Cousin Rosamund by Rebecca West

Author:Rebecca West
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2010-06-15T04:00:00+00:00

VI

IT WAS A DAY OR TWO afterwards that Oliver and I had to go down to the West Country for a charity concert, to be given at a house that was supposed to be very beautiful, Barbados Hall, just after Goodwood. There was so much reason why we should attend this concert, and there is so much of the accident in all events, that I did not think we would ever go. Oliver’s interest in the occasion was his passionate desire that I and a violinist named Martin Allen, who had been a fellow-student of mine at the Athenaeum, should play a sonata for piano and violin written by Kurt Jasperl, a Swiss composer in his early thirties. Why it was imperative that this should happen Oliver explained to Miss Beevor and Mary and myself one afternoon when he came in for tea. It was no trouble having Miss Beevor. She had to stay in bed perhaps one day in ten, which gave Kate something to distract her from growing melancholy. For the rest Miss Beevor was cheerful, and men liked talking to her.

‘Jasperl,’ Oliver said, to her rather than to Mary and me, ‘is consumptive, and he is just about to come out of a sanatorium after two years of treatment.’

‘Oh, poor young man,’ said Miss Beevor.

‘It would be appalling if he were to come out and throw away the strength he has got back by going out and taking some wretched teaching job,’ said Oliver.

‘Of course, of course,’ said Miss Beevor, ‘the poor young man.’

‘If he could get one,’ added Oliver, ‘which is doubtful. You see, he has much against him. It is impossible to collect money for him in Switzerland or Germany or France, because his earlier compositions aroused keen controversy and were widely discussed, and were in fact quite worthless. They were cheap and nasty experiments in atonality.’

‘Tchk, tchk,’ said Miss Beevor, looking across at Mary and me, over her tea-cup. She had made the journey all the way from Mendelssohn and Massenet to Debussy and Ravel and Fauré, and even to Poulenc, under pressure from our family, but she liked sometimes to make the point that travel can take one too far, that it may land one among the head-hunters.

‘The performance of these horrors had given him the reputation of a charlatan, whom nobody was going to be anxious to maintain. Moreover,’ said Oliver, a knot of trouble appearing on his forehead, ‘he is a violent and irrational man.’

‘Oh, tchk, tchk,’ said Miss Beevor. She would have made a superb accompanist. ‘But perhaps it is part of his illness.’

‘No,’ said Oliver sadly. ‘He is just one of those people born with a taste for hurting other people. He enjoys contriving monstrous situations without issue. The last thing he did, which makes it impossible to collect money for him in Switzerland now and will make it impossible at any future time, I think, was quite bad. The wife of a rich industrialist, a Madame Kehl, who

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.