OUR MODERN YOUTH

Ladies' Mirror, Volume 3, Issue 9, 2 March 1925, Page 58

OUR MODERN YOUTH

DOES THE SLANG AND APPARENT IRREVERANCE OF OUR YOUTH OF TO-DAY INDICATE THAT THERE HAS BEEN ANY REAL CHANGE. A WELL-KNOWN WOMAN WRITER % RELATES HER EXPERIENCES 12

TT struck me as funny that when I Youth came to play with me 1 I should be reading "Twenty Years | After." Her coming at that moment re- | called with something of a shock I the fleet-footed passage of time. i For, just so many years ago I used ; to go, very shyly, to play with a j lady whose age then was what mine \ is now. So that Youth was to me i what I was, in the past, to that : gracious friend. zA (§e?ise of "Values i "DUT Youth didn't come shyly. The I present generation has a better I sense of values than that. It knows j that it is charming, and sweet, and attractive, and has no cause to apol- [ ogise. Also it pays its elders a com- \ pliment undreamt of in the days of our shyness. It is the compliment : of treating us as contemporaries. j What though we played the piano : when it sucked a coral? Aren't we both playing the piano now? That | is Youth's philosophy, or so I read I it in her snapping, bright eyes. So Youth came to play with me. We have two pianos, which she declared to be perfectly topping. We'd play Chaminade first, if I didn't mind, for "her reading was appalling ; never could sight-read for nuts !" And didn't I think Chaminade a nice change after all the high-brow stunts they gave one at the college? To IQiolpp the Worst "OUT, first of all, please, might she sit on the rug and have a cigarette while I played for her? She wanted to know the worst, please. She was sure I was an awful nib at technique, and she'd like to discover, before venturing to play on that second piano with me, just what she had let herself in for. j She was sure I should be sorry I had asked her to come. I'd no- idea | what a duffer she was. I'd want to ' put her out on the mat, like a howling Pekingese. And what had I been j playing when she passed yesterday? | Scarlatti? How awfully brainy! 1 . - And I wrote, didn't I? Goodness! i She felt like a worm! Everything I was so exciting and -brow. No. She did not play at all well. Her

rhythm was ghastly, her technique deplorable, her reading a crime, and she hadn't any memory. I looked at her brow, broad and arched; at her hands, strong and capable; at her wrists, supple and firm. I suggested that perhaps things were not quite. so bad as she implied. And, as to being brainy, brains were of little use without practice. I seldom practised; but she, I was sure, practised regularly. No! no ! She was a slacker. I'd no idea how she slacked. of 'Discords A T length we got going. She at her piano, I at mine. "Shall we begin?" I asked, ready for anything from this lively maiden. "Righto!" called she. "Please count! Oh! I tremble! I shake! How you'll hate me in one little minute!" At the first double bar she turned her face to me; it was happy and shining. "Did you ever hear anything so appalling?" she asked. "I didn't once get the key! Don't you hate the sound of me? But I warned you, and you wouldn't believe. Try again ? Righto! Let's! Threeand—four —and one! Now!" It was like a cyclonic hailstorm of discords. But she rode it after the fashion of a modern Valkyrie. So that gradually, steadily, after each repetition of the storm, I became conscious of two things: a perfect sense of rhythm and a touch that was purposeful and firm. I smiled to myself. I found the new, go-ahead methods amusing. "When she gets the right notes that child will make you sit up," I thought. And so we persevered for an hour, scattering avalanches cf wrong notes, dropping our flats and our sharps, in a rhythmical metre and swing, interspersed with breathless apologies for her playing and enthusiastic eulogies on the tone of my two pianos. At length I got her to play me something solo. She was sure she couldn't. If I'd only heard her mas- . ter on Wednesday Perfectly raving ! Took off the roof! My goodness! Well, them, she'd play a little thing of Brahms'. Awfully highbrow, but quite easy. I wouldn't mind its being high-brow? Her friends did. They wanted jollier

things. But at the College they stuffed you with high-brows. Please, I musn't be critical. Please, I must talk to the dog or something. She was terrified. Her hands felt like slippery herrings and her fingers like bundles of firewood. Now then! c Perfection at £ast "W7FLL, now then! I was surprised, and I was not. The fleetingyears had not so dimmed my perceptions as to make me oblivious to the ways of our flappers. To their audacity, their modesty, their contempt for anything not quite perfection. Yet I rubbed my eyes, and unbuttoned my ears. There she sat, the bright, merry, careless lass, the technical "dud," the harmonic fool, the rhythmic idiot, the deprived of memory. She sat fair and square at the keyboard, her dark, bobbed hair swaying and jerking, her firm, lissom hands flying over the intricacies of a Brahms rhapsody. She played . without her book, like an angel. She made that piece dance and throb and sigh and sing, with a touch of highly-prac-tised skill, with the perfection and finish of a professional pianist. And when she had finished she received my congratulations with the shy smile of a child. "But I can't play, really. You should hear Mary Stafford and Hilary James. They're really swish! They have technique!

They play at the concerts! They're most frightfully high-brow! I just plod along, but they soar!" Youth's £ittle Ways /~\H yes, Youth amused me, and gave me great joy. She is coming again. We are to try Schumann's Concerto. She pretends to be horribly frightened. But I know what will happen. She will make me play dozens of -fugues and scores of partitas. For this young person with a terror of brains and anything highbrow has a passion for Bach. It wouldn't do to admit it, of course. It might suggest "pose." and that would be awful. So we play Bach in secret, and publicly lament being deprived of our jazz tunes. It's Youth's little way. It's the fashion just now. But young people who would be a la mode must not have those fingers, nor that sort of brow. Nor must they look quite so enchanted and bewitched when listening to 'the immortal Forty-eight Preludes and Fugues. Before she left 1 caught a glimpse of her copy of Brahms. It was enhanced by a highly poetical portrait of the great man with flowing beard. Above it, written in pencil, in a pretty, girlish hand, was the word "Beaver!" Decidedly, Youth is refreshing. 1 hope she comes again soon.