526
PARTISAN REVIEW
When again there was a pause of a moment, Miss Bristead sat and
looked at her lap. But quickly she returned to the charge: "I suppose,"
she said humorously to the doorway," that the first section .represented
Baby .when he was just beginning to hang and that the second is called
Five-Finger Exercises."
The piano picked up when the space had been made. I listened for
this
movement with excitement. It began with the theme of obstruction
again, and, though this was now sharpened and speeded-up, I was at first
rather disappointed. In a moment, I was almost terrified. The four-notes
which had not let her move, now in their way became hysterically
i~sis
tent. The thing seemed to he getting out of hand and began to sound
absolutely hellish, a shrieking of desperation; and the horror of the
nightmare came hack on me. Miss Bristead got up and coughed slightly
and went out through the door into the hall as if she had to speak to
the maid hut at the same time desired definitely to indicate that she was
done with the music. I continued to listen, and there crept upon me a
freezing apprehension like that of those days when I had dreaded to come
to the house: the piano seemed to he carrying me, like the panic of my
dreams, to some had unintelligible goal. The awful accelerated movement
had passed from the negative of inertia to a frenzied destructive denial.
But now it met a new kind of theme which it seemed itself to have produced
and which was lifted like the human cry in the slow movement of Beet–
hoven's last string quartet, shuddering and terror-stricken at first as it
shrilled from the sinister harping that was beginning to tear like a beast
at a carcase, then rising to a plangency, to a clarity, that, passing the
conventional limits of this sort of affirmation in music, began to assail
one's attention more recklessly, more compellingly, more triumphantly,
just as the diabolic yapping of the other theme, becoming fiercer and
fiercer, had forced itself beyond all limits. This cry, itself now reiterated,
not only wrecked the hounds of the conventional,
it
even seemed to escape
from the probable--anguished, appealing, pitying, recognizing all human
discrepancy, debasement, self-disgust and self-accusal of the individual
who knows his own nature and who yet cannot undo what he is; hut
reaching by the voice of music out of the brooding of deformity in soli·
tude to speak to other beings of their solitudes and of the universal human
fate, declaring by its certainty of pain h.ow
~uch
our nature wrongs us.
The voice broke away: for that moment, becoming at once more complex
and more ordered, it had been with a life of its own-something
that shone and resounded and yet had a solid wholeness, something that
had left all deformity behind and that nothing now could ever violate.
Miss Bristead came hack into the room just as the final statement was
struck, pulling up perhaps a little short of the development one might
have expected and yet perfeetly making its point. "That was immensely
interesting!" she said to the person in the music-room. "It must he very
exhausting playing such violent music." She sat down lleside me on the
