510
PARTISAN REVIEW
ness and grace which seemed youthful and contrasted with the professional
matter-of-factness, that matter-of-factness of the middle-aged artist that
has almost become grim, with which she had taken me into her workshop
before. We went again into the adjoining music-room, where the cellos
and violins, even the old dark cracked box of the clavichord, looked ripe
in the September light, which made things inside seem the ruddier for
the turn for the colder without.
It
was pleasant to watch Ellen's straight
hack, her sure and energetic features, as she took command of the key–
board. And the pieces were lucid and lovely-at moments even thrilling.
They did seem to me a lapse into the past: they were so much like. other
things she had written in a vein I thought she had put behind her. But
then, why shouldn't she escape into the past? It was better than going to
pieces. I noticed, however, in the last one an insistent reiterated phrase
which recalled the obsessive monotony of the movement from the sonata
she had played me. "I like the one about the cemetery particularly," I
said, wanting to reassure her after our rather painful conversation in
connection with the other piece. "I think you've handled that heavy
recurrent effect perfectly successfully there." "It returns to solemnity and
deadness," she said, playing the last bars again. "I wanted to give the
effect of the whole thing being anchored by the graveyard. In a place
like that, it's the dead, the men who have died at sea, that give life its
price, its seriousness. You feel them under the ground, just lying there
and never moving. The cemetery doesn't speak aloud, hut everybody
knows what
it
means. Even the lighthouse implies the cemetery-and
the gulls can fly around above the graves, they can fly ever so high up
above them-but the gulls are just light irresponsible spirits that haven't
anything to lose from the sea-the thing that's really serious is the human
dead, and the living who are pledged to the dead. The islanders who are
dead are lying there like the part of the island that's submerged-all the
part that's ahov6 water is based on them.-You see I've got suggestions
of the same effect in the other pieces, too." She showed me how the
flight of the gulls would fall back into the shadow of the earth and how
the graveyard returned a deep echo to the pealing of the Lisbon hell.
"Are you sure that that belongs with the gulls and the bell?" I felt
that it tarnished the clearness. "No:
it
doesn't
belong with them, of
course: it's supposed
not
to belong-but it has to be there just the same.–
Oh, I know it: it's flat, flat, flat!" she said suddenly, flinging over the
leaf and getting up from the piano. "It's the David Emery Nickerson in
all of us-or should I say, 'the Mrs. Wentworth of Brookline?'" She
smiled and .was amusing again.
She had said it as the French would say,
"C'est plat, plat, plat!"
and
I had noticed during our conversation an addiction to French gestures
and phrases. She had had
toute une histoire
over a manuscript she had
sent to a music competition, and she had shrugged over the inefficiency
of the old fuddiduds who made the awards. There was a certain fluidity
and elegance that might have been brought ba9k from Paris about her
