Child Of Music Read Free

had overheard the strictures on himself.
    Momentarily discomfort was almost obliterated by the thrill of driving home in company with the famous Torelli. But the recollection of Stephen Tarkman returned again and again over the years to annoy and embarrass her. If he had ultimately been proved wrong in that argument she might have forgiven him and forgotten the incident. But within a couple of years Rodney Eskith had been more or less sunk without trace. It is almost unforgivable when the people we dislike are proved right.
    Felicity had had an exceptionally happy childhood and girlhood. The only child of affectionate parents, she had been allowed to develop her very real musical talent to the full, without being given too wildly inflated ideas about her gifts. Her father, with kindly but astringent realism, had pointed out from the beginning that few people reached the heights of the public performer and that if she ended as a good and successful teacher, she could still regard herself as having a certain value in the musical world.
    At that stage she was still inclined to see herself as sweeping on and off platforms, with the world more or less waiting on tiptoe to hear her, so she took these words of wisdom rather scornfully. But their basic good sense remained somewhere at the back of her mind and, as she gradually found her feet in a competitive world, she also found the true measure of her gifts.
    She was a born teacher, with a splendid capacity for arousing interest in her pupils and opening new and glorious vistas for them. No child ever looked bored in her classes, and no individual pupil ever felt of less than supreme interest and importance in her musical scheme of things.
    Faced with her very first class of almost uniformly blank pupils, she had asked if they had heard of this composer or that work. One and all shook discouraged heads and waited for the criticism. But instead she cried,
    'You lucky children! You've got it all before you. We're going to have a wonderful time. Just listen to this for a start.' And she went to the piano and played a simple, tripping, heart-warming little tune. 'Do you like it?'
    One or two said tentatively that they did. Several still looked blank. And the trouble-maker in the class giggled.
    'You've got the right idea.' Felicity picked him out at once. 'It's funny — it's gay — it's something to laugh at. Come here. — Yes, you. The boy who knew when to laugh.'
    He came slowly, not at all sure that she was not going to hold him up to ridicule.
    'How old are you?' Felicity asked.
    'Twelve,' he admitted reluctantly.
    'Twelve? Just two years younger than the chap who wrote this. His name was Mozart. Listen again.' She played it once more. 'He was fourteen when he wrote that, and he meant it for boys and girls like you, so that you could laugh and enjoy something easy but of quality. There are lots of tunes like this. They make you feel good and they're fun to sing, even if you only la-la the tune.'
    'I could sing it now,' he asserted suddenly.
    'Sing it, then.'
    So he piped his way through it with a certain degree of accuracy. Then the others wanted to join in. They sang it twice. Then someone said in a way it was prettier than pop. And Felicity knew the class was hers.
    By the time she came to Carmalton her methods were a trifle less naïve, but she never had the slightest trouble in holding the interest of a class. She loved her subject. And in a warm, unsentimental way she loved her pupils too. She knew that in a commercially corrupted world they were constantly assailed by the ugly, the puerile and the insidiously damaging. And she tried with all her heart and skill to make beauty and artistic truth as easily available to them as the trash with which they were perpetually bombarded.
    Only a small proportion in her classes really assimilated much of what she was trying to put over to them, she knew. But few remained untouched by it and some even developed a musical enjoyment and