“That’s what I’ll teach you. You’d better come five days a week for a while. Ben says money’s no object in your case, praise God! I think we’ll get on — simpatico. And the muhd’ll do wonders for you. Actually makes physical changes, in a lot o’ people. Funny thing, I’ve known it to clear up terrible cases o’ halitosis almost overnight. Not that that’s your trouble. But you’re stiff as a new boot and you’ve an awful Canadian accent as I suppose you know. It banishes regional accents completely.”
As Monica ran down the stairs and out into Coram Square it did not occur to her to wonder why the muhd had not banished Molloy’s very marked Irish accent. And in justice to him, it must be said that it was greatly diminished when he sang. She knew only that she was where she wanted to be, in the hands of a great teacher. She would master the secrets of the muhd. She would be a bardic singer like Murtagh Molloy. And if it involved having her waist hugged, and hugging his stomach in return — let it be so.
[TWO]
In the months of hard work which followed, Monica’s enthusiasm never failed. Even during the preliminary six weeks when Molloy would not allow her to sing at all, in any sense which she understood, she was obedient. For an hour a day, five days a week, she stood before him, striving as best she might to follow his instructions.
“Feet a little apart. Let your neck go back as far as it will — no, don’t move it, think it and let it go back itself. Now, think your head forward and up without losing the idea of your neck going back. Now you’re poised. Get the muhd, now — this time it’ll be joy. Think o’ joy, and feel joy. Open your lungs and let joy pour in — no, don’t suck breath, just let it go in by itself. Now, with your muhd chosen, say “Ah”, and let me hear joy. — Christmas! D’you call that joy! Maybe that’s the joy of an orphan mouse on a rainy Monday, but I want the real, living joy of a young girl with her health and strength. Again — Ah, your jaw’s tense. Get your neck free; think it free, and your head forward and up, and your jaw can’t tense. Come on, now, try it again.”
It was a technique for learning to command emotion — or, as Molloy preferred to call it, muhd. It became apparent to Monica that her range of emotion was small, and her ability to manifest it in sound, infinitesimal. This was dismaying, because she had been used to thinking of herself as a girl with plenty of emotional range; she could feel so much. But Molloy had his own way of extending the range of feeling and expression in his pupils.
“Your emotional muscles are weak, and what y’have are stiff. D’you go to the theatre? Well, you should. In fact, you must. Go to the Old Vic; go to any Shakespeare — any big stuff at all. Watch the actors. Working like dogs, when they’re any good. Muhd, muhd, muhd, all the time; lightning changes, and subtleties like shot silk, winking and showing up new colours every second. Without a command o’ muhd the work’d kill ’em. But it doesn’t; they thrive on it. Never sick, and live to massive ages. And why? Because muhd’s life, that’s why. D’you know the Seven Ages o’ Man, in As You Like It? Well, here, take this book and get it by rote for tomorra.”
Work on the Seven Ages of Man became, under Molloy’s enthusiastic direction, a riot of muhd.
“We start off calmly — the philosophic vein.” Molloy’s face was suffused with an appearance of weighty thought, and his stumpy frame took on the characteristic pose of those statues of nineteenth-century statesmen, to be seen in municipal parks — one foot advanced, and a hand outstretched as though quelling the applause of an audience.
All th’ world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances.
And one man in his time plays many parts.
His acts being seven ages.
Here Molloy underwent a startling metamorphosis; with knees bent, swaying gently from side to side, he hugged an imaginary baby to his ashy waistcoat.
At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
“Ah, the wee soul!” said he, then like lightning banished the infant, and put on an expression which suggested a sick chimpanzee.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.
The chimpanzee gave place to something very airy, with hands clasped over its heart.
And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow.
Working on these lines, Molloy breathed the muhd of the soldier, the justice, and the Pantaloon — this last such a picture of trembling, piping eld as even the Comédie Française has never attempted. And his final portrait of dissolution —
Sans eyes, sans teeth, sans taste — sans everything —
seemed to couple senility with the last ravages of paresis in a manner truly frightening.
It was not ham acting. It was something more alarming than that. Into each of these shopworn cliches of pantomime Molloy injected a charge of vitality which gave it a shocking truth. Vocally his performance was powerful, if in bad taste; physically it was rowdy and grotesque; but his meaning was palpable. To Monica it was a revelation; she had never seen anyone carry on like that before. She admired, and loyally fought down the embarrassment which rose in her. She was quite sure, however, that she could never do it herself.
Such resistance was like catnip to Molloy. Part of his profession was to prove to people that they could do what they believed to be outside their powers. Monica was put to work, exhorted, bullied and cajoled until, in a week or two she could cradle the baby, whine, sigh, roar, dogmatize (stroking an imaginary beard), shake like the Pantaloon, and at last, with eyes closed and hands hanging limp like the paws of a poisoned dog, await the stroke of death. Compared with Molloy’s Protean performance hers was the merest shadow, but it was far beyond anything that she had ever dreamed she might achieve.
“Now we’re beginning to get somewhere,” said Molloy on the day when, at the third time of repetition, Monica had excelled herself. “Y’know, between ourselves, the stage people are always after me. A lot o’ them come for lessons, y’see, and they say, ‘Murty, you’re a born director, and there’s a dearth of ’em; how about it?’ But I say, ‘Boys, if it was only a question of speech, I’d do it like a shot, but I’ve no talent for the tableau side o’ the thing. I’ve th’ear, but I lack th’eye’.”
This was the process of vocal and spiritual unbuttoning which Sir Benedict Domdaniel had said would be accomplished by Murtagh Molloy. From the Seven Ages of Man they progressed to the First Chorus from Henry V, and at the beginning of each lesson Molloy would say — “Right; now let’s have it — O for a Muse afar!” Obediently Monica would set her feet apart, poise her head on her neck, breathe a muhd commensurate with England’s martial glory and declaim —
O, for a Muse of fire —
and so to the end of the speech, with horses, monarchs, and apologies for the inadequacy of the Elizabethan theatre, all complete. She was becoming quite pleased with herself, torn between her pride in being able to satisfy Molloy, and a sense of shame in the amount of noise and strutting which that involved.
In these declamatory exercises she was not permitted to speak the words in her accustomed way, and at first she used her true ear to copy Molloy’s own accent. But when she did this he astonished her by declaring that she was speaking with a pronounced Canadian twangs and compelled her to adopt a tune and colour of speech which certainly was not English as she heard it spoken by Mrs Merry, or by any of the people she met in chance contacts, but which she learned to identify in the theatre, at the performances of classical plays to which she was constantly being urged by Molloy. It was not the “English accent” mocked by Kevin and Alex, and forbidden by her mother, but it was not Canadian either; it was a speech that Garrick would not have found very strange, and of which Goldsmith would have approved.
Going to the theatre was, at first, a lonely business, and she did not like it. She had studied one or two of the plays of Shakespeare in school, but she had never associated them with any idea of entertainment. Nor was her first visit to the Old Vic a happy one, for the play was The Comedy of Errors, very cleverly transformed by a young director with his name to make into a mid-Victorian farce, in which the two Antipholuses, in chimney-pot hats and Dundreary whiskers, and the two Dromios, in identical liveries, rushed up and downstairs on a twirly scaffolding which was called Ephesus, until at last they were united with an Aemilia and a Luciana in crinolines and ringlets. Several critics had said that this treatment illuminated the play astonishingly, but for Monica it remained a depressing mystery. She was happier when, in a few weeks, it gave place to Romeo and Juliet. Peggy Stamper, dirtier than before, had hunted her up, and they went together. Afterward they discussed the play in detail at a Corner House and Monica expressed strong disapproval of the conduct of Friar Lawrence; if he had not tried to be so clever, everything might very well have been straightened out, and the lovers made happy. But then, said Peggy, where would the tragedy have been? And was it not better that Romeo and Juliet should have been unhappy, and tremendous, than happy, and just like everybody else? Monica would not have this; common sense, said she, was surely to be expected of everybody.