The path that had led Richard Shafer into the Rue de Grenelle and
under the windows of Carola Brune without knowing it, was long and
roundabout, and in places rather rough. It was one of the by-ways of
the unknown quantity.
To him, from the first, the thought of the perfect summer had been
like something that he had lost and would never find again. It made
him dissatisfied, fickle, and resentful. He went back to his college
work with a temper which handicapped him in everything. His lessons
seemed like the dullest drudgery to one who felt sure that he had in
him the making of a poet or a musician, he did not quite know
which--perhaps it was both. The fellowship of the other boys, with its
rude and hearty democracy, streaked with funny little social
prejudices and ambitions, was a thing of which he could not or would
not learn the secret.
He tried running with the literary set. But Shorty Burke, who was the
acknowledged college genius, said of him, "Shafer seems to think that
he's the only man since Keats, and all the rest of us are duffers."
He tried running with the fast set. But Duke Jones, who could carry
more strong liquors than any man in the crowd, said of him, "Dick is
no good; when he goes to town with us he's a thousand miles away, and
every glass makes him more stuck-up and quarrelsome."
He tried running with the purely social set, the arbiters of college
elegance. But it bored him immensely, and he took no pains to conceal
it, so they silently cast him out.
The consequence of all this was that he failed to get into any of the
upper-class societies, and consoled himself with the belief that he
was terribly in love with a girl three years older than himself.
She was part of a liberal education, and she was very kind to him
because she liked his really beautiful violin playing. When she told
him, at the beginning of his senior year, that she was going to marry
one of the assistant professors, he added another illustration to his
theory that "all girls are like that," and plunged into a violent
course of study for honours and a fellowship. But it was too late. He
graduated with a fourth group and a firm conviction that college is a
failure.
Then he went to New York, with his violin and with a dozen poems and
half-a-dozen short stories in his trunk, resolved to storm the
magazines or to get a place in one of the great orchestras--he was not
quite sure which of the two short paths to fame it would be.
It was neither. He sold two sonnets and a story which brought him in
$47.50. For a few months he saw life in the Great White Way and other
paths, and found them very dusty. It would not be true to say that
there was no amusement in it. There were times when it was
excessively merry. And for the little _Caffe Fiammella_, where the
fat, bald-headed proprietor used to introduce him as "_l'illustrissimo
violinista Signore Ricardo Sciafero_," and where the mixed audience
welcomed his music with delight, he had a sincere affection, in spite
of the ineradicable smell of garlic. There was a girl there who was
the living image of Raphael's _Fornarina_, until she began to talk.
But in all the life that he thus confusedly saw, there was not a
single hour to which he could have said with Faust, "Oh, stay, thou
art so fair!" For behind it all, there was that inward, unconscious
standard of beauty and happiness--the summer which he could not have
forgotten if he would, and would not have forgotten if he could. It
did not console or comfort him at all. It only kept him from being
contented--which, after all, would have been the worst thing in the
world for him at the present stage of his education.
So when the remnant of his patrimony had shrunk to a couple of hundred
dollars, he burned his poems and stories, for which he had conceived a
strong disgust, and took passage on a small French steam-ship for
Bordeaux, to make the "grand tour" of Europe. His violin made him the
most popular person on the ship. He had a facile talent and a good
memory, which enabled him to play almost any kind of music; and when
he could not remember he could improvise. The second officer, a short,
stout man, with a pointed black beard, and a secret passion for the
fine arts, conceived a great fancy for the young American. When they
reached Bordeaux he took Richard to his favourite theatre and
introduced him to the leader of the orchestra, a person with a crinkly
yellow face and a soft heart, whose name was Camembert, for which
reason his intimates called him "the Cheese."
The theatre was about to close for the summer, but four of the
musicians had made a plan for a concert tour in various small cities
and watering-places. When M. Camembert had heard Richard play after a
joyous supper in the famous restaurant of the _Chapon Fin_, he
embraced him with effusion and invited him to join the company.
Nothing could have suited the young man's humour better. They
wandered from one city-in-etching to another,--Angouleme, Poitiers,
Tours, Rennes, Caen,--grey and crumbly towns, white and trim towns.
They visited the rocky resorts of Brittany and the sandy resorts of
Normandy. They played in a little theatre, or in a casino, or in the
ballroom of a hotel. Their fortunes varied, but in the main they were
prosperous. The announcements of "The Renowned Camembert Quintette,
with a celebrated American Soloist" attracted an amused curiosity. And
the music was good, for the old man was a real master, and the
practice was strenuous and persistent. It was hard work, but it was
also good fun, and the great thing for Richard was that he learned
more of the human side of music and of the philosophy of life than he
could have done in ten years of insulated study.
A vein of luck which they struck in Rouen and Dieppe emboldened them
to turn eastward, with comfortably full pockets, and try the Dauphine
and High Savoy. At Grenoble they had a frost and a heavy loss, but at
the sleepy Baths of Uriage they made a week of good harvest with
afternoon recitals. Chambrey did well for them, and Annecy even
better, so that, in spite of the indifference of Aix, they reached
Geneva in funds. Then they played their way around the Lake of Geneva,
and up into the Rhone Valley, and so over to the Italian lakes with
the autumn.
Here, at Pallanza, in a garden overhanging the Lago Maggiore where the
Borromean Isles sleep in their swan-like beauty on the blue-green
waves, they faced the question of turning homeward or going on to the
south for a winter tour. As they sat around the little iron table,
which held a savoury Spanish omelette and a corpulent straw-covered
flask of Chianti, their spirit was cheerful and their courage high.
"Why not?" asked the valiant Camembert. "Is it that the Italians are
more difficult to conquer than the French? Napoleon did it--my faith,
yes. Forward to the conquest of Italy!"
Richard was immensely amused. He did not really care which way they
went, as long as they went somewhere. His heart was full of a vague
hunger for home,--deep, wild, sheltering woods, friendly hills,
companionable and never-failing little rivers,--he longed to be there.
But he knew that was impossible. So why not Italy? It would certainly
be an adventure.
And so it was. But the conquest was largely a matter of imagination.
They saw the flowing green streets of Venice, the ruddy towers of
Bologna, the grey walls and dark dome of Florence. They saw the
fountains flash in Rome and the red fire run down the long slope of
Vesuvius at Naples. They crossed over to Sicily and saw ivory Palermo
in her golden shell and Taormina sitting high upon the benches of her
amphitheatre. In that sense they conquered and possessed Italy, as any
one who has eyes and a heart may do.
But Italy did not pay much tribute to their music. They had to travel
third-class and sleep in the poorest inns, cultivating a taste for
macaroni and dark bread with pallid butter. Still, they were merry
enough until they reached Genoa, and perceived that there was no
reasonable prospect of their being able to make anything at all in the
over-civilised and over-entertained towns of the Riviera.
"We must retreat, my children," said the Cheese, crinkling his face
over the sour wine in a musty _trattoria_, "but let us retreat in good
order and while we have the means to do so. How much money in bank?"
They counted their resources and found them hardly enough to pay the
railway fare to Bordeaux. Richard insisted upon putting the remnant of
his private fortune into the common fund, but the others would not
have it.
"No," they said, "you shall not give us money. But you may settle all
the restaurant bills between here and Bordeaux."
"But I am not going to Bordeaux," said he; "I am going to Paris."
At this there was voluble protest and discussion. Richard had no
arguments, but his determination was as fixed as it was unreasonable.
Finally he forced them to take fifty francs as a loan. At Lyons the
quintette dissolved with emotional embraces, the four going westward,
and he northward in the night train.
When he walked out into the stony desert in front of the _Gare de
Lyon_ in the grey chill of a March morning, he had just two hundred
and twenty francs in his pocket, and he felt that he was really adrift
in the world. There was nothing for him to hold fast to, no one who
had need of him.
He found a garret room in the _Rue Cherche Midi_, and looked up two
friends of his who were studying at the _Beaux Arts_. They introduced
him to a newspaper correspondent who threw a bit of work in his way--a
fortnightly letter to an Arkansas paper on French fashions and
society, at five dollars _per_ letter. This did not go very far, but
it retarded the melting away of his estate while he finished two
articles,--one on "The Cradle of the French Revolution," the Chateau
of Vezille, which he had visited during his week at the Baths of
Uriage,--the other on "An Eruption of Vesuvius," which had opportunely
occurred while he was in Naples. For the first time in his life he
wrote directly, simply, and naturally, describing what he had really
seen, and expressing what he had really felt and imagined. He sent the
articles to two American magazines and relapsed into a state of doubt
and despair.
He took what Paris has to give a young man in the way of cheap
diversion, but he found it as dusty as New York. The long rambles
through the older parts of the city, the solitary excursions into the
forests of the environs, really satisfied and refreshed him more.
Meantime the feeling that he was adrift grew upon him and his reserve
of capital disappeared. The wolf scratched at the door of his garret
and short rations were necessary. In the second week of May a
remittance arrived from the Arkansas paper for his last two letters,
with the statement that they were not "snappy" enough to suit the
taste of the community, and that the correspondence had better be
discontinued.
So it was that he strode through the Rue de Grenelle in the May
twilight, with fifty francs in his pocket, resolved to spend it all
that night--and then? Well, it was not very clear in his mind, but
certainly he was not going back to his miserable lodging,--and surely
there must be some way of making an end of it all for a man who felt
that he was adrift and very tired,--there was no one to care much if
he dropped out, and he could see no attractive reason for going on.
It was then that he heard the notes of the _humoreske_ coming down
into the deserted street and stood still to listen. The memories of
the perfect summer floated around him again. Something in the music
seemed to call to him, to plead with him, to try to console and cheer
him with a wonderful, playful tenderness like the pure wordless
sympathy of a child.
"If she had only known how to play it like that," he said to himself;
"if she had only cared enough--she would have called me back. But here
is a woman who does know--and perhaps even for me--well, I will fight
a little longer."
So he turned back to his lonely lodging, guided and impelled by
something that he could not quite understand, and did not even try to
explain. Surely it would be absurd to think that the chance hearing of
a bit of music could have an influence on a man's life.