“Oh, I keep at it. I have good days and bad. Sometimes my eyes don’t see straight and my fingers are sticks. This afternoon the music made it all seem easy; I think it would help if the orchestra played in our class room.”
“A capital idea; I’ll speak to the directors about it. Music does seem to pry us loose from the earth. You may be surprised to know that I used to dabble at the violin myself—a long time ago. I was looked on as a promising student, and might have been a real good fiddler if I had kept it up.”
“But you still play, of course?”
“Not by a long shot! I broke my fiddle on my seventeenth birthday and turned toward a business career.”
“I suppose you had to do that.”
“Well, it didn’t seem quite square to my ancestors to fit myself to be the third fiddler in an orchestra; they were eminently practical persons. If I had kept at music as a life business very likely their shades would have haunted me and snapped my fiddle strings. But I have no regrets. I should probably have starved to death if my early ambitions hadn’t been thwarted. Anyhow, I guess I’m a kind of fatalist; if it had been in the books that I was to go fiddling through the world—why, I should have fiddled. And in the same way, it was ordained that you should go in for art, and here you are, spending your days at it and nothing could head you off.”
“Oh, yes; many things could! Many things tried!”
“I can’t believe it! I believe that everybody has a destiny; I don’t know what mine is, but I undoubtedly have it. I wouldn’t have you think that because I fell on my fiddle and smashed it and lost my chance of immortality that way, I am a person without accomplishments. I would have you know that I’m a man with a profession. I’m a mining engineer and can prove it by my diploma, and—no other way!”
His spirits were high; they talked and laughed together without restraint. He had not in a long time laughed and chaffed with a girl in this way. This walk through the dusk was oddly complete in itself; he felt no curiosity about her now, no interest in her life beyond this half-hour. Her simplicity, the frank way in which she disclosed her own ignorance, her serious belittling of her work in the art school, interested and touched him. She did not quite understand him; she was not used to his kind of banter. His mention of his youthful study of the violin she had taken soberly and she talked of her own aims to show her sympathy.
“There are so many students all over the world studying art that it seems silly for me to be wasting time over it. I had better be learning to do office work or how to sell things in a shop, or how to cook for some of these East End people, or dust rooms and wait on table. But sometimes my teachers have praised me, and that puts off the evil day when I shall have to come down to hard work and burn my portfolio——”