I
They parted at the end of the summer--the boy and the girl--after
having been very happy together for two months and very miserable for
two days. The trouble was that she would not marry him.
This was not altogether strange, for Richard Shafer was only twenty
and had just finished his second year in college. To Carola Brune, who
was a year younger, he seemed perfect as a playmate, but she simply
could not imagine him as a husband. He was too vague, unformed, boyish
in his moods and caprices. She was a strong girl, with quick and
powerful impulses in her nature, and she felt that she would need a
strong man to hold her. What Richard was, what he would be, she could
not clearly see. She loved to make music with him--she at the piano,
he with his violin. She loved to roam the woods with him, and to go
out in a canoe with him on the moonlit river. But she could not and
she would not say that she loved _him_--at least, not enough to
promise to marry him now.
He took her "no" very hard. He argued the case persistently. There
were no real obstacles, that he could see, to their marriage. She was
the daughter of a musician, a Bohemian, who would make no objections
to an unworldly match. He was an orphan with a little patrimony of
four or five thousand dollars, enough to live on until the world
recognised his genius as a poet and his mastery as a violinist.
At this, unfortunately, being a little nervous and overstrained by the
long pleading, she laughed. "Oh, Dick!" she cried. "Swinburne and
Sarasate--two single gentlemen rolled into one!"
Now there is nothing that a boy--or for that matter, a man--dislikes
so much as laughter when he is making a declaration of love. His sense
of humour at that time is in eclipse, and even the gentlest turn of
wit shocks him deeply.
"Very well," he answered, rising from their favourite seat among the
roots of an old hemlock tree overhanging the stream, "let us go back
to the hotel. I have been a silly ass, I suppose, and now it's all
over."
"But why?"--she was tempted to ask him as they walked through the
woods. Why was it all over? Why shouldn't they go on being good
friends and comrades? Couldn't he see that she had only tried to make
a little joke to ease the strain? Didn't he know that she really had a
wonderful admiration for his talents and a large hope for his future?
But something held her back from speaking. She was embarrassed and
slightly ashamed. He was in a strange mood, evidently offended,
absurdly polite and distant, making talk about the concert that was to
come off that evening. She could not bring herself to explain to him
now. She would do it in the morning when the air was clearer and
cooler.
As they entered the hotel, she turned into the music room, saying that
she had to practise for her part in the concert. He held out his hand
with a little formal gesture. "I wish you a big success," said he; "my
part doesn't need any practice." Then he went upstairs to pack his
trunk for the six o'clock train.
An hour later, as he passed out of the door, he heard her still at the
piano. She was playing for her own pleasure now--just to relieve the
tension of her feelings by letting them flow out on the rhythmic
current of music. It was her favourite piece, that magical _humoreske_
by Dvorak, which is like an April day, full of smiles and tears,
pleading and laughter. The clear notes came out under her exquisite
touch with a penetrating charm of airy, graceful fantasy. To the angry
boy at the door it seemed as if they were full of delicate
indifference and mockery. They expressed to him the spirit of a
girl--light, capricious, elusive, yet with a will that can resist all
appeal and evade all attack--an invincible butterfly, a thistle-down
of steel--the thing that a man wants most in all the world and yet can
not have unless she chooses. She stood for his first defeat, his great
disappointment, his discovery that life can refuse; and now she was
playing this quaint, careless, mocking music!
"She does not care," he said to himself, as he climbed into the
stage, "and I will not care. She is only a flirt. All girls are like
that." With this profound generalisation in what he called his mind,
but what was really his temper, he rode sullenly away.
He did not hear how she lingered caressingly over the last phrases of
the _humoreske_, playing them very softly, with her blond head bent
over the piano, as if she were trying to recall something. He did not
know that she put on the frock that he liked best, with the mauve
ribbons, for the concert that night. He did not see her lips quiver
and the look of pained surprise flash into her brown eyes when she
heard that he had gone without even saying good-bye.
Naturally she, thinking him a proud and foolish boy, waited for him to
come back or to write. Naturally he, having classified her as a cold
and heartless flirt, expected her to send him a letter asking him to
return. Naturally neither of these things happened. The little
bank-dividing stream of circumstance flowed between them, ever
broadening, until it seemed like an impassable river.
Each of them said, "It was only an episode." Each of them was sure
that there was nothing in it which could mean a lasting pain, nothing
which time would not obliterate. Each of them repeated a wise phrase
or two about "passing fancies" and "puppy love," and so they went
their ways lightly enough, reasonably resolving not to think of each
other any more.
But it was strange how clearly and brightly the scenes of the summer
itself lived in their memories. To both of them there was a peculiar
and deepening vividness in those pictures of certain places.
The hardwood ridges in the forest, where there was no undergrowth and
they could walk straight ahead, side by side, through the interminable
colonnade of beeches and birches which upheld the green, gold-flecked
roof,--the dark tangled spruce thicket, where one must stoop under the
interlacing lower branches, dead and brittle, and creep over the soft
brown carpet of fallen needles, dry and slippery, in order to reach a
little open glade, moist with springs, where the red wood-lily and the
purple-fringed orchid grew,--the high steep rock that jutted out from
the woods about half-way up the slope of the Dome, as if to make a
narrow view-point of surprise where two people could stand close
together and look down upon the broad valley and the blue hills
beyond,--the old hemlock, with its big, bent knees covered with moss,
ready to hold them comfortably in its lap, while they read poetry or
stories of adventure, and the little river sung its sleepy song at
their feet,--the long stillwater where the canoe floated quietly among
the mirrored stars,--the merry rapids where the moon path spread
before them broad and silvery, luring them to follow it down to
danger,--the twilight hour in the music room, where the piano answered
to the violin, and through the open door and windows the aromatic
breath of the pine-trees and the spicy smell of wild grapes drifted
faintly in,--a certain afternoon when the cool rain-drops beat in
their faces as they tramped home, after a long walk over the hills,
wet and joyous, swinging their clasped hands and chanting some
foolish, endless song of the road,--a certain evening when the
murmuring hemlock above them grew silent, and the whispering water
below them seemed to hush, and a single big star across the river was
softly throbbing in the mauve dusk, and their lips met for a moment as
purely and silently as the twilight meets the night;--these were
pictures that would not fade and dissolve. There was something
unforgettable about them.
Was it the spirit of place that possessed them with a unique
loveliness; or was it that they were illuminated by the charm of a
companionship in which two hearts had tasted together the sweetest cup
in the world, the royal chalice of the pure, uncalculating,
inexplicable joy of living?
Be that as it may, the fact remains that while the boy and the girl
went away from each other, and grew separately to manhood and
womanhood, and had other experiences and joys and troubles, that
summer stayed with them both as something rare and unequalled, set
apart in its delectable perfection, a standard by which,
unconsciously, they measured all happiness and all beauty.
The effect of such an inward standard is peculiar. It is apt to give a
certain detachment, a touch of isolation, to the person who possesses
it. And whether that is a good thing or a bad thing depends upon the
tone which is given to it by an unknown quantity, the way in which the
secret will of the spirit chooses to take and use it.
To Carola Brune it was like the possession of something very precious,
which she had found and which she felt she could never lose. She
followed the path which was marked out for her as a student of music
with tranquil enthusiasm and cheerful industry; she made friends
everywhere by her serene and wholesome loveliness; and she did her
work at the piano so well that when she went to Paris, at the end of
the second year, to continue her studies, she found no difficulty in
being received as a pupil by the great Alberti.
"You have a very happy touch, mademoiselle," said the little gray man
one day at the end of a lesson. He gave his moustache that fierce
upward turn with which he accompanied his rare compliments, and
frowned at her benignly while he went on. "I suppose you know that you
really play better than you know how to play. What right have you to
do that?"
She smiled as she turned around to him, for she had learned to
understand his abrupt ways. "No right, dear master," she said, "only
perhaps it is because I happen to know a little of the meaning of
happiness."
"But you play the sad music too," he continued, "and you let it all
come out."
"That is because I am not afraid of sadness," she answered, with her
clear brown eyes looking quietly up at him.
His voice grew gentle and he laid his hand on her shoulder. "You have
the secret, my child--to know the meaning of happiness, and not to be
afraid of sadness, but to pour it all into the music. That is the
secret, and it will make you a musician,--it will carry you far, I
think,--provided you don't neglect your practising," he added
brusquely.
She shook her head and laughed. "I wouldn't dare do that with such a
tyrant as you, dear master."
"Next week," he went on, giving a new upward twist to his moustache,
"I shall expect you to be letter-perfect with that G major concerto of
Beethoven--no more drum-beats, remember. And mind, you are not to
think of playing in public, at a concert, until I tell you. It may be
a long time,--a year, perhaps,--but I am not going to let them spoil
my sweetest rose by forcing her into bloom too soon."
"Despot," she laughed back as he patted her hand at the door, "if you
only had a kind heart I should love you--a little!"
On the way home to her tiny apartment in the Rue de Grenelle, where
she lived with her aunt and her younger sister, who was a student of
drawing, she walked through the Garden of the Luxembourg, thinking
about a concert. Not one of those which the master had forbidden to
her, but a very simple and foolish and far-away little concert in the
old hotel beside the Delaware. And the deep beauty of the forest came
back to her, and the long-shining reaches of the river, and the hours
of good comradeship with a boy who perfectly shared her joy of living,
and the breath of the pine-trees and the sweetness of the wild grape!
Did she really smell them now? No, it was only the faint fragrance of
the formal beds of hyacinths and tulips and jonquils on the terraces
behind the old palace. In the broad walks, children were running and
playing. Old men were smoking on the benches in a drowsy peace. In the
shady paths under the tall trees, evidently amatory couples were
strolling or sitting close together. Carola enjoyed it all--but there
was a look in her face, half sad, half smiling, as if she remembered
something better.
When she reached home, she laid aside her hat and scarf, and went into
the little _salon_. She sat down at the piano and let her fingers run
idly over the keys, wandering from fragment to fragment of soft music.
Then with a firmer touch she began to play the _humoreske_ of
Dvorak, but with a new phrasing, a new expression. It was full of
an infinite tenderness, a great longing, a sweetness of distant and
remembered joy. It seemed to be singing over again the favourite song
of some one who had died--singing very clearly and distinctly so as
not to lose a single note, a single movement, of the unforgotten
melody of happiness.
The delicate dusk of a May evening gathered slowly in the room. The
windows were wide open. In the narrow, curving street below, already
half-deserted, a young man who was passing with long aimless steps, as
if he felt that he must be going somewhere but did not know exactly
where, stopped suddenly when he heard the music above him, and stood
listening until its last note trembled into silence. Then he strode
away, but in the opposite direction, as if he had changed his mind.