§ 7
What he told her might be summarized thus:
“A recital is an expensive business. It means taking a risk. If it is a failure it is a big failure. If it is a success it opens up a vista of bigger successes. It is the barrier which every first-class virtuoso has to approach and surmount. There is no reason why you should not attempt to surmount it. Provided you are willing to undertake the financial risk. After all, though you will never be a first-class pianist, you may quite easily be a second, and a good many second-class people pass the barrier successfully.”
As a sort of running undercurrent to his remarks there was the implication:
“There is no knowing what the British public may do. I prophesy neither success nor failure. Even if you aren’t tip-top the public may insist on treating you as if you were, in which case you will no doubt have a difficulty in believing anybody who tells you you aren’t. If the fickle public makes an idol of you, I can’t help it. I can only assure you you don’t merit it. In fact, I wash my hands of all responsibility for your future.”
Practically what he said was:
“I will help you as far as I can. I will arrange your recital, get you a hall, have tickets, programmes and announcements printed, and secure you a tolerable press. All this I will do without in the least guaranteeing that your enterprise will be anything but a howling fiasco.”
She had expected so little that she was grateful even for this. She had prepared herself to receive merciless rebuffs. What she had not prepared herself to do was to express gratitude. Consequently she found a difficulty in doing so. But no annoyance was discernible in him. He did not appear to want her thanks or even to notice the absence of them. And this in some inexplicable sense piqued her. She would have liked him to say: “Aren’t you grateful?” (Though, of course, it was just the last thing he would ever say.) But at least he might have waited enquiringly for her to voice her gratitude. And if he had, she would probably not have done so. But because he ran on talking of all kinds of irrelevant things she was both quaintly annoyed and intensely desirous of thanking him.
Suddenly she realized he was paying her the stupendous compliment of talking to her about himself.
“Of course I love music,” he was saying, “but I do not let it occupy my whole life. There are bigger things. Infinitely bigger things....”
She was pleased he had used the word “love” so straightforwardly, so naturally, so unhysterically. She was glad he had not said “am fond of,” or “am awfully keen on,” or “like very much.” Most men were afraid of the word; she was glad he was not. And immediately she thought: “If I had said it, it would have sounded schoolgirlish. What is it that gives dignity to what he says?”
“What are they?” she asked.
“The biggest and most important thing in the world,” he replied, “is life. Life is worth living, there’s not a doubt about that. But it’s more worth living for some people than for others. And the things that make or tend to make those differences are among those infinitely bigger things of which I spoke.”
She did not properly understand what he meant, but she was striving magnificently to seem as if she did. And the more she strove the more she felt: There are parts of this man that I shall never understand. And I am defenceless, I am at a terrible disadvantage, because there are no parts of me that he could not understand if he would.... And all the time during the conversation she had been noticing little insignificant things which gave her a peculiar, almost a poignant pleasure. His appearance was anything but effeminate, yet the whole pose of him as he poured out tea was instinct with an almost womanly grace. All his movements (excepting those that involved the rising out of his deck-chair) were so free, so unfettered, so effortless, even when they were uncouth. This does not mean that his table manners were perfect. They were not. Some of them were extremely original. He ate small triangular ham sandwiches at two mouthfuls. He dropped cigarette ash into his saucer. His cake dissection was ungeometrical. And yet he was all the while doing two things at once with such a superb and easy-going facility—talking and having tea. She admired him. She passionately admired him. She passionately admired him because everything she admired him for was done so unconsciously, so effortlessly, so unthinkingly. She watched the movements of his face as he spoke, and admired the splendid lack of symmetry that was there. She was fascinated by the appalling ugliness of some of his facial expressions. And she was fascinated by his supreme neglect of whether they were ugly or not. She shrank back at some of his facial eccentricities; she wanted to cry out: “Don’t do that again—ever! It looks terrible! It spoils you. You don’t show yourself to advantage a bit!” And the next minute she was admiring the nonchalance that made him so splendidly indifferent to the impressions he gave. The very hideousness of him at times was the measure of his individuality and of her admiration.