II
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 Caffè Fiammella, where the fat, bald-headed proprietor used to introduce him as "l'illustrissimo violinista Signore Ricardo Sciafèro," 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 Raphæl'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,—Angoulême, 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 Dauphiné 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. Chambréy did well for them, and Annécy 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 Rivièra.
"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.