"The rest isn't good, or isn't finished – "
"How old were you when you wrote this song?"
Gaye hesitated. 'Twenty, I think."
"Ten years ago! What have you been doing since? You 'want to write music,' eh? Well, write it! What else can I say? This is good, absolutely good, and so is that racket with the trombones. You can write music, but, my dear man, what can I do about it? Can I produce four songs and half a Mass by an unknown student of Vaslas Chey? No. You want encouragement, I know. Well, that I give. I encourage you. I encourage you to write more music. Why don't you?"
"I realise this is very little," Gaye brought out stiffly. His face was contorted, one hand was fiddling and pulling at the knot of his tie. Otto was sorry for him and unnerved by him. "Very little, why not make it more?" he said, genial. Gaye looked down at the piano keys, put his hand on them; he was shaking. "You see," he began, then turned away with a jerk, stooping, hiding his face with his hands, and broke into sobs. Otto sat like a stone on the piano bench. The small boy, forgotten all this time, sitting with his grey-stockinged legs hanging over the edge of the sofa, slipped down and ran to his father; of course he was blubbering too, but he kept pulling at his father's coat, trying to get at his hand, whispering, "Papa, don't, papa, please don't." Gaye knelt and put his arm around the child. "Sorry, Vasli, don't worry, it's all right…." But he was not yet in control of himself. Otto rose with some majesty, and called in his wife's maid. "Take the laddie, go give him candy, make him happy, eh?" The girl, a calm Swiss who knew all Central Europeans were mad, nodded, ignoring the weeping man, and said, "Come, what's your name?"
The child held on to his father.
"Go with her, Vasli," Gaye said. The child let her take his hand, and went out with her.
"You have a fine little boy," said Otto. "Now, sit down, Gaye. Brandy? A little, eh?" He opened and shut desk drawers, puffed and grunted to himself, put a glass in Gaye's hand, sat down again at the desk.
"I can't – " Gaye began, worn out, at rock bottom.
"No, you can't; neither can I; these things happen. You were more surprised than I, perhaps. But listen now, Ladislas Gaye. I have no time for the woes of all the world, I have a great many cares of my own and I'm very busy. But since we've come so far, I'd like to know what makes you break down like this."
Gaye shook his head. With the submissiveness that had vanished only while they were going through his score, he answered Otto's questions. He had had to quit the music school when his father died; he now supported his mother, his wife, his three children on his pay as clerk for a plant that made ballbearings and other small steel parts. He had worked there eleven years. Four evenings a week he gave piano lessons, for which they let him use a practice-room at the Schola Cantorum.
Otto did not find much to say for a while. "The good Lord has seen fit to give you bad luck," he remarked. Gaye did not reply. Indeed, good or bad luck seemed hardly adequate to describe this kind of solid, persevering mismanagement of the world, from which Ladislas Gaye and most other men suffered, and Otto Egorin, for no clear reason, did not. "Why did you come to see me, Gaye?"
"I had to. I knew what you'd have to say, that I haven't written enough. But when I heard you were to be here, I swore to myself I'd see you, I had to. They know me at the Schola, but they're busy with their students, of course; since Chey died there's no one who … I had to see you. Not for encouragement, but to see a man who lives for music, who arranges half the concerts in the country, who stands for … for …"
"For success," said Otto Egorin. "Yes, I know. I wanted to be a composer. When I was twenty, in Vienna, I used to go look at the house where Mozart lived, I used to go stare at Beethoven's tomb in the cemetery. I called on Mahler, on Richard Strauss, every composer who came to Vienna. I soaked myself in their success, the dead and the living. They had written music and it was played. Even then, you see, I knew I was not a real composer, and I needed their reality, to make life mean anything at all. That's not your problem. You need only to be reminded that there is music – eh? That not everyone makes steel ballbearings."
Gaye nodded.
"Is there no one else," Otto asked abruptly, "to take care of mama?"
"My sister married a Czech fellow, they live in Prague. . . . And she's bedridden, my mother."
"Yes. And there would still be the wife with the nervous disorder, and the kids, eh, and the bills, and the steel-ballbearings plant. . . . Well, Gaye, I don't know. You know, there was Schubert. I often wonder about Schubert, it's not just you that makes me think of him. Why did God create Franz Schubert? To expiate some other men's sins? Also, why did he kill the man off the moment he reached the level of the last quintet? – But Schubert didn't wonder why God had created him. To write music, of course. Du holde Kunst, ich danke dir! Incredible. The little, sickly, ugly crackpot with glasses, scribbling his music like any other crackpot, never hearing it played – Du holde Kunst! How would you say it, 'thou gracious Art, thou kindly Art'? As if any art were kindly, gracious, gentle! Have you ever thought of throwing it over, Gaye? Not the music. The rest."
He met the gaze of the strange, cold, dark eyes and refused to be ashamed, to apologise. Gaye had said that he, Otto Egorin, lived for music. He did. He might be a good bourgeois; he might be very sorry for a poor devil who needed nothing in God's world but a little cash in order to be a good composer; but he would not apologise to the poor devil's sick mother and sick wife and three brats. If you live for music you live for music.
"I'm not made so."
"Then you're not made to write music."
"You thought differently when you were reading my Sanctus."
"Du lieber Herr Gott!" Otto exploded. He was a great patriot, but his mother and his upbringing had been Viennese and in moments of real emotion he reverted to German. "All right! Did it ever occur to you, my dear young man, that you incur a certain responsibility in writing something like that Sanctus? That you become answerable? That music has no arthritis, no nervous disorders, no hungry potbelly and 'Papa, papa, I want this, I want that,' but all the same she depends on you, on you alone? Other men can feed brats and keep sick women. But no other man can write your music!"
"Yes, I know that."
"But you're not quite sure anyone would undertake to feed the brats and keep the women. Probably they wouldn't. Doch, doch – you're too gentle, too gentle, Gaye." Otto strode up and down the room on his bandy legs, snorting and grimacing. "When I finish the Mass may I send it to you?" "Yes. Yes, of course. I shall be pleased to see it. When will it be? Ten years from now? 'Gaye, who the devil's Gaye, where did I meet him – this is good – a young fellow, he shows promise – ' And you'll be forty, getting tired, ready for a little arthritis or nervous disorder yourself. Certainly send me your Mass! . . . You have great talent, Gaye, you have great courage, but you're too gentle, you must not try to write a big work like this Mass. You can't serve two masters. Write songs, short pieces, something you can think of while you work at this Godforsaken steel plant and write down at night when the rest of the family's out of the way for five minutes. Write them on anything, unpaid bills, whatever, and send them to me, don't think you have to pay two and a half kroner a sheet for this fine paper, you can't afford fine paper – when they're printed is time to think of that. Send me songs, not ten years from now but a month from now, and if they're as good as this Goethe song I'll give you a section on my wife's program in Krasnoy in December. Write little songs, not impossible Masses. Hugo Wolf, you know – Hugo Wolf wrote only songs, eh?"
He thought that Gaye, overcome with gratitude, was going to break down again, and though apprehensive he felt pleased with himself, wise, generous: he had made the poor fellow happy and might get something from him, too. The accompaniment to the Goethe song was still running in his head, spare, dry, sorrowful, beautiful. Then Gaye began to speak and Otto realised, slowly, but without real surprise, that it was not gratitude at all. "The Mass is what I've got to write, what I have in me. The songs come, sometimes a lot of them together, but I've never been able to write them at will, it has to be a good day. But the Mass, and a symphony I've been working on, they have size and weight, you see, they carry themselves along over the weeks, and I can always work on them when I have time. I know the Mass is ambitious. But I know all I want to say in it. It will be good. I've learned how to do what I must do, you see. I've begun it, I have to finish it."