“Find the 317th page, Davy, and begin at the top of the right-hand
column.”
The boy turned the leaves of the old instruction book obediently, and
then began to read in a sing-song, monotonous tone:--
“'One of Pag-pag'”--
“Pag-a-ni-ni's.”
“'One of Paggernyner's' (I wish all the fellers in your stories didn't
have such tough old names!) 'most dis-as-ter-ous triumphs he had when
playing at Lord Holland's.' (Who was Lord Holland, uncle Tony?) 'Some
one asked him to im-pro-vise on the violin the story of a son who kills
his father, runs a-way, becomes a highway-man, falls in love with a
girl who will not listen to him; so he leads her to a wild country site,
suddenly jumping with her from a rock into an a-b-y-double-s'”--
“Abyss.”
“'--a--rock--into--an--abyss, were they disappear forever. Paggernyner
listened quietly, and when the story was at an end he asked that all the
lights should be distinguished.'”
“Look closer, Davy.”
“'Should be extinguished. He then began playing, and so terrible was
the musical in-ter-pre-ta-tion of the idea which had been given him
that several of the ladies fainted, and the sal-salon-s_a_lon, when
relighted, looked like a battle-field.' Cracky! Wouldn't you like to
have been there, uncle Tony? But I don't believe anybody ever played
that way, do you?”
“Yes,” said the listener, dreamily raising his sightless eyes to the
elm-tree that grew by the kitchen door. “I believe it, and I can hear
it myself when you read the story to me. I feel that the secret of
everything in the world that is beautiful, or true, or terrible, is
hidden in the strings of my violin, Davy, but only a master can draw it
from captivity.”
“You make stories on your violin, too, uncle Tony, even if the ladies
don't faint away in heaps, and if the kitchen doesn't look like a
battle-field when you 've finished. I'm glad it doesn't, for my part,
for I should have more housework to do than ever.”
“Poor Davy! you couldn't hate housework any worse if you were a woman;
but it is all done for to-day. Now paint me one of your pictures,
laddie; make me see with your eyes.”
The boy put down the book and leaped out of the open door, barely
touching the old millstone that served for a step. Taking a stand in
the well-worn path, he rested his hands on his hips, swept the landscape
with the glance of an eagle, and began like a young improvisator:--
“The sun is just dropping behind Brigadier Hill.”
“What color is it?”
“Red as fire, and there isn't anything near it,--it 's almost alone
in the sky; there 's only teenty little white feather clouds here and
there. The bridge looks as if it was a silver string tying the two sides
of the river together. The water is pink where the sun shines into it.
All the leaves of the trees are kind of swimming in the red light,--I
tell you, nunky, just as if I was looking through red glass. The weather
vane on Squire Bean's barn dazzles so the rooster seems to be shooting
gold arrows into the river. I can see the tip top of Mount Washington
where the peak of its snow-cap touches the pink sky. The hen-house door
is open. The chickens are all on their roost, with their heads cuddled
under their wings.”
“Did you feed them?”
The boy clapped his hand over his mouth with a comical gesture of
penitence, and dashed into the shed for a panful of corn, which he
scattered over the ground, enticing the sleepy fowls by insinuating
calls of “Chick, chick, chick, chick! _Come,_ biddy, biddy, biddy,
biddy! _Come,_ chick, chick, chick, chick, chick!”
The man in the doorway smiled as over the misdemeanor of somebody very
dear and lovable, and rising from his chair felt his way to a corner
shelf, took down a box, and drew from it a violin swathed in a silk bag.
He removed the covering with reverential hands. The tenderness of the
face was like that of a young mother dressing or undressing her child.
As he fingered the instrument his hands seemed to have become all eyes.
They wandered caressingly over the polished surface as if enamored of
the perfect thing that they had created, lingering here and there with
rapturous tenderness on some special beauty,--the graceful arch of
the neck, the melting curves of the cheeks, the delicious swell of the
breasts.
When he had satisfied himself for the moment, he took the bow, and
lifting the violin under his chin, inclined his head fondly toward it
and began to play.
The tune at first seemed muffled, but had a curious bite, that began
in distant echoes, but after a few minutes' the playing grew firmer and
clearer, ringing out at last with velvety richness and strength until
the atmosphere was satiated with harmony. No more ethereal note ever
flew out of a bird's throat than Anthony Croft set free from this
violin, his _liebling_, his “swan song,” made in the year he had lost
his eyesight.
Anthony Croft had been the only son of his mother, and she a widow. His
boyhood had been exactly like that of all the other boys in Edgewood,
save that he hated school a trifle more, if possible, than any of the
others; though there was a unanimity of aversion in this matter that
surprised and wounded teachers and parents.
The school was the ordinary “deestrick” school of that time; there were
not enough scholars for what Cyse Higgins called a “degraded” school.
The difference between Anthony and the other boys lay in the reason as
well as the degree of his abhorrence.
He had come into the world a naked, starving human soul; he longed to
clothe himself, and he was hungry and ever hungrier for knowledge; but
never within the four walls of the village schoolhouse could he get hold
of one fact that would yield him its secret sense, one glimpse of clear
light that would shine in upon the “darkness which may be felt” in his
mind, one thought or word that would feed his soul.
The only place where his longings were ever stilled, where he seemed at
peace with himself, where he understood what he was made for, was out
of doors in the woods. When he should have been poring over the sweet,
palpitating mysteries of the multiplication table, his vagrant gaze was
always on the open window near which he sat. He could never study when a
fly buzzed on the window-pane; he was always standing on the toes of his
bare feet, trying to locate and understand the buzz that puzzled him.
The book was a mute, soulless thing that had no relation to his
inner world of thought and feeling. He turned ever from the dead
seven-times-six to the mystery of life about him.
He was never a special favorite with his teachers; that was scarcely to
be expected. In his very early years, his pockets were gone through with
every morning when he entered the school door, and the contents, when
confiscated, would comprise a jew's-harp, a bit of catgut, screws
whittled out of wood, tacks, spools, pins, and the like. But when robbed
of all these he could generally secrete a piece of elastic, which, when
put between his teeth and stretched to its utmost capacity, would yield
a delightful twang when played upon with the forefinger. He could also
fashion an interesting musical instrument in his desk by means of spools
and catgut and bits of broken glass. The chief joy of his life was an
old tuning-fork that the teacher of the singing school had given him,
but, owing to the degrading and arbitrary censorship of pockets that
prevailed, he never dared bring it into the schoolroom. There were ways,
however, of evading inexorable law and circumventing base injustice.
He hid the precious thing under a thistle just outside the window. The
teacher had sometimes a brief season of apathy on hot afternoons, when
she was hearing the primer class read, “_I see a pig. The pig is big.
The big pig can dig;_” which stirring in phrases were always punctuated
by the snores of the Hanks baby, who kept sinking down on his fat little
legs in the line and giving way to slumber during the lesson. At such
a moment Anthony slipped out of the window and snapped the tuning-fork
several times,--just enough to save his soul from death,--and then
slipped in again. He was caught occasionally, but not often; and even
when he was, there were mitigating circumstances, for he was generally
put under the teacher's desk for punishment. It was a dark, close,
sultry spot, but when he was well seated, and had grown tied of looking
at the triangle of elastic in the teacher's congress boot, and tired
of wishing it was his instead of hers, he would tie one end of a bit of
thread to the button of his gingham shirt, and, carrying it round his
left ear several times, make believe he was Paganini languishing in
prison and playing on a violin with a single string.
As he grew older there was no marked improvement, and Tony Croft was by
general assent counted the laziest boy in the village. That he was lazy
in certain matters merely because he was in a frenzy of industry to
pursue certain others had nothing to do with the case, of course.
If any one had ever given him a task in which he could have seen cause
working to effect, in which he could have found by personal experiment a
single fact that belonged to him, his own by divine right of discovery,
he would have counted labor or study all joy.
He was one incarnate Why and How, one brooding wonder and interrogation
point. “Why does the sun drive away the stars? Why do the leaves turn
red and gold? What makes the seed swell in the earth? From whence comes
the life hidden in the egg under the bird's breast? What holds the moon
in the sky? Who regulates her shining? Who moves the wind? Who made
me, and what am I? Who, why, how whither? If I came from God but only
lately, teach me his lessons first, put me into vital relation with
life and law, and then give me your dead signs and equivalents for real
things, that I may learn more and more, and ever more and ever more.”
There was no spirit in Edgewood bold enough to conceive that Tony
learned anything in the woods, but as there was never sufficient school
money to keep the village seat of learning open more than half the year
the boy educated himself at the fountain head of wisdom, and knowledge
of the other half. His mother, who owned him for a duckling hatched
from a hen's egg, and was never quite sure he would not turn out a black
sheep and a crooked stick to boot, was obliged to confess that Tony had
more useless information than any boy in the village. He knew just where
to find the first Mayflowers, and would bring home the waxen beauties
when other people had scarcely begun to think about the spring. He could
tell where to look for the rare fringed gentian, the yellow violet, the
Indian pipe. There were clefts in the rocks of the Indian Cellar where,
when every one else failed, he could find harebells and columbines.
When his tasks were done, and the other boys were amusing themselves
each in his own way, you would find Tony lying flat on the pine needles
in the woods, listening to the notes of the wild birds, and imitating
them patiently, til you could scarcely tell which was boy and which was
bird; and if you could, the birds couldn't, for many a time he coaxed
the bobolinks and thrushes to perch on the low boughs above his head and
chirp to him as if he were a feathered brother. There was nothing about
the building of nests with which he was not familiar. He could have
taken hold and helped if the birds had not been so shy, and if he had
had beak and claw instead of clumsy fingers. He would sit near a beehive
for hours without moving, or lie prone in the sandy road, under the
full glare of the sun, watching the ants acting out their human comedy;
sometimes surrounding a favorite hill with stones, that the comedy might
not be turned into a tragedy by a careless footfall. The cottage on the
river road grew more and more to resemble a museum and herbarium as the
years went by, and the Widow Croft's weekly house-cleaning was a matter
that called for the exercise of Christian grace.
Still, Tony was a good son, affectionate, considerate, and obedient.
His mother had no idea that he would ever be able, or indeed willing,
to make a living; but there was a forest of young timber growing up, a
small hay farm to depend upon, and a little hoard that would keep him
out of the poorhouse when she died and left him to his own devices.
It never occurred to her that he was in any way remarkable. If he were
difficult to understand, it reflected more upon his eccentricity than
upon her density. What was a woman to do with a boy of twelve who, when
she urged him to drop the old guitar he was taking apart and hurry off
to school, cried, “Oh, mother! when there is so much to learn in this
world, it is wicked, wicked to waste time in school.”
About this period Tony spent hours in the attic arranging bottles and
tumblers into a musical scale. He also invented an instrument made
of small and great, long and short pins, driven into soft board to
different depths, and when the widow passed his door on the way to bed
she invariable saw this barbaric thing locked up to the boy's breast,
for he often played himself to sleep with it.
At fifteen he had taken to pieces and put together again, strengthened,
soldered, tinkered, mended, and braced every accordion, guitar,
melodeon, dulcimer, and fiddle in Edgewood, Pleasant River, and the
neighboring villages. There was a little money to be earned in this way,
but very little, as people in general regarded this “tinkering” as a
pleasing diversion in which they could indulge him without danger. As
an example of this attitude, Dr. Berry's wife's melodeon had lost two
stops, the pedals had severed connection with the rest of the works,
it wheezed like an asthmatic, and two black keys were missing. Anthony
worked more than a week on its rehabilitation, and received in return
Mrs. Berry's promise that the doctor would pull a tooth for him some
time! This, of course, was a guerdon for the future, but it seemed
pathetically distant to the lad who had never had a toothache in his
life. He had to plead with Cyse Higgins for a week before that prudent
young farmer would allow him to touch his five-dollar fiddle. He
obtained permission at last only because by offering to give Cyse his
calf in case he spoiled the violin. “That seems square,” said Cyse
doubtfully, “but after all, you can't play on a calf!” “Neither will
your fiddle give milk, if you keep it long enough,” retorted Tony; and
this argument was convincing.
So great was his confidence in Tony's skill that Squire Bean trusted his
father's violin to him, one that had been bought in Berlin seventy years
before. It had been hanging on the attic wall for a half century, so
that the back was split in twain, the sound-post lost, the neck and the
tailpiece cracked. The lad took it home, and studied it for two whole
evenings before the open fire. The problem of restoring it was quite
beyond his abilities. He finally took the savings of two summers'
“blueberry money” and walked sixteen miles to Portland, where he bought
a book called The Practical Violinist. The Supplement proved to be
a mine of wealth. Even the headings appealed to his imagination and
intoxicated him with their suggestions,--On Scraping, Splitting, and
Repairing Violins, Violin Players, Great Violinists, Solo Playing,
etc.; and at the very end a Treatise on the Construction, Preservation,
Repair, and Improvement of the Violin, by Jacob Augustus Friedheim,
Instrument Maker to the Court of the Archduke of Weimar.
There was a good deal of moral advice in the preface that sadly puzzled
the boy, who was always in a condition of chronic amazement at the
village disapprobation of his favorite fiddle. That the violin did not
in some way receive the confidence enjoyed by other musical instruments,
he perceived from various paragraphs written by the worthy author of The
Practical Violinist, as for example:--
“Some very excellent Christian people hold a strong prejudice against
the violin because they have always known it associated with dancing and
dissipation. Let it be understood that your violin is 'converted,' and
such an obligation will no longer lie against it. ... Many delightful
hours may be enjoyed by a young man, if he has obtained a respectable
knowledge of his instrument, who otherwise would find the time hang
heavy on his hands; or, for want of some better amusement, would
frequent the dangerous and destructive paths of vice and be ruined
forever. ... I am in hopes, therefore, my dear young pupil, that your
violin will occupy your attention at just those very times when, if you
were immoral or dissipated, you would be at the grogshop, gaming-table,
or among vicious females. Such a use of the violin, notwithstanding the
prejudices many hold against it, must contribute to virtue, and furnish
abundance of innocent and entirely unobjectionable amusement. These are
the views with which I hope you have adopted it, and will continue to
cherish and cultivate it.”