III

Late one afternoon in the winter of 189-, Cressida and I were walking in

Central Park after the first heavy storm of the year. The snow had been

falling thickly all the night before, and all day, until about four

o'clock. Then the air grew much warmer and the sky cleared. Overhead it

was a soft, rainy blue, and to the west a smoky gold. All around the

horizon everything became misty and silvery; even the big, brutal

buildings looked like pale violet water-colours on a silver ground. Under

the elm trees along the Mall the air was purple as wisterias. The

sheep-field, toward Broadway, was smooth and white, with a thin gold wash

over it. At five o'clock the carriage came for us, but Cressida sent the

driver home to the Tenth Street house with the message that she would

dine uptown, and that Horace and Mr. Poppas were not to wait for her.

As the horses trotted away we turned up the Mall.

"I won't go indoors this evening for any one," Cressida declared. "Not

while the sky is like that. Now we will go back to the laurel wood.

They are so black, over the snow, that I could cry for joy. I don't know

when I've felt so care-free as I feel tonight. Country winter, country

stars--they always make me think of Charley Wilton."

She was singing twice a week, sometimes oftener, at the Metropolitan that

season, quite at the flood-tide of her powers, and so enmeshed in

operatic routine that to be walking in the park at an unaccustomed hour,

unattended by one of the men of her entourage, seemed adventurous. As we

strolled along the little paths among the snow banks and the bronze

laurel bushes, she kept going back to my poor young cousin, dead so long.

"Things happen out of season. That's the worst of living. It was untimely

for both of us, and yet," she sighed softly, "since he had to die, I'm

not sorry. There was one beautifully happy year, though we were so poor,

and it gave him--something! It would have been too hard if he'd had to

miss everything." (I remember her simplicity, which never changed any

more than winter or Ohio change.) "Yes," she went on, "I always feel very

tenderly about Charley. I believe I'd do the same thing right over again,

even knowing all that had to come after. If I were nineteen tonight, I'd

rather go sleigh-riding with Charley Wilton than anything else I've ever

done."

We walked until the procession of carriages on the driveway, getting

people home to dinner, grew thin, and then we went slowly toward the

Seventh Avenue gate, still talking of Charley Wilton. We decided to dine

at a place not far away, where the only access from the street was a

narrow door, like a hole in the wall, between a tobacconist's and a

flower shop. Cressida deluded herself into believing that her incognito

was more successful in such non-descript places. She was wearing a long

sable coat, and a deep fur hat, hung with red cherries, which she had

brought from Russia. Her walk had given her a fine colour, and she

looked so much a personage that no disguise could have been wholly

effective.

The dining-rooms, frescoed with conventional Italian scenes, were built

round a court. The orchestra was playing as we entered and selected

our table. It was not a bad orchestra, and we were no sooner seated than

the first violin began to speak, to assert itself, as if it were suddenly

done with mediocrity.

"We have been recognized," Cressida said complacently. "What a good tone

he has, quite unusual. What does he look like?" She sat with her back to

the musicians.

The violinist was standing, directing his men with his head and with the

beak of his violin. He was a tall, gaunt young man, big-boned and rugged,

in skin-tight clothes. His high forehead had a kind of luminous pallour,

and his hair was jet black and somewhat stringy. His manner was excited

and dramatic. At the end of the number he acknowledged the applause, and

Cressida looked at him graciously over her shoulder. He swept her with a

brilliant glance and bowed again. Then I noticed his red lips and thick

black eyebrows.

"He looks as if he were poor or in trouble," Cressida said. "See how

short his sleeves are, and how he mops his face as if the least thing

upset him. This is a hard winter for musicians."

The violinist rummaged among some music piled on a chair, turning over

the sheets with flurried rapidity, as if he were searching for a lost

article of which he was in desperate need. Presently he placed some

sheets upon the piano and began vehemently to explain something to the

pianist. The pianist stared at the music doubtfully--he was a plump old

man with a rosy, bald crown, and his shiny linen and neat tie made him

look as if he were on his way to a party. The violinist bent over him,

suggesting rhythms with his shoulders and running his bony finger up and

down the pages. When he stepped back to his place, I noticed that the

other players sat at ease, without raising their instruments.

"He is going to try something unusual," I commented. "It looks as if it

might be manuscript."

It was something, at all events, that neither of us had heard before,

though it was very much in the manner of the later Russian composers who

were just beginning to be heard in New York. The young man made a

brilliant dash of it, despite a lagging, scrambling accompaniment by the

conservative pianist. This time we both applauded him vigorously and

again, as he bowed, he swept us with his eye.

The usual repertory of restaurant music followed, varied by a charming

bit from Massenet's "Manon," then little known in this country. After we

paid our check, Cressida took out one of her visiting cards and wrote

across the top of it: _"We thank you for the unusual music and the

pleasure your playing has given us."_ She folded the card in the middle,

and asked the waiter to give it to the director of the orchestra. Pausing

at the door, while the porter dashed out to call a cab, we saw, in the

wall mirror, a pair of wild black eyes following us quite despairingly

from behind the palms at the other end of the room. Cressida observed as

we went out that the young man was probably having a hard struggle. "He

never got those clothes here, surely. They were probably made by a

country tailor in some little town in Austria. He seemed wild enough to

grab at anything, and was trying to make himself heard above the dishes,

poor fellow. There are so many like him. I wish I could help them all! I

didn't quite have the courage to send him money. His smile, when he bowed

to us, was not that of one who would take it, do you think?"

"No," I admitted, "it wasn't. He seemed to be pleading for recognition. I

don't think it was money he wanted."

A week later I came upon some curious-looking manuscript songs on the

piano in Cressida's music room. The text was in some Slavic tongue with

a French translation written underneath. Both the handwriting and the

musical script were done in a manner experienced, even distinguished. I

was looking at them when Cressida came in.

"Oh, yes!" she exclaimed. "I meant to ask you to try them over. Poppas

thinks they are very interesting. They are from that young violinist,

you remember,--the one we noticed in the restaurant that evening. He sent

them with such a nice letter. His name is Blasius Bouchalka (Boú-kal-ka),

a Bohemian."

I sat down at the piano and busied myself with the manuscript, while

Cressida dashed off necessary notes and wrote checks in a large square

checkbook, six to a page. I supposed her immersed in sumptuary

preoccupations when she suddenly looked over her shoulder and said,

"Yes, that legend, _Sarka_, is the most interesting. Run it through a few

times and I'll try it over with you."

There was another, "_Dans les ombres des fôrets tristes_", which I

thought quite as beautiful. They were fine songs; very individual, and

each had that spontaneity which makes a song seem inevitable and, once

for all, "done." The accompaniments were difficult, but not unnecessarily

so; they were free from fatuous ingenuity and fine writing.

"I wish he'd indicated his tempi a little more clearly," I remarked as I

finished Sarka for the third time. "It matters, because he really has

something to say. An orchestral accompaniment would be better, I should

think."

"Yes, he sent the orchestral arrangement. Poppas has it. It works out

beautifully,--so much colour in the instrumentation. The English horn

comes in so effectively there," she rose and indicated the passage, "just

right with the voice. I've asked him to come next Sunday, so please be

here if you can. I want to know what you think of him."

Cressida was always at home to her friends on Sunday afternoon unless she

was billed for the evening concert at the Opera House, in which case we

were sufficiently advised by the daily press. Bouchalka must have been

told to come early, for when I arrived on Sunday, at four, he and

Cressida had the music-room quite to themselves and were standing by the

piano in earnest conversation. In a few moments they were separated by

other early comers, and I led Bouchalka across the hall to the

drawing-room. The guests, as they came in, glanced at him curiously. He

wore a dark blue suit, soft and rather baggy, with a short coat, and a

high double-breasted vest with two rows of buttons coming up to the loops

of his black tie. This costume was even more foreign-looking than his

skin-tight dress clothes, but it was more becoming. He spoke hurried,

elliptical English, and very good French. All his sympathies were French

rather than German--the Czecks lean to the one culture or to the other. I

found him a fierce, a transfixing talker. His brilliant eyes, his gaunt

hands, his white, deeply-lined forehead, all entered into his speech.

I asked him whether he had not recognized Madame Garnet at once when we

entered the restaurant that evening more than a week ago.

"_Mais, certainement!_ I hear her twice when she sings in the afternoon,

and sometimes at night for the last act. I have a friend who buys a

ticket for the first part, and he comes out and gives to me his pass-back

check, and I return for the last act. That is convenient if I am broke."

He explained the trick with amusement but without embarrassment, as if it

were a shift that we might any of us be put to.

I told him that I admired his skill with the violin, but his songs much

more.

He threw out his red under-lip and frowned. "Oh, I have no instrument!

The violin I play from necessity; the flute, the piano, as it happens.

For three years now I write all the time, and it spoils the hand for

violin."

When the maid brought him his tea, he took both muffins and cakes and

told me that he was very hungry. He had to lunch and dine at the place

where he played, and he got very tired of the food. "But since," his

black eyebrows nearly met in an acute angle, "but since, before, I eat

at a bakery, with the slender brown roach on the pie, I guess I better

let alone well enough." He paused to drink his tea; as he tasted one of

the cakes his face lit with sudden animation and he gazed across the hall

after the maid with the tray--she was now holding it before the aged and

ossified 'cellist of the Hempfstangle Quartette. "_Des gâteaux_" he

murmured feelingly, "_ou est-ce qu'elle peut trouver de tels gâteaux ici

â_ New York?"

I explained to him that Madame Garnet had an accomplished cook who made

them,--an Austrian, I thought.