“Yes, always a good chap, and so very patient,” he murmured to himself. “Do you know, Cumberland, I had to work—yes, to work—at that Symphony in the train. And I define work as doing something that gives you no pleasure. Talking about work, I must post these before I forget.”
He took from his pocket a number of post cards all addressed to Ernest Newman. These post cards appeared to amuse him immensely, and he handed them to me with a smile. There were about a dozen of them, and each bore an anagram of the word “work”—KROW, WROK, ROWK, RWKO, etc.
“He’ll receive these by the first post in the morning,” Bantock explained, “and if they don’t succeed in making him jump out of bed and finish his analysis of my Omar Khayyám for Breitkopf and Härtel, nothing will.”
Point was added to the jest by the fact that Newman has always been a particularly hard, and generally very heavily pressed worker.
. . . . . . . .
In his early manhood Bantock travelled a good deal in the East, not so much by choice, but because circumstances drove him thither. Yet I often feel that the [250] ]East is his natural home. Whether or not he has any close acquaintance with Eastern languages, I do not know, but he certainly likes his friends to think he has, and many of the letters he has sent me contain quotations and odd words written in what I take to be Persian and Chinese characters. I should not, however, be in the least surprised to learn that these are “faked,” for Bantock loves nothing so much as gently pulling the legs of his friends.
He has not, however, the foresight of Eastern people. His enthusiasms drive him into extremes and into monetary extravagances. When he lived at Broadmeadow, with its extensive wooded grounds, outside Birmingham, he had a mania for bulbs, and I remember his showing me a stable the floor of which was covered with crocus, daffodil, jonquil and narcissus bulbs.
“But,” protested I, “these ought to have been planted months ago.”
“I know, I know,” he said sadly. “But the gardener is so busy. Still, there they are.”
His philosophic outlook has been largely directed by Eastern philosophy. He admires cunning and takes a beautiful and childlike delight in believing that he possesses that quality in abundance. But in reality, he cannot deceive. Even his card tricks are amateurish, and his chess-playing is only just good.