Evelyn Innes 1901 — Chapter 1

London: T. Fisher Unwin, 8 July 1901, pages 9-13, 2,918 words

I

An Elizabethan virginal had come to him to be repaired, and he had worked all the afternoon, and when overtaken by the dusk he had impatiently sought a candle, and he placed it so that its light fell upon the jacks.... Only one more remained to be adjusted. He picked it up, touched the quill and dropped it into its place, and when he had tuned the instrument his moment had come, and he sat running his fingers over the keys.

His face was in his eyes: they reflected the flame of faith and of mission; they were the eyes of one whom fate had thrown on an obscure wayside of dreams, the face of a dreamer and propagandist of old-time music and its instruments. He sat at the virginal like one who loved its old design and sweet tone, in such strict keeping with the music he was playing — a piece by W. Byrd, “John, come kiss me now” — and, when it was finished, his fingers strayed into another, “Nancie," by Thomas Morley. His hands moved over the keyboard softly, as if they loved it, and his thoughts, though deep in the gentle music, entertained casual admiration of the sixteenth-century organ which had lately come into his possession, and which he could see at the end of the room on a slightly raised platform. Its beautiful shape, and the shape of the old instruments, vaguely perceived, lent an enchantment to the darkness. In the corner was a viola da gamba, and against the walls a harpsichord and a clavichord.

Above the virginal on which Mr. Innes was playing there hung a portrait of a woman, and, happening to look up, a sudden memory came upon him, and he began to play an aria out of Don Giovanni. But he stopped before many bars, and holding the candle end high, so that he could see the face, continued the melody with his right hand. To see her lips and to strike the notes was almost like hearing her sing it again. Her voice came to him through many years, from the first evening he had heard her sing at La Scala. Then he was a young man spending a holiday in Italy, and she had made his fortune for the time by singing one of his songs. They were married in Italy, and at the end of some months they had gone to Paris and to Brussels, where Mrs. Innes had engagements to fulfil. It was in Brussels that she had lost her voice. For a long while it was believed that she might recover it, but these hopes proved illusory, and, in trying to regain what she had lost irrevocably, the money she had earned dwindled to a last few hundred pounds. The Inneses had returned to London, and, with a baby-daughter, settled in Dulwich. Mr. Innes accepted the post of organist at St. Joseph’s, the parish church in Southwark, and Mrs. Innes had begun her singing classes.

Her reputation as a. singer favoured her, and an aptitude for teaching enabled her to maintain, for many years, a distinguished position in the musical world. Mr. Innes’s abilities contributed to their success, and he might have become a famous London organist if he had devoted himself to the instrument. But one day seeing in a book the words "viola d’amore," he fancied he would like to possess an instrument with such a name. The instrument demanded the music that had been written for it. Byrd’s beautiful vocal Mass had led him to Palestrina and Vittoria, and these wakened in him dreams of a sufficient choir at St. Joseph’s for a revival of their works.

So when Evelyn clambered on her father’s knee, it was to learn the chants that he hummed from old manuscripts and missals, and it was the contrapuntal fancies of the Elizabethan composers that he gave her to play on the virginal, or the preludes of Bach on the clavichord. Her infantile graces at these instruments were the delight and amazement of her parents. She warbled this old-time music as other children do the vulgar songs of the hour; she seemed less anxious to learn the operatic music which she heard in her mother’s class-rooms, and there was a shade of uneasiness in Mrs. Innes’s admiration of the beauty of Evelyn’s taste; but Mr. Innes said that it was better that her first love should be for the best, and he could not help hoping that it would not be with the airs of Lucia and Traviata that she would become famous. As if in answer, the child began to hum the celebrated waltz a moment after a beautiful Ave Maria, composed by a Fleming at the end of the fifteenth century, a quick, sobbing rhythm, expressive of naïve petulance at delay in the Virgin’s intercession. Mr. Innes called it natural music — music which the modern Church abhorred and shamefully ostracised; and the conversation turned on the incurably bad taste and the musical misdeeds of a certain priest, Father Gordon, whom Mr. Innes judged to be responsible for all the bad music to be heard at St. Joseph’s.

For Mr. Innes’s ambition was to restore the liturgical chants of the early centuries, from John Ockeghem, the Flemish silversmith of Louis XI., whose recreation it was to compose motets, to Thomas da Vittoria; and, after having made known the works of Palestrina and of those who gravitated around the great Roman composer, he hoped to disinter the masses of Orlando di Lasso, of Goudimel and Josquin des Près, the motets of Nannini, of Felice Anerio, of Clemens non Papa.... He would go still further back. For before this music was the plain chant or Gregorian, bequeathed to us by the Early Church, coming down to her, perhaps, from Egyptian civilisation, the mother of all art and all religion, an incomparable treasure which unworthy inheritors have mutilated for centuries. It was Mr. Innes’s belief that the supple, free melody of the Gregorian was lost in the shouting of operatic tenors and organ accompaniments. The tradition of its true interpretation had been lost, and the text itself, but, by long study of ancient missals, Mr. Innes had penetrated the secret of the ancient notation, vague as the eyeballs of the blind; and, in the absence of a choir that could read this strange alphabet of sound, he cherished a plan for an edition of these old chants, rewritten by him into the ordinary notation of our day. But impassable obstacles intervened: the apathy and indifference of the Jesuits, and their fear lest such radical innovations should prove unpopular and divert the congregation of St. Joseph’s elsewhere. He had abandoned hope of converting them from their error, but he was confident that reaction was preparing against the jovialities of Rossini, whose Stabat Mater, he said, still desecrated Good Friday, and against the erotics of M. Gounod and his suite. And this inevitable reaction Mr. Innes strove to advance by his pupils. Many became disciples and helped to preach the new musical gospel. He induced them to learn the old instruments, and among them found material for his concerts. Though a weak man in practical conduct, he was steadfast in his ideas. His concerts had begun to attract a little attention; he was receiving support from some rich amateurs, and was able to continue his propaganda under the noses of the worthy fathers in whose church he was now serving, but where he knew that one day he would be master.

But, unfortunately, Mr. Innes could only give a small part of his time to these concerts. Notwithstanding his persuasiveness, there remained on his hands some intractable pupils who would not hear of viol or harpsichord, who insisted upon being taught to play modern Masses on the organ, and these he could not afford to refuse. For of late years his wife’s failing health had forced her to relinquish teaching, and the burden of earning their living had fallen entirely upon him. She hoped that a long rest might improve her in health, and that in some months — six, she imagined as a sufficient interval — she would be able to undertake in full earnestness her daughter’s education. To do this had become her dearest wish; for there could now be little doubt that Evelyn had inherited her voice, the same beautiful quality and fluency in vocalisation; and, thinking of it, Mrs. Innes held out her hands and looked at them, striving to read in them the progress of her illness. Evelyn wondered why, just at that moment, her father had turned from the bedside overcome by sudden tears; and, when they met in the parlour, Evelyn asked why her mother had looked at her hands so significantly.

He said that it was thus her mother foreshadowed Violetta’s death, when Armand’s visit is announced to her.

This was three years ago; but since Mrs. Innes’s death very little had been done with Evelyn’s voice. The Jesuits had spent money in increasing their choir and orchestra, and Mr. Innes was constantly rehearsing the latest novelties in religious music. All his spare time was occupied with private teaching; and discovering in his daughter a real aptitude for the lute, he had taught her that instrument, likewise the viola da gamba, for which she soon displayed even more original talent. She played both instruments at his concerts, and, as several pupils offered themselves, he encouraged her to give lessons — he had made of her an excellent musician, able to write fugue and counterpoint; only the production of the voice he had neglected. Now and again, in a fit of repentance, he had insisted on her singing some scales, but his heart was not in the lesson, and it fell through.

He was suspicious that she knew she could not learn singing from him; but an avowal of his inability to teach her would necessitate some departure from his own ideas, and, like all men with a mission, Mr. Innes was deficient in moral courage, and in spite of himself he evaded all that did not coincide with the purpose of his life. He loved his daughter above everything, except his music, and the thought that he was sacrificing her to his ambition afflicted him with cruel assaults of conscience. Often he asked himself if he were capable of redeeming his promise to his dead wife, or if he shirked the uncongenial labour it entailed? And it was this tormenting question that had impelled him to light the candle, and raise it so that he could better see his wife’s face.

Though an indifferent painting, the picture was obviously very like the sitter. The likeness was in the cold blue eyes, steeped in determination; the jaws, too, were nearly as significant as the cold eyes. This woman’s will must have been almost unconscious, like some deep mysterious instinct, and. it must have made everyone obey her. No one had ever questioned the desires of this woman, and Mr. Innes had found the happiness of his life in submission to her will. As he looked at the portrait he thought of her firm step as she passed towards her classrooms and the loving obedience she obtained from her pupils. He considered the tight, small mouth and thought of the calm, even voice, and then he thought of Evelyn’s mouth, which was as small, but vaguer in outline. Her face was more oval than her mother’s, and in the photograph which he took from the chimney-piece the line of the chin deflected, giving the face a beautiful wistfulness. He was still looking at the photograph when his daughter entered. Her walk was the undulating walk of a thin girl, with long arms and long slender legs. She was two- or three-and-twenty, and her eyes were full of energy and wistfulness, and they shed a charm upon her face. Her hair was bright and reddish, and harmonised well with her complexion, which was bright in the cheeks, and there were freckles under her ears. When she unpinned her black straw hat and laid it on the table her father admired her long beautiful hands, and the rich thick hair which slipped over her neck. She was dressed in a woollen material, the colour of the blackberry when it begins to ripen, and the colour suited her.

Her father, though he was fifty-five, had lost little of the original grace of a well-knit figure. He was not a tall man, and he was dressed in rough clothes like a workman, and Evelyn looked at him as if she liked him in his working-clothes. His hair and his beard were short, and the pointed beard suited the long, delicately-shaped nose. His grey eyes were mild and beautiful, and he stood rolling a cigarette, and his way of rolling it betrayed the dandy in him. For Mr. Innes was in his heart a dandy, though not in his clothes — though even in his clothes there was a certain consciousness; he was not dressed anyhow, though he was dressed roughly.

"Well," she said, "have you finished the virginal?”

"Yes, I have finished it. Try it."

She ran her fingers down the keys.

"Yes, it goes admirably; but I can’t stand this gloom," she said, looking round, "I must have some light. Besides, it must be getting late. I wonder what kind of a dinner Margaret has got for us. I left it to her. A good one, I hope. I’m ravenous.”

A few minutes after, she appeared in the doorway, holding a lamp high, the light showing over her white skin and reddish hair. "Margaret has excelled herself — boiled haddock, melted butter, a neck of mutton, and a rice pudding. And I have brought back a bag of oranges. Now come, darling. You’ve done enough to that virginal. Run upstairs and wash your hands, and remember that the fish is getting cold.”

She was waiting for him in the little back room — the lamp was on the table — and when they sat down to dinner she began the tale of her day’s doings. But she hadn’t got further than the fact that they had

asked her to stay to tea at Queen’s Gate, when her tongue, which always went quite as fast as her thoughts, betrayed her, and, before she was aware, she had said that her pupil’s sister was in delicate health and that the family was going abroad for the winter. This was equivalent to saying she had lost a pupil. So she rattled on, hoping that her father would not perceive the inference.

"There doesn’t seem to be much luck about at present," he said. “That’s the third pupil you’ve lost this month.”

"It is unfortunate… and just as I was beginning to save a little money." A moment after her voice had recovered its habitual note of cheerfulness. "Then what do you think I did? An idea struck me; I took the omnibus and went straight to St. James’s Hall.”

“To St. James’s Hall!”

"Yes, M. Desjardin, the French composer, has come over to give a series of concerts. I thought I should like him to try my voice.”

"You didn’t see him?”

"Yes, I did. He was coming down the stairs. The clerk said, ‘That is Monsieur Desjardin,’ and we went into the hall and I sang to him.”

"What did you sing to him?”

"‘Have you seen but a white lily grow?’ and ‘Que vous me coûtez cher, mon occur, pour vos plaisirs.’”

"Ah! that music must have surprised him. What did he say?”

"I don’t think I sang very well, but he seemed pleased. He said I had a very fine voice and sang the old music beautifully, but that it would be impossible for me to sing modern music without ruining my voice, until I had been taught. I asked him if it would not be well to try to earn a little money by concert singing, so that I might go abroad later on. He said, ‘I am glad that all my arrangements are made, otherwise I might be tempted to offer you an engagement. One engagement leads to another, and if you sing before your voice is properly placed' — "posée" was the word he used — ‘you will ruin it.’”

“Is that all?”

“Yes, that’s all." Then, noticing the pained look that had come into her father’s face, she added, “It was nice to hear that he thought well of my voice.”

But she could tell what he was thinking of, and, regretting her tongue’s indiscretion, she tried to divert his thoughts from herself. His brooding look continued, and to remove it she had to fetch his pipe and tobacco. When he had filled it for the third time he said —

"There is the Bach and the Handel sonata waiting for us; we ought to be getting to work.”

"I’m quite ready, father. I suppose I must not eat any more oranges," and she surveyed her plate full of skins.

Mr. Innes took up the lamp, Evelyn called to the servant to get another, and followed him into the music-room. The lamps were placed on the harpsichord. She lighted some candles, and in the moods and aspirations of great men they found a fairyland, and the lights disappeared from the windows opposite, leaving them still there.