THE REHEARSAL
39
on the keyboard in obscene rhythms. Then the trainer would rush
forward cracking a whip or eventually shooting a pistol, trying there–
by to forestall the worst: ape duos were liable at such moments to
engage
in
deadly combat, more than one Stradivarius had fallen prey
to their destructive moods, and the audience too, from the heights
of enravishment, easily lowered itself to lynching.
Strange mankind. Willem De Foe looked at his feet, in the
clumsy buckled calf boots they wore in the mid-twentieth century, at
his ankles covered by gray gaiters, as they overcame space, slowly but
safely, one two, one two, as man had done.since time immemorial ...
and he felt how his gait was encircled, besieged, importuned, threat–
ened, crushed and made nonsense of by the cars, bicycles, torpedoes,
hoppicopters and helicopters that made up the noisy, maddening
multilayer traffic of midtown, as he approached Concert Hall. He
clasped his violin case, made of genuine alligator, with his initials on
it, and with a velvet lining, worn away in spots, which had served
him over forty years, and he felt how his art, his pure and disinter–
ested craft, was enclosed, pressed, squeezed, belittled, annulled, made
absurd by the innovations of these days. The circle had closed, air–
tight and foolproof. The most futuristic means produced the most
archaic effects. Of flutes and snakes he thought, of the Pied Piper,
of groups crazed by irresistible rhythms and dancing to their death,
of others regaining their senses under the healing smoothness of song.
He thought of cows munching in air-conditioned stables, their glands
lovingly quickened by the outpouring of sweet milking music, the
grass visibly growing as the horn sounded. Of certain ancient modes
he thought, and wondered how it was that they disturbed the Greeks
so much they had to be censored by the government, and then he saw
it all happening again before his eyes- the crazed masses and the gov–
ernment seizing control of their art. Only what had been simple and
unconscious had become complex and calculated; electronic instru–
ments were producing sounds more elementary than the elements, and
brutes were now sophisticated.
Yet man, he thought, remained always the same. In a shop
window before which he had stopped, he saw white on black and
black
on white and the prices blurred on the tags. Then it all took
the shape of brassieres, corsets, pantie girdles, slips, nightgowns, and
