His words were almost like a challenge, and it reached to Jethro’s innermost nature. He would show this Gorgio robber what a Romany could do, and do as easily as the birds sing. The Gorgio was a money-master, they said, but he would find that a Romany was a master, too, in his own way. He thought of one of the first pieces he had ever heard, a rhapsody which had grown and grown, since it was first improvised by a Tzigany in Hungary. He had once played it to an English lady at the Amphitryon Club in London, and she had swooned in the arms of her husband’s best friend. He had seen men and women avert their heads when he had played it, daring not to look into each other’s eyes. He would play it now—a little of it. He would play it to her—to the girl who had set him free in the Sagalac woods, to the ravishing deserter from her people, to the only woman who had told him the truth in all his life, and who insulated his magnetism as a ground-wire insulates lightning. He would summon her here by his imagination, and tell her to note how his soul had caught the music of the spheres. He would surround himself with an atmosphere of his own. His rage, his love, and his malignant hate, his tenderness and his lust should fill the barber’s shop with a flood which would drown the Gorgio raider. He laughed to himself, almost unconsciously. Then suddenly he leaned his cheek to the instrument and drew the bow across the strings with a savage softness. The old cottonfield fiddle cried out with a thrilling, exquisite pain, but muffled, as a hand at the lips turns agony into a tender moan. Some one—some spirit—in the fiddle was calling for its own.
Five minutes later-a five minutes in which people gathered at the door of the shop, and heads were thrust inside in ravished wonder—the palpitating Romany lowered the fiddle from his chin, and stood for a minute looking into space, as though he saw a vision.
He was roused by old Berry’s voice. “Das a fiddle I wouldn’t sell for a t’ousand dollars. If I could play like dat I wouldn’t sell it for ten t’ousand. You kin play a fiddle to make it worth a lot—you.”
The Romany handed back the instrument. “It’s got something inside it that makes it better than it is. It’s not a good fiddle, but it has something—ah, man alive, it has something!” It was as though he was talking to himself.
Berry made a quick, eager gesture. “It’s got the cotton-fields and the slave days in it. It’s got the whip and the stocks in it; it’s got the cry of the old man that’d never see his children ag’in. That’s what the fiddle’s got in it.”
Suddenly, in an apparent outburst of anger, he swept down on the front door and drove the gathering crowd away.
“Dis is a barber-shop,” he said with an angry wave of his hand; “it ain’t a circuse.”
One man protested. “I want a shave,” he said. He tried to come inside, but was driven back.
“I ain’t got a razor that’d cut the bristle off your face,” the old barber declared peremptorily; “and, if I had, it wouldn’t be busy on you. I got two customers, and that’s all I’m going to take befo’ I have my dinner. So you git away. There ain’t goin’ to be no more music.”
The crowd drew off, for none of them cared to offend this autocrat of the shears and razor.