroom and gave him a final drill in the anthems and solos for the day, correcting him when he played too fast, and keeping a kind but uncannily vigilant eye on his fourth finger, which, for all the special exercises she had devised, persisted in being weaker than the others—a weakness which made for unsteady trills. Sometimes when he was practising alone she would call out from the kitchen in the middle of an étude, "Paul, Paul, go back two bars. You've left out an A-flat in the bass," and he never ceased wondering how she could unerringly name the note.

He had known for a long while that Aunt Verona was unlike every other creature in Hale's Turning, but he had taken her major oddities for granted. As he grew older he marvelled more and more. He wondered, for instance, why she never went to church, since she took such an interest in its affairs. He had been less offhand in his reports since the day, years ago, when, in reply to her query as to what the Sunday-school teacher had talked about, he had said, "Oh, about Jesus and God and all those!" For on that occasion Aunt Verona had laughed till she cried. He shrank from questioning her about herself, both because he was shy and because he knew she disliked personal questions, which she either evaded or dismissed with a peremptory "I'll tell you some day." In daylight she never ventured farther than the well, and as far back as Paul could remember there had been only three or four occasions, at dead of night, when she had passed through the gate into the street. These ominous sorties had been preceded by long fits of depression. Then Aunt Verona had gone to one of the unused rooms upstairs, put on a veil and some appall- ingly old-fashioned clothes, installed him before the kitchen stove with a book and an apple, and stolen out for an hour or two.

He had suffered mental agony during her absences, for he had guessed that she had been at the doctor's and the association of the ideas of doctor and night-time awakened in his mind a tragic memory. He saw himself again as a boy of three in Aunt Verona's arms wriggling, imploring his mother not to go away. He saw his mother run back into the room, kneel to kiss him, the tears streaming down her cheeks, then wrench herself away, heedless of his din, to go to a fiendish place she called the "sanatorium." At that point the picture became blurred, for she had never come back.

The terror bred in him by that dim tragedy had come stealing back like a ghost on the few occasions when Aunt Verona had gone out, steadfastly refusing to let him accompany her. He would rather have faced a legion of doctors with her than be left at the mercy of weird shadows, but nothing would have induced him to say "Yes" when Aunt Verona enjoined, in parting, "You won't be afraid, child, will you?" Ashamed of his fears, he sat with his book until the outer door closed, then retreated to a corner of the room, pressed his back against the protective wall and waited, tense and wide-eyed.

He wondered, too, why he should have to go on to Miss Todd's for choir rehearsal, when the choir might much more conveniently have come to Aunt Verona's. Miss Todd had only a tinny upright piano and her house was on the hill beyond the church, whereas Aunt Verona had a concert piano that had been brought on his father's ship all the way from Hamburg in Germany, the best piano in the whole province, and the harmonium which had belonged to his mother was almost as good as a pipe organ. Yet it was somehow unthinkable that the choir should come to Aunt Verona's house. For that matter nobody came but Dr. Wilcove, Mr. Silva, the chore-man, and Becky States, the coloured washerwoman, who wore long glass earrings which she had abstracted from a broken lamp-shade in the parlour. Gritty Kestrell and Walter Dreer and Mark Laval didn't count, for they were children and never came indoors unless it was stormy. Paul was ill at ease when he brought them into the bare house, because it was so different from the noisy, cheerful interiors of other houses. Yet he secretly noted that when Aunt Verona sat them down to a table in the playroom and served them with milk and bread and butter and jam and cookies, there was a vague distinction about the occasion that subdued Gritty and reduced the elegant Walter to whispers—Walter whose mother made entrancing frosted walnut cakes!

If people knocked at the door Paul answered. Unless the caller were a tramp, a gipsy woman or a pedlar, it was his duty to say, "My aunt's not at home," though every one in Hale's Turning knew the contrary. At first, when he had protested against this fib, Aunt Verona had said, "Certain fibs have to be told, child, in the interest of truth as a whole. Little negatives are sometimes comprised in a positive total. You'll understand one day. Besides, in Milieux, where people are less literal-minded, it's simply a way of saying 'She doesn't wish to receive visitors to-day. She had seemed unusually serious and had sat looking out the playroom window, her eyes on some remote horizon of thought. Paul, drawing a picture of a locomotive on the blackboard, had kept as quiet as a mouse. Then, speaking to herself, Aunt Verona had blurted out, "God, what a labyrinth, labyrinth, labyrinth!"

Her cryptic manner and the strange word had abashed him, and he had put down his chalk preparing to steal away. With a start Aunt Verona had remembered his existence and fixed him with a stern eye, modified by her extraordinary, serious smile. "You, child, must never say that. I can, but you mustn't. Promise."

He had promised readily enough and run out of doors. But at supper he couldn't resist asking a question which had been tormenting him. "Why mustn't I say 'labyrinth,' Aunt Verona?" he had finally ventured. Aunt Verona had been puzzled a long while, then broke into one of her rare, kind laughs. "It was the other word, child, that Aunt Verona wished you not to say—the first word."

"Oh, 'God?

"Yes . . . Except in your prayers."

From Aunt Verona's change of expression he had known he mustn't pursue the subject, and alone in bed he had got himself involved in an intricate piece of casuistry, trying to define the legitimate use and vain misuse of the name of the Deity. Intricate, because it had all to be negotiated without implying that Aunt Verona was a breaker of the commandments. The dire consequences of taking the name of the Lord in vain were minutely known to him. Hell was redder and hotter than the coals over which Aunt Verona baked onions when he had a cold, and it was obvious that one's own aunt would not go to such a place when she died. Besides, he took it for granted that Aunt Verona had been "saved." It was certainly lucky that his mother had been saved before she entered that fatal sanatorium!

Mark Laval, who attended Mass in the heathenish church across the river where the French-Canadian lumberjacks lived, had told him that only Catholics got to heaven, and Paul had run home terrified at the thought that his mother might be baking like an onion, till Mr. Silva, who was chopping wood in the yard, had reassured him. Mr. Silva—whom the people of Hale's Turning called "Mr. Silver" unaware that Silva meant "woods"—said that the Catholics invented such stories in the hope of converting you, and that night Paul had dreamt he was running for dear life down an endless corridor pursued by priests in black robes who were breathing hard and trying to lasso him with objects like bicycle tyres. He had stumbled and wakened just in time, but hadn't dared go to Aunt Verona's door and ask her to let him crawl into her bed, for he was a big boy of seven.

Section 3

Mr. Silva was continually throwing off remarks which were as unusual in their way as were the objects he whittled out of pieces of board. When the sap was running in the alders he could make better whistles and slingshots than Mark Laval. Mark was clever with his blunt fingers, but you couldn't be sure that his whistles would blow or that the bark wouldn't split, whereas Mr. Silva was infallible.

One day when Paul came in from school to practise, Mr. Silva was replacing the heavy lid of the piano; the piano à queue, as Aunt Verona had called it on one of their French-speaking days, and the phrase had made Paul giggle.

On a newly-tuned instrument old pieces revived, like wilting flowers when put into water, and Paul played with extra zest. Mr. Silva lingered in the room, and Paul guessed that Aunt Verona suffered him to remain because his ideas stimulated her, as did those of the tramps and gipsies. Paul shared her contempt for the general mentality of the village and her respect for the Portuguese Jack of all trades whom the village dismissed as "odd." He had asked Aunt Verona why Mr. Silva was contented to do chores for a living rather than return to Oporto where there were palm trees or go to Halifax where there were hundreds of pianos to tune, but it had been difficult to get all his questions formulated in German, which Aunt Verona made him speak on Mondays and Wednesdays, and she had merely replied, "Ohne Zweifel, weil er gefunden hat, dass er hier glücklicher ist, als irgendwo anders."

After Paul had tested the piano, he turned to Mr. Silva, who was standing in the doorway fingering his cap and beaming with a sort of wistful pleasure. "Ah," said the old man, "music is the universal language. If every one had an aunt like yours to teach them, there would be no more wars. The nations would take the yoke of Beethoven and Bach upon them and learn of them. When you grow up you will write noble music too, and people of all countries will play it, spreading love and truth throughout the world."

From Mr. Silva's speech Paul drew two overwhelming deductions. First, people wrote music! He had assumed that all music, the world's fixed répertoire, was comprised in the volumes and sheets which were kept in a trunk upstairs and brought forth one at a time, to be mastered in succession—a series which had commenced when he was five years old with "The Merry Peasant" and which was to culminate in a certain redoubtable Liszt Sonata for the satisfactory performance of which, when he had grown up to its measure, Aunt Verona was pledged to hand over to him the watch which the Queen of Holland had given his father for rescuing nineteen Dutch sailors from a burning ship. It had never occurred to him that Beethoven and Bach had once been boys, then grown up and made music out of their heads.

The second deduction was that German and Dutch and Spanish and perhaps even Chinese boys liked music too—the very pieces Canadian boys liked! He had, without stopping to think about it, assumed that music was English, like spelling and geography. He had always realized that one would have to talk German to a German boy, and one wouldn't have anything to say to a Chinese boy—except "Muckahighlo," which Mr. Silva said was swearing—but now he realized that, no matter "what nation of a boy" he might meet, he could always, in a sense, get on terms with the stranger by playing the piano. This rich thought coloured his hours of practice for many days. The following Sunday in church he pretended that the congregation was composed of delegates from every nation under the sun, quite without means of making themselves understood to one another until the moment when he climbed on his bench and old Silas out in the vestry turned on the water power that pumped the organ. And, before the choir straggled in, he gave himself the illusion that the congregation were sighing in relief and listening eagerly, that their minds, concentrated on the œcumenical strains of the voluntary—especially chosen for the occasion and sweetly condescending in spirit—were flowing into a single stream of intelligence, that the world was being flooded with good tidings. Phœbe Meddar—whose mother's hat was the only sign of the enchanted family that came within range of the organ mirror—was a delegate from Alcantara, a princess who knew not a word of any human language, but to whose ears every vibration of sound in the gilded Pipes revealed sweet secrets. Walter Dreer was a swashbuckling Don, secretly in love with the Princess, but unable to declare himself inasmuch as he couldn't even play "I love coffee, I love tea" on the black notes.

For days, as he sailed boats in the river with Mark Laval or whittled arrows and swords in the shop where Gritty Kestrell's father made coffins, he kept coming back to Mr. Silva's notion of music reaching out over the world as a healing and teaching influence. One afternoon, as he sat swinging on the gate in front of Aunt Verona's empty house, where tiger lilies grew rank among the long grass, he dreamed that Queen Victoria had sent for him and after touching his shoulder with a shining Excalibur, commanded him to go out to South Africa and play the Moonlight Sonata to the angry Boers—on a vast organ with pipes that stretched like a golden bridge to heaven.

Section 4

Paul and Gritty sometimes played "ship" among the impressive boxes which Gritty's mother forbade her to mention by name. Once Gritty had occasion to write the word, and she spelt it "coughin." In a small showroom were even more mysterious boxes, shiny and trimmed with metal. They had arrived ready-made from Halifax, wrapped in blue tissue paper which Gritty and Paul tore off and soaked in their school bottles, for it was a point of taste at school to have "coloured water" with which to wash one's slate, just as it was a point of respectability to have a slice of cake and an apple to top off one's sandwich luncheons on stormy days.

On his fifth birthday Paul had commenced school, for, although it was a Thursday and the middle of a term, Aunt Verona had had no choice but to fulfil a promise that he should be allowed to attend "when he got five." As Aunt Verona never appeared in public, it had fallen to the lot of Mr. Silva to escort Paul to Miss Ranston with an explanatory note.

His clean face and jaunty person were offensive to the big boys who played leap-frog in the angle of the school steps, and on the second day their sense of injury expressed itself in a concerted attack. He found himself enclosed in a ring of howling red Indians. Before his eyes were dancing legs and visions of lifelong humiliation; but he was armed with presence of mind and an umbrella. Deliberately he selected the ringleader and administered a jab with the umbrella point which in the confusion went to his assailant's eye and pierced it.

"Serves you right," Paul piped, as the others, scared at the sight of blood, fell back. That is what he said, and mounted the high steps, intact as a god, clutching his umbrella. Out of the enemy's reach he collapsed, and in sickness and horror clung to the caressing Miss Ranston, explaining to her what he had disdained to explain to the beastly others, that he had aimed at Bean-Oh's stomach, but some one had pushed his elbow.

He had, however, described a charmed circle about himself, even though his victim, who squinted ever after, was a torturing reminder of his first experience of meaningless hostility, his first battle for freedom.

His next epoch-making exploit, two years later, was to become enamoured of a little girl whose surname began, romantically, with the same letter as his own, and who consequently stood next him in the Friday afternoon spelling matches, To that little girl, Leila Meddar, there clung a most ethereal odour of coco-nut cookies. Night after night Paul lay awake composing dialogues designed for every conceivable contingency whereby they might find themselves together—they two and nobody else. He hoarded bits of tissue paper and rummaged in Aunt Verona's attic for choice rags, that Leila might one day have the prettiest bottle of coloured water in the class. He spent afternoons in the fields looking for new "secrets," a word which in the code of the undertaker's daughter and himself signified "flowering mosses." Whenever the time was ripe, Leila should be brought to see and admire them. To no living soul—not even to Gritty, who was a tomboy and a fairly safe confidante—did he breathe a hint of his ardours.

One Monday he was appointed monitor for the boys, and Leila Meddar, in automatic accordance with a romantic alphabet, was appointed for the girls. This meant that for five precious days it would be their joint duty to dust the blackboards and gather hats and coats for distribution at dismissal time. Daily he rehearsed a declaration for the cloakroom, but daily it adhered to his tongue. He could merely swoon in the sweet, pervasive odour of cookies.

One morning Leila was absent, and the world grew grey. Day after day her seat remained vacant, and Paul took to walking by the river, casting furtive glances at the windows of the white cottage on the bluff where Leila lived. There was no sign of her and he would go back to the fields behind Aunt Verona's house and say comforting things to his patient "secrets." Then one day Miss Ranston, in a queer voice, told them that Leila Meddar would never come back to school, for she had been ill and God had taken her up into heaven where she would not have to suffer any more.