While he was practicing, a message came from down the street that Colonel House would like to see him. Very little else would have taken him away from the piano at that moment, but he was soon in the Colonel’s study.
Colonel House came quickly to the point, as usual. “Next Thursday I am going to leave for Washington, and I wish to have with me your memorandum on Poland.”
What the Colonel meant was this: he had decided that the time had come to present President Wilson with a full-scale study of the Polish situation. What he needed from Paderewski was a memorandum telling exactly what he wanted for his country and how he thought it should be accomplished. It was the sort of document that half a dozen trained diplomats might work over for three weeks!
Paderewski felt as though a large mallet had just thumped him on the head. “Thursday! But I have my recital tomorrow! And besides, it is impossible to prepare such a document without the necessary data, and besides—”
“I must have that memorandum by Thursday morning!”
Paderewski had by this time learned one thing about the Colonel. He might be a man of few words, but he meant every one of them.
He walked back to his hotel slowly. At all costs, he told himself, he must keep his wits about him and not panic. During World War II there was a Seabee slogan that would have appealed to Paderewski, had he heard it. “The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer.” He himself operated along these lines. This job was impossible. It would take a while. He went up to his rooms and began practicing for four hours.
The program of that Tuesday afternoon recital included the Beethoven C minor piano sonata, Op. 111. This is one of the most taxing of all the sonatas in the kind of intellectual demands it makes on the performer. In addition to the Beethoven he played the Schumann “Butterflies,” one of his favorite recital pieces, and his own piano sonata Op. 21. Shorter works by Chopin, Liszt, Mendelssohn and his composer-friend Stojowski completed the program. And as usual in a Paderewski recital, the encores he played so generously were almost as extensive as the printed program.
Next morning the critics were enthusiastic about the pianist’s “bravura performance.” They spoke of the wild delight of the audience which agreed to go home only after the lights in the hall had been turned off. It was, in other words, “a typical Paderewski recital audience,” wrote the man from the Tribune. In it were “men and women of society, musicians, and many young persons, even boys and girls who will grow up to tell their juniors about the time ‘when I heard Paderewski.’”
Yet neither the critic nor the boys and girls knew what a fantastic scene they had just witnessed: Paderewski locked in absolute concentration on Beethoven and Schumann and the others, while the fate of his country waited silently for him on his desk.