My mother introduced Crawford to all the editors she knew, and very soon he was hard at work writing book notices for the Critic and articles for all the magazines that would give him a chance. Meanwhile he was studying with Georg Henschel for the operatic stage. He had a fine voice and a magnificent stage presence, but his ear was not quite true. He would sing perfectly in tune four nights running; on the fifth he would sing false and never know it. Henschel at first thought that this defective ear could be overcome by training. The old music my uncle and my brother had sung was brought out, and every evening my mother and Marion gave us delightful concerts. Crawford went that spring to visit Uncle Sam in New York and there he got the clew to his real calling. He talked a great deal to my uncle about his experience in India and about one man in especial, who had deeply interested him. Uncle Sam said:
“You must write a novel about that man.”
When we moved to Oak Glen that summer, Crawford went with us. Outside the door of the house was the “green parlor”, an open space shut in from the road by a high arbor-vitae hedge. In the green parlor stood a long wooden table, where morning and afternoon Crawford sat writing steadily for hours at a time on the novel Uncle Sam had suggested. In the evening he would read us what he had written. The manuscript showed few changes and hardly an erasure. His work as editor of the Indian Herald in Allahabad gave him a sureness of touch I have never known equaled in any literary man. So “Mr. Isaacs”, the book that made him famous overnight, was written. At the other end of the wooden table I sat writing my first story, destined for a brilliant if brief career, “The Newport Aquarelle.”
Work over, we gathered round the piano, or under the oaks with our guitars. Our repertory of Italian folksong included several that old Father Corné brought to Newport when the century was young; others Marion had picked up while roaming about Italy, helping the peasants with the vintage, a part of the “rolling stone” process his mother deplored. The moss he then gathered lined his nest comfortably when building time came, for it is his intimacy with the life of the people that gives the charm to his Italian novels.
In September, 1881, the telephone was installed at Oak Glen. The first message came at midnight, when the house was roused by the strange alarm bell, ringing in the dark.
“Are you there?” It was the voice of my cousin Sam Francis, speaking from the club.
“President Garfield is dead.”
In my mother’s poem to Garfield, written the next day, there is a reference to this new miracle of electricity.
Our sorrow sends its shadow round the earth.
The lightning’s message by our tears is shaped.
The telephone was then what the automobile has been for so long, and the flying machine bids fair to become,—one of the popular themes of current literature. Plays were constructed and novels written with the telephone as the chief motif. Our own family “Telephone Song”, composed by Laura Richards, enjoyed a brief but brilliant fame.