THE REHEARSAL
37
when, after the performance, he had to get up and shake the hand of
one of these upstarts, intruders, parasites, and his fluffy white lock fell
forward over his blushing forehead and he lowered his blue eyes as
he bowed. But then came the women conductors and the child prodi–
gies, and he felt bewildered and humiliated. They could not even ex–
plain what they wanted; they just put it across. And when he got up
to shake their tiny hands after the performance, he felt like a cartoon
in the
New Yorker.
And then came the blind conductors, with the
supersensitive hands, which was where the real trouble began.
Willem De Foe was not only a concert master, in the old sense,
he was also a master--one who had mastered a craft and enjoyed its
mastery. To fall into a trance while playing, hardly to know what
he had been playing after he played it, was repulsive to him; it hu–
miliated .and confused him and he yearned for his sixty-fifth birth–
day, still seven years away, which would give him the right to retire
from the orchestra. He could go on giving private lessons, playing
chamber music, and do some painting in his spare time: large trees
in the Lowlands, with solid green flat horizons and distant little
windmills.
The orchestra went into a trance. The audience went into .a
trance. And the world at large must have been in a trance. Imagine
the state of mind parents had to be in, to gouge out the eyes of their
promising boys in order to make better conductors of them. A few
hundred years earlier, the same parents would have castrated their
sons for the sake of their voices. But those too were mad times and
the people at large were afflicted with St. Vitus's dance and worse.
They did away with the castrating then, finally, as they had now
done .away with the blinding; but things had gone so far that conduc–
tors, even if they were not blind, had themselves led to the podium
by slender young boys and they wore thick dark glasses and their
hands were sensitive as though they were blind.
But that was not the worst.
It seemed only yesterday, but it must have been some twenty
years ago that the first rumors came out of the Yerkes Laboratory
that experiments were being made with teaching apes to talk. The
scientists did not make much headway along this line, but it must
have been just about that time that Dr. Hamilton Howard exhibited
the first piano-playing ape, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for
