Meantime, the fatal foundation-scholarship examination, to be held in December, was approaching, and I awaited its advent with an unruffled consciousness of another failure imminent. To prepare for it, I had certain private tuition out of school hours, and by a much more oppressive piece of legislation, I was not allowed to have anything to do with music except in so far as it was musical to contribute a muscular treble to the choir in chapel. That deprivation I still deplore, for I had at that time an odd and quite untrained faculty for visualizing, by some interior process, tunes that I heard, and being able to “see” them, so to speak, without any direct exercise of will. Thus, a term or two later, when an accompanist failed, I took his place at some sing-song, and transposed at sight Handel’s “Where’er you walk,” which I did not previously know, from the key of B flat into G, without any sense of effort, thanks to this little “kink” of internal visualization. Whatever that kink was, it was not the result of training, but, I suppose, some small natural aptitude towards the science of sound which now I dearly wish that I had been allowed to water and cultivate without break. It must have been a feeble and under-vitalized growth, for when I was at liberty again to waste as much time as I chose at the piano, it was certainly less vigorous than it had been, and never afterwards recovered, when I could stray and strum as I pleased in melodious pastures. The soil in which it grew was there, for all my life music has been to me as a celestial light, shining in dark places for the mitigation of their blackness, and flooding the serene and sunlit with its especial gold, but from that soil there withered a little herb that once grew there, a nest with incubated eggs was despoiled, and the bird came not back. But I expect that the wisdom of the edict was fully justified in the judgment of the prohibitionists, when on one snowy morning in December the list of the winners of foundation-scholarships was promulgated, and there was my name incredibly among them at a decent altitude.
By one of Nature’s most admirable devices our memories always retain a keener sense of such experiences as have been enjoyable, than those of the drabber sort, and to-day I find nothing that I can pick out of the bran-pie that was not bright and alluring. There were friendships and hero-worships, the initiation, in a blue and black striped jersey, into the muddy mysteries of Rugby football, and the dizzy heights (soaring far above the sordid business of the foundation-scholarship) of playing in the lower team of the house. There was a school concert at the end of that first term, and it gave me a complacent thrill to remember that I was a foundation-scholar when the “Carmen” was sung. But it gave me a sense of stupefied astonishment to hear the organist, Mr. Bambridge, play as an encore to his piano-solo, his own original variations on the theme of “Auld Lang Syne.” Never (except in the case of Miss Wirtz) was there such a finger, and speaking purely from the impression then made, I should be obliged to confess that for matter of pure brilliance of execution and mastery of technique, Mr. Bambridge must have been a far more accomplished performer than any pianist whom I have heard since. Why did he not take London by storm with those amazing pyrotechnics of his own invention, and throne himself higher than ever Paderewski or Carreno or Busoni soared? I cannot even now bring myself to believe that any of those lesser lights ever shone like Mr. Bambridge, when with flying fingers and any quantity of the loud pedal he swooped up and down in pearly runs and tremendous octaves, while all the time that powerful thumb of his, relentless and regular as the stroke of a piston, beat out simultaneously (there was the wonder of it) the original air. I wanted the piano to comprise an extra octave or two that so he might have a larger arena for his melodious magic. I wanted to have more ears, so that they should all be glutted with the beautiful banging and netted in the gossamer of Mr. Bambridge’s chromatic scales. Even Bach--but it is always idle to make comparisons between the supreme: who judges between the various peaks that face the dawn, or cares to plumb the sea, so long as the sun glitters on its surface, and in the shadow of the rock there glows the translucent blue of Tyre?...