CHAPTER X.
For a second, nobody answered a word; this quiet declaration of an honest self-sacrifice took them all, even Nora, so utterly by surprise. Then Edward murmured musingly: ‘And it was for this that you gave up the prospect of living at Cambridge, and composing symphonies in Trinity gardens!’
The mulatto smiled a deprecating smile. ‘Oh,’ he cried timidly, ‘you mustn’t say that. I didn’t want to make out I was going to do anything so very grand or so very heroic. Of course, a man must satisfy himself he’s doing something to justify his existence in the world; and much as I love music, I hardly feel as though playing the violin were in itself a sufficient end for a man to live for. Though I must confess I should very much like to stop in England and be a composer. I’ve composed one or two little pieces already for the violin, that have been played with some success at public concerts. Sarasate played a small thing of mine last winter at a festival in Vienna. But then, besides, my father and friends live in Trinidad, and I feel that that’s the place where my work in life is really cut out for me.’
‘And your second great passion?’ Marian inquired. ‘You said you had a second great passion. What is it, I wonder?—Oh, of course, I see—your profession.’
(‘How could she be so stupid!’ Nora thought to herself. ‘What a silly girl! I’m afraid of my life now, the wretched man’ll try to say something pretty.’)
‘O no; not my profession,’ Dr Whitaker answered, smiling. ‘It’s a noble profession, of course—the noblest and grandest, almost, of all the professions—assuaging and alleviating human suffering; but one looks upon it, for all that, rather as a duty than as a passion. Besides, there’s one thing greater even than the alleviation of human suffering, greater than art with all its allurements, greater than anything else that a man can interest himself in—though I know most people don’t think so—and that’s science—the knowledge of our relations with the universe, and still more of the universe’s relations with its various parts.—No, Mrs Hawthorn; my second absorbing passion, next to music, and higher than music, is one that I’m sure ladies won’t sympathise with—it’s only botany.’
‘Goodness gracious!’ Nora cried, surprised into speech. ‘I thought botany was nothing but the most dreadfully hard words, all about nothing on earth that anybody cared for!’
The mulatto looked at her open-eyed with a sort of mild astonishment. ‘What?’ he said. ‘All the glorious lilies and cactuses and palms and orchids of our beautiful Trinidad nothing but hard words that nobody cares for! All the slender lianas that trail and droop from the huge buttresses of the wild cotton-trees; all the gorgeous trumpet-creepers that drape the gnarled branches of the mountain star-apples with their scarlet blossoms; all the huge cecropias, that rise aloft with their silvery stems and fan-shaped leaves, towering into the air like gigantic candelabra; all the graceful tree-ferns and feathery bamboos and glossy-leaved magnolias and majestic bananas and luxuriant ginger-worts and clustering arums: all the breadth and depth of tropical foliage, with the rugged and knotted creepers, festooned in veritable cables of vivid green, from branch to branch among the dim mysterious forest shades—stretched in tight cordage like the rigging yonder from mast to mast, for miles together—oh, Miss Dupuy, is that nothing? Do you call that nothing, for a man to fix his loving regard upon? Our own Trinidad is wonderfully rich still in such natural glories; and it’s the hope of doing a little in my spare hours to explore and disentomb them, like hidden treasures, that partly urges me to go back again where manifest destiny calls me to the land I was born in.’
The mulatto is always fluent, even when uneducated; but Dr Whitaker, learned in all the learning of the schools, and pouring forth his full heart enthusiastically on the subjects nearest and dearest to him, spoke with such a ready, easy eloquence, common enough, indeed, among south Europeans, and among Celtic Scots and Irish as well, but rare and almost unknown in our colder and more phlegmatic Anglo-Saxon constitutions—that Nora listened to him, quite taken aback by the flood of his native rhetoric, and whispered to herself in her own soul: ‘Really, he talks very well after all—for a coloured person!’
‘Yes, of course, all those things are very lovely, Dr Whitaker,’ Marian put in, more for the sake of drawing him out—for he was so interesting—than because she really wanted to disagree with him upon the subject. ‘But then, that isn’t botany. I always thought botany was a mere matter of stamens and petals, and all sorts of other dreadful technicalities.’
‘Stamens and petals!’ the mulatto echoed half contemptuously—‘stamens and petals! You might as well say art was all a matter of pigments and perspective, or music all a matter of crotchets and quavers, as botany all a matter of stamens and petals. Those are only the beggarly elements: the beautiful pictures, the glorious oratorios, the lovely flowers, are the real things to which in the end they all minister. It’s the trees and the plants themselves that interest me, not the mere lifeless jargon of technical phrases.’
They sat there late into the night, discussing things musical and West Indian and otherwise, without any desire to move away or cut short the conversation; and Dr Whitaker, his reserve now broken, talked on to them hour after hour, doing the lion’s share of the conversation, and delighting them with his transparent easy talk and open-hearted simplicity. He was frankly egotistical, of course—all persons of African blood always are; but his egotism, such as it was, took the pleasing form of an enthusiasm about his own pet ideas and pursuits—a love of music, a love of flowers, a love of his profession, and a love of Trinidad. To these favourite notes he recurred fondly again and again, vigorously defending the violin as an exponent of human emotion against Edward’s half-insincere expression of preference for wind instruments; going into raptures to Nora over the wonderful beauty of their common home; and describing to Marian in vivid language the grandeur of those marvellous tropical forests whose strange loveliness she had never yet with her own eyes beheld.
‘Picture to yourself,’ he said, looking out vaguely beyond the ship on to the star-lit Atlantic, ‘a great Gothic cathedral or Egyptian temple—Ely or Karnak, wrought, not in freestone or marble, but in living trees—with huge cylindrical columns strengthened below by projecting buttresses, and supporting overhead, a hundred feet on high, an unbroken canopy of interlacing foliage. Dense—so dense that only an indistinct glimmer of the sky can be seen here and there through the great canopy, just as you see Orion’s belt over yonder through the fringe of clouds upon the gray horizon; and even the intense tropical sunlight only reaches the ground at long intervals in little broken patches of subdued paleness. Then there’s the solemn silence, weird and gloomy, that produces in one an almost painful sense of the vast, the primeval, the mystical, the infinite. Only the low hum of the insects in the forest shade, the endless multitudinous whisper of the wind among the foliage, the faint sound begotten by the tropical growth itself, breaks the immemorial stillness in our West Indian woodland. It’s a world in which man seems to be a noisy intruder, and where he stands awestruck before the intense loveliness of nature, in the immediate presence of her unceasing forces.’
He stopped a moment, not for breath, for it seemed as if he could pour out language without an effort, in the profound enthusiasm of youth, but to take his violin once more tenderly from its case and hold it out, hesitating, before him. ‘Will you let me play you just one more little piece?’ he asked apologetically. ‘It’s a piece of my own, into which I’ve tried to put some of the feelings about these tropical forests that I never could possibly express in words. I call it “Souvenirs des Lianes.” Will you let me play it to you?—I shan’t be boring you?—Thank you—thank you.’
He stood up before them in the pale light of that summer evening, tall and erect, violin on breast and bow in hand, and began pouring forth from his responsive instrument a slow flood of low, plaintive, mysterious music. It was not difficult to see what had inspired his brain and hand in that strangely weird and expressive piece. The profound shade and gloom of the forest, the great roof of overarching foliage, the flutter of the endless leaves before the breeze, the confused murmur of the myriad wings and voices of the insects, nay, even the very stillness and silence itself of which he had spoken, all seemed to breathe forth deeply and solemnly on his quivering strings. It was a triumph of art over its own resources. On the organ or the flute, one would have said beforehand, such effects as these might indeed be obtained, but surely never, never on the violin. Yet in Dr Whitaker’s hand that scraping bow seemed capable of expressing even what he himself had called the sense of the vast, the primeval, and the infinite. They listened all in hushed silence, and scarcely so much as dared to breathe while the soft pensive cadences still floated out solemnly across the calm ocean. And when he had finished, they sat for a few minutes in perfect silence, rendering the performer that instinctive homage of mute applause which is so far more really eloquent than any mere formal and conventional expression of thanks ‘for your charming playing.’
As they sat so, each musing quietly over the various emotions aroused within them by the mulatto’s forest echoes, one of the white gentlemen in the stern, a young English officer on his way out to join a West Indian regiment, came up suddenly behind them, clapped his hand familiarly on Edward’s back, and said in a loud and cheerful tone: ‘Come along, Hawthorn; we’ve had enough of this music now—thank you very much, Dr Thingummy—let’s all go down to the saloon, I say, and have a game of nap or a quiet rubber.’
Even Nora felt in her heart as though she had suddenly been recalled by that untimely voice from some higher world to this vulgar, commonplace little planet of ours, the young officer had broken in so rudely on her silent reverie. She drew her dainty white lamb’s-wool wrapper closer around her shoulders with a faint sigh, slipped her hand gently through Marian’s arm, and moved away, slowly and thoughtfully, toward the companion-ladder. As she reached the doorway, she turned round, as if half ashamed of her own graciousness, and said in a low and genuine voice: ‘Thank you, Dr Whitaker—thank you very much indeed. We’ve so greatly enjoyed the treat you’ve given us.’
The mulatto bowed and said nothing; but instead of retiring to the saloon with the others, he put his violin case quietly under his arm, and walking alone to the stern of the vessel, leant upon the gunwale long and mutely, looking over with all his eyes deep and far into the silent, heaving, moonlit water. The sound of Nora’s voice thanking him reverberated long through all the echoing chambers of his memory.