The Unknown Quantity Part 8

III

In the pause that followed, the Music-Lover let himself drift quietly with the thoughts of peace and concord awakened by this loveliest of andantes.

The beginning of the _Scherzo_ found him, somehow or other, in a new relation to the visible image of the orchestra. The weird, almost supernatural music, murmured at first by the 'cellos and double-ba.s.ses, then proclaimed by the horns as if by the trumpet of Fate itself; the repet.i.tion of the same struggle of emotions which had marked the first movement, but now more tense, more pa.s.sionate, more human, the strange, fantastic mingling of comedy and tragedy in the _Trio_ and the _Fugue_ with its abrupt questions and answers; all this seemed to him like a moving picture of the inner life of man.

And while he followed it, the other half of his mind was watching the players, no longer as a group, a unit of disciplined action, but as individuals, persons for each of whom life had a distinct colour, and tone, and meaning.

His eyes rested unconsciously on the pale, dreamy face of the second violinist; the black, rugged brows of the trumpeter; the long, gentle countenance of the flute-player with its flexible lips and blond beard.

The grizzled head of the 'cellist bent over his instrument with an air of quiet devotion. The burly form of the player of the double-ba.s.soon, behind his rare and awkward instrument, waiting for his time to come in, had the look of a man who could not be surprised or troubled by anything. One of the ba.s.s-violinists had the rough-hewn figure and the divinely chiseled, sorrow-lighted face of Lincoln, the others were children of the everyday. The clarionettist, with his dark beard and high temples, might have sat for Rembrandt's picture of "The Philosopher." The rotund kettle-drummer, with his smooth head and sparkling eyes, restlessly turning his little keys and bending down to listen to the tuning of his grotesque music-pots, seemed impatient for the part in the score when he was to build the magical bridge, on which the symphony pa.s.ses, without a break, from the third to the last movement.

"All these persons," said the inner voice of the Music-Lover (he listening all the while to the entangling and unfolding, dismissing and recalling of the various motives)--"all these persons have their own lives and characters. They have known joys and sorrows, failures and successes. They have hoped and feared. All that Beethoven poured into this music from his experience of poverty, of conflict with physical weakness and the cruel limitations of Fate, of baffled desire, of loneliness, of strong resolution, of immortal courage and faith, these players in their measure and degree have known.

"Even now they may be in love, in hatred, in friends.h.i.+p, in jealousy, in gloom, in resignation, in courage, or in happiness. What strange paths lie behind them; what laughter and what tears have they shared; what secret ties unite them, one with another, and what hidden barriers rise between those who do not understand and those who do not care! There are many stories running along underneath this music, some of them just begun, some long since ended, some never to find a true completion: little stories of many lands, humourous and pathetic, droll and capricious legends, merry jests, vivid romances, serious tales of patience and devotion.

"And out of these stories, because they are human, has come the humanity of the players: the thing which makes it possible for them to feel this music, and to play it, not as a machine would play, grinding it out with dead monotony, but with all the colour and pa.s.sion of life itself.

"Why should we not know something of this hidden background of the orchestra? Why should not somebody tell one of the stories that is waiting here? Not I, but some one familiar with this region, who has trodden its paths and shared in its labours; not a mere lover of music, but a musician."

Here the inner voice which had been running along through the _Scherzo_ and the _Trio_ and the _Recapitulation_, died away quietly with the _pianissimo_ pa.s.sage in which the double-ba.s.ses and the drum carry one through the very heart of mystery; and the Music-Lover found himself intensely waiting for the great _Finale_.

Now it comes, long-expected, surprising, victorious, sweeping all the instruments into its mighty current, pausing for a moment to take up the most delicate and mysterious melody of the _Scherzo_ (changed as if by magic into something new and strange), and then moving on again, with hurrying, swelling tide, until it breaks in the swift-rolling, thunderous billows of immeasurable jubilation.

The Music-Lover drew a long breath. He sat motionless in his seat. The storm of applause did not disturb him. He did not notice that the audience had risen. He was looking at the orchestra, already beginning to melt away; but he did not really see them.

Presently a hand was stretched out from the second row behind him, and touched him on the shoulder. He turned around and saw the face of his friend the Dreamer, the Brushwood Boy, with his bright eyes and disheveled hair. And beside him was the radiant presence of the Girl Who Understood.

"_Lieber Meister,_" said the Boy, "you are coming now with us. There is a bite and a sup, and a pipe and an open fire, waiting for you in our room--and I have a story to read you. _Bitte komm!_"

HUMORESKE

I

They parted at the end of the summer--the boy and the girl--after having been very happy together for two months and very miserable for two days. The trouble was that she would not marry him.

This was not altogether strange, for Richard Shafer was only twenty and had just finished his second year in college. To Carola Brune, who was a year younger, he seemed perfect as a playmate, but she simply could not imagine him as a husband. He was too vague, unformed, boyish in his moods and caprices. She was a strong girl, with quick and powerful impulses in her nature, and she felt that she would need a strong man to hold her. What Richard was, what he would be, she could not clearly see. She loved to make music with him--she at the piano, he with his violin. She loved to roam the woods with him, and to go out in a canoe with him on the moonlit river. But she could not and she would not say that she loved _him_--at least, not enough to promise to marry him now.

He took her "no" very hard. He argued the case persistently. There were no real obstacles, that he could see, to their marriage. She was the daughter of a musician, a Bohemian, who would make no objections to an unworldly match. He was an orphan with a little patrimony of four or five thousand dollars, enough to live on until the world recognised his genius as a poet and his mastery as a violinist.

At this, unfortunately, being a little nervous and overstrained by the long pleading, she laughed. "Oh, d.i.c.k!" she cried. "Swinburne and Sarasate--two single gentlemen rolled into one!"

Now there is nothing that a boy--or for that matter, a man--dislikes so much as laughter when he is making a declaration of love. His sense of humour at that time is in eclipse, and even the gentlest turn of wit shocks him deeply.

"Very well," he answered, rising from their favourite seat among the roots of an old hemlock tree overhanging the stream, "let us go back to the hotel. I have been a silly a.s.s, I suppose, and now it's all over."

"But why?"--she was tempted to ask him as they walked through the woods. Why was it all over? Why shouldn't they go on being good friends and comrades? Couldn't he see that she had only tried to make a little joke to ease the strain? Didn't he know that she really had a wonderful admiration for his talents and a large hope for his future?

But something held her back from speaking. She was embarra.s.sed and slightly ashamed. He was in a strange mood, evidently offended, absurdly polite and distant, making talk about the concert that was to come off that evening. She could not bring herself to explain to him now. She would do it in the morning when the air was clearer and cooler.

As they entered the hotel, she turned into the music room, saying that she had to practise for her part in the concert. He held out his hand with a little formal gesture. "I wish you a big success," said he; "my part doesn't need any practice." Then he went upstairs to pack his trunk for the six o'clock train.

An hour later, as he pa.s.sed out of the door, he heard her still at the piano. She was playing for her own pleasure now--just to relieve the tension of her feelings by letting them flow out on the rhythmic current of music. It was her favourite piece, that magical _humoreske_ by Dvorak, which is like an April day, full of smiles and tears, pleading and laughter. The clear notes came out under her exquisite touch with a penetrating charm of airy, graceful fantasy. To the angry boy at the door it seemed as if they were full of delicate indifference and mockery. They expressed to him the spirit of a girl--light, capricious, elusive, yet with a will that can resist all appeal and evade all attack--an invincible b.u.t.terfly, a thistle-down of steel--the thing that a man wants most in all the world and yet can not have unless she chooses. She stood for his first defeat, his great disappointment, his discovery that life can refuse; and now she was playing this quaint, careless, mocking music!

"She does not care," he said to himself, as he climbed into the stage, "and I will not care. She is only a flirt. All girls are like that." With this profound generalisation in what he called his mind, but what was really his temper, he rode sullenly away.

He did not hear how she lingered caressingly over the last phrases of the _humoreske_, playing them very softly, with her blond head bent over the piano, as if she were trying to recall something. He did not know that she put on the frock that he liked best, with the mauve ribbons, for the concert that night. He did not see her lips quiver and the look of pained surprise flash into her brown eyes when she heard that he had gone without even saying good-bye.

Naturally she, thinking him a proud and foolish boy, waited for him to come back or to write. Naturally he, having cla.s.sified her as a cold and heartless flirt, expected her to send him a letter asking him to return. Naturally neither of these things happened. The little bank-dividing stream of circ.u.mstance flowed between them, ever broadening, until it seemed like an impa.s.sable river.

Each of them said, "It was only an episode." Each of them was sure that there was nothing in it which could mean a lasting pain, nothing which time would not obliterate. Each of them repeated a wise phrase or two about "pa.s.sing fancies" and "puppy love," and so they went their ways lightly enough, reasonably resolving not to think of each other any more.

But it was strange how clearly and brightly the scenes of the summer itself lived in their memories. To both of them there was a peculiar and deepening vividness in those pictures of certain places.

The hardwood ridges in the forest, where there was no undergrowth and they could walk straight ahead, side by side, through the interminable colonnade of beeches and birches which upheld the green, gold-flecked roof,--the dark tangled spruce thicket, where one must stoop under the interlacing lower branches, dead and brittle, and creep over the soft brown carpet of fallen needles, dry and slippery, in order to reach a little open glade, moist with springs, where the red wood-lily and the purple-fringed orchid grew,--the high steep rock that jutted out from the woods about half-way up the slope of the Dome, as if to make a narrow view-point of surprise where two people could stand close together and look down upon the broad valley and the blue hills beyond,--the old hemlock, with its big, bent knees covered with moss, ready to hold them comfortably in its lap, while they read poetry or stories of adventure, and the little river sung its sleepy song at their feet,--the long stillwater where the canoe floated quietly among the mirrored stars,--the merry rapids where the moon path spread before them broad and silvery, luring them to follow it down to danger,--the twilight hour in the music room, where the piano answered to the violin, and through the open door and windows the aromatic breath of the pine-trees and the spicy smell of wild grapes drifted faintly in,--a certain afternoon when the cool rain-drops beat in their faces as they tramped home, after a long walk over the hills, wet and joyous, swinging their clasped hands and chanting some foolish, endless song of the road,--a certain evening when the murmuring hemlock above them grew silent, and the whispering water below them seemed to hush, and a single big star across the river was softly throbbing in the mauve dusk, and their lips met for a moment as purely and silently as the twilight meets the night;--these were pictures that would not fade and dissolve. There was something unforgettable about them.

Was it the spirit of place that possessed them with a unique loveliness; or was it that they were illuminated by the charm of a companions.h.i.+p in which two hearts had tasted together the sweetest cup in the world, the royal chalice of the pure, uncalculating, inexplicable joy of living?

Be that as it may, the fact remains that while the boy and the girl went away from each other, and grew separately to manhood and womanhood, and had other experiences and joys and troubles, that summer stayed with them both as something rare and unequalled, set apart in its delectable perfection, a standard by which, unconsciously, they measured all happiness and all beauty.

The effect of such an inward standard is peculiar. It is apt to give a certain detachment, a touch of isolation, to the person who possesses it. And whether that is a good thing or a bad thing depends upon the tone which is given to it by an unknown quant.i.ty, the way in which the secret will of the spirit chooses to take and use it.

To Carola Brune it was like the possession of something very precious, which she had found and which she felt she could never lose. She followed the path which was marked out for her as a student of music with tranquil enthusiasm and cheerful industry; she made friends everywhere by her serene and wholesome loveliness; and she did her work at the piano so well that when she went to Paris, at the end of the second year, to continue her studies, she found no difficulty in being received as a pupil by the great Alberti.

"You have a very happy touch, mademoiselle," said the little gray man one day at the end of a lesson. He gave his moustache that fierce upward turn with which he accompanied his rare compliments, and frowned at her benignly while he went on. "I suppose you know that you really play better than you know how to play. What right have you to do that?"

She smiled as she turned around to him, for she had learned to understand his abrupt ways. "No right, dear master," she said, "only perhaps it is because I happen to know a little of the meaning of happiness."

"But you play the sad music too," he continued, "and you let it all come out."

"That is because I am not afraid of sadness," she answered, with her clear brown eyes looking quietly up at him.

His voice grew gentle and he laid his hand on her shoulder. "You have the secret, my child--to know the meaning of happiness, and not to be afraid of sadness, but to pour it all into the music. That is the secret, and it will make you a musician,--it will carry you far, I think,--provided you don't neglect your practising," he added brusquely.

She shook her head and laughed. "I wouldn't dare do that with such a tyrant as you, dear master."

"Next week," he went on, giving a new upward twist to his moustache, "I shall expect you to be letter-perfect with that G major concerto of Beethoven--no more drum-beats, remember. And mind, you are not to think of playing in public, at a concert, until I tell you. It may be a long time,--a year, perhaps,--but I am not going to let them spoil my sweetest rose by forcing her into bloom too soon."

"Despot," she laughed back as he patted her hand at the door, "if you only had a kind heart I should love you--a little!"

On the way home to her tiny apartment in the Rue de Grenelle, where she lived with her aunt and her younger sister, who was a student of drawing, she walked through the Garden of the Luxembourg, thinking about a concert. Not one of those which the master had forbidden to her, but a very simple and foolish and far-away little concert in the old hotel beside the Delaware. And the deep beauty of the forest came back to her, and the long-s.h.i.+ning reaches of the river, and the hours of good comrades.h.i.+p with a boy who perfectly shared her joy of living, and the breath of the pine-trees and the sweetness of the wild grape!

Did she really smell them now? No, it was only the faint fragrance of the formal beds of hyacinths and tulips and jonquils on the terraces behind the old palace. In the broad walks, children were running and playing. Old men were smoking on the benches in a drowsy peace. In the shady paths under the tall trees, evidently amatory couples were strolling or sitting close together. Carola enjoyed it all--but there was a look in her face, half sad, half smiling, as if she remembered something better.

When she reached home, she laid aside her hat and scarf, and went into the little _salon_. She sat down at the piano and let her fingers run idly over the keys, wandering from fragment to fragment of soft music.

Then with a firmer touch she began to play the _humoreske_ of Dvorak, but with a new phrasing, a new expression. It was full of an infinite tenderness, a great longing, a sweetness of distant and remembered joy. It seemed to be singing over again the favourite song of some one who had died--singing very clearly and distinctly so as not to lose a single note, a single movement, of the unforgotten melody of happiness.