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A Cathedral Singer
[Illustration]
A Cathedral Singer
BY JAMES LANE ALLEN
Author of "The Sword of Youth," "The Bride of the Mistletoe," "The
Kentucky Cardinal," "The Choir Invisible," etc.
WITH FRONTISPIECE BY SIGISMOND DE IVANOWSKI
NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1916 Copyright, 1914, 1916, by THE CENTURY CO.
_Published, March, 1916_
TO PITY AND TO FAITH
A Cathedral Singer
I
Slowly on Morningside Heights rises the Cathedral of St. John the
Divine: standing on a high rock under the Northern sky above the long
wash of the untroubled sea, above the wash of the troubled waves of men.
It has fit neighbors. Across the street to the north looms the
many-towered gray-walled Hospital of St. Luke--cathedral of our ruins,
of our sufferings and our dust, near the cathedral of our souls.
Across the block to the south is situated a shed-like two-story building
with dormer-windows and a crumpled three-sided roof, the studios of the
National Academy of Design; and under that low brittle skylight youth
toils over the shapes and colors of the visible vanishing paradise of
the earth in the shadow of the cathedral which promises an unseen, an
eternal one.
At the rear of the cathedral, across the roadway, stands a low stone
wall. Just over the wall the earth sinks like a precipice to a green
valley bottom far below. Out here is a rugged slope of rock and verdure
and forest growth which brings into the city an ancient presence,
nature--nature, the Elysian Fields of the art school, the potter's field
of the hospital, the harvest field of the church.
This strip of nature fronts the dawn and is called Morningside Park.
Past the foot of it a thoroughfare stretches northward and southward,
level and wide and smooth. Over this thoroughfare the two opposite-moving
streams of the city's traffic and travel rush headlong. Beyond the
thoroughfare an embankment of houses shoves its mass before the eyes,
and beyond the embankment the city spreads out over flats where human
beings are as thick as river reeds.
Thus within small compass humanity is here: the cathedral, the hospital,
the art school, and a strip of nature, and a broad highway along which,
with their hearth-fires flickering fitfully under their tents of stone,
are encamped life's restless, light-hearted, heavy-hearted Gipsies.
* * * * *
It was Monday morning and it was nine o'clock. Over at the National
Academy of Design, in an upper room, the members of one of the women's
portrait classes were assembled, ready to begin work. Easels had been
drawn into position; a clear light from the blue sky of the last of
April fell through the opened roof upon new canvases fastened to the
frames. And it poured down bountifully upon intelligent young faces. The
scene was a beautiful one, and it was complete except in one particular:
the teacher of the class was missing--the teacher and a model.
Minutes passed without his coming, and when at last he did enter the
room, he advanced two or three steps and paused as though he meant
presently to go out again. After his usual quiet good-morning with his
sober smile, he gave his alert listeners the clue to an unusual
situation:
"I told the class that to-day we should begin a fresh study. I had not
myself decided what this should be. Several models were in reserve, any
one of whom could have been used to advantage at this closing stage of
the year's course. Then the unexpected happened: on Saturday a stranger,
a woman, came to see me and asked to be engaged. It is this model that I
have been waiting for down-stairs."
Their thoughts instantly passed to the model: his impressive manner, his
respectful words, invested her with mystery, with fascination. His
countenance lighted up with wonderful interest as he went on:
"She is not a professional; she has never posed. In asking me to engage
her she proffered barely the explanation which she seemed to feel due
herself. I turn this explanation over to you because she wished, I
think, that you also should not misunderstand her. It is the fee, then,
that is needed, the model's wage; she has felt the common lash of the
poor. Plainly here is some one who has stepped down from her place in
life, who has descended far below her inclinations, to raise a small sum
of money. Why she does so is of course her own sacred and delicate
affair. But the spirit in which she does this becomes our affair,
because it becomes a matter of expression with her. This self-sacrifice,
this ordeal which she voluntarily undergoes to gain her end, shows in
her face; and if while she poses, you should be fortunate enough to see
this look along with other fine things, great things, it will be your
aim to transfer them all to your canvases--if you can."
He smiled at them with a kind of fostering challenge to their
over-confident impulses and immature art. But he had not yet fully
brought out what he had in mind about the mysterious stranger and he
continued:
"We teachers of art schools in engaging models have to take from human
material as we find it. The best we find is seldom or never what we
would prefer. If I, for instance, could have my choice, my students
would never be allowed to work from a model who repelled the student or
left the student indifferent. No students of mine, if I could have my
way, should ever paint from a model that failed to call forth the finest
feelings. Otherwise, how can your best emotions have full play in your
work; and unless your best emotions enter into your work, what will your
work be worth? For if you have never before understood the truth, try to
realize it now: that you will succeed in painting only through the best
that is in you; just as only the best in you will ever carry you
triumphantly to the end of any practical human road that is worth the
travel; just as you will reach all life's best goals only through your
best. And in painting remember that the best is never in the eye, for
the eye can only perceive, the eye can only direct; and the best is
never in the hand, for the hand can only measure, the hand can only
move. In painting the best comes from emotion. A human being may lack
eyes and be none the poorer in character; a human being may lack hands
and be none the poorer in character; but whenever in life a person lacks
any great emotion, that person is the poorer in everything. And so in
painting you can fail after the eye has gained all necessary knowledge,
you can fail after your hand has received all necessary training, either
because nature has denied you the foundations of great feeling, or
because, having these foundations, you have failed to make them the
foundations of your work.
"But among a hundred models there might not be one to arouse such
emotion. Actually in the world, among the thousands of people we know,
how few stir in us our best, force us to our best! It is the rarest
experience of our lifetimes that we meet a man or a woman who literally
drives us to the realization of what we really are and can really do
when we do our best. What we all most need in our careers is the one who
can liberate within us that lifelong prisoner whose doom it is to remain
a captive until another sets it free--our best. For we can never set our
best free by our own hands; that must always be done by another."
They were listening to him with a startled recognition of their inmost
selves. He went on to drive home his point about the stranger:
"I am going to introduce to you, then, a model who beyond all the others
you have worked with will liberate in you your finer selves. It is a
rare opportunity. Do not thank me. I did not find her. Life's storms
have blown her violently against the walls of the art school; we must
see to it at least that she be not further bruised while it becomes her
shelter, her refuge. Who she is, what her life has been, where she comes
from, how she happens to arrive here--these are privacies into which of
course we do not intrude. Immediately behind herself she drops a curtain
of silence which shuts away every such sign of her past. But there are
other signs of that past which she cannot hide and which it is our
privilege, our duty, the province of our art, to read. They are written
on her face, on her hands, on her bearing; they are written all over
her--the bruises of life's rudenesses, the lingering shadows of dark
days, the unwounded pride once and the wounded pride now, the
unconquerable will, a soaring spirit whose wings were meant for the
upper air but which are broken and beat the dust. All these are sublime
things to paint in any human countenance; they are the footprints of
destiny on our faces. The greatest masters of the brush that the world
has ever known could not have asked for anything greater. When you
behold her, perhaps some of you may think of certain brief but eternal
words of Pascal: 'Man is a reed that bends but does not break.' Such is
your model, then, a woman with a great countenance; the fighting face of
a woman at peace. Now out upon the darkened battle-field of this
woman's face shines one serene sun, and it is that sun that brings out
upon it its marvelous human radiance, its supreme expression: the love
of the mother. Your model is the beauty of motherhood, the sacredness of
motherhood, the glory of motherhood: that is to be the portrait of her
that you are to paint."
He stopped. Their faces glowed; their eyes disclosed depths in their
natures never stirred before; from out those depths youthful, tender
creative forces came forth, eager to serve, to obey. He added a few
particulars:
"For a while after she is posed you will no doubt see many different
expressions pass rapidly over her face. This will be a new and painful
experience to which she will not be able to adapt herself at once. She
will be uncomfortable, she will be awkward, she will be embarrassed,
she will be without her full value. But I think from what I discovered
while talking with her that she will soon grow oblivious to her
surroundings. They will not overwhelm her; she will finally overwhelm
them. She will soon forget you and me and the studio; the one ruling
passion of her life will sweep back into consciousness; and then out
upon her features will come again that marvelous look which has almost
remodeled them to itself alone."
He added, "I will go for her. By this time she must be waiting
down-stairs."
As he turned he glanced at the screens placed at that end of the room;
behind these the models made their preparations to pose.
"I have arranged," he said significantly, "that she shall leave her
things down-stairs."
It seemed long before they heard him on the way back. He came slowly, as
though concerned not to hurry his model, as though to save her from the
disrespect of urgency. Even the natural noise of his feet on the bare
hallway was restrained. They listened for the sounds of her footsteps.
In the tense silence of the studio a pin-drop might have been
noticeable, a breath would have been audible; but they could not hear
her footsteps. He might have been followed by a spirit. Those feet of
hers must be very light feet, very quiet feet, the feet of the
well-bred.
He entered and advanced a few paces and turned as though to make way for
some one of far more importance than himself; and there walked forward
and stopped at a delicate distance from them all a woman, bareheaded,
ungloved, slender, straight, of middle height, and in life's middle
years--Rachel Truesdale.
She did not look at him or at them; she did not look at anything. It was
not her role to notice. She merely waited, perfectly composed, to be
told what to do. Her thoughts and emotions did not enter into the scene
at all; she was there solely as having been hired for work.
One privilege she had exercised unsparingly--not to offer herself for
this employment as becomingly dressed for it. She submitted herself to
be painted in austerest fidelity to nature, plainly dressed, her hair
parted and brushed severely back. Women, sometimes great women, have in
history, at the hour of their supreme tragedies, thus demeaned
themselves--for the hospital, for baptism, for the guillotine, for the
stake, for the cross.
But because she made herself poor in apparel, she became most rich in
her humanity. There was nothing for the eye to rest upon but her bare
self. And thus the contours of the head, the beauty of the hair, the
line of it along the forehead and temples, the curvature of the brows,
the chiseling of the proud nostrils and the high bridge of the nose, the
molding of the mouth, the modeling of the throat, the shaping of the
shoulders, the grace of the arms and the hands--all became conspicuous,
absorbing. The slightest elements of physique and of personality came
into view powerful, unforgetable.
She stood, not noticing anything, waiting for instructions. With the
courtesy which was the soul of him and the secret of his genius for
inspiring others to do their utmost, the master of the class glanced at
her and glanced at the members of the class, and tried to draw them
together with a mere smile of sympathetic introduction. It was an
attempt to break the ice. For them it did break the ice; all responded
with a smile for her or with other play of the features that meant
gracious recognition. With her the ice remained unbroken; she withheld
all response to their courteous overtures. Either she may not have
trusted herself to respond; or waiting there merely as a model, she
declined to establish any other understanding with them whatsoever. So
that he went further in the kindness of his intention and said:
"Madam, this is my class of eager, warm, generous young natures who are
to have the opportunity of trying to paint you. They are mere beginners;
their art is still unformed. But you may believe that they will put
their best into what they are about to undertake; the loyalty of the
hand, the respect of the eye, the tenderness of their memories,
consecration to their art, their dreams and hopes of future success. Now
if you will be good enough to sit here, I will pose you."
He stepped toward a circular revolving-platform placed at the focus of
the massed easels: it was the model's rack of patience, the mount of
humiliation, the scaffold of exposure.
She had perhaps not understood that this would be required of her, this
indignity, that she must climb upon a block like an old-time slave at an
auction. For one instant her fighting look came back and her eyes,
though they rested on vacancy, blazed on vacancy and an ugly red rushed
over her face which had been whiter than colorless. Then as though she
had become disciplined through years of necessity to do the unworthy
things that must be done, she stepped resolutely though unsteadily upon
the platform. A long procession of men and women had climbed thither
from many a motive on life's upward or downward road.
He had specially chosen a chair for a three-quarter portrait, stately,
richly carved; about it hung an atmosphere of high-born things.
Now, the body has definite memories as the mind has definite memories,
and scarcely had she seated herself before the recollections of former
years revived in her and she yielded herself to the chair as though she
had risen from it a moment before. He did not have to pose her; she had
posed herself by grace of bygone luxurious ways. A few changes in the
arrangement of the hands he did make. There was required some separation
of the fingers; excitement caused her to hold them too closely together.
And he drew the entire hands into notice; he specially wished them to be
appreciated in the portrait. They were wonderful hands: they looked
eloquent with the histories of generations; their youthfulness seemed
centuries old. Yet all over them, barely to be seen, were the marks of
life's experience, the delicate but dread sculpture of adversity.
For a while it was as he had foreseen. She was aware only of the
brutality of her position; and her face, by its confused expressions and
quick changes of color, showed what painful thoughts surged. Afterward a
change came gradually. As though she could endure the ordeal only by
forgetting it and could forget it only by looking ahead into the
happiness for which it was endured, slowly there began to shine out upon
her face its ruling passion--the acceptance of life and the love of the
mother glinting as from a cloud-hidden sun across the world's storm.
When this expression had come out, it stayed there. She had forgotten
her surroundings, she had forgotten herself. Poor indeed must have been
the soul that would not have been touched by the spectacle of her,
thrilled by her as by a great vision.
There was silence in the room of young workers. Before them, on the face
of the unknown, was the only look that the whole world knows--the love
and self-sacrifice of the mother; perhaps the only element of our better
humanity that never once in the history of mankind has been misunderstood
and ridiculed or envied and reviled.
Some of them worked with faces brightened by thoughts of devoted mothers
at home; the eyes of a few were shadowed by memories of mothers
alienated or dead.
II
That morning on the ledge of rock at the rear of the cathedral Nature
hinted to passers what they would more abundantly see if fortunate
enough to be with her where she was entirely at home--out in the
country.
The young grass along the foot of this slope was thick and green;
imagination missed from the picture rural sheep, their fleeces wet with
April rain. Along the summit of the slope trees of oak and ash and maple
and chestnut and poplar lifted against the sky their united forest
strength. Between the trees above and the grass below, the embankment
spread before the eye the enchantment of a spring landscape, with late
bare boughs and early green boughs and other boughs in blossom.
The earliest blossoms on our part of the earth's surface are nearly
always white. They have forced their way to the sun along a frozen path
and look akin to the perils of their road: the snow-threatened lily of
the valley, the chill snowdrop, the frosty snowball, the bleak hawtree,
the wintry wild cherry, the wintry dogwood. As the eye swept the park
expanse this morning, here and there some of these were as the last
tokens of winter's mantle instead of the first tokens of summer's.
There were flushes of color also, as where in deep soil, on a projection
of rock, a pink hawthorn stood studded to the tips of its branches with
leaf and flower. But such flushes of color were as false notes of the
earth, as harmonies of summer thrust into the wrong places and become
discords. The time for them was not yet. The hour called for hardy
adventurous things, awakened out of their cold sleep on the rocks. The
blue of the firmament was not dark summer blue but seemed the sky's
first pale response to the sun. The sun was not rich summer gold but
flashed silver rays. The ground scattered no odors; all was the budding
youth of Nature on the rocks.
Paths wind hither and thither over this park hillside. Benches are
placed at different levels along the way. If you are going up, you may
rest; if you are coming down, you may linger; if neither going up nor
coming down, you may with a book seek out some retreat of shade and
coolness and keep at a distance the millions that rush and crush around
the park as waters roar against some lone mid-ocean island.
About eleven o'clock that morning, on one of these benches placed where
rock is steepest and forest trees stand close together and vines are
rank with shade, a sociable-looking little fellow of some ten hardy
well-buffeted years had sat down for the moment without a companion. He
had thrown upon the bench beside him his sun-faded, rain-faded,
shapeless cap, uncovering much bronzed hair; and as though by this
simple act he had cleared the way for business, he thrust one
capable-looking hand deep into one of his pockets. The fingers closed
upon what they found there, like the meshes of a deep-sea net filled
with its catch, and were slowly drawn to the surface. The catch
consisted of one-cent and five-cent pieces, representing the sales of
his morning papers. He counted the coins one by one over into the palm
of the other hand, which then closed upon the total like another net,
and dropped the treasure back into the deep sea of the other pocket.
His absorption in this process had been intense; his satisfaction with
the result was complete. Perhaps after every act of successful banking
there takes place in the mind of man, spendthrift and miser, a momentary
lull of energy, a kind of brief _Pax vobiscum_ my soul and stomach,
my twin masters of need and greed! And possibly, as the lad deposited
his earnings, he was old enough to enter a little way into this adult
and despicable joy. Be this as it may, he was not the next instant up
again and busy. He caught up his cap, dropped it not on his head but on
one of his ragged knees; planted a sturdy hand on it and the other
sturdy hand on the other knee; and with his sturdy legs swinging under
the bench, toe kicking heel and heel kicking toe, he rested briefly
from life's battle.
The signs of battle were thick on him, unmistakable. The palpable sign,
the conqueror's sign, was the profits won in the struggle of the
streets. The other signs may be set down as loss--dirt and raggedness
and disorder. His hair might never have been straightened out with a
comb; his hands were not politely mentionable; his coarse shoes, which
seemed to have been bought with the agreement that they were never to
wear out, were ill-conditioned with general dust and the special grime
of melted pitch from the typical contractor's cheapened asphalt; one of
his stockings had a fresh rent and old rents enlarged their grievances.
A single sign of victory was better even than the money in the
pocket--the whole lad himself. He was strongly built, frankly
fashioned, with happy grayish eyes, which had in them some of the cold
warrior blue of the sky that day; and they were set wide apart in a
compact round head, which somehow suggested a bronze sphere on a column
of triumph. Altogether he belonged to that hillside of nature, himself a
human growth budding out of wintry fortunes into life's April, opening
on the rocks hardy and all white.
But to sit there swinging his legs--this did not suffice to satisfy his
heart, did not enable him to celebrate his instincts; and suddenly from
his thicket of forest trees and greening bushes he began to pour forth a
thrilling little tide of song, with the native sweetness of some human
linnet unaware of its transcendent gift.
Up the steep hill a man not yet of middle age had mounted from the
flats. He was on his way toward the parapet above. He came on slowly,
hat in hand, perspiration on his forehead; that climb from base to
summit stretches a healthy walker and does him good. At a turn of the
road under the forest trees with shrubbery alongside he stopped
suddenly, as a naturalist might pause with half-lifted foot beside a
dense copse in which some unknown species of bird sang--a young bird
just finding its notes.
It was his vocation to discover and to train voices. His definite work
in music was to help perpetually to rebuild for the world that
ever-sinking bridge of sound over which Faith aids itself in
walking-toward the eternal. This bridge of falling notes is as Nature's
bridge of falling drops: individual drops appear for an instant in the
rainbow, then disappear, but century after century the great arch
stands there on the sky unshaken. So throughout the ages the bridge of
sacred music, in which individual voices are heard a little while and
then are heard no longer, remains for man as one same structure of rock
by which he passes over from the mortal to the immortal.
Such was his life-work. As he now paused and listened, you might have
interpreted his demeanor as that of a professional musician whose ears
brought tidings that greatly astonished him. The thought had at once
come to him of how the New York papers once in a while print a story of
the accidental finding in it of a wonderful voice--in New York, where
you can find everything that is human. He recalled throughout the
history of music instances in which some one of the world's famous
singers had been picked up on life's road where it was roughest. Was
anything like this now to become his own experience? Falling on his ear
was an unmistakable gift of song, a wandering, haunting, unidentified
note under that early April blue. He had never heard anything like it.
It was a singing soul.
Voice alone did not suffice for his purpose; the singer's face,
personality, manners, some unfortunate strain in the blood, might debar
the voice, block its acceptance, ruin everything. He almost dreaded to
walk on, to explore what was ahead. But his road led that way, and three
steps brought him around the woody bend of it.
There he stopped again. In an embrasure of rock on which vines were
turning green, a little fellow, seasoned by wind and sun, with a
countenance open and friendly, like the sky, was pouring out his full
heart.
The instant the man came into view, the song was broken off. The sturdy
figure started up and sprang forward with the instinct of business. When
any one paused and looked questioningly at him, as this man now did, it
meant papers and pennies. His inquiry was quite breathless:
"Do you want a paper, Mister? What paper do you want? I can get you one
on the avenue in a minute."
He stood looking up at the man, alert, capable, fearless, ingratiating.
The man had instantly taken note of the speaking voice, which is often a
safer first criterion to go by than the singing voice itself. He
pronounced it sincere, robust, true, sweet, victorious. And very quickly
also he made up his mind that conditions must have been rare and
fortunate with the lad at his birth: blood will tell, and blood told
now even in this dirt and in these rags.
His reply bore testimony to how appreciative he felt of all that faced
him there so humanly on the rock.
"Thank you," he said, "I have read the papers."
Having thus disposed of some of the lad's words, he addressed a pointed
question to the rest:
"But how did you happen to call me mister? I thought boss was what you
little New-Yorkers generally said."
"I'm not a New-Yorker," announced the lad, with ready courtesy and good
nature. "I don't say boss. We are Southerners. I say mister."
He gave the man an unfavorable look as though of a mind to take his true
measure; also as being of a mind to let the man know that he had not
taken the boy's measure.
The man smiled at being corrected to such good purpose; but before he
could speak again, the lad went on to clinch his correction:
"And I only say mister when I am selling papers and am not at home."
"What do you say when not selling papers and when you are at home?"
asked the man, forced to a smile.
"I say 'sir,' if I say anything," retorted the lad, flaring up, but
still polite.
The man looked at him with increasing interest. Another word in the
lad's speech had caught his attention--Southerner.
That word had been with him a good deal in recent years; he had not
quite seemed able to get away from it. Nearly all classes of people in
New York who were not Southerners had been increasingly reminded that
the Southerners were upon them. He had satirically worked it out in his
own mind that if he were ever pushed out of his own position, it would
be some Southerner who pushed him. He sometimes thought of the whole New
York professional situation as a public wonderful awful dinner at which
almost nothing was served that did not have a Southern flavor as from a
kind of pepper. The guests were bound to have administered to them their
shares of this pepper; there was no getting away from the table and no
getting the pepper out of the dinner. There was the intrusion of the
South into every delicacy.
"We are Southerners," the lad had announced decisively; and there the
flavor was again, though this time as from a mere pepper-box in a school
basket. Thus his next remark was addressed to his own thoughts as well
as to the lad:
"And so _you_ are a Southerner!" he reflected audibly, looking down at
the Southern plague in small form.
"Why, yes, Mister, we are Southerners," replied the lad, with a gay and
careless patriotism; and as giving the handy pepper-box a shake, he
began to dust the air with its contents: "I was born on an old Southern
battle-field. When Granny was born there, it had hardly stopped smoking;
it was still piled with wounded and dead Northerners. Why, one of the
worst batteries was planted in our front porch."
This enthusiasm as to the front porch was assumed to be acceptable to
the listener. The battery might have been a Cherokee rose.
The man had listened with a quizzical light in his eyes.
"In what direction did you say that battery was pointed?"
"I didn't say; but it was pointed up this way, of course."
The man laughed outright.
"And so you followed in the direction of the deadly Southern shell and
came north--as a small grape-shot!"
"But, Mister, that was long ago. They had their quarrel out long ago.
That's the way we boys do: fight it out and make friends again. Don't
you do that way?"
"It's a very good way to do," said the man. "And so you sell papers?"
"I sell papers to people in the park, Mister, and back up on the avenue.
Granny is particular. I'm not a regular newsboy."
"I heard you singing. Does anybody teach you?"
"Granny."
"And so your grandmother is your music teacher?"
It was the lad's turn to laugh.
"Granny isn't my grandmother; Granny is my mother."
Toppling over in the dust of imagination went a gaunt granny image; in
its place a much more vital being appeared just behind the form of the
lad, guarding him even now while he spoke.
"And so your mother takes pupils?"
"Only me."
"Has any one heard you sing?"
"Only she."
It had become more and more the part of the man during this colloquy to
smile; he felt repeatedly in the flank of his mind a jab of the comic
spur. Now he laughed at the lad's deadly preparedness; business
competition in New York had taught him that he who hesitates a moment is
lost. The boy seemed ready with his answers before he heard the man's
questions.
"Do you mind telling me your name?"
"My name is Ashby. Ashby Truesdale. We come from an old English family.
What is your name, and what kind of family do you come from, Mister?"
"And where do you live?"
The lad wheeled, and strode to the edge of the rock,--the path along
there is blasted out of solid rock,--and looking downward, he pointed to
the first row of buildings in the distant flats.
"We live down there. You see that house in the middle of the block, the
little old one between the two big ones?"
The man did not feel sure.
"Well, Mister, you see the statue of Washington and Lafayette?"
The man was certain he saw Washington and Lafayette.
"Well, from there you follow my finger along the row of houses till you
come to the littlest, oldest, dingiest one. You see it now, don't you?
We live up under the roof."
"What is the number?"
"It isn't any number. It's half a number. We live in the half that isn't
numbered; the other half gets the number."
"And you take your music lessons in one half?"
"Why, yes, Mister. Why not?"
"On a piano?"
"Why, yes, Mister; on _my_ piano."
"Oh, you have a piano, have you?"
"There isn't any sound in about half the keys. Granny says the time has
come to rent a better one. She has gone over to the art school to-day to
pose to get the money."
A chill of silence fell between the talkers, the one looking up and the
other looking down. The man's next question was put in a more guarded
tone:
"Does your mother pose as a model?"
"No, Mister, she doesn't pose as a model. She's posing as herself. She
said I must have a teacher. Mister, were _you_ ever poor?"
The man looked the boy over from head to foot.
"Do you think you are poor?" he asked.
The good-natured reply came back in a droll tone:
"Well, Mister, we certainly aren't rich."
"Let us see," objected the man, as though this were a point which had
better not be yielded, and he began with a voice of one reckoning up
items: "Two feet, each cheap at, say, five millions. Two hands--five
millions apiece for hands. At least ten millions for each eye. About
the same for the ears. Certainly twenty millions for your teeth. Forty
millions for your stomach. On the whole, at a rough estimate you must
easily be worth over one hundred millions. There are quite a number of
old gentlemen in New York, and a good many young ones, who would gladly
pay that amount for your investments, for your securities."
The lad with eager upturned countenance did not conceal his amusement
while the man drew this picture of him as a living ragged gold-mine, as
actually put together and made up of pieces of fabulous treasure. A
child's notion of wealth is the power to pay for what it has not. The
wealth that childhood _is_, escapes childhood; it does not escape the
old. What most concerned the lad as to these priceless feet and hands
and eyes and ears was the hard-knocked-in fact that many a time he
ached throughout this reputed treasury of his being for a five-cent
piece, and these reputed millionaires, acting together and doing their
level best, could not produce one.
Nevertheless, this fresh and never-before-imagined image of his
self-riches amused him. It somehow put him over into the class of
enormously opulent things; and finding himself a little lonely on that
new landscape, he cast about for some object of comparison. Thus his
mind was led to the richest of all near-by objects.
"If I were worth a hundred million," he said, with a satisfied twinkle
in his eyes, "I would be as rich as the cathedral."
A significant silence followed. The man broke it with a grave surprised
inquiry:
"How did you happen to think of the cathedral?"
"I didn't happen to think of it; I couldn't help thinking of it."
"Have you ever been in the cathedral?" inquired the man more gravely
still.
"Been in it! We go there all the time. It's our church. Why, good Lord!
Mister, we are descended from a bishop!"
The man laughed outright long and heartily.
"Thank you for telling me," he said as one who suddenly feels himself to
have become a very small object through being in the neighborhood of
such hereditary beatitudes and ecclesiastical sanctities. "Are you,
indeed? I am glad to know. Indeed, I am!"
"Why, Mister, we have been watching the cathedral from our windows for
years. We can see the workmen away up in the air as they finish one
part and then another part. I can count the Apostles on the roof. You
begin with James the Less and keep straight on around until you come out
at Simon. Big Jim and Pete are in the middle of the row." He laughed.
"Surely you are not going to speak of an apostle as Pete! Do you think
that is showing proper respect to an apostle?"
"But he was Pete when he was little. He wasn't an apostle then and
didn't have any respect."
"And you mustn't call an apostle Big Jim! It sounds dreadful!"
"Then why did he try to call himself James the Greater? That sounds
dreadful too. As far as size is concerned he is no bigger than the
others: they are all nine and a half feet. The Archangel Gabriel on the
roof, he's nine and a half. Everybody standing around on the outside of
the roof is nine and a half. If Gabriel had been turned a little to one
side, he would blow his trumpet straight over our flat. He didn't blow
anywhere one night, for a big wind came up behind him and blew him down
and he blew his trumpet at the gutter. But he didn't stay down," boasted
the lad.
Throughout his talk he was making it clear that the cathedral was a
neighborhood affair; that its haps and mishaps possessed for him the
flesh and blood interest of a living person. Love takes mental
possession of its object and by virtue of his affection the cathedral
had become his companion.
"You seem rather interested in the cathedral. Very much interested,"
remarked the man, strengthening his statement and with increased
attention.
"Why, of course, Mister. I've been passing there nearly every day since
I've been selling papers on the avenue. Sometimes I stop and watch the
masons. When I went with Granny to the art school this morning, she told
me to go home that way. I have just come from there. They are building
another one of the chapels now, and the men are up on the scaffolding.
They carried more rock up than they needed and they would walk to the
edge and throw big pieces of it down with a smash. The old house they
are using for the choir school is just under there. Sometimes when the
class is practising, I listen from the outside. If they sing high, I
sing high; if they sing low, I sing low. Why, Mister, I can sing up
to--"
He broke off abruptly. He had been pouring-out all kinds of confidences
to his new-found friend. Now he hesitated. The boldness of his nature
deserted him. The deadly preparedness failed. A shy appealing look came
into his eyes as he asked his next question--a grave question indeed:
"_Mister, do you love music?_"
"Do I love music?" echoed the startled musician, pierced by the
spear-like sincerity of the question, which seemed to go clean through
him and his knowledge and to point back to childhood's springs of
feeling. "Do I love music? Yes, some music, I hope. Some kinds of music,
I hope."
These moderate, chastened words restored the boy's confidence and
completely captured his friendship. Now he felt sure of his comrade,
and he put to him a more searching question:
"Do _you_ know anything about the cathedral?"
The man smiled guiltily.
"A little. I know a little about the cathedral," he admitted.
There was a moment of tense, anxious silence. And now the whole secret
came out:
"Do you know how boys get into the cathedral choir school?"
The man did not answer. He stood looking down at the lad, in whose eyes
all at once a great baffled desire told its story. Then he pulled out
his watch and merely said:
"I must be going. Good morning." He turned his way across the rock.
Disappointment darkened the lad's face when he saw that he was to
receive no answer; withering blight dried up its joy. But he recovered
himself quickly.
"Well, I must be going, too," he said bravely and sweetly. "Good
morning." He turned his way across the rock. But he had had a good time
talking with this stranger, and, after all, he _was_ a Southerner; and
so, as his head was about to disappear below the cliff, he called back
in his frank human gallant way:
"I'm glad I met you, Mister."
The man went up and the boy went down.
The man, having climbed to the parapet, leaned over the stone wall. The
tops of some of the tall poplar-trees, rooted far below, were on a level
with his eyes. Often he stopped there to watch them swaying like upright
plumes against the wind. They swayed now in the silvery April air with a
ripple of silvery leaves. His eyes sought out intimately the barely
swollen buds on the boughs of other forest trees yet far from leaf. They
lingered on the white blossoms of the various shrubs. They found the
pink hawthorn; in the boughs of one of those trees one night in England
in mid-May he had heard the nightingale, master singer of the non-human
world. Up to him rose the enchanting hillside picture of grass and moss
and fern. It was all like a sheet of soft organ music to his
nature-reading eyes.
While he gazed, he listened. Down past the shadows and the greenness,
through the blossoms and the light, growing fainter and fainter, went a
wandering little drift of melody, a haunting, unidentified sound under
the blue cathedral dome of the sky. He reflected again that he had never
heard anything like it. It was, in truth, a singing soul.
Then he saw the lad's sturdy figure bound across the valley to join
friends in play on the thoroughfare that skirts the park alongside the
row of houses.
He himself turned and went in the direction of the cathedral.
As he walked slowly along, one thing haunted him remorsefully--the
upturned face of the lad and the look in his eyes as he asked the
question which brought out the secret desire of a life: "Do you know how
boys get into the cathedral choir school?" Then the blight of
disappointment when there was no answer.
The man walked thoughtfully on, seemingly as one who was turning over
and over in his mind some difficult, delicate matter, looking at it on
all sides and in every light, as he must do.
Finally he quickened his pace as though having decided what ought to be
done. He looked the happier for his decision.
III
That night in an attic-like room of an old building opposite Morningside
Park a tiny supper-table for two stood ready in the middle of the floor;
the supper itself, the entire meal, was spread. There is a victory which
human nature in thousands of lives daily wins over want, that though it
cannot drive poverty from the scene, it can hide its desolation by the
genius of choice and of touch. A battle of that brave and desperate kind
had been won in this garret. Lacking every luxury, it had the charm of
tasteful bareness, of exquisite penury. The supper-table of cheap wood
roughly carpentered was hidden under a piece of fine long-used
table-linen; into the gleaming damask were wrought clusters of
snowballs. The glare of a plain glass lamp was softened by a too costly
silk shade. Over the rim of a common vase hung a few daffodils, too
costly daffodils. The supper, frugal to a bargain, tempted the eye and
the appetite by the good sense with which it had been chosen and
prepared. Thus the whole scene betokened human nature at bay but
victorious in the presence of that wolf, whose near-by howl startles the
poor out of their sleep.
Into this empty room sounds penetrated through a door. They proceeded
from piano-keys evidently so old that one wondered whether possibly they
had not begun to be played on in the days of Beethoven, whether they
were not such as were new on the clavichord of Bach. The fingers that
pressed them were unmistakably those of a child. As the hands wandered
up and down the keyboard, the ear now and then took notice of a broken
string. There were many of these broken strings. The instrument plainly
announced itself to be a remote, well-nigh mythical ancestor of the
modern piano, preternaturally lingering on amid an innumerable deafening
progeny. It suggested a superannuated human being whose loudest
utterances have sunk to ghostly whispers in a corner.
Once the wandering hands stopped and a voice was heard. It sounded as
though pitched to reach some one in an inner room farther away, possibly
a person who might just have passed from a kitchen to a bedroom to make
some change of dress. It was a very affectionate voice, very true and
sweet, very tender, very endearing.
"Another string snapped to-day. There's another key silent. There won't
be any but silent keys soon."
There must have been a reply. Responding to it, the voice at the piano
sounded again, this time very loyal and devoted to an object closer at
hand:
"But when we do get a better one, we won't kick the old one down-stairs.
It has done _its_ best."
Whereupon the musical ancestor was encouraged to speak up again while he
had a chance, being a very honored ancestor and not by any means dead in
some regions. Soon, however, the voice pleaded anew with a kind of
patient impatience:
"I'm awfully hungry. Aren't you nearly ready?"
The reply could not be heard.
"Are you putting on the dress _I_ like?"
The reply was not heard.
"Don't you want me to bring you a daffodil to wear at your throat?"
The reply was lost. For a few minutes the progenitor emptied his ancient
lungs of some further moribund intimations of tone. Later came another
protest, truly plaintive:
"You couldn't look any nicer! I'm awfully hungry!"
Then all at once there was a tremendous smash on the keys, a joyous
smash, and a moment afterward the door was softly opened.
Mother and son entered the supper-room. One of his arms was around her
waist, one of hers enfolded him about the neck and shoulders; they were
laughing as they clung to one another.
The teacher of the portrait class and his pupils would hardly have
recognized their model; the stranger on the hillside might not at once
have identified the newsboy. For model and newsboy, having laid aside
the masks of the day which so often in New York persons find it
necessary to wear,--- the tragic mask, the comic mask, the callous,
coarse, brutal mask, the mask of the human pack, the mask of the human
sty,--model and newsboy reappeared at home with each other as nearly
what in truth they were as the denials of life would allow.
There entered the room a woman of high breeding, with a certain
Pallas-like purity and energy of face, clasping to her side her only
child, a son whom she secretly believed to be destined to greatness. She
was dressed not with the studied plainness and abnegation of the model
in the studio, but out of regard for her true station and her motherly
responsibilities. Her utmost wish was that in years to come, when he
should look back upon his childhood, he would always remember with
pride his evenings with his mother. During the day he must see her
drudge, and many a picture of herself on a plane of life below her own
she knew to be fastened to his growing brain; but as nearly as possible
blotting these out, daily blotting them out one by one, must be the
evening pictures when the day's work was done, its disguises dropped,
its humiliations over, and she, a serving-woman of fate, reappeared
before him in the lineaments of his mother, to remain with him
throughout his life as the supreme woman of the human race, his idol
until death, his mother.
She now looked worthy of such an ideal. But it was upon him that her
heart lavished every possible extravagance when nightly he had laid
aside the coarse half-ragged fighting clothes of the streets. In those
after years when he was to gaze backward across a long distance, he must
be made to realize that when he was a little fellow, it was his mother
who first had seen his star while it was still low on the horizon; and
that from the beginning she had so reared him that there would be
stamped upon his attention the gentleness of his birth and a mother's
resolve to rear him in keeping with this through the neediest hours.
While he was in his bath, she, as though she were his valet, had laid
out trim house shoes and black stockings; and as the spring-night had a
breath of summer warmth, of almost Southern summer warmth, she had put
out also a suit of white linen knickerbockers. Under his broad sailor
collar she herself had tied a big, soft, flowing black ribbon of the
finest silk. Above this rose the solid head looking like a sphere on a
column of triumph, with its lustrous bronzed hair, which, as she brushed
it, she had tenderly stroked with her hands; often kissing the bronzed
face ardent and friendly to the world and thinking to herself of the
double blue in his eyes, the old Saxon blue of battle and the old Saxon
blue of the minstrel, also.
It was the evening meal that always brought them together after the
separation of the day, and he was at once curious to hear how everything
had gone at the art school. With some unsold papers under his arm he had
walked with her to the entrance, a new pang in his breast about her that
he did not understand: for one thing she looked so plain, so common. At
the door-step she had stopped and kissed him and bade him good-by. Her
quiet quivering words were:
"Go home, dear, by way of the cathedral."
If he took the more convenient route, it would lead him into one of the
city's main cross streets, beset with dangers. She would be able to sit
more at peace through those hours of posing if she could know that he
had gone across the cathedral grounds and then across the park as along
a country road bordered with young grass and shrubs in bloom and forest
trees in early leaf. She wished to keep all day before her eyes the
picture of him as straying that April morning along such a country
road--sometimes the road of faint far girlhood memories to her.
Then with a great incomprehensible look she had vanished from him. But
before the doors closed, he, peering past her, had caught sight of the
walls inside thickly hung with portraits of men and women in rich
colors and in golden frames. Into this splendid world his mother had
vanished, herself to be painted.