AN UNLIKELY STORY
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I am hoping very much that this story will, as Agony Column advertisements put it, meet the eye of a certain Professor at a certain Academy of Music. Of course I might tell it to him myself, as he happens to be my Professor, at least from 7 to 7.45 on Friday evenings; but it is a story which involves a great deal of explanation and, well—things on the whole get believed better in print.
To be quite frank I did begin telling him at the time, but I saw that the first two words had destroyed his faith in the rest of it. I don't really blame him, for it began with "my cleaner," and I don't suppose that he has the ghost of an idea that, if you teach cooking, as I do, under the London County Council, they kindly keep a charlady to wash up for you and so on, and they call her a "cleaner."
The Professor is a very bad listener. I might have managed to explain to him what a cleaner is, but I never could have made him see why she was having tea with me, so I gave it up.
Really it is so simple. She lives at Cambridge Heath; I live at Croydon, which doesn't sound as countrified but is really so much nicer that no Croydon people who knew Cambridge Heathers could help asking them to tea at least once a year, when the garden was at its best. My cleaner's visit is always very delightful, because she makes the garden seem at least four times its usual size by sheer admiration; but this year, just as she was getting into her stride, it began to rain, and we had to seek refuge by the piano.
We sang "Where the Bee Sucks" and "Annie Laurie" very successfully, and she at last unthawed to the extent of remarking that she would give us a "chune," though she "hadn't stood up" to sing by herself "for donkey's ears." Stipulating that someone should help her out if the need arose, she investigated the inside of the piano-stool where the music lives, looking for a suitable song, and made, to her horror, the discovery that among all the odd pages it contained there was not one that had ever adhered to a piece called "The Maxeema," nor yet to a song which asks how someone is "Goin' to keep 'em down on the farm now they've seen gay Paree?"
The painful incident was passed over at the time, "The Long Trail" being discovered at the bottom of the pile and satisfactorily negotiated, and I forgot all about it until the next Friday evening, when, just as I was about to shake the dust of Cambridge Heath off my shoes, my cleaner, rising from her scrubbing, wiped her hands on her apron, produced two large limp sheets of white paper which resolved themselves into the music I ought to have had and hadn't, and pressed them upon me with all the eagerness of a more than cheerful giver.
A kind of panic seized me, for on Friday evenings I make the Academy of Music as it were a half-way house on my way home. Under the cleaner's kind and beaming glance there was nothing to do but put them into the attaché case in which I carry my music and try to believe that, wonderful man as he is, even my Professor wouldn't be able to see inside it when it was shut, in fact that it only rested with me to be quite sure that in his presence I only took out Chopin and not the gentleman who was interested in farming.
And I managed nicely. I took out the "Nocturnes" and shut the case up again before the cleverest (and nicest) of Professors could have guessed the company they were keeping, and he was graciously pleased to nod, instead of shaking his head, for most of the three-quarters of an hour. He really must have been pleased with me, for at 7.45 he told me that I showed marked improvement, and then kept me till 7.49 while he explained that a flair for the best of music such as I exhibited was both uncommon and, from a Professor's point of view, exceeding enjoyable. At 7.50—he, benign, I blushful—we approached the attaché-case.
"Allow me," said my Professor, reaching for it to replace Chopin; but I snatched it up before he could get it. Like most truly great men he is a little absent-minded, and he didn't seem to notice anything, but just held out his hand in farewell. But when my Professor shakes hands it means more than that; it means benediction, recognition, salutation—lots of things; for it is rumoured at the Academy that he never bestows that honour on any save those whom he regards as kindred spirits, acolytes at the altar of Music, personalities, not pupils.
And then my attaché-case opened itself quietly, after the manner of attaché-cases, and laid "'Ow're you goin' to keep 'em?" and "The Maxeema" right side up, and their names in such large print too, like an offering at his wonderful feet. Trembling at the knees I said:—
"My cleaner gave them to me."
But he looked at me and went on looking, and that is why I hope so very much that he will read this very unlikely story.