“Ah, you wicked boy,” he said, “why even our dear Lady Sunningdale would recognise herself.”
Martin pushed his plume out of his left eye and laughed.
“That’s the joy of it,” he said. “She did recognise it. About half way through she said, ‘Why, that’s me.’ You know you told me to do that,—to take anything, the east wind, or a London fog, or a friend, and make music of it.”
“Play it once more, if you will,” said Karl, “and then to work. Not that that is no work. There is a great deal of work in that. Also I perceive with secret satisfaction that you do not find it easy to play. But the bravura is rather unkind. She is never quite like that.”
“Ah, the bravura is only her clothes,” said Martin, preparing to begin again. “She even told me which hat she had on. It is the one she describes as a covey of birds of paradise which have been out all night in a thunderstorm, sitting on a tomato-salad.”
Again Karl sat and listened to the torrent of fragments and currents of interrupted thoughts. Heard for the second time it seemed to him even a more brilliantly constructed absence of construction than before, an anomalous farrago which could only have been attained by a really scholarly and studious disregard of all rules; no one who had not the rules at his finger-tips could have broken them so accurately. It was a gorgeous parody of musical grammar in exactly the mode in which Lady Sunningdale’s conversation was a brilliant parody of speech, full of disconnected wit, and lit from end to end with humour, but as jerky as the antics of a monkey, as incapable of sustained flight in any one direction as a broken-winged bird, a glorious extravagance.
Karl had left his seat and stood near the piano as the bravura passage began. This time it seemed to present no difficulty to Martin, though his unerring hands were hardly more than a brown mist over the keys. And Karl felt a sudden spasm of jealousy of his pupil as a huge cascade of tenths and octaves streamed out of Martin’s fingers.
“Yes, indeed, the bravura is not easy,” he remarked, when Martin had finished, “and I think you played it without a mistake, did you not? Is it quite easy to play tenths like that?”
Martin laughed.
“I find I’ve got not to think of anything else,” he said. “Will that do for my composition for the week?”