A Cathedral Singer

by James Lane Allen

He laid down his napkin,—he could eat no more, and there was nothing more to eat,—and he folded his hands quite like the head of the house at ease after a careless feast, and began his story.

Well, he had had a splendid day, too. After he had left her he had gone to the dealer's on the avenue with the unsold papers. Then he had crossed over to the cathedral, and for a while had watched the men at work up in the air. He had walked around to the choir school, but no one was there that morning, not a sound came from the inside. Then he had started down across the park. As he sat down to count his money, a man who had climbed up the hillside stopped and asked him a great many questions: who taught him music and whether any one had ever heard him sing. This stranger also liked music and he also went to the cathedral, so he claimed. From that point the story wound its way onward across the busy hours till nightfall.

It was a child's story, not an older person's. Therefore it did not draw the line between pleasant and unpleasant, fair and unfair, right and wrong, which make up for each of us the history of our checkered human day. It separated life as a swimmer separates the sea: there is one water which he parts by his passage. So the child, who is still wholly a child, divides the world.

But as she pondered, she discriminated. Out of the long, rambling narrative she laid hold of one overwhelming incident, forgetting the rest: a passing stranger, hearing a few notes of his voice, had stopped to question him about it. To her this was the first outside evidence that her faith in his musical gift was not groundless.

When he had ended his story she regarded him across the table with something new in her eyes—something of awe. She had never hinted to him what she believed he would some day be. She might be wrong, and thus might start him on the wrong course; or, being right, she might never have the chance to start him on the right one. In either case she might be bringing to him disappointment, perhaps the failure of his whole life.

Now she still hid the emotion his story caused. But the stranger of the park had kindled within her that night what she herself had long tended unlit—the alabaster flame of worship which the mother burns before the altar of a great son.

An hour later they were in another small attic-like space next to the supper-room. Here was always the best of their evening. No matter how poor the spot, if there reach it some solitary ray of the great light of the world, let it be called your drawing-room. Where civilization sends its beams through a roof, there be your drawing-room. This part of the garret was theirs.

In one corner stood a small table on which were some tantalizing books and the same lamp. Another corner was filled by the littlest, oldest imaginable of six-octave pianos, the mythical piano ancestor; on it were piled some yellowed folios, her music once. Thus two different rays of civilization entered their garret and fell upon the twin mountain-peaks of the night—books and music.

Toward these she wished regularly to lead him as darkness descended over the illimitable city and upon its weary grimy battle-fields. She liked him to fall asleep on one or the other of these mountain-tops. When he awoke, it would be as from a mountain that he would see the dawn. From there let him come down to the things that won the day; but at night back again to things that win life.

They were in their drawing-room, then, as she had taught him to call it, and she was reading to him. A knock interrupted her. She interrogated the knock doubtfully to herself for a moment.