The sound of the telephone bell brought the tuner’s mild blue eyes from
his plate.
“F sharp,” he remarked. “Same pitch as the bell in my shop.”
“How extraordinary that you can name the pitch of a sound offhand!”
exclaimed the professor, eyeing him with interest.
“All in the way of business,” replied the tuner placidly. “No, thank
you, ma’arm, no cream on the pudding. I never paint the lily, as father
used to say. . . . I’d not have been tuning pianos all over the world
with a ‘come again’ always behind me if I hadn’t had something of an ear,
would I, now?”
“But accurate to such a degree! I thought one tuned by chords and
melodies and—and that sort of thing.”
“Chords! Melodies!” repeated the tuner with professional scorn. “Of
course some do muddle along that way, but there’s nothing in it. The
octave, there’s the interval to give the test to a man’s ear.”
“You’re Greek in your preferences,” commented the professor with a smile.
“The Greeks, you know, knew nothing of harmony as we understand it.
Their only interval was the octave—they called it magadizing.”
“Well now, to think of it!” said the tuner. “I wish I’d known. There
was a Greek sailor on the Silvershell, and I might have had a chat with
him about his music.”
“I was referring to the ancient Greeks,” the professor explained. “I am
not familiar with modern Greek music, but I imagine it is very much like
modern music everywhere.”
“Of course,” agreed the tuner cynically. “Comic operas, chords that give
all ten fingers something to do—that’s music as they write it now. And
I’m not saying that it hasn’t its place,” he went on. “It’s human, at
least. Professionally, I admire the octave, but when I sit down in the
evening for a bit of a rest and me daughter Nora plays ‘Vesper Chimes,’
the way those chords pile up on each other don’t hurt me the way it would
some. After all, perfection’s apt to be a bit bleak, isn’t it? There
was Cartwright, for instance. The octave came to be the only perfect
interval for him—poor Cartwright!”
“Cartwright?” repeated the professor curiously.
“Haven’t I ever told you about Cartwright? Hm! Well!” He pushed his
chair back a little from the table, fixed his eyes thoughtfully on the
antics of a pair of orioles building a nest outside the window, and
meditated for a moment. We were too wise to break the silence, for we
knew that the tuner was digging up from the storehouse of a rich memory
some fresh chapter in the Odyssey of his wanderings. After a little he
began his tale.
* * * * *
What the professor here said about the Greeks and their octaves set me
thinking about Cartwright. I haven’t often spoken of him, for there’s
not much to tell that most people would understand. Molly, now, she
always speaks of him as that poor crazy Mr. Cartwright. The perfect
interval is nonsense, Molly says. Red Wing’s good enough for her. . .
but I’d better begin at the beginning.
It was the time Molly and I were taking our wedding trip on the tramp
schooner Silvershell, and we were cruising about the Pacific after copra
and vanilla and all those cargoes that sound so romantic when one’s
young. One of the ports we were bound for was a place called Taku, down
in the Dangerous Archipelago. The captain warned us that it would be a
bad trip.
“But you ought to make your fortune there,” he says, “for I’ll lay a
wager you’re the first tuner that’s ever visited the place. Whether you
get home to spend your money or not, that’s another matter. That’s on
the knees of the gods,” says the captain, who was an Oxford man and had
picked up some of his expressions there.
When we got in among the islands I saw what he meant. Coral they were,
and reefs above water and below. Molly and I slept in our life
preservers night after night, and daytime we could scarcely go down to
meals for wondering how we’d get through that boiling sea of breakers and
hidden peaks of coral. We’d some narrow shaves, too, but we made Taku,
and anchored one evening in a lagoon that looked as if it might have been
painted on a colored calendar, palms and parrots and native huts and all.
The Silvershell was to be in port some time, and the captain told us to
look about as much as we liked.
“There’s an organ up at the mission,” he says. “It’s got asthma or
something. If you can cure it, I’ll gladly foot the bill. I’m a
church-going man when I’m ashore,” says the captain, who liked his joke,
“but that organ puts me clean off religion.”
Well, I made a good job of the organ, and very grateful the ladies were
for it, too. Then I went up to the British commissioner’s, where I was
told there was a piano needing attention. Davidson, the commissioner,
was an uncommonly decent chap, and he put me in the way of two or three
more odd bits of tuning and repairing, besides having his own instrument
put into shape. The missionary ladies had suggested that Molly and I
stay with them while the Silvershell was in port, so I could put in a
tidy bit of work in a day. But there were only twenty white families in
the place, and I’d about gone through the work when one afternoon
Davidson stopped me as I was going back to the mission, and asked me to
step up to the house with him, as a friend of his wanted to talk with me
about rather a large job of repairing he wished done.
The friend was Cartwright. I shall never forget that first sight of him,
not to my dying day. He was standing in the big music room where I’d
been working for Davidson two or three days before, and as we came in he
turned and gave us such a look!
“Oh, it’s you!” he said, as if he’d expected something terrible to come
in the door. And then, as Davidson introduced us, he nodded in an
offhand sort of way. He was the only man I’ve ever called beautiful.
Beautiful was the only word to describe him. “Golden lads,”—I once heard
an actor spout about them at a play, and now, when I remember that
expression, I think of Cartwright. He was a golden lad, for all his
haunted, unhappy face.
“I’ve a piano at home that wants looking after,” he says to me after a
moment. “Rather a large job, but if you are willing to go back with me
in the morning I’ll make it worth your while.”
“If it isn’t too far away,” I said. “I’m only stopping here while the
Silvershell is in port.”
“Not so far,” says Cartwright. “I could have you back here in three or
four days. And I’ll make it worth your while.” In spite of his
off-handedness, it was plain he was keen on having me come.
Of course I said I’d go, and then Cartwright nodded and said something
about my being at the wharf about five, and left us, just like that.
“But he never told me what was needed for the piano,” I said to Davidson.
“About everything, I fancy,” Davidson answers gruffly. “It hasn’t been
touched in ten years.”
“Ten years!” I said. “He’s no business having a piano if he cares no
more for it than that.”
“He cared too much for it, perhaps,” Davidson said in a peculiar tone.
He took out his pipe and fussed with it, then he went on. “Perhaps I
ought to tell you. He hasn’t touched the piano since the night his wife
drowned herself. . . . I was there at the time. Cartwright and
Charlotte had been singing together.”
“Was Charlotte his wife?”
“His cousin, Sir John Brooke’s daughter. Sir John is my chief, you know.
They are expected back from England almost any day now.”
Davidson’s face had gone quite red at the mention of the girl’s name, and
all at once I guessed why he had been so keen about having his piano in
shape. I wondered if it was for this Charlotte’s sake that Cartwright,
too, was preparing.
“Cartwright’s wife was the daughter of old Miakela, the native chief,”
was the surprising information Davidson offered me next. “She had been
educated at a convent in Manila, and she was very beautiful in a cold,
foreign way. I think, though, it was her voice that first attracted
Cartwright. It was perfect; it made other quite nice voices sound coarse
and shrill. Cartwright had come out to Taku to visit his uncle, and he
met the girl here the evening she came back from Manila. The next day he
married her—rode over the mountains to ask her father’s permission. That
old savage—fancy! There was a huge row with Sir John, and Cartwright
took the girl and went to live on a little atoll about forty miles from
here. . . . Miss Charlotte hadn’t come out from school in England then.
She came back the next year. . . That’s how it happened.”
As a matter of fact he really hadn’t told me how it happened at all, but
he began to talk of other things, and after a bit I said good-night, and
went back to tell Molly about my new job.
I wish you could have seen the lagoon the next morning when I went down
to meet Cartwright. The old coral wharf was flushed with pink that
shaded into mauve below the water, and the mauve went amethyst, and then
violet blue out where the Silvershell slept at her anchor in the middle
of the lagoon. And still! Not a ripple anywhere until a high-prowed
native canoe slipped out from a pool of shadow under the palms along the
shore, cutting through the glassy water like a boat in a dream. As she
neared the wharf the sun jumped up from the sea, and Cartwright, all in
white, stood up in the stern and shaded his eyes with his hand. He was a
picture, his haunted beauty above the bronzed backs of the rowers.
He apologized for bringing me out so early, then seemed to forget all
about me and sat silent, his eyes on the horizon line. Not that I
minded. I wanted to be let alone, so I could look about me as we slipped
along over a sea that seemed to have no end.
Once outside the lagoon, the men bent to their paddles with a will,
breaking into a melody that reminded me of some hymn tune. They gave it
a foreign twist by ending each line on the octave.
“Wonderful pitch!” I said.
“What’s that?” asked Cartwright, jerking his head round. I repeated what
I’d said. He glared at me wildly, then seemed to pull himself together,
and muttered some sort of reply.
“Well, if a simple speech has that effect on you, my lad, I’ll sit
silent,” I said to myself, and silent I did sit the rest of the trip.
About the middle of the morning a bunch of what looked like feather
clusters rose out of the sea in front of us. Pretty soon I could see a
pinky ridge below, then a line of white. The men put up a brown sail,
and in another hour we slid between two lines of breakers into the
tiniest lagoon I ever saw, lying in the arms of a crescent-shaped atoll.
The whole thing could not have been more than four or five miles long and
fifty feet high at the ridge. There was a group of native huts on the
beach and a rambling house above, set in a grove of breadfruit and citron
and scarlet flame trees. The rest of the island was bare except for a
brush of pandanus along the crest and a group of coconut palms on the
point, their trunks leaning seaward, as if they were looking for
something on the horizon. A lonely spot, yet with a sharp, gemlike
beauty of its own.
“Won’t you come up and rest a bit?” Cartwright asked. “You had an early
start this morning.”
I said I’d rather go right to work. I hadn’t forgotten the way he glared
at me in the boat, and I wasn’t going to put myself in the way of another
look like that.
“Right, then; I’ll show you the piano,” he says. But he didn’t move,
only stood staring at me with the look of a small boy that had got
himself into some trouble, and was wondering if I could help him out.
Suddenly he started off almost on a run, and led me around the shore to
the point below the coconut palms, where a pavilion stood in a thick
clump of trees. The place looked as if it hadn’t been visited for years.
The path was choked with undergrowth, and the doorway was almost hidden
by twisted ropes of lianas, growing down serpent fashion from the
branches overhead.
“A sweet place to keep a piano,” I thought to myself. I could hardly
believe it was the piano he was bringing me to. But as we reached the
door I saw it in its wrapping of tarpaulin, half hid under forest rubbish
that had filtered through the broken thatch of the roof. As I lifted one
corner of the cover, something jumped up with a rush of wings and went
screaming past my head. It gave me a proper fright.
“Just a parrot,” Cartwright said. “You’ve upset her nest, you see. Be
careful when you lift the lid. There may be centipedes inside.”
“If you’ll clear the live stock off the outside, I’ll see to the inside,”
I said. “I should think a cheaper piano would have done the parrots to
nest in, sir.
“It seems odd to you,” he said meekly, wrinkling his forehead a little.
“I wish I could explain—”
He caught himself up, and I answered never a word, but began examining
the piano. It was a Broadwood grand, but the state it was in! I’d hard
work not to give him a further piece of my mind.
For three days I worked at the poor thing. Hammers eaten off by the
white ants, wires that the sea rust had done for, cracked keys, nothing
really in shape but the sounding board. And all the time I was working
the parrots kept screaming over my head, the trades blew through the torn
thatch of palms, the surf beat on the pink and purple reefs beyond the
point, and I kept thinking what a queer start it all was and how much I’d
have to tell Molly when I got back.
Now and again Cartwright would stop a few minutes in the doorway and make
jerky conversation, eyeing the piano like a starving man the while. He
stopped quite a time the third morning. I was busy tuning and hadn’t
much to say, but gradually he came nearer.
“How’s it coming on?” he asked.
“All in shape but one string,” I said. “Try the tone of it, sir.”
“I mustn’t touch it, I mustn’t touch it,” he says to himself, but all the
time he was coming closer, as if something was pulling him on. He put
out his hand and struck B flat octave.
“The upper B is mute!” he cries.
I explained that the string had broken twice, and I hadn’t got around to
putting another in.
“Broken!” he says wildly. “She’s not going to have it there. And now
I’ll not get the sound out of my head again!”
I suppose he saw something in my face that made him recollect himself.
It was pitiful to see him pull himself together.
“Do your best with it, old chap,” he says hurriedly. “I’m depending on
you. My uncle and cousin are to be back from England soon. I—I want
everything right when my cousin Charlotte comes.”
He spoke the girl’s name as if it were a charm.
That evening, as we were smoking, he began to talk of his cousin again.
She’d stayed with his people while she was going to school, he told me,
and she and Cartwright had been great friends.
“She was comforting,” he said. “She made one feel happy and—and normal.”
Then he said, in a tone that sounded as if he expected me to contradict
him: “She had a good ear for music, too. Not perfect, of course. . . .
Did you ever know any one with an ear so perfect that only the eighth
interval satisfied them?”
“One or two,” I said, wondering what he was driving at now. “They were
cranks, though. One should love music in reason, in my opinion.”
“In reason, that’s it,” Cartwright repeated in a low tone. “My cousin
loved it in reason. I couldn’t. Perfection—I was tortured with the
idea.”