“You’re Greek in your preferences,” commented the professor with a smile. “The Greeks, you know, knew nothing of harmony as we understand it. Their only interval was the octave—they called it magadizing.”
“Well now, to think of it!” said the tuner. “I wish I’d known. There was a Greek sailor on the Silvershell, and I might have had a chat with him about his music.”
“I was referring to the ancient Greeks,” the professor explained. “I am not familiar with modern Greek music, but I imagine it is very much like modern music everywhere.”
“Of course,” agreed the tuner cynically. “Comic operas, chords that give all ten fingers something to do—that’s music as they write it now. And I’m not saying that it hasn’t its place,” he went on. “It’s human, at least. Professionally, I admire the octave, but when I sit down in the evening for a bit of a rest and me daughter Nora plays ‘Vesper Chimes,’ the way those chords pile up on each other don’t hurt me the way it would some. After all, perfection’s apt to be a bit bleak, isn’t it? There was Cartwright, for instance. The octave came to be the only perfect interval for him—poor Cartwright!”
“Cartwright?” repeated the professor curiously.
“Haven’t I ever told you about Cartwright? Hm! Well!” He pushed his chair back a little from the table, fixed his eyes thoughtfully on the antics of a pair of orioles building a nest outside the window, and meditated for a moment. We were too wise to break the silence, for we knew that the tuner was digging up from the storehouse of a rich memory some fresh chapter in the Odyssey of his wanderings. After a little he began his tale.
What the professor here said about the Greeks and their octaves set me thinking about Cartwright. I haven’t often spoken of him, for there’s not much to tell that most people would understand. Molly, now, she always speaks of him as that poor crazy Mr. Cartwright. The perfect interval is nonsense, Molly says. Red Wing’s good enough for her. . . but I’d better begin at the beginning.
It was the time Molly and I were taking our wedding trip on the tramp schooner Silvershell, and we were cruising about the Pacific after copra and vanilla and all those cargoes that sound so romantic when one’s young. One of the ports we were bound for was a place called Taku, down in the Dangerous Archipelago. The captain warned us that it would be a bad trip.
“But you ought to make your fortune there,” he says, “for I’ll lay a wager you’re the first tuner that’s ever visited the place. Whether you get home to spend your money or not, that’s another matter. That’s on the knees of the gods,” says the captain, who was an Oxford man and had picked up some of his expressions there.
When we got in among the islands I saw what he meant. Coral they were, and reefs above water and below. Molly and I slept in our life preservers night after night, and daytime we could scarcely go down to meals for wondering how we’d get through that boiling sea of breakers and hidden peaks of coral. We’d some narrow shaves, too, but we made Taku, and anchored one evening in a lagoon that looked as if it might have been painted on a colored calendar, palms and parrots and native huts and all.