The Blower of Bubbles. Beverley Baxter
"What is it, Pest?" he cried. "Out with it!"
I smiled gloomily; but still it was a smile.
"Why," I said, "aren't the lamps in Sloane Square bright like these?"
He didn't answer. Probably he knew the truth would have hurt.
III
What a hole to dine in on Christmas Eve! Such waiters—such guests—such food—such wine!
I believe the proprietor owned three such establishments, each, in a triumph of irony, called "Arcadia." The very linen of the waiters drooped disconsolately, and the whole place reeked of cabbage and wet umbrellas. My spirits, which had risen momentarily from their classic depths, sank like the sands of an egg-timer.
"My dear fellow," I said, "you can't mean to dine here?"
An oily waiter ambled up to us and wrung his hands in a paroxysm of welcome.
"Your tabil, Meester Norman," he said in some nondescript foreign dialect, "iss ready."
Good heavens! The Blower of Bubbles had even ordered dinner in advance! With the feelings of an unwilling martyr, I followed my friend and his escort past tawdry millinery saleswomen, dining in state with their knights-errant of the haberdashery stores; by a table where a woman was gazing admiringly at a man with a face as expressionless as a pumpkin; through a lane of chattering, laughing, rasping denizens of the London that is neither West End nor East End—of people whose clothes, faces, and voices merged into a positive debauch of mediocrity.
When we were seated and had ordered something from the waiter, I turned to Basil Norman for an explanation.
"What is it?" I asked. "An affair with a seamstress, or are you just looking for 'copy'?"
He laughed and lit a cigarette.
"Pest," he said, "this is a caprice of mine, a tit-bit for my vanity. You would have chosen the 'Trocadero' or the 'Ritz,' with all the tyranny of Olympian and largessed waiters with whom it is impossible to attain the least pretence of equality. I prefer 'Arcadia,' where I am something of a patron saint, and am even consulted by the proprietor."
"You play to humble audiences."
"Quietly, Pest—the proprietor might hear you. He is a very Magog for dignity, I assure you, in spite of his asthma."
"I gather, then, that you are a regular diner here?"
"Hardly that. But I am a little more consistent than most of his patrons. To be candid"—he leaned towards me as if it were a secret of the first magnitude—"it's his cook."
"His what?"
"His cook. Really, I'm afraid he's hardly first class."
"I am certain of it."
"He would have made an admirable medieval Jesuit, but, as a matter of fact, I wonder Steinburg——"
"The proprietor?"
"Yes. I don't know why he keeps him on. He says the fellow has a couple of blind children, and if he were dismissed under a cloud he would have trouble in securing employment. But that's not business. The fellow's an ass, isn't he?"
Whereupon his face beamed with delight, and his gray eyes twinkled like diamonds. My comment on the matter was stifled by the arrival of hors-d'œuvre. I had no idea that one tray could hold such a variety of unpalatable things. At the table next to us a woman laughed boisterously, her shoulders, which were fat and formless, vibrating like blanc-mange.
"Ah!" said Basil Norman; "Klotz has arrived."
He indicated a low platform, where a dingy pianist, pimply of countenance and long of hair, was strumming the barbaric discords that always accompany the tuning of stringed instruments. A violinist, with his back towards us, was strangling his instrument into submission; while a cellist, possessed of enormous eyebrows and a superb immobility of pasty-facial expressionlessness, sat by his cello as though he had been lured there under false pretenses, and had no intention of taking any part in the proceedings—unless forced to do so by a writ of habeas-corpus. A fourth musician, who seemed all shirt and collar, blew fitfully into a flute, as if he realized it was an irrelevant thing, and was trying to rouse it to a sense of responsibility.
"Which," I asked, "is Klotz?"
As I spoke the violinist turned about and caught my host's eye. They both bowed—Norman cordially; the musician, I thought, with restraint. The fellow stood out as a man apart from his accomplices; his high forehead and dreamy eyes were those of an artist, though a receding chin robbed his face of strength. He was the type one sees so often—able to touch, but never grasp, the cup of success.
"Klotz," said Norman, "is superb. He has the touch of the artist about him. His tone is not always good, and sometimes he scratches; but when he is at his best he does big things. So many people can perform at music—just as so many write at words—but Klotz plays with color. His art has all the charm of a day in April. He will caress a phrase according to his mood, like a mother crooning to her child. To know how to hesitate before a note in a melody, as a worshiper hesitates at the entrance to a shrine, is Art, and an Art that cannot be taught.
"It is so with painters, writers, musicians—they must have that sense of color, that instinct that brings each subtle nuance of expression into being."
I began to feel bored.
Suddenly the orchestra became animated and burst into a waltz, one of those ageless, rhythmic compositions that might have been the very first or the very last waltz ever written. Supported by wailing strings and the irrelevant flute, the enjoyment of the diners took on fresh impetus. The lady with the shoulders became a vibrating obbligato. The pumpkin-faced man beamed fatuous delight, an electric light behind him giving the odd effect that he was illuminated inside like a Hallow-e'en figure. A girl, who might have been pretty if she hadn't rouged, took a puff from her toilet-case and powdered her nose. She felt that the evening was commencing. Over the whole scene my melancholy brooded as a ghostly presence. To me it seemed like the dominant seventh in a chord of surfeiting commonplaceness; once it was heard, the whole pitch of the evening would alter to another key.
Fortunately the dominant seventh remained unheard.
The waltz stopped, and we turned our undivided attention to dinner.
"Klotz," said my host, pouring me a glass of wine, "should have made a mark, but——"
"Damn Klotz!"
"That has been done, Pest. The Bricklayers' Union, or something equally esthetic, took exception to him for one reason or another, and prevailed upon its sister-cabal to debar him from the big orchestras. To offend your Union, dear boy, is to accomplish the total eclipse of your future. Even genius to-day is subject to regulations. Klotz is in a worse position than a clerk with a Board School education trying to secure employment in a London bank."
"Confound it!" I said, "there must be some spheres reserved for gentlemen."
His twinkling eyes steadied, and a dreamy look crept into them. "Pest," he murmured, "some day England is going to thank God for the gentlemen—who were educated at Board Schools. Listen!—the cellist is playing Saint-Saëns."
Dinner—or the mess of foodstuffs dignified by the name—was almost finished when Klotz, the violinist, started one of the rare melodies which Wagner permitted himself—the Song to the Evening Star.
It was being beautifully played—even I would have admitted that—but I could not account for the troubled look that crept into my companion's face, driving the gayety and the whimsicality from it as a cloud obscures the sunlight.
"Klotz," he said anxiously, "is in great sorrow."
"How the deuce," I muttered, with a feeling of creepiness stealing over me, "can you tell that? Do you read it in his face?"
He shook his head. "Listen!" he said; "can't you hear it? Can't you feel the tears in it?"
And in spite of myself I remained silent,