It was then, for the first time, that I saw Guido impatient. “Vai!” he whispered angrily, slapped at Robin’s clutching hand and pushed him roughly away. And he leaned a little closer to the instrument, as though to make up by yet intenser listening for what the interruption had caused him to miss.
Robin looked at him, astonished. Such a thing had never happened before. Then he burst out crying and came to me for consolation.
When the quarrel was made up—and Guido was sincerely repentant, was as nice as he knew how to be when the music had stopped and his mind was free to think of Robin once more—I asked him how he liked the music. He said he thought it was beautiful. But bello in Italian is too vague a word, too easily and frequently uttered, to mean very much.
“What did you like best?” I insisted. For he had seemed to enjoy it so much that I was curious to find out what had really impressed him.
He was silent for a moment, pensively frowning. “Well,” he said at last, “I liked the bit that went like this.” And he hummed a long phrase. “And then there’s the other thing singing at the same time—but what are those things,” he interrupted himself, “that sing like that?”
“They’re called violins,” I said.
“Violins.” He nodded. “Well, the other violin goes like this.” He hummed again. “Why can’t one sing both at once? And what is in that box? What makes it make that noise?” The child poured out his questions.
I answered him as best I could, showing him the little spirals on the disk, the needle, the diaphragm. I told him to remember how the string of the guitar trembled when one plucked it; sound is a shaking in the air, I told him, and I tried to explain how those shakings get printed on the black disk. Guido listened to me very gravely, nodding from time to time. I had the impression that he understood perfectly well everything I was saying.
By this time, however, poor Robin was so dreadfully bored that in pity for him I had to send the two children out into the garden to play. Guido went obediently; but I could see that he would have preferred to stay indoors and listen to more music. A little while later, when I looked out, he was hiding in the dark recesses of the big bay tree, roaring like a lion, and Robin, laughing, but a little nervously, as though he were afraid that the horrible noise might possibly turn out, after all, to be the roaring of a real lion, was beating the bush with a stick, and shouting, “Come out, come out! I want to shoot you.”
After lunch, when Robin had gone upstairs for his afternoon sleep, he re-appeared. “May I listen to the music now?” he asked. And for an hour he sat there in front of the instrument, his head cocked slightly on one side, listening while I put on one disk after another.
Thenceforward he came every afternoon. Very soon he knew all my library of records, had his preferences and dislikes, and could ask for what he wanted by humming the principal theme.
“I don’t like that one,” he said of Strauss’s “Till Eulen Spiegel.” “It’s like what we sing in our house. Not really like, you know. But somehow rather like, all the same. You understand?” He looked at us perplexedly and appealingly, as though begging us to understand what he meant and so save him from going on explaining. We nodded. Guido went on. “And then,” he said, “the end doesn’t seem to come properly out of the beginning. It’s not like the one you played the first time.” He hummed a bar or two from the slow movement of Bach’s D Minor Concerto.
“It isn’t,” I suggested, “like saying: All little boys like playing. Guido is a little boy. Therefore Guido likes playing.”
He frowned. “Yes, perhaps that’s it,” he said at last. “The one you played first is more like that. But, you know,” he added, with an excessive regard for truth, “I don’t like playing as much as Robin does.”
Wagner was among his dislikes; so was Debussy. When I played the record of one of Debussy’s Arabesques, he said, “Why does he say the same thing over and over again? He ought to say something new, or go on, or make the thing grow. Can’t he think of anything different?” But he was less censorious about the “Après-Midi d’un Faune.” “The things have beautiful voices,” he said.
Mozart overwhelmed him with delight. The duet from Don Giovanni, which his father had found insufficiently palpitating, enchanted Guido. But he preferred the quartets and the orchestral pieces.
“I like music,” he said, “better than singing.”
Most people, I reflected, like singing better than music; are more interested in the executant than in what he executes, and find the impersonal orchestra less moving than the soloist. The touch of the pianist is the human touch, and the soprano’s high C is the personal note. It is for the sake of this touch, that note, that audiences fill the concert halls.
Guido, however, preferred music. True, he liked “La ci darem”; he liked “Deh vieni alla finestra”; he thought “Che soave zefiretto” so lovely that almost all our concerts had to begin with it. But he preferred the other things. The Figaro overture was one of his favourites. There is a passage not far from the beginning of the piece, where the first violins suddenly go rocketing up into the heights of loveliness; as the music approached that point, I used always to see a smile developing and gradually brightening on Guido’s face, and when, punctually, the thing happened, he clapped his hands and laughed aloud with pleasure.
On the other side of the same disk, it happened, was recorded Beethoven’s Egmont overture. He liked that almost better than Figaro.
“It has more voices,” he explained. And I was delighted by the acuteness of the criticism; for it is precisely in the richness of its orchestration that Egmont goes beyond Figaro.
But what stirred him almost more than anything was the Coriolan overture. The third movement of the Fifth Symphony, the second movement of the Seventh, the slow movement of the Emperor Concerto—all these things ran it pretty close. But none excited him so much as Coriolan. One day he made me play it three or four times in succession; then he put it away.
“I don’t think I want to hear that any more,” he said.
“Why not?”
“It’s too … too …” he hesitated, “too big,” he said at last. “I don’t really understand it. Play me the one that goes like this.” He hummed the phrase from the D Minor Concerto.
“Do you like that one better?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No, it’s not that exactly. But it’s easier.”
“Easier?” It seemed to me rather a queer word to apply to Bach.
“I understand it better.”
One afternoon, while we were in the middle of our concert, Signora Bondi was ushered in. She began at once to be overwhelmingly affectionate towards the child; kissed him, patted his head, paid him the most outrageous compliments on his appearance. Guido edged away from her.
“And do you like music?” she asked.
The child nodded.
“I think he has a gift,” I said. “At any rate, he has a wonderful ear and a power of listening and criticising such as I’ve never met with in a child of that age. We’re thinking of hiring a piano for him to learn on.”
A moment later I was cursing myself for my undue frankness in praising the boy. For Signora Bondi began immediately to protest that, if she could have the upbringing of the child, she would give him the best masters, bring out his talent, make an accomplished maestro of him—and, on the way, an infant prodigy. And at that moment, I am sure, she saw herself sitting maternally, in pearls and black satin, in the lea of the huge Steinway, while an angelic Guido, dressed like little Lord Fauntleroy, rattled out Liszt and Chopin, to the loud delight of a thronged auditorium. She saw the bouquets and all the elaborate floral tributes, heard the clapping and the few well-chosen words with which the veteran maestri, touched almost to tears, would hail the coming of the little genius. It became more than ever important for her to acquire the child.
“You’ve sent her away fairly ravening,” said Elizabeth, when Signora Bondi had gone. “Better tell her next time that you made a mistake, and that the boy’s got no musical talent whatever.”
In due course, the piano arrived. After giving him the minimum of preliminary instruction, I let Guido loose on it. He began by picking out for himself the melodies he had heard, reconstructing the harmonies in which they were embedded. After a few lessons, he understood the rudiments of musical notation and could read a simple passage at sight, albeit very slowly. The whole process of reading was still strange to him; he had picked up his letters somehow, but nobody had yet taught him to read whole words and sentences.
I took occasion, next time I saw Signora Bondi, to assure her that Guido had disappointed me. There was nothing in his musical talent, really. She professed to be very sorry to hear it; but I could see that she didn’t for a moment believe me. Probably she thought that we were after the child too, and wanted to
