The Debatable Land Part 6

The s.e.xton of Trinity was sweeping the steps. He took off his cap when Gard stopped to ask him where Moselle lived. "Two streets up, riverence," he said, "an' turn to your left; number sixty-siven, on'y it's rubbed out, riverence. Is it a bit o' music you're carryin', sor?"

Gard found where sixty-seven was rubbed out on a street door, and under direction climbed three narrow flights, to a narrow, top-story hall, with a skylight overhead and several doors, one with the grimy card of Fritz Moselle tacked upon it. He knocked. "_Herein!_ Come! Veil, _du lieber Himmel_! It's de lil' anchorite!"

The room which Moselle came storming across seemed to have been originally three rooms, but the part.i.tions had been mainly cut away.

There were two pianos, and two grates for coal fires. Floor and chairs and tables were a welter of sheet-music, beer-bottles, steins, books, flower-pots, cats, pipes, newspapers, and rumpled rugs. Moselle came through it like a loose meteor, bent on breaking chaos into smaller fragments; hair brushed back and yellowish, dingy with age, eyebrows and mustache that swelled and dropped like cataracts, weight to threaten floors, huge, fat fist, and porcelain pipe in mouth. He hugged Gard to his mighty belly, muttered and puffed hoa.r.s.ely, and pulled him across the room to where a man in black had risen from his chair, who had a long jaw and aggressive chin, shaven bluish, a slouched hat on his head, a frock-coat, and was tall, gaunt and bony. He held out his hand.

"I'm glad to know you, Mr. Windham," he said, in a deep, drawling voice, with a certain winningness of smile.

"'Tis Shack Mavering. He knows about you, _kleiner_," cried Moselle, boisterous, explanatory. "'Tis a friend of Mephisto, der Faust-devil, und of me. Ha! Sit down. Vat iss dat?" pointing to Gard's bundle.

Gard dropped his bundle beside his chair. At the brotherhood was orderly calm, thoughtful silence, cool, clear walls, and whispering sound of slippered feet. Moselle at organ lessons in Trinity had never seemed so loose and free, broad, joyous, unlimited. Somehow Gard felt as if vacant s.p.a.ces about his soul were growing warm and inhabited. He laughed, and knew no reason for it.

"I've left the brotherhood. I'm going to be--"

"Gott! Vat you going to be?"

Gard laughed again.

"I thought you might know, and if you did you'd be sure to tell me."

"So!" Moselle's face, when it dropped vivacity and took on gravity, fell into rugged, powerful lines. "Got no money?"

"No."

"Nor clothes of a human too much, nor plans, nor friends but old Fritz, nor knowledge of perversity? Good! All good! You will stay mit old Fritz some veek or more, und I vill get you a church-organ to play somevere.

Good! _Hein?_ Shplendid! Shack!"--gesticulating over Gard--"look you at his head, his eyelid, his shape of der hair-line. Vat? It is super-sensuous Florentine, und de back of his head is Yankee, und so hard you not break him mit an axe. I say in all human variety is law, und device, und chain of causes, und you are mitout science to know not music itself haf more severe und mathematic system. Dat boy is at de end of his shtring of causes--at de end of his shtring. Ha!"

"End of his rope is the idiom," said Mavering, in solemn ba.s.s. "It means he's down on his uppers. You'd better attend to me and learn pure English. Your English is composite, mistaken, and slangy, and you are, in body and mind, an epitome of gross fatness, whom no science of human variety could cla.s.sify."

The depth and solemnity of his voice, the funereal gravity of his long face, seemed burlesquely cla.s.sical. His speech was flowing, and composed of structural sentences. Moselle waved his pipe joyously.

"_Continuez_, Shack! Heet her up! Advance! Boy, I gif you a lil' pipe and a lil' beer, but not much, um so you be not sick. My friend Shack is eloquent und foolish. Und ve tree vill talk now till to-morrow is gray."

The talk ran on. Already Gard seemed to himself not merely an hour, but days, weeks--a period which the clock could not understand or measure--away from the brotherhood. The country of ideas into which he had come was a loose republic, where no man knew the limits of his personality or his daring. He might loosen his belt and shout, if he chose. Here conversation was erratic and glancing, not necessarily an exchange of what one really thought; and yet, however obliquely from his meaning one spoke, there seemed to be less misunderstanding than among the brothers, with whom the guiding of the tongue to simple truth was a matter of searching conscience. And again, at times, both Moselle and Mavering would say things that seemed to Gard to meet the fact or question before them with a sharper recognition, a more instant candor.

He admired and laughed in pure joy of the brave, new world that had such creatures in it, with unstraightened ideas that were free to dance in the sunbeam or dig in the mine, and forget whether they had or had not any connection with the soul's salvation. It was a kind of renaissance for him, a discovery of humanism and the pagan pleasure of mere living with vivacity of body and mind. Here on the threshold of his new life were two to greet him who were witty, kind, ironical, experienced, and seemed to be without care or fear. If, as Moselle had implied, there were something hard and critical in the back of his head, some reserve of judgment, something not plastic and receptive, but resistent and decisive, it did not trouble him now with criticisms or decisions, but let him bask and admire.

"Dey want an organist in Hamilton. It is Saint Mary's, a church Protestant Episcopal, called High Church, _videlicet_, protesting mit apologies, und cultured to beat de band, vich is an idiom obscure, my friend Shack. Vat band?"

"Bra.s.s band."

"Ach so! Vell, vat did I mean?"

"Your German mind was headed right, but went astray on a by-path of idiom. Saint Mary's culture is not in compet.i.tion with a bra.s.s band in blue uniform, but aims at the highest orchestral and surpliced effects."

"Vell, a choir committee wrote me, anyhow, und I loss de letter.

_Helas!_ I loss everyt'ing--my reputation, my bes' friends! I put 'em somevere und forget 'em. Vat did I do mit my letter?"

"I suppose it's in your pocket."

"Gott! So it is! Vell, dey vant an organist, und Saint Mary's--"

"Has a three-banked organ, and Hamilton is a sleepy place, good for your neophyte to sit down in and learn the alphabet of humanity. I know Saint Mary's."

"Ach! Plazes! So you do!" Moselle stopped short and looked at Mavering under overhanging, yellowish eyebrows. "Am I intruding--roping in your domestic circle, Shack?"

"I think likely. It's no circle. It's an incommensurable ratio. You know that."

"I know no more than you like, Shack," said Moselle, gently. "You haf no objections?"

"None at all."

"Vell," said Moselle, after a pause, "so it is."

"Mr. Windham," said Mavering, flowingly, "nature cast me for the part of the villain. She gave me the countenance of one reflecting darkness, a voice unfit for lighter remarks than 'I will be revenged!'--made me a lean and hungry Ca.s.sius, and bid me a.s.sa.s.sinate and betray. The inspired text has it that 'All the world's a stage.' It follows that every man is cast for a role, and if he tries to introduce anything not in character he appears to make a mess of it, the management docks his salary, and the public blights his career. I once tried to play a hero and a lover, and invited the conjunction of happy stars. It was no good. The notion of it, as you see, is causing this German monster to make a braying a.s.s of himself."

"Ho! Ho!" Moselle chuckled, and puffed. "Der _kleiner_ don' know your stage und your Shakespeare. He shtare like a house afire."

"Oh, that's it."

"Vat is dat, Shack, a house afire? An idiom extravagant, confusing."

"It means he stares with breathless expectancy, with bewilderment and fear. I don't recommend the figure to your use. The conception of red conflagration and fire-bells is a Shakespearean flight, and you can't handle combination figures. You stick to a simple retail line of business for cash or you'll bust. You can't take risks and thirty days'

credit for a meaning. The English language has no confidence in you. You aren't sound for the market. Mr. Windham, you will probably meet in Hamilton a Mrs. Mavering, who lives close by Saint Mary's, and who will say nothing whatever of me. If I were you I would cultivate her acquaintance, but imitate that particular reserve."

"Vell," said Moselle, gently, "das iss good, but don't fill de _kleiner_ mit bevilderment. He don' understand, und he take indigestion. Go buy de grocery und de beer, Shack, und ve make a dinner here, und to-morrow de _kleiner_ shall haf human clothes, und go to the theatre und see friend Shack arrested for his vickedness in de fif' act."

After a while the dusk began falling. When Mavering came back with bundles and a basket containing a hot shoulder of meat from the baker's, the long room was lit glimmeringly by a lamp or two. And Moselle declared finally, and referred especially to the beer and seasoned cheese, that he was in favor of the animal half of man.

"He develope his soul too fast. Let him vait, let him vait. For his shtomach und feet haf stood by him, his friends from old, so old, und maybe his soul don' do so. She act frisky, _hein_?"

Mavering said, "I'm something of a conservative myself. Man ate before he prayed and loved the way he ate, but we live in a radical age."

Then Moselle played dream music, with fluffy, floating things in it, on one of the pianos, as though he never ate anything heavier than lettuce, and was, in the verity of music, a fair maiden who walked in a green-and-white garden and was pure and slim as the lilies; a woodthrush in the distance sang a love song that was like a hymn, but never came into the garden, and finally each lily became the spirit of a lily, the woodthrush the memory of a song, and garden, maiden and all went up a silver moonbeam to the moon.

Moselle played on through the evening, and towards twelve Mavering rose and left. Half an hour later Moselle swung around on his piano-stool.

"Shack gone? _Kleiner, kleiner!_ your eyes are full mit damp shleep;"

and he looked at Gard with his own eyes, grave and old and calm. "I denke you are more lofable als lofing, _kleiner_, an' for an artist de first's nodding, de last is all. '_Geliebt und gelebet_.' Aber one must _lieben_ in order to _leben_. '_Geliebt und gelebet_.' Ach! I haf so."

Gard slept in a room at the end of the hall, woke in the dawn, and lay waiting for the bell before matins. Then he remembered, and laughed aloud. But a throng of memories rose reproachfully. The chapel organ would be played badly now; Francis would drone all day in the schoolroom, but there would be no one for him to talk with about Cicero's beautiful adjectives; Brother Andrew would pat himself on the back of the hand, look wistfully down the corridor, trot away to the refectory, and find the salad uninteresting.

So Gard became organist at Saint Mary's in Hamilton, in the fall of '55, and in time a noted young person. In the immediate years that followed, the old life came to seem hardly more than a vivid dream, or a story told him by another man who had never left the brothers, but was still playing for offices and hurrying along white corridors. He had time on his hands, and read eagerly, and his rooms grew littered like Fritz Moselle's. He hardly knew what he was himself, except a kind of highway, along which the thoughts of other men, and emotions that he might claim his own since they came from nowhere in particular, travelled hastily.

It was something additional to that sense common to humanity of existence as a hurried journey from the unknown to the unknown, his ignorance of his antecedents back of the Foundlings' Hospital. Yet he seemed to feel no curiosity about them. They had no claim upon him, those antecedents, and he had none to them that he cared to put forward.

The past might bury its wrecks if it could. His name might be a clue, or it might be the effort of an inventive or reminiscent nurse. He never inquired and never knew, then or thereafter, but was content to have and possess it, as something that had floated ash.o.r.e with him and served well the purposes of a name. After all, the mortal millions have their severance from each other ruled with not so great a difference in point of isolation, and with the same "salt, estranging sea." Each is for himself the centre of things; the currents of the deep swing round him; he is alone with his main issues.

Gard saw a place and repute slowly forming for him, and had almost come to see himself a citizen of Hamilton, the straight road of a quiet life stretching before him under a cool gray sky. Moselle, whom he went down into the greater city to see now and then, doubted that outcome.