A Cathedral Singer Part 4

"You had a perfectly splendid time, didn't you?"

She laughed to herself.

"Now, then," she said, coming to what had all along been most in her consciousness--"now, then, tell me about _your_ day. Begin at the moment _you_ left _me_."

He laid down his napkin,--he could eat no more, and there was nothing more to eat,--and he folded his hands quite like the head of the house at ease after a careless feast, and began his story.

Well, he had had a splendid day, too. After he had left her he had gone to the dealer's on the avenue with the unsold papers. Then he had crossed over to the cathedral, and for a while had watched the men at work up in the air. He had walked around to the choir school, but no one was there that morning, not a sound came from the inside. Then he had started down across the park. As he sat down to count his money, a man who had climbed up the hillside stopped and asked him a great many questions: who taught him music and whether any one had ever heard him sing. This stranger also liked music and he also went to the cathedral, so he claimed. From that point the story wound its way onward across the busy hours till nightfall.

It was a child's story, not an older person's. Therefore it did not draw the line between pleasant and unpleasant, fair and unfair, right and wrong, which make up for each of us the history of our checkered human day. It separated life as a swimmer separates the sea: there is one water which he parts by his pa.s.sage. So the child, who is still wholly a child, divides the world.

But as she pondered, she discriminated. Out of the long, rambling narrative she laid hold of one overwhelming incident, forgetting the rest: a pa.s.sing stranger, hearing a few notes of his voice, had stopped to question him about it. To her this was the first outside evidence that her faith in his musical gift was not groundless.

When he had ended his story she regarded him across the table with something new in her eyes--something of awe. She had never hinted to him what she believed he would some day be. She might be wrong, and thus might start him on the wrong course; or, being right, she might never have the chance to start him on the right one. In either case she might be bringing to him disappointment, perhaps the failure of his whole life.

Now she still hid the emotion his story caused. But the stranger of the park had kindled within her that night what she herself had long tended unlit--the alabaster flame of worship which the mother burns before the altar of a great son.

An hour later they were in another small attic-like s.p.a.ce next to the supper-room. Here was always the best of their evening. No matter how poor the spot, if there reach it some solitary ray of the great light of the world, let it be called your drawing-room. Where civilization sends its beams through a roof, there be your drawing-room. This part of the garret was theirs.

In one corner stood a small table on which were some tantalizing books and the same lamp. Another corner was filled by the littlest, oldest imaginable of six-octave pianos, the mythical piano ancestor; on it were piled some yellowed folios, her music once. Thus two different rays of civilization entered their garret and fell upon the twin mountain-peaks of the night--books and music.

Toward these she wished regularly to lead him as darkness descended over the illimitable city and upon its weary grimy battle-fields. She liked him to fall asleep on one or the other of these mountain-tops. When he awoke, it would be as from a mountain that he would see the dawn. From there let him come down to the things that won the day; but at night back again to things that win life.

They were in their drawing-room, then, as she had taught him to call it, and she was reading to him. A knock interrupted her. She interrogated the knock doubtfully to herself for a moment.

"Ashby," she finally said, turning her eyes toward the door, as a request that he open it.

The janitor of the building handed in a card. The name on the card was strange to her, and she knew no reason why a stranger should call. Then a foolish uneasiness attacked her: perhaps this unwelcome visit bore upon her engagement at the studio. They might not wish her to return; that little door to a larger income was to be shut in their faces.

Perhaps she had made herself too plain. If only she had done herself a little more justice in her appearance!

She addressed the janitor with anxious courtesy:

"Will you ask him to come up?"

With her hand on the half-open door, she waited. If it should be some tradesman, she would speak with him there. She listened. Up the steps, from flight to flight, she could hear the feet of a man mounting like a deliberate good walker. He reached her floor. He approached her door and she stepped out to confront him. A gentleman stood before her with an unmistakable air of feeling himself happy in his mission. For a moment he forgot to state this mission, startled by the group of the two. His eyes pa.s.sed from one to the other: the picture they made was an unlooked for revelation of life's harmony, of nature's sacredness.

"Is this Mrs. Truesdale?" he asked with appreciative deference.

She stepped back.

"I am Mrs. Truesdale," she replied in a way to remind him of his intrusion; and not discourteously she partly closed the door and waited for him to withdraw. But he was not of a mind to withdraw; on the contrary, he stood stoutly where he was and explained:

"As I crossed the park this morning I happened to hear a few notes of a voice that interested me. I train the voice, Madam. I teach certain kinds of music. I took the liberty of asking the owner of the voice where he lived, and I have taken the further liberty of coming to see whether I may speak with you on that subject--about his voice."

This, then, was the stranger of the park whom she believed to have gone his way after unknowingly leaving glorious words of destiny for her.

Instead of vanishing, he had reappeared, following up his discovery into her very presence. She did not desire him to follow up his discovery.

She put out one hand and pressed her son back into the room and was about to close the door.

"I should first have stated, of course," said the visitor, smiling quietly as with awkward self-recovery, "that I am the choir-master of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine."

Stillness followed, the stillness in which painful misunderstandings dissolve. The scene slowly changed, as when on the dark stage of a theater an invisible light is gradually turned, showing everything in its actual relation to everything else. In truth a shaft as of celestial light suddenly fell upon her doorway; a far-sent radiance rested on the head of her son; in her ears began to sound old words spoken ages ago to another mother on account of him she had borne. To her it was an annunciation.

Her first act was to place her hand on the head of the lad and bend it back until his eyes looked up into hers; his mother must be the first to congratulate him and to catch from his eyes their flash of delight as he realized all that this might mean: the fulfilment of life's dream for him.

Then she threw open the door.

"Will you come in?"

It was a marvelous welcome, a splendor of spiritual hospitality.

The musician took up straightway the purpose of his visit and stated it.

"Will you, then, send him to-morrow and let me try his voice?"

"Yes," she said as one who now must direct with firm responsible hand the helm of wayward genius, "I will send him."

"And if his voice should prove to be what is wanted," continued the music-master, though with delicate hesitancy, "would he be--free? Is there any other person whose consent--"

She could not reply at once. The question brought up so much of the past, such tragedy! She spoke with composure at last:

"He can come. He is free. He is mine--wholly mine."

The choir-master looked across the small room at his pupil, who, upon the discovery of the visitor's ident.i.ty, had withdrawn as far as possible from him.

"And you are willing to come?" he asked, wishing to make the first advance toward possible acquaintanceship on the new footing.

No reply came. The mother smiled at her awe-stricken son and hastened to his rescue.

"He is overwhelmed," she said, her own faith in him being merely strengthened by this revelation of his fright. "He is overwhelmed. This means so much more to him than you can understand."

"But you will come?" the choir-master persisted in asking. "You _will_ come?"

The lad stirred uneasily on his chair.

"Yes, sir," he said all but inaudibly.

His inquisitive, interesting friend of the park path, then, was himself choir-master of St. John's! And he had asked him whether _he_ knew anything about the cathedral! Whether _he_ liked music! Whether _he_ knew how boys got into the school! He had betrayed his habit of idly hanging about the old building where the choir practised and of singing with them to show what he could do and would do if he had the chance; and because he could not keep from singing. He had called one of the Apostles Jim! And another Apostle Pete! He had rejoiced that Gabriel had not been strong enough to stand up in a high wind!

Thus with mortification he remembered the day. Then his thoughts were swept on to what now opened before him: he was to be taken into the choir, he was to sing in the cathedral. The high, blinding, stately magnificence of its scenes and processions lay before him.

More than this. The thing which had long been such a torture of desire to him, the hope that had grown within him until it began to burst open, had come true; his dream was a reality: he was to begin to learn music, he was to go where it was being taught. And the master who was to take him by the hand and lead him into that world of song sat there quietly talking with his mother about the matter and looking across at him, studying him closely.

No; none of this was true yet. It might never be true. First, he must be put to the test. The man smiling there was sternly going to draw out of him what was in him. He was going to examine him and see what he amounted to. And if he amounted to nothing, then what?

He sat there shy, silent, afraid, all the hardy boldness and business preparedness and fighting capacity of the streets gone out of his mind and heart. He looked across at his mother; not even she could help him.

So there settled upon him that terror of uncertainty about their gift and their fate which is known only to the children of genius. For throughout the region of art, as in the world of the physical, nature brings forth all things from the seat of sensitiveness and the young of both worlds appear on the rough earth unready.

"You _do_ wish to come?" the choir-master persisted in asking.