away, and the oboe of the Italian band began to run up and down the
scale, she sank upon her cool step, stretched her toes and sighed.
“Gee!” she murmured, “N’Yawk’s the place!”
EDGAR, THE CHOIR BOY UNCELESTIAL
You all know how they look in the pictures—enlarged photogravures,
mostly: they have appealing violet eyes and drooping mouths and oval
faces. They tip their heads back and to the side, and there is usually a
broad beam of light falling across their little official nighties.
People frame them in Flemish oak and hang them over the piano, and
little girls long to resemble them.
But Edgar was not that kind. So greatly did he differ, in fact, that
even the choirmaster, who ought to have known better, was deceived, and
discovered him with difficulty. When that gentleman confronted them in
the parish house, a mob of suspicious little boys, shoving, growling,
snickering, and otherwise fulfilling their natures, he promptly selected
Tim Mullaly, who possessed to an amazing degree the violet eyes and the
drooping mouth and the oval face, as his first soprano. The choirmaster
was young in years and his profession.
But Tim refused to sing the scale alone, and as the others scorned to
accompany him in this exercise, Mr. Fellowes, determinedly patient,
suggested in the hilarious “come-on-boys!” fashion consecrated to
childhood by adults, that they should all join in some popular melody,
to limber them up and dispel their uneasiness.
[Illustration: “_But Tim refused to sing the scale alone._”]
“What shall we sing?” he called out breezily, from the piano-stool,
faintly indicating a “ragtime” rhythm with his left hand, still facing
them as he searched the forbidding countenances before him for a gleam
of friendship.
After all, they were human boys, and they could all sing after a
fashion, or they would not have been induced by relatives who had read
the qualifications for choir membership to attend this trying function.
“’Hot time!’” burst from one of the youngsters.
“All right!” and the inviting melody drew them in; soon they were
shouting lustily. Raucous altos, nasal sopranos, fatal attempts to
compass a bass—at any rate, they were started. The verse was over, the
chorus had begun, when a sudden sound sent the choirmaster’s heart to
his throat, his hands left the keys. Into the medley of coarse, boyish
shouting dropped a silvery thread of purest song, a very bird-note. For
a moment it flowed on the level of the chorus, then suddenly, with an
indescribable leap, a slurring rush, it rose to an octave above and led
them all. The choirmaster twirled around on the stool.
“Who’s that? Which boy is singing up there?” he demanded excitedly.
There was no reply. They grinned consciously at each other; one could
imagine them all guilty.
“Come, come, boys! Don’t be silly—who was it?”
Silence, of the most sepulchral sort. Mr. Fellowes shrugged his
shoulders, swung round again, and started the second verse. They dashed
through it noisily; he picked out here and there a sweet little treble,
one real alto. But his ears were pricked for something better, and
presently it came. The rhythm was too enticing.
“_Please, oh, please, oh, don’t you let me fall——_”
“By George, he’s a human blackbird!”
“_You’re all mine, an’ I love you best of all——_”
“That’s high C!”
“_An you mus’ be my man, ’r I’ll have no man at all——_”
The choirmaster burst into a joyous if somewhat reedy tenor.
“_There’ll be a hot time in the old town to-night!_”
He whirled about, still singing, and caught the ecstatic, dreamy gaze of
Tim Mullaly.
“It’s you!” he cried, pouncing on him. Tim giggled feebly.
“Yessir,” he said.
“Now sing this scale, and I’ll give you five cents.”
An envious sigh quavered through the parish hall.
Tim threw back his head and opened his drooping mouth.
“_Do, re——_”
There was a flash of blue gingham, a snarl of rage, a sound as of fifty
pounds of small boy suddenly seated on the floor.
“Where’s yer fi’ cents?” a new voice inquired easily.
The choirmaster perceived with amazement that the owner of the voice, a
freckled boy with an excessively _retroussé_ nose, was sitting on the
prostrate Tim.
“What is the meaning of this? Get up!” he said sternly. “What’s your
name? I can’t have any of this sort of thing in my choir!”
The freckled boy did not rise. In fact, he seated himself more
comfortably on Master Mullaly, and demanded again:
“Where’s yer fi’ cents?”
[Illustration: “’_Where’s yer fi’ cents?_’”]
The choirmaster stepped forward and seized the offender’s collar. As his
fingers tightened, the captive burst into the chorus of the moment
before—it was the blackbird voice! So obstinate was the choirmaster’s
first impression that he looked instinctively at the fallen Tim to catch
the notes, but Tim was struggling meekly but firmly for breath, and this
free trilling came from above him. The choirmaster relaxed his hold.
“It was you all the time!” he said in a stupor of surprise.
“Yep,” replied the singer, “it was me. Did yer think it was him?” with a
slight jounce to indicate his victim.
“Get up, won’t you, and sing me something else,” the choirmaster urged.
The boy rose promptly.
“What’ll I sing?” he returned amicably. There had been a different tone
in the choirmaster’s voice.
“Happy Home! Happy Home!” the crowd demanded. They had stood to one side
in the most neutral manner during the brief struggle that had laid Tim
low, and listened respectfully to the brief colloquy that followed. It
was evident that past experience had suggested this attitude on their
part.
The choirmaster looked relieved. He had no narrow prejudices, but he
realized that a hymn like “My Happy Home” comes with good effect from
the parish-hall windows.
“Where’s your mouth organ?” demanded the freckled one of a larger boy in
the crowd. The latter promptly produced the instrument in question,
cuddled it in both hands a moment after the fashion of the virtuoso, and
drew forth the jerky and complex series of strains peculiar to it. It
was evidently a prelude—a tune vaguely familiar to the choirmaster.
Suddenly the boy’s voice burst into this sombre background:
“_I’d leave my yappy yome fer you,
Oo-oo-oo-oo!_”
[Illustration: “’_I’d leave my yappy yome fer you, Oo-oo-oo-oo!_’”]
The choirmaster sighed ecstatically. A voice so tender, so soft, so rich
in appealing inflections he had never heard. The repeated vowels cooed,
they caressed, they allured.
“_You’re the nices’ man n’ I ever knoo,
Oo-oo-oo-oo!_”
If you remember how Madame Melba cooes, “Edgardo! Edgardo-o-o!” when she
sings the mad scene from “Lucia,” you will have an idea of the liquid,
slipping notes of that snub-nosed, freckled boy.
“What’s your name?” asked the choirmaster respectfully.
It appeared at first to be Egg-nog, but resolved into Edgar Ogden under
careful cross-examination, and its owner agreed to attend three weekly
rehearsals and two Sunday services for the princely salary of
twenty-five cents a week, the same to be increased in proportion to his
progress.
Subsequent efforts proved that it was utterly hopeless to attempt to
teach him to read music. When Tim Mullaly and the stupidest alto in the
United States—as the choirmaster assured him—could stumble through what
was considerately known as a duet at sight, and that was the work of
many months, Edgar was still learning his solos by ear. It was wasted
effort to insist, and the choirmaster spent long hours and nearly wore
his forefinger to the bone, fixing in his pupil’s mind the succession of
notes in anthems and _Te Deums_. Once learned, however, he never forgot
them, and Mr. Fellowes thrilled with pride as the silver stream of his
voice flowed higher, higher, above the organ, beyond the choir at his
side, till the people in the church sighed and craned their necks to
look at the wonderful boy.
[Illustration: “_As a matter of fact, they looked, most of them, at
Tim._”]
As a matter of fact, they looked, most of them, at Tim Mullaly, who,
fresh from his Saturday bath, in his little cassock and cotta, realized
the dreams of the most exigent lithographer. He stood next to Edgar, and
owing to a certain weakness of mind invariably followed with his lips
the entire libretto, so to speak, of the work in hand. As his appealing
expression and violet eyes were undetachable, he had all the effect of
the soloist, and received most of the credit from that vast majority who
fail to distinguish one little boy, like one Chinaman, from another,
unless he possesses some such salient feature as Tim’s pleading gaze.
This little apprehension was mercifully unsuspected by Edgar, otherwise
it is to be feared that the services of a physician would have been
required in the Mullaly household. Not that Edgar had any professional
pride in his voice. He possessed, according to his own ideas, many more
valuable and decorative qualities. His power of song was entirely
hereditary, and came to him from his father, who was of English descent.
The elder Mr. Ogden, whom rumor reported to run frequent risks of being
bitten like a serpent and stung like an adder at the last, had mounted
to a dizzy height in the Knights of Pythias entirely through his voice,
a sweet and powerful tenor, and was accustomed to spend the greater part
of his time in committing to memory and practising dramatic songs of a
highly moral variety with choruses on this order:
“_‘You lie! I saw you steal that ace!’
A crashing blow right in the face—
A pistol shot and death’s disgrace
Was in that pack of cards!_”
At the proper point, a friend in another room would shoot off a blank
cartridge to a stormy accompaniment on the Pythian piano, and the
Knights would become so appreciative that the soloist, to borrow a
classical phrase, rarely got home until morning. What time Mr. Ogden
found himself able to spare from getting up his repertoire was
judiciously employed in borrowing money for the purchase of new articles
of regalia, for with the Pythians to rise was to shine.
His elder son Samuel, familiarly known as Squealer, inherited both his
father’s tendencies, and was in great demand among the saloons and
pool-rooms, where he sang ballads of a tender and moral nature, dealing
mostly with the Home, and the sanctity of the family relation in
general. One of these in especial, in which Squealer assumed a hortatory
attitude and besought an imaginary parent to “take her back, Dad,”
adding in a melting baritone,
“_She’s my mother and your wife!_”
so affected a certain bar-room _habitué_, whose habit of chasing his
family through the tenement with a carving-knife had led them to move
out of town, that he had been known to lay his head on the bar and weep
audibly.
It was a moot point among his friends as to which was Squealer’s real
_chef d’œuvre_, the song just mentioned or another which ran,
“_You’ll only have one mother, boy,
You can’t treat her too well!_”
Very often after singing this Squealer would become too affected to
endure the thought of what the song described as “the old home, empty
now,” and would repair to some scene which drew less heavily on the
emotions, thus assuring a sleepless if wrathful night to Mrs. Ogden, and
fluent altercation on his return to the old home.
Mrs. Ogden was not musical herself, and devoted most of her energies to
fine laundry work, a less emotional but more lucrative occupation.
Edgar’s professional duties interested her chiefly by reason of the
weekly salary, now grown to fifty cents, of which one-tenth was allowed
him for his private purse, the remainder being applied to the very
obvious necessities of the household. His consequent position as
wage-earner was firmly established, and his mother, though she cherished
a natural contempt for the mental calibre of any young man who
considered Edgar’s voice worth fifty cents a week, saw to it that so
remunerative an organ received all the consideration it deserved.
[Illustration: “_Shiny storm rubbers were urged upon the artist’s
reluctant feet._”]
To Mr. Ogden’s undisguised horror, two new suits of under flannels were
purchased at the beginning of the winter, and shiny storm rubbers were
urged upon the artist’s reluctant feet on every slushy day. The most
unconvincing cough was rewarded with black licorice, purchased from the
general household fund, and when Edgar had the measles, the Prince of
Wales, to use Mr. Ogden’s irritated phrase, might have been glad to
taste the mutton broth and cocoa that fattened that impudent kid.
[Illustration: “_She was not in the habit of applying her disciplinary
measures to the throat._”]
Nor was her system limited to this soft indulgence, as the occasion of
one of the choirmaster’s visits proved. Fearful lest the purpose of his
call should become evident too abruptly, he began by one of his
customary eulogies of his first soprano’s voice. She received his
enthusiasm coldly, indicated forcibly her own lack of musical ability,
and boasted, with a pride inexplicable to one who has not been
accustomed to consider this gift synonymous with penitentiary
qualifications, that she could not carry a tune. On his mentioning
somewhat diffidently that Edgar’s fines for tardiness, absence, etc.,
must in the nature of things make appreciable inroads upon his salary,
the interview assumed a different aspect.
Wiping her hands on her apron, Mrs. Ogden assured the choirmaster that
if Edgar wasn’t earning his wages she’d attend to that part of it, all
right. So intent was her expression that he felt obliged to put in a
plea for gentleness, on the ground that such a delicate mechanism as the
human throat could not be too carefully treated. Mrs. Ogden assured him
that she was not in the habit of applying her disciplinary measures to
the throat, and the audience was at an end. The day happened to be
Saturday, and at the evening rehearsal it seemed to the choirmaster that
things had never gone so smoothly. After all, he thought, it needed a
mother to reason with the boys—he had made several calls of the same
nature that week—a mother knew best how to influence them. And he was
abundantly justified in his conclusions.
[Illustration: “_A mild and stolid youth._”]
On Sunday afternoon Edgar marched into the church, impassive and
uninteresting to the outward vision, with Tim beside him, rapt and
effective. Edgar stared vacantly into space, his feet marked the time at
the proper distance from the crucifer, a mild and stolid youth, who
could never understand why it was that just as he turned the corner and
began to climb the steps to the choir-stalls his cassock should suddenly
tighten below the knees and almost throw him. Edgar’s partner in the
column could have informed him, but prudence rendered him
uncommunicative.
“_The brightest hopes we cherish here,
How fast they tire and faint!_”
Edgar’s brows met, he took a longer stride in reaching for his B flat,
and the crucifer grasped his pole nervously and broke step a moment—his
cassock had caught again.
“_How many a spot defiles the robe
That wraps an earthly saint!_”
“He sings like an angel,” the rector mused. “How clumsy that Waters boy
is!”
Once through with the Psalter, which he loathed because he was not
always certain of his pointing, and could not endure Tim’s look of
horror at his occasional slips, Edgar, having hunched his shoulders at
just the angle to prevent the tenor behind him from looking across into
the transept, and ostentatiously opened his service at the _Nunc
dimittis_, so that Tim might by his innocent nudging and indications of
his own _Magnificat_ page call a frown and a fine from the choirmaster,
devoted himself to a study of the rose-window over the transept.
The decoration of this window was a standing subject of quarrel between
him and the first alto, Howard Potter. Edgar had advanced the somewhat
untenable proposition that the various figures in the stained-glass
windows represented the successive rectors and choirmasters of St.
Mark’s. Howard had objected that the dedications under the windows
referred (as he had discovered by adroit questions that gave his
informants no idea whatever of what he was driving at) to persons who
had never held office of any kind in the church.
Edgar had then fallen back on the theory that the figures were portraits
of the persons whom the windows commemorated. Howard triumphantly
queried why, then, should the legend, “Sacred to the memory of Walter,
beloved husband of Mary Bird Ferris,” appear under a tall woman in dark
green glass with a most feminine amount of hair and a long red sash?
Edgar was staggered, but suddenly recalled his father’s glowing account
of a costume ball given by the Knights of Pythias, in which many of the
Knights appeared in women’s clothes, one in particular, the proprietor
of a fish market, having rented a long and flowing wig the better to
deceive his fellow-Knights and their delighted guests. This had
impressed Edgar as intensely humorous; he greatly enjoyed picturing the
scene to his imagination, and he strengthened his wavering infallibility
by declaring that the beloved husband of Mary Bird Ferris was beyond
doubt a Pythian in costume.
This had silenced Howard for a week, but one afternoon at evensong, just
before the electric bell sounded in the robing-room to summon them to
the hall, he had rapidly inquired in a hissing whisper, “Who that white
puppy carryin’ the flag in the round window on the side, where the bird
was, was a picture of?”
The bird was the lectern-eagle, and neither of the antagonists had ever
seen a lamb. Edgar had recognized the fact that it was a poorly drawn
puppy, and he did not believe that it could possibly have balanced in
one crooked-up knee and at that perilous angle any such banner as the
artist had given it. It was also crushingly apparent to him that no
Knight of Pythias, with all the assistance in the world, could transform
himself into such a woolly, curly, four-legged object as that.
[Illustration: “’_Who that white puppy carryin’ the flag ... was._’”]
Then why should the brass plate beneath it declare that this rose-window
was placed in “loving memory of Alice Helen Worden, who departed this
life June nineteenth, eighteen hundred and ninety”? That was no name for
a puppy, to begin with. The whole affair irritated Edgar exceedingly. He
saw no explanation whatever. He perceived that he should have to fight
the first alto. This was not only a great responsibility in itself, but
the necessity of evading the parental eye added to the nervous strain,
and the consciousness that on this particular Sunday afternoon Mr. Ogden
occupied one of the rear pews, with the idea of seeing how he behaved
during service, and subsequently accompanying him home, so weighed upon
the spirits of the first soprano that William Waters accomplished the
choir steps, in the recessional, without a stumble.
Throughout the service Edgar was as one in a dream. His vision was
turned inward, and he even forgot his effective trick of frightening the
choirmaster into cold chills by looking vacantly uncertain of the proper
moment to take up the choir’s share of the responses. The fact that he
invariably came in at the precise beat had never fortified Mr. Fellowes
against that nervous shudder as he saw his first soprano’s mouth open
hesitatingly two seconds before the time. To-day he was spared all
anxiety. Edgar’s voice and Tim’s eyes were the perfection of tuneful
devotion.
“_And blèss thine in-hèr-i-tànce!_”
they implored softly. Neither of them had the remotest idea what
inheritance meant—they would have besought as willingly a blessing for
irrelevance or inelegance; but to the assistant clergyman, whose nervous
scratching of his nose, while waiting for the alms-basin to reach him,
was to Edgar and Tim as definite and eagerly awaited a part of the
service as any other detail, the slow-syllabled Gregorian cadence
brought the word in a sudden new light and he made it the text for a
sermon so successful as to get him, a little later, a parish of his own.
This leads us to many interesting conclusions, musical and other.
The rector noticed with pleasure the seedy-looking man in the back of
the church: he was just then smarting a little under the accusation of
“aristocratic tendencies”: a body of conservatives had never approved of
the boy-choir. He hoped to get the man into the Brotherhood of St.
Andrew, if he were allied to no other organization.
Mr. Ogden, as we know, was on business of his own—business that kept him
glaring fixedly in the rector’s direction, which encouraged that good
man still further. It is to be doubted if the Brotherhood would have
appealed to him, however. Not that he would have been hindered by any
narrow sectarian tendencies. Mrs. Ogden, who did up the shirt-waists of
the Presbyterian minister’s daughter, was by her presented regularly
with a missionary bank in the form of a _papier-maché_ cottage with a
chimney imitating red brick; and Edgar, employing a Napoleonic strategy,
triumphantly attended the Methodist Christmas festivals and the Baptist
Sunday-school picnics, the latter society offering a merry-go-round on a
larger scale, the former providing the infant faithful with more
practicable presents and larger candy-bags. Squealer, moreover, had sung
“The Holy City” more than once for the Congregational Christian Endeavor
Society, so that Mr. Ogden felt, with a certain justice, that his church
connection did him credit on the whole, and excused himself from any
undue energy in that direction.
He watched his son keenly, but Edgar’s ecclesiastical demeanor was
without a flaw. Moreover, his plans were gradually maturing. He sang
_Amen_ at proper intervals and by a process of unconscious cerebration
managed to get between the organist and the tenor, who depended on Mr.
Fellowes to mark the time for him with his left hand, and in consequence
of being unable to see him, bungled his offertory solo; but his thoughts
were otherwhere. He had decided to slip out of the south transept door,
thus eluding parental pursuit, and fight Howard Potter in his own back
yard before he slept. He would practise upon his victim a recent
scientific acquisition proudly styled by him “the upper-cut,” which he
had learned from an acquaintance at the cost of ten cents and three
sugar-cookies.
At this point the anthem-prelude drew him to his feet. He had saved his
voice, according to directions, for his solo, and in the waiting hush
every word flowed, soft and pure, to the end of the church.
“_Mercy and truth, mercy and truth, mercy—_” Ah, that exquisite soft
swoop downward! The organ rippled on contentedly, a continuation of
Edgar’s flutelike tones—“_and truth are me-et together_!” There was all
the richness of a woman’s voice, all the passionless clearness of a
boy’s, all the morning innocence of a child’s.
It occurred to him suddenly that the north transept would be safer—it
was on the side farthest from home.
“_Righteousness and peace, righteousness and peace have kissèd each
other!_”
He wondered if Howard had learned the upper-cut since their last
encounter.
Tim’s face was as the face of an angel; a long slanting ray from the
rose-window fell across his curls.
“_Have kissèd each other_,” Edgar sighed softly. “_Have kissèd each
other_—” the caressing tones melted into the organ’s, whispered once
more, “_each other_,” and died lingeringly. A long breath, an audible
“Ah-h-h!” drifted through the church. The choirmaster kicked his feet
together under the organ for joy. He little knew that at that very
moment the future of his vested choir was swinging lightly in the
balance.
But such was the fact. Fate, who links together events seemingly
isolated, smoothed Edgar’s way to his fight, but allowed him to be
beaten. If this had not happened, his wrath would not have vented itself
in hectoring a bad-tempered bass at the Wednesday rehearsal, by
scampering in front of him and mimicking with wonderful accuracy his
gruff, staccato voice.
“_He taketh up the isles—as a ver-ry—little thing!_” mocked Edgar.
“Shut up!” growled the bass.