VI
The practice proceeded with renewed vigor through the evenings that followed; then French Janin sank back into a torpor, varied by acute depression.
“I haven't got the life in me to teach you,” he admitted to Harry Baggs. “I'll be dead before you get your chance; besides, you ought to be practising all day, and not digging round plants and singing a little in the evening. You've got the voice, but that's not enough; you've got to work at exercises all your life.”
“I'm strong,” Harry Baggs told him; “I can work more than most men.”
“No, that won't do alone; you've got to go at it right, from the start; the method's got to be good. I'll be dead in some hospital or field when you'll be hardly starting. But remember it was Janin who found you, who dug you out of a set of tramps, gave you your first lessons.” He changed. “Stay along with me, Harry,” he begged; “take me with you. You're strong and'll never notice an old man. You will be making thousands some day. I will stop the morphia; perhaps I've got a good bit in me yet. Attention!” He raised the bow.
“No!” he cried, interrupting. “Breathe deep, below the chest. Control! Control! Hold the note steady, in the middle; don't force it into your head.”
His determination scion expired. Tears crept from under his sunken lids. He reached furtively into his pocket, took morphia. The conviction seized Harry Baggs that nothing could be accomplished here. The other's dejection was communicated to him. Where could he find the money, the time for the necessary laborious years of preparation? He was without credentials, without clothes; there was no one to whom he could go but the old spent man beside him. They were adrift together outside life, as the huts they inhabited were outside the orderly town beyond the hill.
He rose, left Janin, and walked slowly along the fence to the road. The moon had increased in size and brilliancy; the apple trees had bloomed and their fallen petals glimmered on the ground. He thought of the house on the smooth sward, with its hedge and old trees; a sudden longing seized him to linger at its edge, absorb again the profound peaceful ease; and he quickened his pace until he was opposite the low gray façade.
He sat on the soft steep bank, turned on his elbow, gazing within. The same voices drifted from the porch, voices gay or placid, and contained laughter. A chair scraped. It was all very close to Harry Baggs—and in another world. There was a movement within the house; a window leaped into lighted existence and then went out against the wall. Immediately after, a faint pure harmony of strings drifted out to the hedge. It was so unexpected, so lovely, that Harry Baggs sat with suspended breath. The strings made a pattern of simple harmony; and then, without warning, a man's voice, almost like his own, began singing. The tones rose fluid and perfect, and changed with feeling. It seemed at first to be a man; and then, because of a diminuendo of the voice, a sense of distance not accounted for by his presence near the hedge, he knew that he heard a record of the actual singing.
The voice, except for its resemblance to his own, did not absorb his attention; it was the song itself that thrilled and held him. He had never before heard music at once so clear and capable of such depths. He realized instinctively, with a tightening of his heart, that he was listening to one of the great songs of which Janin had spoken. It hung for a minute or more in his hearing, thrilling every nerve, and then died away. It stopped actually, but its harmony rang in Harry Baggs' brain. Instantly it had become an essential, a permanent part of his being. It filled him with a violent sense of triumph, a richness of possession that gave birth to a new unconquerable pride.
He rose, waited for a short space; but nothing more followed. He was glad of that; he had no wish to blur the impressions of the first. Harry Baggs hurried up the road and crossed the field to where he had left French Janin. The latter was still sleeping, crumpled against the vegetation. Baggs grasped the thin shoulder, shook him into consciousness.
“I have just heard something,” he said. “Listen! What is it?”
He sang without further preliminary, substituting a blank phrasing for uncomprehended words; but the melody swept without faltering to its conclusion. Janin answered irritably, disturbed by his rude awakening:
“The Serenade from Don Giovanni—Mozart. Well, what about it?”
“It's wonderful!” Harry Baggs declared. “Are there any more as great?”
“It is good,” Janin agreed, his interest stirred; “but there are better—the Dio Possente, the Brindisi from Hamlet. Once I led the finale of Hamlet. I saw the Director——”
“I'll get every one,” the boy interrupted.
“There are others now, newer—finer still, I'm told; but I don't know.” Janin rose and steadied himself against the fence. “Give me a start. I've been getting confused lately; I don't seem to keep a direction like I could. From Don Giovanni: 'Deh vieni alla finestra'—'Come to the window' 's about it. I'm glad you're not a tenor; they're delicate and mean. But you are a fine boy, Harry; you'll take the old man up along with you!”
He talked in a rapid faint voice, like his breathing. Harry Baggs grasped his arm and led him down to their shanty. French Janin entered first, and immediately the other heard a thin complaint from within:
“Somebody's got that nice bed you made me.”
Harry Baggs went into the hut and, stooping, shook a recumbent shape.
“Get out of the old man's place!” he commanded.
A string of muffled oaths responded.
“There's no reserved rooms here.”
“Get out!” Baggs insisted.
The shape heaved up obscurely and the boy sent him reeling through the door. French Janin sank with weary relief on the straw and bagging. He grasped the thick young arm above him.
“We won't be long in this,” he declared; “diamond studs!”
He fell asleep instantly, with his fingers caught in Harry Baggs' sleeve. The latter, with the supreme egotism of youth, of a single ambition, loosened the hand and moved out of the narrow confinement of the shanty. He wanted space, the sky, into which to sing his imaginary triumphant songs.