The E. F. Benson Megapack by E.F. Benson

Author:E.F. Benson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ghost, supernatural, horror, short stories, ghost stories
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2013-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

THURSDAY EVENINGS

With the death of Mrs. Georgiana Wallace, in 1920, a very notable link with certain artistic activities in the mid-Victorian era was severed. She had long passed her eightieth year, but her mental faculties were quite unclouded—the link, in fact, was unrusted and untarnished—and only a couple of days before she died she gave the last of her famous Thursday evenings. I was taken there by a friend, and that was the solitary occasion on which I saw Mrs. Wallace alive. She was tremendously vivacious that night in praise of past time and (with many little shakes of her pretty porcelain head and holdings-up of her hands loaded with mourning rings) in condemnation of the grotesque gods which the present age has enshrined in the Temple of Art. Her fairness of mind was shown in the fact that she considered that much in the Golden Age of Victorian Art was “sad rubbish.” That horrid old cynic, Mr. Thackeray, for instance, was one of her hottest aversions; Dickens, with his odious vulgar descriptions of low life, was another; the pre-Raphaelite movement was just “a piece of impertinence”; and when Mr. Swinburne was incautiously mentioned, she flushed a little and changed the subject.

Mrs. Wallace, then, did not regard any of these distinguished people as precious metal, and I found myself beginning to wonder where the lode lay. So far from these persons being pure gold, she did not consider them as being possessed of the smallest touch of gilding. But then her face lit up as she talked to us of that memorable evening when she heard the first performance of that famous song “The Lost Chord.”

“That’s what I mean by music,” she said, “and where are you to find such music now? I went to a concert the other day at the Queen’s Hall, but after sitting through an hour of it I had to come away. Such a caterwauling I never heard! There was an Overture by that dreadful Mr. Wagner, and there was a Symphony by Brahms—shocking stuff, and there was a piece by Debussy, which finished me: Un après-midi d’un Faune, they called it. I’m sure I wondered what he had had for lunch to give him such a nightmare afterwards. I stopped my ears, my dear, until it was over; and then I came home, and sang ‘The Lost Chord’ through twice, to put all those dreadful noises out of my head. Ah, I shall never forget the evening when it was sung for the first time at St. James’s Hall. There wasn’t a dry eye in the place. The words, too, by Miss Adelaide Anne Procter! A bit of lovely poetry!”

Then, with very little encouragement, after a sniff at her lavender salts, the old lady suffered herself to be led to “the instrument,” as she called the piano, and sang the masterpiece again in a faint far-away voice which sounded as if it came from the next house but one.

She spoke of the tremendous excitement

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