“Real wool, carefully spun so that I know that not a thread of rubbish has been sneaked into it. This must be the proper lamb’s-wool, or it is not good.”
She unwrapped the figure, which was bandaged at least six layers deep, and there we saw a violin.
“The great lady is undressed for her sleep,” said Mamusia, and indeed the violin had no bridge, no strings, no pegs, and looked very much like someone in déshabillé. “You see that the sleep is coming on her; the varnish is already a little dulled, but she is breathing, she is sinking into her trance. In six months she will be wakened by me, her cunning servant, and I shall dress her again and she will go back to the world with her voice in perfect order.”
Hollier put out his hand to touch the brown dust that surrounded the woollen cloth. “Damp,” he said.
“Of course it is damp. And it is alive, too. Don’t you know what that is?”
He sniffed at his fingers, but shook his head.
“Horse dung,” said Mamusia. “The best; thoroughly rotted and sieved, and from horses in mighty health. This comes from a racing stable, and you wouldn’t believe what they make me pay for it. But the shit of old nags isn’t what I want. The very best is demanded for the very best. She’s a Bergonzi, this sleeper,” she said, tapping the violin lightly. “Ignorant people chatter about Strads, and Guarneris, and they are magnificent. I like a Bergonzi. But the best is a St. Petersburg Leman; that’s one over there, in her fourth month—or will be when the moon is new. They must be put to bed according to the moon,” she said, cocking an eye at Hollier to see how he would take that.
“And where do they come from, all these great ladies and gentlemen?” he said, looking around the room, in which there were probably forty cases of various sizes.
“From my friends the great artists,” said Mamusia. “I must not tell whose fiddles these are. But the great artists know me, and when they come here—and they all do come to this city, sometimes every year—they bring me a fiddle that needs a rest, or has come down with some trouble of the voice. I have the skill and the love to make everything right. Because you see this asks for understanding that goes beyond anything the cleverest craftsman can learn. And you must be a fiddler yourself, to test and judge. I am a very fine fiddler.”
“Who could doubt it?” said Hollier. “I hope that some day I may have the great honour of hearing you. It would be like listening to the voice of the ages.”
“You may say that,” said Mamusia, who was enjoying every instant of the courtly conversation. “I have played on some of the noblest instruments in the world—because these are not just violins, you know, but violas, and those big fellows over there are the violoncellos, and those biggest of all are the big-burly-bumbles, the double basses, which have a way of going very gruff when they have to travel—and I can make them speak secrets like a doctor. The great player, oh yes, he makes them sing, but Oraga Laoutaro makes them whisper what is wrong, and then sing for joy when it is wrong no longer.—This room should not be open; Yerko, cover Madame until I can come back and put her to bed again.”
Upstairs then, and after a tremendous exchange of compliments between Hollier and Mamusia, I drove him home in my little car.
What a success it had been! Well worth a few blows and a lot of cursing from Mamusia, for it had brought me near to Hollier again. I could feel his enthusiasm. But it was not directly for me.
“I know you won’t be offended, Maria,” he said, “but your Mother is an extraordinary discovery, a living fossil. She might have come out of any age, from the nineteenth century in Hungary to anywhere in Europe for six or seven centuries back. That wonderful boasting! It refreshed me to hear her, because it was like Paracelsus himself, that very great man and emperor of boasters. And you remember what he said: Never hope to find wisdom at the high colleges alone—consult old women, Gypsies, magicians, wanderers, and all manner of peasant folk and random folk, and learn from them, for these have more knowledge about such things than all the high colleges.”
“What about Professor Froats?” I said, “with his search in the dung-heap for a jewel that he suspects may be there, but of whose nature he can hardly guess?”
“Yes, and if my old friend Ozy finds anything I shall borrow any part of it that can be bent to support my research on the Filth Therapy. What your Mother is doing is Filth Therapy at its highest—though to call that wonderful substance in which she buries the fiddles filth is to be victim to the stupidest modern prejudice. But I am inclined to think of Ozy as a latter-day alchemist; he seeks the all-conquering Stone of the Philosophers exactly where they said it must be sought, in the commonest, most neglected, most despised.—Please take me to see your Mother again. She enchants me. She has in the highest degree the kind of spirit that must not be called unsophisticated, but which is not bound by commonplaces. Call it the Wild Mind.”
Another meeting would be easy, as I found the minute I returned to One Hundred and Twenty Walnut Street.
“Your man is very handsome,” she said. “Just what I like; fine eyes, big nose, big hands. That goes with a big thing; has he a big thing?”
This was mischief, meant to disconcert me, to make me blush, which it did to my annoyance.
“You watch yourself with him, my daughter; he is a charmer. Such elegant speech! You love him, don’t you?”
“I admire him very much. He is a great scholar.”
Hoots of laughter from Mamusia. “He is a great scholar,” she peeped in a ridiculous falsetto, holding up her skirts and tiptoeing around the room in what I suppose was meant to be an imitation of me, or of whatever my university work suggested to her. “He is a man, in just the way your Father was a man. You had better be careful, or I will take him away from you! I could love that man!”
If you try it, you’ll wish you hadn’t, I thought. But I am not half-Gypsy for nothing, and I gave her an answer to choke her with butter.
“He thinks you are wonderful,” I said. “He raved about you all the way home. He says you are a true phuri dai.” That is the name of the greatest Gypsy women; not the so-called “queens” who are often just for show to impress gadje, but the great old female counsellors without whose wisdom no Kalderash chief would think of making an important decision. I was right; that fetched her.
“He is truly a great man,” she said. “And at my age I would rather be a phuri dai than anybody’s pillow-piece. I’ll tell you what I’ll do; I’ll make sure you get him. Then we’ll both have him.”
Oh God, what now?
The New Aubrey IV
1
It was near the end of November before all Cornish’s possessions were sorted and ready for removal to the public bodies for whom they were intended. The job, which had seemed unmanageable to begin with, had called for nothing but hard work to complete it and Hollier and I had worked faithfully, giving up time we wanted and needed for other tasks. Urquhart McVarish had not exerted himself to the same extent, and possessed some magic whereby a lot of his sorting and note-making was undertaken by the secretary from Arthur Cornish’s office, who in her turn was able to provide a couple of strong men who could lift and lug and shuffle things about.
Hollier and I had nobody to blame but ourselves. McVarish was in charge of paintings and objects of art, which can be heavy and clumsy, so he could hardly have been expected to do the work by himself. But Hollier was in charge of books, and he was the kind of man who hates to have anyone else touch a book until he has examined it thoroughly, by which time he might as well put it in its final place. Except that there rarely is any final place for books, and people whose job it is to sort them seem always to be juggling and pushing them hither and yon, making heaps as tall as chimneys on the floor, when the space on tables has been filled. My job was to sort and arrange the manuscripts and portfolios of drawings, and it was not work I could very well trust out of my own hands. Indeed, I wanted no help.