“So pleased,” shouted Madame Kropotky through the clamour. “Sit by me. Vanya will get you something to drink. It is beautiful, yes? That is Stanislas—such a genius his new work on the Piccadilly Tube Station—great, n’est-ce pas? Five days he was continually travelling upon the escalator to absorb the tone values.”
“Colossal!” yelled Wimsey.
“So—you think? Ah! You can appreciate! You understand it is really for the big orchestra. On the piano it is nothing. It needs the brass, the effects, the timpani-b’rrrrrrr! So! But one seizes the form, the outline! Ah! it finishes! Superb! Magnificent!”
The enormous clatter ceased. The pianist mopped his face and glared haggardly round. The violinist put down its instrument and stood up, revealing itself, by its legs, to be female. The room exploded into conversation. Madame Kropotky leapt over her seated guests and embraced the perspiring Stanislas on both cheeks. The frying pan was lifted from the stove in a fusillade of spitting fat, a shriek went up for “Vanya” and presently a cadaverous face was pushed down to Wimsey’s, and a deep guttural voice barked at him: “What will you drink?” while simultaneously a plate of kippers came hovering perilously over his shoulder.
“Thanks,” said Wimsey, “I have just dined—just dined,” he roared despairingly, “full up, complet!”
Marjorie came to the rescue with a shriller voice and more determined refusal.
“Take those dreadful things away, Vanya. They make me sick. Give us some tea, tea, tea!”
“Tea!” echoed the cadaverous man, “they want tea! What do you think of Stanislas’ tone poem? Strong, modern, eh? The soul of rebellion in the crowd—the clash, the revolt at the heart of the machinery. It gives the bourgeois something to think of, oh, yes!”
“Bah!” said a voice in Wimsey’s ear, as the cadaverous man turned away, “it is nothing. Bourgeois music. Programme music. Pretty!—You should hear Vrilovitch’s Ecstasy on the letter Z. That is pure vibration with no antiquated pattern in it. Stanislas—he thinks much of himself, but it is old as the hills—you can sense the resolution at the back of all his discords. Mere harmony in camouflage. Nothing in it. But he takes them all in because he has red hair and reveals his bony structure.”
The speaker certainly did not err along these lines, for he was as bald and round as a billiard ball. Wimsey replied soothingly:
“Well, what can you do with the wretched and antiquated instruments of our orchestra? A diatonic scale, bah! Thirteen miserable, bourgeois semitones, pooh! To express the infinite complexity of modern emotion, you need a scale of thirty-two notes to the octave.”
“But why cling to the octave?” said the fat man. “Till you can cast away the octave and its sentimental associations, you walk in fetters of convention.”
“That’s the spirit!” said Wimsey. “I would dispense with all definite notes. After all, the cat does not need them for his midnight melodies, powerful and expressive as they are. The love hunger of the stallion takes no account of octave or interval in giving forth the cry of passion. It is only man, trammelled by a stultifying convention—Oh, hullo, Marjorie, sorry—what is it?”
“Come and talk to Ryland Vaughan,” said Marjorie. “I have told him you are a tremendous admirer of Philip Boyes’ books. Have you read them?”
“Some of them. But I think I’m getting lightheaded.”
“You’ll feel worse in an hour or so. So you’d better come now.” She steered him to a remote spot near the gas oven, where an extremely elongated man was sitting curled up on a floor cushion, eating caviar out of a jar with a pickle fork. He greeted Wimsey with a sort of lugubrious enthusiasm.
“Hell of a place,” he said, “hell of a business altogether. This stove’s too hot. Have a drink. What the devil else can one do? I come here, because Philip used to come here. Habit, you know. I hate it, but there’s nowhere else to go.”
“You knew him very well, of course,” said Wimsey, seating himself in a wastepaper basket, and wishing he was wearing a bathing suit.
“I was his only real friend,” said Ryland Vaughan, mournfully. “All the rest only cared to pick his brains. Apes! parrots! all the bloody lot of them.”
“I’ve read his books and thought them very fine,” said Wimsey, with some sincerity. “But he seemed to me an unhappy soul.”
“Nobody understood him,” said Vaughan. “They called him difficult—who wouldn’t be difficult with so much to fight against? They sucked the blood out of him, and his damned thieves of publishers took every blasted coin they could lay their hands on. And then that bitch of a woman poisoned him. My God, what a life!”
“Yes, but what
