Mary Wollaston

by Henry Kitchell Webster

He was a skilled artisan, a stringer and chipper in a piano factory (chipping, if you care to be told, is the tuning a piano gets before its action is put in). One would hardly have predicted then, considering the man's energy and intelligence, that he would remain just that, go on working at the same bench for thirty-five years. But, as I have said, his energy found its main outlet in emotional religion.

Their first child, born in 1886, was a girl whom they named Sarah. Anthony came two years later and for twelve years there were no more. Then came the late baby, whom they appropriately named Benjamin and allowed a somewhat milder bringing up than the iron rule the elder ones had been subjected to.

It was the dearest wish of David's life to make a preacher of Anthony and he must have got by way of answers to his prayers, signs which reconciled him to the sheer impossibility of this project. The boy's passion for music manifested itself very early and with this David compromised by training him for the higher reaches of his own craft. He got employment for Anthony in the piano factory for a year or two after his graduation from high school and then sent him on for a liberal two years in a school in Boston where the best possible instruction in piano tuning was to be had.

Sarah was half-way through high school when her brother Benjamin was born and for two years after she graduated, her mother's ill health, the familiar breakdown of the middle forties, kept her at home. Then she defied her father and took a job in a down-town office. What he objected to, of course, was not her going to work but the use she made of the independence with which self-support provided her. The quarrel never came to a real break though often enough it looked like doing so, and except for the brief period of her marriage Sarah always lived at home.

When Anthony came back from Boston, he revolted, too. He had not been a prodigal; indeed, during his second year in the East, he had in one way or another, earned his own living and he had learned even beyond his father's hopes to tune pianos. But he did it at an incredibly small expense in time and energy. What his heart went into during those two years was the study of musical theory and composition, and, thanks to a special aptitude which rose to the pitch of genius, he managed to make the comparatively meager training he could get in so short a time, suffice to give him the technical equipment he needed.

He came home armed, too, with a discovery. The discovery that a man not enslaved by a possessive sense, a man whose self-respect is not dependent upon the number of things he owns, a man able therefore to thumb his nose at all the maxims of success, occupies really a very strong position.

He didn't like the factory, though he gave it what he considered a fair trial. He didn't like the way they tuned pianos in a factory. The dead level of mechanical perfection which they insisted upon was a stupid affront to his ear. And, of course, the strict regimentation of life at home, the, once more, dead level of the plateau upon which life was supposed to be lived, was distasteful to one with a streak of the nomad and the adventurer in him.

Thanks to his discovery he was able to construct an alternative to a life like that. A skillful piano tuner could earn what money he needed anywhere and could earn enough in a diligent week to set him free, his simple wants provided for, for the rest of the month.

But even a wanderer needs a base, a point of departure for his wanderings, and his father's house could not be made to serve that purpose, so Anthony domiciled himself, after a long quest, in the half story above a little grocery just off North LaSalle Street and not far from the river.

It happened when Anthony had been living there a year or more that the grocer, with whom he was on the friendliest of terms, got, temporarily, into straits at precisely the time that Anthony had three hundred dollars. He had won a prize of that amount offered by a society for the encouragement of literature for the minor orchestral instruments, with a concerto for the French horn. The grocer offered his note for it, but Anthony thought of something better. He bought his room. It was to be his to live in, rent free, for as long as time endured.