I travel and sell Bug Powder—Seeking my Wages—Pork and
Beans—Reminiscences of Sarasate—I strive to outrival
Paganini—Practising the Violin—I am presented with a Round Robin—My
Blasted Ambitions
AS the hot months came round my money gave out. Work was plentiful in
the numerous factories that throb and thunder with machinery in
Providence, but such work was not congenial to my temperament, and would
ruin my fingers for violin-playing, as the post-digging job did.
Nevertheless I should have availed myself of the opportunity had no
alternative appealed to me. But my friend the conductor was a crank who
was always producing some new scheme or invention that would assist him
financially and augment his moderate musician’s salary.
One night he came to my diggings beaming with enthusiasm over a plan to
make us both rich. He had invented a new bug powder: our fortunes were
made; all we had to do was to let the Providence public know the
catastrophe that we had ready for these insects. Suburban houses in the
States are generally made of wood that is specially suitable for the bug
state. So the population of Rhode Island all have one secret; and on
dark nights in hot weather candle gleams and shadowy figures can be seen
dodging on the windows of the tenements, as restless folk in their
nightshirts smash bugs on the wooden walls. I write from experience.
They creep down the walls in regiments, and while you sleep eat your
eyelids; if you wink they seek crevices, dart into your ears, and
prepare for the next attack! Closing your toes together swiftly at night
in bed, you can be sure that you have squashed three or four American
bugs. I have carelessly glanced at skeletons which I thought were
ancient dead bugs on the walls in the room of my new lodgings, and then
at midnight I have lit the candle, and down the walls were marching
battalions of old bug-skins! They had smelt me, and the regiments on the
frontier of my bedstead were already full blown with my blood.
So it is obvious that a good insect powder would be a blessing in
Providence.
Well, my Swedish friend and I threw our musical instruments aside, and
started on the bug powder business, full of hope. I had several musical
compositions that I was ambitious to publish on my own account. I felt
that Providence bugs had presented the tide in my affairs which I should
take at the flood.
With our pockets stuffed with a thousand bills, advertisements bearing
testimonials from American presidents and English royalties who had
stayed in America, my comrade and I tramped along with our hearts
singing the excelsior song of happiness. We really lived in a paradise
of ignorance and youth. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”
is a true phrase, and happy, though selling bug powder, was equally true
of us.
We marched, singing, on the dusty, white track to Narragansett. In the
suburban gardens that led to the front doors grew gorgeous flowers. I
can still dream that I smell their fragrance, and see the dancing
blossoms in the brilliant sunshine. Strange things darted over us,
hovered near the blooms and moaned like big humble bees. They were
humming-birds, glittering and flashing their vivid colours, outrivalling
the flowers with their brilliant feathery garment. The sky was blue as a
girl’s eyes, and nearly as beautiful. We delivered the thousand bills
and spent the rest of the day by a river. Wild fowl swam across it, and
fresh from the eggs, with frightened eyes gleaming, the little ones
paddled behind them. For miles the country was strewn with trees and
houses, many of them made of wood, and at these especially we left three
or four bills and at length disposed of the lot.
When we called on my friend the conductor for a first instalment of
twenty dollars for our services we found him out, but after several
visits we caught him. He was pleased to hear that we had worked a full
week and left five thousand advertisements, but he put off the payment
of our wages and borrowed my last five dollars! We haunted him for days;
he was seldom home. My comrade and I sweated for miles and miles,
seeking him at his various musical engagements; but the man seemed
gifted with second sight, for as we knocked at the front entrance he
hurried off from the back and vanished. The bug business failed and he
moved. Still we demanded our wages by post; for he had left no address,
and we hoped that the postal authorities would forward our pleading
request. At last we found him. The sound of martial music came down D——
Street: a military band was leading a funeral procession, of some old
soldier I suppose. There at the head of the band he blew solo cornet. We
dared not approach him, but in our excitement we waved our hands. He
winked in a friendly way as he passed on, and the strains of Chopin’s
_Funeral March_ faded with our hopes.
Eventually we caught him in a cul-de-sac, got ten dollars out of him and
lived on pork and beans for a fortnight. Providence would be indeed
stricken without pork and beans. As a rule they are not cooked, or
rather baked, at home, but bought in jars, hot from the baker’s oven,
ten and twenty-five cents a jar. Crime is scarce in Providence, capital
punishment abolished. If a citizen sat down to his meal and discovered
no pork and beans, and slew the waiter, he would get off on extenuating
circumstances. Well, to revert to the bug powder business, like all my
commercial enterprises, it ceased on my receiving the ten dollars, and
my employer the bandmaster told me, when I met him a month after, that I
had made five dollars more out of the enterprise than he did.
This brings me to another friend, a Sioux Indian, who was married and
lived in the next rooms to my own. His wife, a white woman, took in
washing and kept him. I used to sit in the evening and listen to his
opinion of the States. His whole soul hated the Yankees. I once praised
the Americans and their cities. He was down on me in a flash. “I am the
true American,” he growled, “and the day will come when we shall get our
country back.” I did not argue the point with him; his old wife kept
him, and he showed base ingratitude by his opinions. He was educated and
well dressed, and revealed to me, by all his conversation, the same kind
of spite for the foreigner that I had noticed in the South Seas.
Notwithstanding that the States had been peopled by whites so long,
still the Yankee was an interloper and the robber of his country. He was
not a bad old Indian, and was a friend to me during my stay at his
tenement.
Just before I took his rooms I went to Boston to hear H——, a celebrated
violinist who was performing there; I was anxious to hear if he was as
wonderful as the review notices made him. I do not think I have ever
heard such fine playing equalled even. He played Mendelssohn’s concerto,
and swayed the legato strain out till it sang like a rivulet of silver
song as the deeper notes mellowed to a golden strain as perfect in
quality as the sunset lyre-bird of Australia. I have heard Sarasate,
Ysaye, Joachim and many others, but no one with a better tone and
intonation, except Sarasate, who played like some inspired magician off
the concert stage. I heard him play at his villa in Biarritz, where I
had the pleasure of receiving a gratuitous lesson from the celebrated
_maestro_. “No, like this,” he said, as I played one of his own
compositions: then he lifted his violin to his chin, and looked out of
the villa’s latticed window as he played and rippled out a sparkling
chain of diamond-pure notes and then literally swooned into the adagio.
I never had the courage to play that particular piece after.
After hearing that violin virtuoso at Boston I became enthusiastic and
returned to Providence. The fever was on me. Again I determined to be
the world’s greatest violinist! I almost wept at my wasted life on sea
and shore. What might I not have been now, thought I, had I been
practising the violin all those thousands of days instead of making
sailors and South Sea Island savages my comrades? I went to the music
stores and purchased the American editions of Petrie’s _Studies_, and
Paganini’s _Twenty-four Etudes-Caprices_.
In my room, over the old Indian’s, I commenced. At daybreak I jumped
each morning off my trestle bed and started practising. At first I
tackled the Caprice which is double-stopping throughout. In a week I had
got it off. I had long fingers, otherwise I should think it an
impossibility. All day I bowed away. My furniture consisted of a
music-stand, the _Etudes_, my bed and me! When I look back and think of
my wonderful perseverance, it seems almost incredible. True and
wonderful is the energy and happiness that aspiration brings to youth!
Day after day I worked away at the studies with almost demon-like fury.
Soon my chin had a great scab on it where the violin rested as I ground
out the double-stopping sweeps, arpeggios and staccatos. I became thin
and haggard-looking. I greedily devoured the lives of great violinists,
among them Paganini and Ole Bull; also, after long intervals, pork and
beans, as the old Indian below-stairs cooked them. He soon looked upon
me as a sad kind of madman. I would gulp down the beans, look at his old
grandfather clock and rush upstairs, then once more grind away,
determined to make up for lost years. I saw the mighty crowds at
concerts TO BE, applauding my wonderful playing! I was a new Paganini.
Ah! how I remember it all. Through excessive playing the corns on my
finger-tips became so hard that I could not feel the strings! My nervous
system was soon wrecked, and my brain became ethereal with dreams—music
was the all in all of life. People who did not play the violin were
insanely ignorant.
Inspired, I extemporised melodies as I bowed and toiled away during the
night hours: the day was not sufficient. The doors of the next tenement
would suddenly bang, and strange tappings sound on the walls. I opened
the window at midnight. I thought my double-stopping assuredly entranced
the neighbours. It was hot weather, their windows were open too. In my
imagination I thought I was playing to crowded houses. I heard the
applause. Do you think I exaggerate? Believe me, I could never write
down the depth, the magnificence, of those enthusiastic dreams. Only
those who have felt as I felt, and were once inspired with ambition as I
was inspired, will know exactly all that I felt, and all that I dreamed.
One day ten solemn-looking American citizens appeared outside the door
of the Indian’s tenement; they wanted to see me. My name was called. I
laid the violin down. I had no friends. Had my brother arrived? Strange
thoughts flitted through my brain. Had people come as a special convoy
to praise my extraordinarily fine playing? I opened the door and,
white-faced and tremulous, I stared at a grey-bearded, solemn-looking
old man who acted as spokesman. He presented me with a round robin.
Fierce faces were looking over his shoulders! Two or three hundred
signatures were there, the landlord’s signature looked the boldest! I
was either to stop playing the violin or give up the premises and move
at once. This was a terrible blow to me. I should lose a day’s practice
if I had to tramp about looking for another room. I hated the world. Men
were hard and mercenary. Only violinists and musicians had souls. I
looked at my violin; it was my dear, abused comrade, and I clung to its
reputation more than ever. No mother on earth ever leaned over her child
with thoughts that outdid the tenderness of mine as I leaned over my
tiny, responsive comrade, silent in its coffin-shaped bed. The dead
child of my musical aspirations it seemed to me, for they were gone, and
my mighty ambition lay a dead failure. Oh, you aspirants, you musicians
and poets of this world, all you who love art for art’s sake, for you,
and you alone, I write this. You will understand; you are my brothers. I
can wish you more success, but no greater happiness than the delirium,
the ecstatic joy that was mine when I sought to become the world’s
greatest violinist.
I became melancholy: my incessant practice and irregular meals had, for
the time being, destroyed my nerves. I thought of my schooldays and my
life at sea, and longed for my boyhood’s days in the Australian bush. I
remembered the kingly stockman and his wife, and the surrounding bush
loneliness; the leafy gum clumps and the parrots roosting in them; and
the hours when I sat on the dead log by the scented wattles in the
hollows and watched the fleets of cockatoos like tiny canoes fade away
in the sunset. I heard in dreams the laughter of the romping bush
children as I raced them down the scrub-covered slopes, and I longed for
those ambitionless days to come again.
MEMORIES
I can still see the forest trees
All waving in the dusk,
As scents drift on the wandering breeze,
From wattle-blooms and musk;
And o’er the mountains far away
Where home the parrots flock,
Roams through the sunset’s crimson ray
The drover with his stock.
The old bush homestead by the sea
Still stands, the front door swings
As on the tall, gaunt, dead gum-tree
The magpie sits and sings.
There, by the door, the stockman sits
And smokes; as on her rug
His pale wife sits just by and knits—
His beard three children tug!
And as I stand and, dreaming, gaze,
The years have taken wing,
And from my heart out of old days
Comes this sad song I sing.
That garden where those children ran,
Raced me, laughed, screamed with joy,
Is overgrown—and I, a man,
Have overgrown the boy.
I know the redwood’s forest height
Of branches thrilled with words,
All laden with God’s golden light—
Songs of soft, bright-winged birds—
Has blazed to ash in homestead fires
Of cities o’er the plains;
Of all those woods and sweet desires
This poem now remains.
Sweet Ellen, curled hair and brown eyes,
I loved her pretty ways;
And as I dream sad heart-mists rise
From those wild boyhood days.
My love was half a passion then,
That pure love God earth gave—
It comes in after years to men
For someone in a grave.
Their shanty where I sweetly slept
And heard the night-birds’ screams—
As thro’ the scrub the dingo crept—
Has rotted into dreams.
Now thro’ the hills the echoes fly
Of hearts o’er shining rails—
The night express fast thundering by
That brings the English mails!
Yet often I go back again
To where the homestead stands;
I gaze in eyes thro’ mists of pain
And clasp old shadow hands;
Kiss Ellen, Bertha and Lurline:
Those pretty children three
May some day read these lines of mine
And all remember me.
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