“No Woman Has Played This in England,” He Declared — the Laundress Played It Twice

“No woman has played this in England,” he said, “and I do not expect to live long enough to hear one try.” He said it from the platform of my town hall, with the applause still hanging in the air like smoke, and I heard every syllable of it, because I was standing where I always stand, at the back by the coat rail, with the gas key in my pocket, and my eye on the flue.

My name is Osgood Trail. I have kept the Marlborough Town Hall for 19 years. I sweep it, I heat it, I mend its chairs, and I put out its lamps. And in all that time, I have watched a great many people say a great many things from that platform, most of them forgettable. That one, I have never forgotten, nor has anybody else who was in the room on the 7th of November, 1903.

The gentleman speaking was Monsieur Etienne Laquois, and he had come to us from London by the 4:00 train, with two trunks and a valet, and a folded silk scarf about his throat, as though our air might do him some injury. He was a virtuoso of considerable name. The committee had scraped and begged for a 12-month to get him, and they had put out the good chairs and hired extra globes and hung the civic bunting, and I had polished the Bechstein’s lacquer until I could see the whole ceiling in it.

He had played magnificently. I will say that plainly, because it matters to what came after. He had played for 2 hours and given us a Chopin ballade that made the draper’s wife weep openly into her glove. And when he rose to speak, the hall was so full of goodwill that you could have warmed your hands at it.

Then somebody in the front row asked, in the way people do when they are pleased with themselves, whether the great man had any encore left in him. Laquois smiled. It was not an unkind smile. That is the thing I want understood. There was no cruelty in the man, only a settled and comfortable certainty, the sort that gets into a person the way damp gets into plaster, from years of nobody contradicting them.

“There is a work,” he said, “by Liszt, the Réminiscences de Don Juan. It is not a piece. It is a mountain. There are perhaps six men living who play it as it stands, and I have not the strength left in my wrists tonight to be the seventh.” He spread his hands, and the room laughed with him.

“It is beyond the reach of your amateurs, messieurs. It is beyond nearly everyone. No woman has played this in England, and I do not expect to live long enough to hear one try.” He meant it lightly. He meant it the way a man says that no one shall ever swim the Channel in February. And the hall took it lightly. And there was a comfortable murmur.

And the committee chairman began to rise to give the vote of thanks. And then a voice came from the back of the hall, from the dark under the coat rail, not 4 ft from where I was standing. “I have played it, sir.” I turned my head so fast I cracked my neck, and I felt it for a week after. She was standing just inside the doors, where the latecomers and the ones who cannot afford a seat stand.

Martha Quill, 23 years old, a laundress at the public washhouse in Cross Street, where she had worked since she was 15. And I knew her because she came in on Thursday mornings with the hall’s tablecloths, and took them away in a wicker basket on her hip. She was wearing her working dress, gray and coarse, and mended at the elbow, because she had come straight from the copper and had not been home.

Her hair was pinned up plain. Her face was the calmest thing in that room. Not one person laughed. I have thought about that often. The hall did not laugh, and I believe it was because of how she said it. No defiance in it. No heat. Only a fact set down quietly, the way you would tell a man the time. Lequarre put a hand to his ear.

“Comment? I did not hear.” I said, I have played it, sir. Her voice carried better the second time. The Don Juan fantasy. I play it from memory. Now, there was a sound in the room, a long low intake, 400 people breathing in at once. Mrs. Pettifer in the third row said, “Oh, the poor girl.” Quite audibly.

And I could have thrown my keys at her. Laquais’ face went through several weathers. Surprise first, then something close to embarrassment on her behalf, and then, and this I watched carefully, a kind of weary courtesy, the sort of man puts on to let somebody down softly. “Mademoiselle,” he said, “I intend no discourtesy, but you must understand what you have said.

It is not a matter of willingness. The double octaves alone.” “I know what is in it, sir,” said Martha Quill. And she began to walk up the center aisle. I do not think anyone told her to. I think she simply decided, in the way a person decides once in a life, and afterwards cannot tell you why it was that night and not some other.

She came up between the good chairs in her washhouse dress with her chin level, and the whole room turned in its seat to watch her come, and the gas globes along the paneling threw her shadow long behind her on the boards I had scrubbed that morning. Halfway up, she passed the Reverend Amos Frayne, who had known her father.

He half rose, as if to catch her arm and spare her. She did not look at him. She kept walking. I should say here how she came to be who she was, because at the time not a soul in that hall knew it, and they have all told the story wrong ever since. Nine years before, a Frenchman named Bertrand Sorel had taken the back bedroom in her mother’s house on Weir Lane.

He was a music master who had come out of Paris in a hurry and never explained why. And he had a bad chest and a worse cough, and he paid his rent in shillings when he had them, and in lessons when he had not. He taught the quill girl on a cottage piano with two dead notes in the bass, and he taught her the way a starving man eats, with terrible seriousness.

I used to hear him through the wall when I called on her mother, counting in French, wrapping the time out on the lid with his knuckle. He died in the winter of 1898. He left no money. He left three trunks of scores, and in the top of the first trunk, tied with a bootlace, the list. She had worked at it for 5 years, in the hour before the washhouse opened and the hour after it shut, on a piano with two dead notes. That is the whole of it.

There was no miracle in it, and no secret. There was only a dead man’s faith and a girl who would not put the thing down. She reached the platform steps. Laquai, to his credit, offered her his hand, and she took it, and he led her to the piano the way you would lead someone to a chair at a difficult funeral. “You are quite certain,” he said, low.

“Quite certain, sir.” He stepped back. He did not go to the wings. He stood at the curve of the instrument with his arms folded and his head a little on one side, and I know exactly what he was thinking because I have seen that same look on a farrier watching an apprentice pick up a hot shoe. Martha Quill sat down at the Bechstein.

She put her hands on the keys, and I saw them. We all saw them. From the front rows at least, and word of it went round the hall in a whisper within a minute. They were a laundress’s hands, red to the wrist from the lye in the boiling water, the knuckles thickened, one nail black from a mangle roller. She had scrubbed them raw before she came in, and it had only made them redder.

She sat quite still for the space of four or five breaths. The hall went so quiet I could hear the gas hissing in the globes over the door. Then she began. The Don Juan does not begin with a melody. It begins with the ground opening. Those bare, terrible descending octaves out of the graveyard scene, the statue’s music, the sound of something walking that ought not to walk.

She took them slowly and without any hurry at all. And they came off that instrument like stones dropped down a well. And I felt the boards under my boots take up the shiver of it. There was a woman in the fifth row who put her hand over her mouth and left it there for the next quarter of an hour. LaCroix’s arms came unfolded.

What she did after that, I will describe as best a caretaker can. And I ask the pardon of anyone who knows the music properly. She let the darkness build until the room could hardly bear it. And then she broke into the duet. That sweet winding tune, Là ci darem la mano, the seducer’s promise.

And she played it so tenderly, with the melody sung out under her thumb and the accompaniment kept back to nothing, that you forgot entirely what her hands looked like. Then came the variations. And the variations are where the mountain begins. I watched the trills. Her right hand held a shake at the top of the keyboard, bright and even as a struck bell.

And underneath it her left came leaping up out of the bass to take the tune, leaping and returning, leaping and returning. And never once did the shake falter or thicken. Then the Leggiero passage, the one that runs like water poured out of a jug. She took it so lightly and so fast that the notes did not sound struck at all. They sounded blown.

And then the champagne aria, Finch’han dal vino, two minutes of pure headlong recklessness. And she went into it with a lift of her shoulders that I can only call joyful. And the piano roared. And the great chords came down in fistfuls. And somewhere behind me a man said, “God above.

” out loud and did not know he had said it. The octaves. I had been dreading the octaves on her behalf without knowing what they were. When they came, they came in both hands at once, doubled, thundering up the whole length of the keyboard in a rising storm, and her forearms were a blur, and her back was straight as a chapel pew, and her face, I could see it in profile, lit orange from the platform lamps.

Her face never changed, not once. There was no grimace, no performance, no throwing of the head. She looked exactly as she looks when she is carrying a full basket up Weir Lane, occupied, unafraid. The statue returned at the end, as it must, and the whole thing crashed down into that final furious descent, and she struck the last chord with both arms and lifted them clean away.

Nothing happened. For a moment, 3 seconds, 4. The Marlborough Town Hall made no sound whatever. I have never heard a silence like it, before or since. It was not the silence of people deciding what to think. It was the silence of people who have been emptied out. Then the hall came apart. They stood, all of them, the aldermen and the shopkeepers and the boys who had sneaked in at the side door, and they stood on the good chairs, some of them, and the noise came up off that floor and hit the ceiling and came back

down, and it went on and on. And I found that I was hammering my own hands together with my eyes streaming and my cap somewhere on the floor. Martha Quill sat at the piano with her red hands in her lap and looked as though she were listening to weather. And Monsieur Etienne Lacroix crossed the platform to her.

This is the part I tell when people ask me for the story, not the playing. The playing was the marvel, but this was the thing worth living to see. He raised one hand to the hall, and the noise died down out of respect for him, and he stood beside the piano, and he was pale, genuinely pale. A man who has had a shock, and he did not make a speech.

He did not say anything gracious or clever. He said, and I heard it because the hall was silent again, “Mademoiselle, I must ask you something, and I ask it without any right at all.” She looked up at him. “Play it again.” There was a stir. He put up his hand again. “Not for them,” he said, “for me. I could not see.

I was standing wrong, and I was not” He stopped and started over. “I have played that work for 11 years, and there are two places in it where I have never been easy, and you were easy in both, and I do not know how it was done. I wish to watch your hands. If you have the strength, Mademoiselle, I beg you to play it a second time, and I beg you to let me stand where I can see.

” I have thought about what that cost him for 20 years, and I have not got to the bottom of it. A man of his standing in a strange town, before 400 people who had just heard him declare a thing impossible, asking the laundress to teach him. She was tired. Anyone could see she was tired.

Her sleeve was dark at the shoulder with sweat, and her breath was still coming short. She sat and considered it for a moment. Then she said, “You’ll want to stand this side, sir, for the left hand. It’s the left hand that does it.” And Laquai came round the tail of the Bechstein and stood at her shoulder, close, bent forward with his hands behind his back, in his white tie and his tails, looking down at those cracked red knuckles as though they were the only thing in England worth looking at.

She played the whole work through again. The hall settled to hear it the way a congregation settles. Nobody left. A few of the men took their watches out, looked at them, and put them away again without reading the time. Out in the lobby, the constable who had come to see the crowd off stood in the doorway with his helmet under his arm, and did not move for 20 minutes.

I will not describe it a second time. I will say only this, the second playing was better than the first, because the first had been an answer, and the second was simply the music. And I will say that twice. Laquaz’s own right hand came out from behind his back and moved a little in the air, following her, the way a man’s foot moves when he watches a dance he knows.

And that at the great octave storm, he leaned in so far that his shadow fell across the keys, and she did not so much as glance at him, and he shut his eyes for a second and then opened them and went on watching. When it was finished, he stood upright, and he was quiet a while, and then he turned to the hall. “An hour ago,” he said, “I told you that no woman in England had played this work.

I was wrong, and I was wrong in a manner that does me no credit, because I did not say it out of knowledge. I said it out of habit.” He turned back and looked at her. “I have been shown my own hands tonight, mademoiselle, and they are smaller than I thought.” Then he took her hand, that red rough hand, and he raised it, and kissed the back of it as though she were a duchess, and the hall came up out of its seats again, and old Frayne, the vicar, was weeping into his hat, and I gave up entirely and sat down on the coat rail bench and let it run.

What followed I can set out briefly, because a caretaker hears everything and repeats most of it. Laquaz stayed in Marlborough 3 days. He spent the greater part of them in the hall with the doors locked, and the two of us and Martha inside it, and I heard more music in those 3 days than in the 19 years before.

In February he came back, and there was a second concert, and he had a second piano brought up from London at his own cost, and he played the accompanying part while Martha Quill played the first. And he had the program printed with her name above his, and would not hear a word against it. The house was so full I had men standing three deep at the back, and the windows open in a frost.

I was there for that second concert, too, of course. I lit every globe in the building myself, and put an extra scuttle of coal on because of the frost. When the two pianos answered one another, his the darker of the pair, hers the brighter, I stopped pretending to check the flue, and simply stood and listened with the coal tongs in my hand.

He paid for her study in London after that, 3 years of it, properly, with a master he chose himself, and he never once let it be called charity. He called it an investment, and said he expected repayment in concerts, and he got it. Her mother kept the cottage piano with the two dead notes, and would not have it mended.

I am an old man now, and the hall has electric light, and the bunting is new. But when they ask me, and they still ask me, the young ones, when I am putting out the chairs, I tell them it was not the impossible piece that did it. Any good story has one of those. I tell them it was a great man in a white tie bending over a washerwoman’s hands in the lamplight asking to be taught.

That is what I saw in my hall. I have swept the boards he stood on ever since, and I have never once minded the work.