Noble in Reason by Phyllis Bentley Page A

when he came in from a class he tossed his books down on the table with a weary impatience. I took his intense and prolonged application for granted; it never occurred to me that Henry, like myself, might sometimes long for easier pleasures.
    For there were times when, happy though I was, the heady and lurid excitements which lay around me just off my path aroused in me a wild surging desire for Life—as we said then,
Life with a capital L;
for scent, colour, drink (I had never tasted it) and laughter, for something rich and pungent, Iknew not what it was. These desires I “worked off” as I then called it, fulfilled as we say now, in my daydreams, which otherwise were rather in abeyance at that time. I would not for the world, of course, have allowed the austere and noble Henry a glimpse into this seething cauldron of my dreams. They were only occasional, in any case, for my real life was so happy at that time, I did not heed them.
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    I perceive now that my sympathy for Henry over Beatrice’s letters was the first disinterested pity I had ever felt. I had pitied my mother, I had pitied Netta; but in them I had a deep interest, I loved them and they loved me. Henry I frankly did not love, though I respected him. So when I straightened forks and ceased to fidget, for Henry’s sake, I was exercising (at long last) some true compassion.
    The trouble about Henry’s musical studies I half understood even at that time, but I hesitated to set myself up as judge in a medium different from my own. I had, after all, a certain reputation as the only unmusical member of the Jarmayne family; I had often been rebuked for singing out of tune. So I would not allow myself to think what I really guessed: namely that Henry bad no genuinely creative musical talent. The elementary steps of musical theory were easy to him, for he had a good ear and an inherited aptitude. But when he had to compose, the poetic element was absent, the inspiration was lacking; he had no original thought of any kind; only a quick and lively brain, very clear and definite, but conventional, confined in all matters within a limited range. I believe now that in the comprehension of the sublimities of music, my father, though in a confused uncertain way, was more able than his son; I see that Henry reached his musical limits within a month or two of coming to London.To a nature like Henry’s, proud and accustomed to despise any inefficiency in others, this inability to progress must have been a severe and perplexing blow.
    For myself, of course, this London experience was of very great value. I have said, for I knew it then, that I did not at that time become a Londoner. But neither did I remain entirely a Yorkshireman. My speech was slightly though not entirely Southernized; my manners, modelled on those of the Londoner Mr. M, had a trifle more of welcome in their mode than those current in the West Riding. Moreover, and more significantly: I had observed two sets of manners, two modes of living, two ways of speech, of which the practitioners of each thought it the only right and possible system. Knowing this, I was emancipated a little from both, detached a little from both, and detachment, the ability to observe with some impartiality his own environment, is a great advantage, perhaps indeed a prime qualification, to any artist, any thinker.
    As for the reading I was enabled to do in Mr. M’s establishment, its value to me was incalculable.
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    One wet Saturday night I mounted a bus to return home after the theatre—I had seen Oscar Ashe in
Count Hannibal
and was in an excited and romantic mood. Nobody but myself would have climbed to the open top on such a night, I thought with pride, but I travelled habitually on the tops of buses, partly from real enjoyment of the wider range of vision provided above, but mainly as a gesture of defiance to the conventional people who travelled below. To my surprise another passenger was already