“But was he acting?” said Mary. “Was he playing the fool for our benefit?”
“No, no. He was genuine all right. But when you’re genuinely in the position of the conscious villain in the melodrama, you inevitably begin to behave like the conscious villain. You act in spite of yourself.”
“But what’s he being a conscious villain about?”
“How on earth should I know?” said Rampion impatiently. Mary always expected him, by some mysterious and magical intuition, to know everything. Her faith sometimes amused and sometimes pleased, but sometimes also annoyed him. “Do you take me for Spandrell’s father confessor?”
“There’s nothing to fly in a rage about.”
“On the contrary,” said Rampion, “there’s practically nothing not to fly in a rage about. If one keeps one’s temper, it’s because one lives most of the time with one’s eyes shut, half asleep. If one were always awake, my God! There wouldn’t be much crockery unsmashed.” He stalked off to his studio.
Spandrell walked slowly eastward from Chelsea along the river, whistling to himself over and over again the opening phrases of the Lydian melody from the “heilige Dankgesang.” Over and over again. The river stretched away into the hot haze. The music was like water in a parched land. After so many years of drought, a spring, a fountain. A watering cart rumbled past trailing its artificial shower. The wetted dust was fragrant. That music was a proof, as he had said to Rampion. In the gutter a little torrent was hurrying a crumpled cigarette packet and a piece of orange peel toward the drain. He stopped whistling. The essential horror. Like carting garbage; that was what it had been. Just nasty and unpleasant, like cleaning a latrine. Not terrible, so much as stupid, indescribably stupid. The music was a proof; God existed. But only so long as the violins were playing. When the bows were lifted from the strings, what then? Garbage and stupidity, the pitiless drought.
In the Vauxhall Bridge Road he bought a shilling packet of writing paper and envelopes. For the price of a cup of coffee and a bun he hired a table in a tea shop. With a stump of pencil he wrote. “To the Secretary General, Brotherhood of British Freemen. Sir, Tomorrow, Wednesday, at five p.m. the murderer of Everard Webley will be at 37, Catskill Street, SW 7. The flat is on the second floor. The man will probably answer the bell in person. He is armed and desperate.”
He read it through and was reminded of those communications (written in red ink, to imitate blood, and under the influence of the serial stories in Chums and the B.O.P.) with which he and Pokinghorne Minor had hoped, at nine years old, to startle and terrify Miss Veal, the matron of their preparatory school. They had been discovered and reported to the head master. Old Nosey had given them three cuts apiece over the buttocks. “He is armed and desperate.” That was pure Pokinghorne. But if he didn’t say it, they wouldn’t carry revolvers. And then, why, then it wouldn’t happen. Nothing would happen. Let it go. He folded the paper and put it into the envelope. There was an essential silliness, as well as an essential nastiness and stupidity. He scribbled the address.
“Well, here we are,” said Rampion, when Spandrell opened his door to them the next afternoon. “Where’s Beethoven? Where’s the famous proof of God’s existence and the superiority of Jesus’s morality?”
“In here.” Spandrell led the way into his sitting room. The gramophone stood on the table. Four or five records lay scattered near it. “Here’s the beginning of the slow movement,” Spandrell went on, picking up one of them. “I won’t bother you with the rest of the quartet. It’s lovely. But the ‘heilige Dankgesang’ is the crucial part.” He wound up the clockwork; the disc revolved; he lowered the needle of the sound box onto its grooved surface. A single violin gave out a long note, then another a sixth above, dropped to the fifth (while the second violin began where the first had started), then leapt to the octave, and hung there suspended through two long beats.
More than a hundred years before Beethoven, stone deaf, had heard the imaginary music of stringed instruments expressing his inmost thoughts and feelings. He had made signs with ink on ruled paper. A century later four Hungarians had reproduced from the printed reproductions of Beethoven’s scribbles that music which Beethoven had never heard except in his imagination. Spiral grooves on a surface of shellac remembered their playing. The artificial memory revolved, a needle travelled in its grooves, and through a faint scratching and roaring that mimicked the noises of Beethoven’s own deafness, the audible symbols of Beethoven’s convictions and emotions quivered out into the air. Slowly, slowly, the melody unfolded itself. The archaic Lydian harmonies hung on the air. It was an unimpassioned music, transparent, pure, and crystalline, like a tropical sea, an Alpine lake. Water on water, calm sliding over calm; the according of level horizons and waveless expanses, a counterpoint of serenities. And everything clear and bright; no mists, no vague twilights. It was the calm of still and rapturous contemplation, not of drowsiness or sleep. It was the serenity of the convalescent who wakes from fever and finds himself born again into a realm of beauty. But the fever was “the fever called living” and the rebirth was not into this world; the beauty was unearthly, the convalescent serenity was the peace of God. The interweaving of Lydian melodies was heaven.
Thirty slow bars had built up heaven, when the character of the music suddenly changed. From being remotely archaic, it became modern. The Lydian harmonies were replaced by those of the corresponding major key. The time quickened. A new melody leapt and bounded, but over earthly mountains, not among those of paradise.
“ ‘Neue Kraft fuehlend,’ ” Spandrell quoted in a whisper from the
