Elisabeth Mann Borgese
THE REHEARSAL
Perhaps he hoped it would tire him so much he would
have no energy left with which to be upset or angry; perhaps that it
would purge and cleanse his mind; but most of all it seemed to him
that if he walked, slowly setting one foot before the other, he would
get there later. Walking would, he thought, delay the unpleasant en–
counter; as, of course, it did not, for Willem De Foe was inexorably
punctual and he simply left home that much earlier than he would
have had to leave had he taken the tram as usual. He left, in fact,
before the housekeeper arrived, and he put a note for her on the
kitchen table, saying he would be late for lunch and wanted an
omelet and cheese and fruit, and that there was no beer in the house,
and that she should call the laundryman. Then he took his raincoat
and his briefcase and his violin case and locked the door and walked
and walked.
He resented conductors in the first place. Perhaps that resent–
ment flowed in his concert master's blood. They had run the show
for centuries, the concert masters, and then, these intruders had ap–
peared: somehow, they were a sign of the
times-duces,
leaders, dic–
tators, hypnotizers of a proletarianized mass orchestra. To tell the
truth, he despised the post-Wagnerian orchestra. In his spare time,
he played the viola d'amore and all his love was centered on the
seventeenth century, on those orchestras in which every member was
a virtuoso and the concert master
primus inter pares.
Yet he was ready
to admire the great conductors of the early and middle twentieth
century. He remembered old Jenkins, under whom he had played
when he himself was quite young, in the last chair of the second
violins. Or Knatthaus and Armageddon, who came later, when he had
moved forward to the concert master's chair. They were men he
could understand and appreciate, though he felt quite embarrassed
