They started early to the sale. Janin, as always, walked swiftly, his
violin wrapped in a cloth beneath his arm. Harry Baggs lounged sullenly
at his side. The day was filled with a warm silvery mist, through which
the sun mounted rayless, crisp and round. Along the road plum trees were
in vivid pink bloom; the apple buds were opening, distilling palpable
clouds of fragrance.
Baggs met the morning with a sullen lowered countenance, his gaze on the
monotonous road. He made no reply to the blind man's infrequent remarks,
and the latter, except for an occasional murmur, fell silent. At last
Harry Baggs saw a group of men about the fence that divided a small lawn
and neatly painted frame house from the public road. A porch was filled
with a confusion of furniture, china was stacked on the grass, and a bed
displayed at the side.
The sale had not yet begun; A youth, with a pencil and paper, was moving
distractedly about, noting items; a prosperous-appearing individual,
with a derby resting on the back of his neck, was arranging an open
space about a small table. Beyond, a number of horses attached to dusty
vehicles were hitched to the fence where they were constantly augmented
by fresh arrivals.
“Here we are!” Baggs informed his companion. He directed Janin forward,
where the latter unwrapped his violin. A visible curiosity held the
prospective buyers; they turned and faced the two dilapidated men on the
road. A joke ran from laughing mouth to mouth. Janin drew his bow across
the frayed strings; Harry Baggs cleared the mist from his throat. As he
sang, aware of an audience, a degree of feeling returned to his tones;
the song swept with a throb to its climax:
“'_You damn ol' nigger, come and bring
Dat boat an' row me home_!'”
There was scattered applause.
“Take your hat round,” Janin whispered; and the boy opened the gate and
moved, with his battered hat extended, from man to man.
Few gave; a careless quarter was added to a small number of pennies and
nickels. Janin counted the sum with an unfamiliar oath.
“That other,” he directed, and drew a second preliminary bar from his
uncertain instrument.
“Here, you!” a strident voice called. “Shut your noise; the sale's going
to commence.”
French Janin lowered the violin.
“We must wait,” he observed philosophically. “These things go on and on;
people come and go.”
He found a bank, where he sat, after stumbling through a gutter of
stagnant water. Harry Baggs followed and filled a cheap ornate pipe.
The voice of the auctioneer rose, tiresome and persistent, punctuated by
bids, haggling over minute sums for the absurd flotsam of a small
house keeping square of worn oilcloth, a miscellany of empty jars. A
surprisingly passionate argument arose between bidders; personalities
and threats emerged. Janin said:
“Listen! That is the world into which musicians are born; it is against
such uproar we must oppose our delicate chords--on such hearts.” His
speech rambled into French and a melancholy silence.
“It's stopped for a little,” Baggs reminded him.
Janin rose stiffly and the other guided him to their former place. The
voice and violin rose, dominated a brief period, and the boy went among
the throng, seeking newcomers. The mist thickened, drops of water shone
on his ragged sleeves, and then a fine rain descended. The crowd filled
the porch and lower floor, bulged apparently from door and windows.
Harry Baggs made a motion to follow with his companion, but no one
moved; there was no visible footing under cover. They stayed out
stolidly in the wet, by an inadequate tree; and whenever chance offered
Harry Baggs repeated his limited songs. A string of the violin broke;
the others grew soggy, limp; the pegs would tighten no more and Janin
was forced to give up his accompanying.
The activities shifted to a shed and barn, where a horse and three sorry
cows and farming implements were sold. Janin and Harry Baggs followed,
but there was no opportunity for further melody; larger sums were here
involved; the concentration of the buyers grew painful. The boy's throat
burned; it was strained, and his voice grew hoarse. Finally he declared
shortly that he was going back to the shelter by the Nursery.
As they tramped over the rutted and muddy road, through a steadily
increasing downpour, Harry Baggs counted the sum they had collected. It
was two dollars and some odd pennies. Janin was closely attentive as the
money passed through the other's fingers. He took it from Baggs' hand,
re-counted it with an unfailing touch, and gave back a half.
The return, even to the younger's tireless being, seemed interminable.
Harry Baggs tramped doggedly, making no effort to avoid the deepening
pools. French Janin struggled at his heels, shifting the violin from
place to place and muttering incoherently.
It was dark when they arrived at the huts; the fires were sodden mats
of black ash; no one was visible. They stumbled from shelter to shelter,
but found them full. One at last was discovered unoccupied; but they had
no sooner entered than the reason was sharply borne upon them--the roof
leaked to such an extent that the floor was an uneasy sheet of mud.
However, there was literally nowhere else for them to go. Janin found
a broken chair on which he balanced his bowed and shrunken form; Harry
Baggs sat against the wall.
He dozed uneasily, and, wakened by the old man's babbling, cursed
him bitterly. At last he fell asleep; but, brought suddenly back to
consciousness by a hand gripping his shoulder, he started up in a blaze
of wrath.
He shook off the hand and heard French Janin slip and fall against an
insecure wall. The interior was absolutely black; Harry Baggs could see
no more than his blind companion. The latter fumbled, at last regained a
footing, and his voice fluctuated out of an apparent nothingness.
“There is something important for you to know,” Janin proceeded.
“I lied to you about your voice--I, once a musician of the orchestra
at the Opéra Comique. I meant to be cunning and take you round to the
fairs, where we would make money; have you sing truck for people who
know nothing. I let you sing to-day, in the rain, for a dollar--while I,
Janin, fiddled.
“I am a _voyou_; there is nothing in English low enough. The thought of
it has been eating at me like a rat.” The disembodied words stopped, the
old man strangled and coughed; then continued gasping: “Attention! You
have a supreme barytone, a miracle! I heard all the great voices for
twenty years, and know.
“At times there is a voice with perfect pitch, a true art and range;
not many--they are cold. At times there is a singer with great heart,
sympathy ... mostly too sweet.
“But once, maybe, in fifty, sixty years, both are together. You are
that--I make you amends.”
The rain pounded fantastically on the roof a few inches above Harry
Baggs' head and the water seeped coldly through his battered shoes;
but, in the violent rebirth of the vague glow he had lost a short while
before, he gave no heed to his bodily discomfort. “A supreme barytone!”
The walls of the hut, the hollow, dissolved before the sudden light
of hope that enveloped him; all the dim dreams, the unformulated
aspirations on which subconsciously his spirit had subsisted, returned.
“Can you be sure?” he demanded uncertainly.
“Absolutely! You are an artist, and life has wrung you out like a
cloth--jail, hungry, outcast; yes, and nights with stars, and water
shining; men like old Janin, dead men, begging on the roads--they are
all in your voice, jumbled--serious barytone----” The high thin recital
stopped, from exhaustion.
Harry Baggs was warm to the ends of his fingers. He wiped his wet brow
with a wetter hand.
“That's fine,” he said impotently; “fine!”
He could hear French Janin breathing stertorously; and, suddenly aware
of the other's age, the misery of their situation, he asked:
“Don't you feel good?”
“I've been worse and better,” he replied. “This is bad for your throat,
after singing all day in the rain. _Voyou_!” he repeated of himself.
Silence enveloped them, broken by the creaking of the blind man's chair
and the decreasing patter of the rain. Soon it stopped and Harry Baggs
went outside; stars glimmered at the edges of shifting clouds, a sweet
odor rose from the earth, a trailing scent of blossoming trees expanded.
He sang in a vibrant undertone a stave without words. An uneasy form
joined him; it was Runnel.
“I b'lieve my head'll burst!” he complained.
“Leave that soda-caffeine be.”
He would never forget Runnel with his everlasting pain; or Dake, who
lived by scaring women.... Great audiences and roses, and the roar of
applause. He heard it now.
V
Harry Baggs returned to the Nursery, where, with his visions, his sense
of justification, he was happy among the fields of plants. There he was
given work of a more permanent kind; he was put under a watchful eye in
a group transplanting berry bushes, definitely reassigned to that labor
to-morrow. He returned to the camp with a roll of tar paper and, after
supper, covered the leaking roof of the shelter. French Janin sat with
his blank face following the other's movements. Janin's countenance
resembled a walnut, brown and worn in innumerable furrows; his neck was
like a dry inadequate stem. As he glanced at him the old man produced
a familiar bottle and shook out what little powder, like finely ground
glass, it contained. He greedily absorbed what there was and, petulantly
exploring the empty container, flung it into the bushes. A nodding
drowsiness overtook him, his head rolled forward, he sank slowly into a
bowed amorphous heap. Harry Baggs roused him with difficulty.
“You don't want to sit like this,” he said; “come up by the field, where
it's fresher.”
He lifted Janin to his feet, half carried him to the place under
the fence. Harry Baggs was consumed by a desire to talk about the
future--the future of his voice; he wanted to hear of the triumphs of
other voices, of the great stages that they finally dominated. He wanted
to know the most direct path there; he was willing that it should not be
easy. “I'm as strong as an ox,” he thought.
But he was unable to move French Janin from his stupor; in reply to his
questions the blind man only muttered, begged to be let alone. Life was
at such a low ebb in him that his breathing was imperceptible. Harry
Baggs was afraid that he would die without a sound--leave him. He gave
up his questioning and sang. He was swept to his feet by a great wave
of feeling; with his head back, he sent the resonant volume of his tones
toward the stars. Baggs stopped suddenly; stillness once more flooded
the plowed hill and he raised imploring arms to the sky in a gust of
longing.
“I want to sing!” he cried. “That's all--to sing.”
Janin was brighter in the morning.
“You must have some exercises,” he told the boy. “I'll get new strings
for the violin; it'll do to give you the pitch.”
At the day's end they went again to the hilltop. French Janin tightened
and tuned his instrument.
“Now!” he measured, with poised bow. “Ah!” Both his voice and violin
were tremulous, shrill; but they indicated the pitch of the desired
note. “Ah!” the old man quavered, higher.
“Ah!” Harry Baggs boomed in his tremendous round tone.
They repeated the exercises until a slip of a new moon, like a wistful
girl, sank and darkness hid the countryside. A palpitating chorus of
frogs rose from the invisible streams. Somnolence again overtook Janin;
the violin slipped into the fragrant grass by the fence, but his fingers
still clutched the bow.
Pity for the other stirred Baggs' heart. He wondered what had ruined
him, brought him--a man who had played in an opera house--here. A bony
elbow showed bare through a torn sleeve--the blind man had no shirt; the
soles of his shoes gaped, smelling evilly. Yet once he had played in an
orchestra; he was undoubtedly a musician. Life suddenly appeared grim, a
sleepless menace awaiting the first opportune weakness by which to enter
and destroy.
It occurred to Harry Baggs for the first time that against such a hidden
unsuspected blight his sheer strength would avail him little. He had
stolen money; that in itself held danger to his future, his voice. He
had paid for it; that score was clear, but he must guard against
such stupidities in the years to come. He had now a conscious single
purpose--to sing. A new sense of security took the place of his doubts.
He stirred Janin from his collapsed sleep, directed him toward their
hut.
He returned eagerly in the evening to the vocal exercises. French Janin
struggled to perform his part, but mostly Harry Baggs boomed out his
Ahs! undirected. The other had been without his white powder for three
days; his shredlike muscles twitched continually and at times he was
unable to hold the violin. Finally:
“Can you go in to the post-office and ask for a package for me at
general delivery?” he asked Harry Baggs. “I'm expecting medicine.”
“That medicine of yours is bad as Runnel's dope. I've a mind to let it
stay.”
The other rose, stood swaying with pinching fingers, tremulous lips.
“I'm afraid I can't make it,” he whimpered.
“Sit down,” Harry Baggs told him abruptly; “I'll go. Too late now to try
pulling you up. Whatever it is, it's got you.”
It was warm, almost hot. He walked slowly down the road toward the town.
On the left was a smooth lawn, with great stately trees, a long gray
stone house beyond. A privet hedge, broken by a drive, closed in
the withdrawn orderly habitation. A young moon bathed the scene in a
diffused silver light; low cultivated voices sounded from a porch.
Harry Baggs stopped; he had never before seen such a concretely
desirable place; it filled him with a longing, sharp like pain. Beyond
the hedge lay a different world from this; he could not even guess its
wide possession of ease, of knowledge, of facility for song. A voice
laughed, gay and untroubled as a bird's note. He wanted to stay, seated
obscurely on the bank, saturate himself with the still beauty; but the
thought of French Janin waiting for the relief of his drug drove him on.
The maple trees that lined the quiet streets of the town were in full
early leaf. Groups paced tranquilly over the brick ways; the houses
stood in secure rows. A longing for safety, recognition, choked at Harry
Baggs' throat. He wanted to stop at the corner, talk, move home to a
shadowy cool porch. He hurried in his ragged clothes past the pools of
light at the street crossings into the kinder gloom. At that moment he
would have surrendered his voice for a place in the communal peace about
him.
He reached the post-office and asked for a package addressed to
Janin. The clerk delayed, regarded him with suspicion, but in the end
surrendered a small precisely wrapped box. As he returned his mood
changed; all he asked, he muttered bitterly, was a fair trial for
his voice. He recognized obscurely that a singer's existence must be
different from the constricted life of a country town; here were no
stage, no audience, for the great harmonies he had imagined himself
producing. He had that in his heart which would make mere security,
content, forever impossible.
In the dilapidated camp French Janin eagerly clutched the box. He almost
filled his palm with the crystalline powder and gulped it hastily. Its
effect was produced slowly.... Janin waited rigidly for the release of
the drug.
The evening following, under the fence on the hill, the blind man dozed
while Harry Baggs exercised his voice.
“Good!” the former pronounced unexpectedly. “I know; heard all the great
voices for twenty years; a violin in the Opera Comique. Once I led the
finale of Hamlet. I saw the Director stop.... He handed me the baton.
He died soon after, and that was the beginning of my bad luck. I should
have been Director; but I was ignored, and came to America--Buenos
Aires; then Washington, and--and morphia.”
There was a long silence and then he spoke again with a new energy:
“I'm done, but you haven't started. You're bigger than ever I was;
you'll go on and on. I, Janin, will train you; when you sing the great
roles I'll sit in a box, wear diamond studs. Afterward, as we roll in a
carriage down the Grandes Boulevards, the people in front of the cafés
will applaud; the voice is appreciated in Paris.”
“I have a lot to learn first,” Baggs put in practically.
The old man recovered his violin. “Ah!” He drew the note tenuous but
correct from the uncertain strings. “Ah!” Harry Baggs vociferated to the
inattentive frogs, busy with their own chorus.