The Complete Five Towns Collections. Bennett Arnold
do you think I had better play, Mr. Otto?'
'You must play what you have just played, of course. Tschaikowsky's all the rage just now. Your left hand's very weak, especially in the last movement. You've got to make more noise—at my concerts. And see here, Miss Toft, don't you go and make a fool of me. I believe you have a great future, and I'm backing my opinion. Don't you go and make a fool of me.'
'I shall play my very best,' she smiled nervously. 'I'm awfully obliged to you, Mr. Otto.'
'Well,' he said, 'you ought to be.'
At the age of fifteen her father, an earthenware manufacturer, and the flamboyant Alderman of Turnhill, in the Five Towns, had let her depart to London to the Royal College of Music. Thence, at nineteen, she had proceeded to the Conservatoire of Liége. At twenty-two she could play the great concert pieces—Liszt's 'Rhapsodies Hongroises,' Chopin's Ballade, Op. 47, Beethoven's Op. 111, etc.—in concert style, and she was the wonder of the Five Towns when she visited Turnhill. But in London she had obtained neither engagements nor pupils: she had never believed in herself. She knew of dozens of pianists whom she deemed more brilliant than little, pretty, modest Clara Toft; and after her father's death and the not surprising revelation of his true financial condition, she settled with her faded, captious mother in Turnhill as a teacher of the pianoforte, and did nicely.
Then, when she was twenty-six, and content in provincialism, she had met during an August holiday at Llandudno her old fellow pupil, Albert Barbellion, who was conducting the Pier concerts. Barbellion had asked her to play at a 'soirée musicale' which he gave one night in the ball-room of his hotel, and she had performed Tschaikowsky's immense and lurid Slavonic Sonata; and the unparalleled Otto, renowned throughout the British Empire for Otto's Bohemian Autumn Nightly Concerts at Covent Garden Theatre, had happened to hear her and that seldom played sonata for the first time. It was a wondrous chance. Otto's large, picturesque, extempore way of inviting her to appear at his promenade concerts reminded her of her father.
II
In the bleak three-cornered artists'-room she could faintly hear the descending impetuous velocities of the Ride of the Walkyries. She was waiting in her new yellow dress, waiting painfully. Otto rushed in, a glass in his hand.
'You all right?' he questioned sharply.
'Oh, yes,' she said, getting up from the cane-chair.
'Let me see you stand on one leg,' he said; and then, because she hesitated: 'Go on, quick! Stand on one leg. It's a good test.' So she stood on one leg, foolishly smiling. 'Here, drink this,' he ordered, and she had to drink brandy-and-soda out of the glass. 'You're better now,' he remarked; and decidedly, though her throat tingled and she coughed, she felt equal to anything at that moment.
A stout, middle-aged woman, in a rather shabby opera cloak, entered the room.
'Ah, Cornelia!' exclaimed Otto grandly.
'My dear Otto!' the woman responded, wrinkling her wonderfully enamelled cheeks.
'Miss Toft, let me introduce you to Madame Lopez.' He turned to the newcomer. 'Keep her calm for me, bright star, will you?'
Then Otto went, and Clarice was left alone with the world-famous operatic soprano, who was advertised to sing that night the Shadow Song from 'Dinorah.'
'Where did he pick you up, my dear?' the decayed diva inquired maternally.
Clarice briefly explained.
'You aren't paying him anything, are you?'
'Oh, no!' said Clarice, shocked. 'But I get no fee this time——'
'Of course not, my dear,' the Lopez cut her short. 'It's all right so long as you aren't paying him anything to let you go on. Now run along.'
Clarice's heart stopped. The call-boy, with his cockney twang, had pronounced her name.
She moved forward, and, by dint of following the call-boy, at length reached the stage. Applause—good-natured applause—seemed to roll towards her from the uttermost parts of the vast auditorium. She realized with a start that this applause was exclusively for her. She sat down to the piano, and there ensued a death-like silence—a silence broken only by the striking of matches and the tinkle of the embowered fountain in front of the stage. She had a consciousness, rather than a vision, of a floor of thousands of upturned faces below her, and tier upon tier of faces rising above her and receding to the illimitable dark distances of the gallery. She heard a door bang, and perceived that some members of the orchestra were creeping quietly out at the back. Then she plunged, dizzy, into the sonata, as into a heaving and profound sea. The huge concert piano resounded under the onslaught of her broad hands. When she had played ten bars she knew with an absolute conviction that she would do justice to her talent. She could see, as it were, the entire sonata stretched out in detail before her like a road over which she had to travel....
At the end of the first movement the clapping enheartened her; she smiled confidently at the conductor, who, unemployed during her number, sat on a chair under his desk. Before recommencing she gazed boldly at the house, and certain placards—'Smoking permitted,' 'Emergency exit,' 'Ices,' and 'Fancy Dress Balls'—were fixed for ever on the retina of her eye. At the end of the second movement there was more applause, and the conductor tapped appreciation with his stick against the pillar of his desk; the leader of the listless orchestra also tapped with his fiddle-bow and nodded. It seemed to her now that she more and more dominated the piano, and that she rendered the great finale with masterful and fierce assurance....
She was pleased with herself as she banged the last massive chord. And the applause, the clapping, the hammering of sticks, astounded her, staggered her. She might have died of happiness while she bowed and bowed again. She ran off the stage triumphant, and the applause seemed to assail her little figure from all quarters and overwhelm it. As she stood waiting, concealed behind a group of palms, it suddenly occurred to her that, after all, she had underestimated herself. She saw her rosy future as the spoiled darling of continental capitals. The hail of clapping persisted, and the apparition of Otto violently waved her to return to the stage. She returned, bowed her passionate exultation with burning face and trembling knees, and retired. The clapping continued. Yes, she would be compelled to grant an encore—to grant one. She would grant it like a honeyed but imperious queen.
Suddenly she heard the warning tap of the conductor's baton; the applause was hushed as though by a charm, and the orchestra broke into the overture to 'Zampa.' She could not understand, she could not think. As she tripped tragically to the artists'-room in her new yellow dress she said to herself that the conductor must have made some mistake, and that——
'Very nice, my dear,' said the Lopez kindly to her. 'You got quite a call—quite a call.'
She waited for Otto to come and talk to her.
At length the Lopez was summoned, and Clarice followed to listen to her. And when the Lopez had soared with strong practised flight through the brilliant intricacy of the Shadow Song, Clarice became aware what real applause sounded like from the stage. It shook the stage as the old favourite of two generations, wearing her set smile, waddled back to the debutante. Scores of voices hoarsely shouted 'Encore!' and 'Last Rose of Summer,' and with a proud sigh the Lopez went on again, bowing.
Clarice saw nothing more of Otto, who doubtless had other birds to snare. The next day only three daily papers mentioned the concert at all. In fact, Otto expected press notices but once a week. All three papers praised the matchless Lopez in her Shadow Song. One referred to Clarice as talented; another called her well-intentioned; the third merely said that she had played. The short dream of artistic ascendancy lay in fragments around her. She was a sensible girl, and stamped those iridescent fragments into dust.
III
The Staffordshire Signal contained the following advertisement: 'Miss Clara Toft, solo pianist, of the Otto Autumn Concerts, London, will resume lessons on the 1st proximo at Liszt House, Turnhill. Terms on application.' At thirty Clarice married James Sillitoe,