(From _The Smart Set_)
Several years ago, I was intimately acquainted with a young man named
Augustus Barber. He was employed in a paper-box manufacturer's business
in the city of London. I never heard what his father was. His mother was
a widow and lived, I think, at Godalming; but of this I am not sure. It
is odd enough that I should have forgotten where she lived, for my
friend was always talking about her. Sometimes he seemed immensely fond
of her; at other times almost to hate her; but whichever it was, he
never left her long out of his conversation. I believe the reason I
forget is that he talked so much about her that I failed at last to pay
attention to what he said.
He was a stocky young man, with light-coloured hair and a pale, rather
blotchy complexion. There was nothing at all extraordinary about him on
either the material or spiritual side. He had rather a weakness for
gaudy ties and socks and jewelry. His manners were a little boisterous;
his conversation, altogether personal. He had received some training at
a commercial school. He read little else than the newspapers. The only
book I ever knew him to read was a novel of Stevenson's, which he said
was "too hot for blisters."
Where, then, in this very commonplace young man, were hidden the
elements of the extraordinary actions and happenings I am about to
relate? Various theories offer; it is hard to decide. Doctors,
psychologists whom I have consulted, have given different opinions; but
upon one point they have all agreed--that I am not able to supply
enough information about his ancestry. And, in fact, I know hardly
anything about that.
This is not, either, because he was uncommunicative. As I say, he used
to talk a lot about his mother. But he did not really inspire enough
interest for anybody to take an interest in his affairs. He was there;
he was a pleasant enough fellow; but when he had gone you were finished
with him till the next time. If he did not look you up, it would never
occur to you to go and see him. And as to what became of him when he was
out of sight, or how he lived--all that, somehow, never troubled our
heads.
What illustrates this is that when he had a severe illness a few years
after I came to know him, so little impression did it make on anyone
that I cannot now say, and nobody else seems able to remember, what the
nature of the illness was. But I remember that he was very ill indeed;
and one day, meeting one of his fellow clerks in Cheapside, he told me
that Barber's death was only a question of hours. But he recovered,
after being, as I heard, for a long time in a state of lethargy which
looked mortal.
It was when he was out again that I--and not only myself but
others--noticed for the first time that his character was changing. He
had always been a laughing, undecided sort of person; he had a facile
laugh for everything; he would meet you and begin laughing before there
was anything to laugh at. This was certainly harmless, and he had a
deserved reputation for good humor.
But his manners now became subject to strange fluctuations, which were
very objectionable while they lasted. He would be overtaken with fits of
sullenness in company; at times he was violent. He took to rambling in
strange places at night, and more than once he appeared at his office in
a very battered condition. It is difficult not to think that he provoked
the rows he got into himself. One good thing was that the impulses which
drove him to do such actions were violent rather than enduring; in fact,
I often thought that if the force and emotion of these bouts ever came
to last longer, he would be a very dangerous character. This was not
only my opinion; it was the opinion of a number of respectable people
who knew him as well as I did.
I recollect that one evening, as three or four of us were coming out of
a music hall, Barber offered some freedom to a lady which the gentleman
with her--a member of Parliament, I was told--thought fit to resent. He
turned fiercely on Barber with his hand raised--and then suddenly grew
troubled, stepped back, lost countenance. This could not have been
physical fear, for he was a strongly built, handsome man--a giant
compared to the insignificant Barber. But Barber was looking at him, and
there was something not only in his face, but, so to speak,
_encompassing_ him--I can't well describe it--a sort of abstract
right--an uncontrolled power--a command of the issues of life and death,
which made one quail.
Everybody standing near felt it; I could see that from their looks. Only
for a moment it lasted, and then the spell was broken--really as if some
formidable spectacle had been swept away from before our eyes; and there
was Barber, a most ordinary looking young man, quiet and respectable,
and so dazed that he scarcely heeded the cuff which the gentleman
managed to get in before we could drag our friend off--
It was about this time that he began to show occasionally the strangest
interest in questions of art--I mean, strange in him whom we had never
known interested in anything of the kind. I am told, however, that this
is not so very remarkable, since not a few cases have been observed of
men and women, after some shock or illness, developing hitherto
unsuspected aptitude for painting or poetry or music. But in such cases
the impulse lasts continuously for a year or two, and now and then for
life.
With Barber the crisis was just momentary, never lasting more than half
an hour, often much less. In the midst of his emphatic and pretentious
talk, he would break off suddenly, remain for a minute lost and
dreaming, and then, after spying at us suspiciously to see if we had
noticed anything strange, he would give an undecided laugh and repeat a
joke he had read in some comic paper.
His talk on these art subjects was without sense or connection, so far
as I could discover. Sometimes he spoke of painting, but when we put to
him the names of famous painters, he had never heard of them, and I
don't believe he had ever been in an art gallery in his life. More often
he spoke of theatrical matters. Coming back from a theatre, he would
sometimes fall to abusing the actors, and show the strongest jealousy,
pointing out how the parts should have been played, and claiming roundly
that he could have played them better. Of course, there were other
times--most times--when he was alike indifferent to plays and players,
or summed them up like the rest of us, as just "ripping" or "rotten." It
was only when the play had much excited him that he became critical, and
at such times none of us seemed willing to dispute with him, though we
hardly ever agreed with what he was saying.
Sometimes, too, he would talk of his travels, telling obvious lies, for
we all knew well enough that he had never been outside the home
counties, except once on a week-end trip to Boulogne-sur-mer. On one
occasion he put me to some confusion and annoyed me considerably before
a gentleman whom I had thoughtlessly brought him with me to visit. This
gentleman had long resided in Rome as agent for an English hosiery firm,
and he and his wife were kindly showing us some photographs, picture
post-cards, and the like, when, at the sight of a certain view, Barber
bent over the picture and became absorbed.
"I have been there," he said.
The others looked at him with polite curiosity and a little wonder. To
pass it off I began to mock.
"No," he persisted, "I have seen it."
"Yes, at the moving-pictures."
But he began to talk rapidly and explain. I could see that the gentleman
and his wife were interested and quite puzzled. It would seem that the
place he described--Naples, I think it was--resembled broadly the place
they knew, but with so many differences of detail as to be almost
unrecognizable. It was, as Mrs. W. said afterward, "like a city
perceived in a dream--all the topsy-turvydom, all the mingling of
fantasy and reality."
After outbursts of this kind, he was generally ill--at least he kept his
bed and slept much. As a consequence, he was often away from the office;
and whenever I thought of him in those days, I used to wonder how he
managed to keep his employment.
One foggy evening in January, about eight o'clock, I happened to be
walking with Barber in the West End. We passed before a concert hall,
brilliantly lighted, with a great crowd of people gathered about the
doors, and I read on a poster that a concert of classical music was
forward at which certain renowned artists were to appear. I really
cannot give any sort of reason why I took it into my head to go in. I am
rather fond of music, even of the kind which requires a distinct
intellectual effort; but I was not anxious to hear music that night, and
in any case, Barber was about the last man in the world I should have
chosen to hear it with. When I proposed that we should take tickets, he
strongly objected.
"Just look me over," he said. "I ain't done anything to you that you
want to take my life, have I? I know the kind of merry-go-round that
goes on in there, and I'm not having any."
I suppose it was his opposition which made me stick to the project, for
I could not genuinely have cared very much, and there was nothing to be
gained by dragging Barber to a concert against his will. Finally, seeing
I was determined, he yielded, though most ungraciously.
"It'll be the chance of a lifetime for an hour's nap," he said as we
took our seats, "if they only keep the trombone quiet."
I repeat his trivial sayings to show how little there was about him in
manner or speech to prepare me for what followed.
I remember that the first number on the programme was Beethoven's
Seventh Symphony. This work, as is well known, is rather long, and so,
at the end of the third movement, I turned and looked at Barber to see
if he was asleep. But his eyes were wide open, feverish, almost glaring;
he was twining and untwining his fingers and muttering excitedly.
Throughout the fourth movement he continued to talk incoherently.
"Shut up!" I whispered fiercely. "Just see if you can't keep quiet, or
we shall be put out."
I was indeed very much annoyed, and some people near by were turning in
their chairs and frowning.--
I do not know whether he heard what I said: I had no chance to talk to
him. The applause had hardly died away at the end of the symphony when a
singer appeared on the stage. Who he was, or what music he sang, I am
utterly unable to say; but if he is still alive it is impossible that he
should have forgotten what I relate. If I do not remember him, it is
because all else is swallowed up for me in that extraordinary event.
Scarcely had the orchestra ceased preluding and the singer brought out
the first notes of his song, than Barber slowly rose from his seat.
"That man is not an artist," he said in a loud and perfectly final
voice, "I will sing myself."
"Sit down, for God's sake!--The management--the police"--
Some words like these I gasped, foreseeing the terrible scandal which
would ensue, and I caught him by the arm. But he shook himself free
without any difficulty, without even a glance at me, and walked up the
aisle and across the front of the house toward the little stairs at the
side which led up to the platform. By this time the entire audience was
aware that something untoward was happening. There were a few cries of
"Sit down! Put him out!" An usher hastened up as Barber was about to
mount the steps.
Then a strange thing happened.
As the usher drew near, crying out angrily, I saw Barber turn and look
at him. It was not, as I remember, a fixed look or a determined look; it
was the kind of untroubled careless glance a man might cast over his
shoulder who heard a dog bark. I saw the usher pause, grow pale and
shamefaced feel like a servant who has made a mistake; he made a
profound bow and then--yes, he actually dropped on his knees. All the
people saw that. They saw Barber mount the platform, the musicians
cease, the singer and the conductor give way before him. But never a
word was said--there was a perfect hush. And yet, so far as my stunned
senses would allow me to perceive, the people were not wrathful or even
curious; they were just silent and collected as people generally are at
some solemn ceremonial. Nobody but me seemed to realize the
outrageousness and monstrosity of the vulgar-looking, insignificant
Barber there on the platform, holding up the show, stopping the
excellent music we had all paid to hear.
And in truth I myself was rapidly falling into the strangest confusion.
For a certain time--I cannot quite say how long--I lost my hold on
realities. The London concert hall, with its staid, rather sad-looking
audience, vanished, and I was in a great white place inundated with
sun--some vast luminous scene. Under a wide caressing blue sky, in the
dry and limpid atmosphere, the white marble of the buildings and the
white-clad people appeared as against a background of an immense blue
veil shot with silver. It was the hour just before twilight, that rapid
hour when the colors of the air have a supreme brilliance and serenity,
and a whole people, impelled by some indisputable social obligation,
seemed to be reverently witnessing the performance of one magnificent
man of uncontrollable power, of high and solitary grandeur.--
Barber began to sing.
Of what he sang I can give no account. The words seemed to me here and
there to be Greek, but I do not know Greek well, and in such words as I
thought I recognized, his pronunciation was so different from what I had
been taught that I may well have been mistaken.
I was so muddled, and, as it were, transported, that I cannot say even
if he sang well. Criticism did not occur to me; he was there singing and
we were bound to listen. As I try to hear it, now, it was a carefully
trained voice. A sound of harps seemed to accompany the singing; perhaps
the harpists in the orchestra touched their instruments.--
How long did it last? I have no idea. But it did not appear long before
all began to waver. The spell began to break; the power by which he was
compelling us to listen to him was giving out. It was exactly as if
something, a mantle or the like, was falling from Barber.
The absurdity of the whole thing began to dawn on me. There was Barber,
an obscure little Londoner, daring to interrupt a great musical
performance so that the audience might listen to him instead! Probably
because I was the only one on the spot personally acquainted with
Barber, I was perceiving the trick put upon us sooner than the rest of
the audience; but they, too, were becoming a little restless, and it
would not be long ere they fully awoke. One thing I saw with perfect
clearness and some terror, and that was that Barber himself realized
that his power was dying within him. He appeared to be dwindling,
shrinking down; in his eyes were suffering and a terrible panic--the
distress of a beaten man appealing for mercy. The catastrophe must fall
in a minute--
With some difficulty I rose from my place and made for the nearest exit.
My difficulty came, not from the crowd or anything like that, but from
an inexplicable sensation that I was committing some crime by stirring
while Barber was on the stage, and even risking my life.
Outside it was raining.
I walked away rapidly, for although I was, to a certain extent, under
the influence of the impression I have just described, some remains of
common sense urged me to put a long distance between myself and the
concert hall as soon as possible. I knew that the hoots and yells of
fury and derision had already broken loose back there. Perhaps Barber
would be taken to the police station. I did not want to be mixed up in
the affair--
But suddenly I heard the steps of one running behind me. As I say, it
was a wet night, and at that hour the street was pretty empty. Barber
ran up against me and caught my arm. He was panting and trembling
violently.
"You fool!" I cried furiously. "Oh, you fool!" I shook myself free of
his hold. "How did you get out?"
"I don't know," he panted. "They let me go--that is, as soon as I saw
that I was standing up there before them all, I jumped off the stage and
bolted. Whatever made me do it? My God, what made me do it? I heard a
shout. I think they are after me."
I hailed a passing cab and shoved Barber inside, and then got in
myself. I gave the cabman a fictitious address in Kensington.
"Yes," I said fiercely. "What made you do it?"
He was bunched in a corner of the cab, shuddering like a man who has
just had some great shock, or who has been acting under the influence of
a drug which has evaporated and left him helpless. His words came in
gasps.
"If you can tell me that!--God, I'm frightened! I'm frightened! I must
be crazy. Whatever made me do it? If they hear of it at the office I'll
lose my job."
"They'll hear of it right enough, my boy," I sneered, "and a good many
other people too. You can't do these little games with impunity."
I caught sight of the clock at Hyde Park corner. It was near a quarter
to ten.
"Why," I said, "you must have been up there over twenty minutes. Think
of that!"
"Don't be so hard on me," said Barber miserably. "I couldn't help it."