Father had been away, reorganizing some old upstate railroad. He returned in an executive mood and proceeded to shake up our home. In spite of my failure as a singer, he was still bound to have us taught music. We boys were summoned before him and informed that we must at once learn to play on something. We might not appreciate it now, he said, but we should later on. “You, Clarence, will learn the violin. George, you the piano. Julian–well, Julian is too young yet. But you older boys must have lessons.”
I was appalled at this order. At the age of ten it seemed a disaster to lose any more of my freedom. The days were already too short for our games after school; and now here was a chunk to come out of playtime three days every week. A chunk every day, we found afterward, because we had to practise.
George sat at the piano in the parlour, and faithfully learned to pound out his exercises. He had all the luck. He was not an inspired player, but at least he had some ear for music. He also had the advantage of playing on a good robust instrument, which he didn’t have to be careful not to drop, and was in no danger of breaking. Furthermore, he did not have to tune it. A piano had some good points. But I had to go through a blacker and more gruesome experience. It was bad enough to have to come in from the street and the sunlight and go down into our dark little basement where I took my lessons. But that was only the opening chill of the struggle that followed.
The whole thing was uncanny. The violin itself was a queer, fragile, cigar-boxy thing, that had to be handled most gingerly. Nothing sturdy about it. Why, a fellow was liable to crack it putting it into its case. And then my teacher, he was queer too. He had a queer pickled smell.
I dare say he wasn’t queer at all really, but he seemed so to me, because he was different from the people I generally met. He was probably worth a dozen of some of them, but I didn’t know it. He was one of the violins in the Philharmonic, and an excellent player; a grave, middle-aged little man–who was obliged to give lessons.
He wore a black, wrinkled frock-coat, and a discoloured gold watch-chain. He had small, black-rimmed glasses; not tortoise-shell, but thin rims of metal. His violin was dark, rich, and polished, and would do anything for him.
Mine was bulky and awkward, brand new, and of a light, common colour.
The violin is intended for persons with a passion for music. I wasn’t that kind of person. I liked to hear a band play a tune that we could march up and down to, but try as I would, I could seldom whistle such a tune afterward. My teacher didn’t know this. He greeted me as a possible genius.
He taught me how to hold the contraption, tucked under my chin. I learned how to move my fingers here and there on its handle or stem. I learned how to draw the bow across the strings, and thus produce sounds. . . .
Does a mother recall the first cry of her baby, I wonder? I still remember the strange cry at birth of that new violin.
My teacher, Herr M., looked as though he had suddenly taken a large glass of vinegar. He sucked in his breath. His lips were drawn back from his teeth, and his eyes tightly shut. Of course, he hadn’t expected my notes to be sweet at the start; but still, there was something unearthly about that first cry. He snatched the violin from me, examined it, readjusted its pegs, and comforted it gently, by drawing his own bow across it. It was only a new and not especially fine violin, but the sounds it made for him were more natural–they were classifiable sounds. They were not richly musical, but at least they had been heard before on this earth.
He handed the instrument back to me with careful directions. I tucked it up under my chin again and grasped the end tight. I held my bow exactly as ordered. I looked up at him, waiting.
“Now,” he said, nervously.
I slowly raised the bow, drew it downward . . .
This time there were two dreadful cries in our little front basement. One came from my new violin and one from the heart of Herr M.
Herr M. presently came to, and smiled bravely at me, and said if I wanted to rest a moment he would permit it. He seemed to think I might wish to lie down a while and recover. I didn’t feel any need of lying down. All I wanted was to get through the lesson. But Herr M. was shaken. He was by no means ready to let me proceed. He looked around desperately, saw the music-book, and said he would now show me that. We sat down side by side on the window-seat, with the book in his lap, while he pointed out the notes to me with his finger, and told me their names.
After a bit, when he felt better, he took up his own violin, and instructed me to watch him and note how he handled the strings. And then at last, he nerved himself to let me take my violin up again. “Softly, my child, softly,” he begged me, and stood facing the wall. . . .
We got through the afternoon somehow, but it was a ghastly experience. Part of the time he was maddened by the mistakes I kept making, and part of the time he was plain wretched. He covered his eyes. He seemed ill. He looked often at his watch, even shook it as though it had stopped; but he stayed the full hour.
That was Wednesday. What struggles he had with himself before Friday, when my second lesson was due, I can only dimly imagine, and of course I never even gave them a thought at the time. He came back to recommence teaching me, but he had changed–he had hardened. Instead of being cross, he was stern; and instead of sad, bitter. He wasn’t unkind to me, but we were no longer companions. He talked to himself, under his breath; and sometimes he took bits of paper, and did little sums on them, gloomily, and then tore them up.
During my third lesson I saw the tears come to his eyes. He went up to Father and said he was sorry but he honestly felt sure I’d never be able to play.
Father didn’t like this at all. He said he felt sure I would. He dismissed Herr M. briefly–the poor man came stumbling back down in two minutes. In that short space of time he had gallantly gone upstairs in a glow, resolved upon sacrificing his earnings for the sake of telling the truth. He returned with his earnings still running, but with the look of a lost soul about him, as though he felt that his nerves and his sanity were doomed to destruction. He was low in his mind, and he talked to himself more than ever. Sometimes he spoke harshly of America, sometimes of fate.
But he no longer struggled. He accepted this thing as his destiny. He regarded me as an unfortunate something, outside the human species, whom he must simply try to labour with as well as he could. It was a grotesque, indeed a hellish experience, but he felt he must bear it.
He wasn’t the only one–he was at least not alone in his sufferings. Mother, though expecting the worst, had tried to be hopeful about it, but at the end of a week or two I heard her and Margaret talking it over. I was slaughtering a scale in the front basement, when Mother came down and stood outside the door in the kitchen hall and whispered, “Oh, Margaret!”
I watched them. Margaret was baking a cake. She screwed up her face, raised her arms, and brought them down with hands clenched.
“I don’t know what we shall do, Margaret.”
“The poor little feller,” Margaret whispered. “He can’t make the thing go.”
This made me indignant. They were making me look like a lubber. I wished to feel always that I could make anything go. . . .
I now began to feel a determination to master this thing. History shows us many examples of the misplaced determinations of men–they are one of the darkest aspects of human life, they spread so much needless pain: but I knew little history. And I viewed what little I did know romantically–I should have seen in such episodes their heroism, not their futility. Any rôle that seemed heroic attracted me, no matter how senseless.
Not that I saw any chance for heroism in our front basement, of course. You had to have a battlefield or something. I saw only that I was appearing ridiculous. But that stung my pride. I hadn’t wanted to learn anything whatever about fiddles or music, but since I was in for it, I’d do it, and show them I could. A boy will often put in enormous amounts of his time trying to prove he isn’t as ridiculous as he thinks people think him.
Meanwhile Herr M. and I had discovered that I was nearsighted. On account of the violin’s being an instrument that sticks out in front of one, I couldn’t stand close enough to the music-book to see the notes clearly. He didn’t at first realize that I often made mistakes from that cause. When he and I finally comprehended that I had this defect, he had a sudden new hope that this might have been the whole trouble, and that when it was corrected I might play like a human being at last.
Neither of us ventured to take up this matter with Father. We knew that it would have been hard to convince him that my eyes were not perfect, I being a son of his and presumably made in his image; and we knew that he immediately would have felt we were trying to make trouble for him, and would have shown an amount of resentment which it was best to avoid. So Herr M. instead lent me his glasses. These did fairly well. They turned the dim greyness of the notes into a queer bright distortion, but the main thing was they did make them brighter, so that I now saw more of them. How well I remember those little glasses. Poor, dingy old things. Herr M. was nervous about lending them to me; he feared that I’d drop them. It would have been safer if they had been spectacles: but no, they were pince-nez; and I had to learn to balance them across my nose as well as I could. I couldn’t wear them up near my eyes because my nose was too thin there; I had to put them about half-way down where there was enough flesh to hold them. I also had to tilt my head back, for the music-stand was a little too tall for me. Herr M. sometimes mounted me on a stool, warning me not to step off. Then when I was all set, and when he without his glasses was blind, I would smash my way into the scales again.
All during the long winter months I worked away at this job. I gave no thought, of course, to the family. But they did to me. Our house was heated by a furnace, which had big warm air-pipes; these ran up through the walls with wide outlets into each room, and sound travelled easily and ringingly through their roomy, tin passages. My violin could be heard in every part of the house. No one could settle down to anything while I was practising. If visitors came they soon left. Mother couldn’t even sing to the baby. She would wait, watching the clock, until my long hour of scale-work was over, and then come downstairs and shriek at me that my time was up. She would find me sawing away with my forehead wet, and my hair wet and stringy, and even my clothes slowly getting damp from my exertions. She would feel my collar, which was done for, and say I must change it. “Oh, Mother! Please!”–for I was in a hurry now to run out and play. But she wasn’t being fussy about my collar, I can see, looking back; she was using it merely as a barometer or gauge of my pores. She thought I had better dry myself before going out in the snow.
It was a hard winter for Mother. I believe she also had fears for the baby. She sometimes pleaded with Father; but no one could ever tell Father anything. He continued to stand like a rock against stopping my lessons.
Schopenhauer, in his rules for debating, shows how to win a weak case by insidiously transferring an argument from its right field, and discussing it instead from some irrelevant but impregnable angle. Father knew nothing of Schopenhauer, and was never insidious, but, nevertheless, he had certain natural gifts for debate. In the first place his voice was powerful and stormy, and he let it out at full strength, and kept on letting it out with a vigour that stunned his opponents. As a second gift, he was convinced at all times that his opponents were wrong. Hence, even if they did win a point or two, it did them no good, for he dragged the issue to some other ground then, where he and Truth could prevail. When Mother said it surely was plain enough that I had no ear, what was his reply? Why, he said that the violin was the noblest instrument invented by man. Having silenced her with this solid premise he declared that it followed that any boy was lucky to be given the privilege of learning to play it. No boy should expect to learn it immediately. It required persistence. Everything, he had found, required persistence. The motto was, Never give up.
All his life, he declared, he had persevered in spite of discouragement, and he meant to keep on persevering, and he meant me to, too. He said that none of us realized what he had had to go through. If he had been the kind that gave up at the very first obstacle, where would he have been now–where would any of the family have been? The answer was, apparently, that we’d either have been in a very bad way, poking round for crusts in the gutter, or else non-existent. We might have never even been born if Father had not persevered.
Placed beside this record of Father’s vast trials overcome, the little difficulty of my learning to play the violin seemed a trifle. I faithfully spurred myself on again, to work at the puzzle. Even my teacher seemed impressed with these views on persistence. Though older than Father, he had certainly not made as much money, and he bowed to the experience of a practical man who was a success. If he, Herr M., had been a success he would not have had to teach boys; and sitting in this black pit in which his need of money had placed him, he saw more than ever that he must learn the ways of this world. He listened with all his heart, as to a god, when Father shook his forefinger, and told him how to climb to the heights where financial rewards were achieved. The idea he got was that perseverance was sure to lead to great wealth.
Consequently our front basement continued to be the home of lost causes.
Of course, I kept begging Herr M. to let me learn just one tune. Even though I seldom could whistle them, still I liked tunes; and I knew that, in my hours of practising, a tune would be a comfort. That is, for myself. Here again I never gave a thought to the effect upon others.
Herr M., after many misgivings, to which I respectfully listened–though they were not spoken to me, they were muttered to himself, pessimistically–hunted through a worn old book of selections, and after much doubtful fumbling chose as simple a thing as he could find for me–for me and the neighbours.
It was spring now, and windows were open. That tune became famous.
What would the musician who had tenderly composed this air, years before, have felt if he had foreseen what an end it would have, on Madison Avenue; and how, before death, it would be execrated by that once peaceful neighbourhood. I engraved it on their hearts; not in its true form but in my own eerie versions. It was the only tune I knew. Consequently I played and replayed it.
Even horrors when repeated grow old and lose part of their sting. But those I produced were, unluckily, never the same. To be sure, this tune kept its general structure the same, even in my sweating hands. There was always the place where I climbed unsteadily up to its peak, and that difficult spot where it wavered, or staggered, and stuck; and then a sudden jerk of resumption–I came out strong on that. Every afternoon when I got to that difficult spot, the neighbours dropped whatever they were doing to wait for that jerk, shrinking from the moment, and yet feverishly impatient for it to come.
But what made the tune and their anguish so different each day? I’ll explain. The strings of a violin are wound at the end around pegs, and each peg must be screwed in and tightened till the string sounds just right. Herr M. left my violin properly tuned when he went. But suppose a string broke, or that somehow I jarred a peg loose? Its string then became slack and soundless. I had to re-tighten it. Not having an ear, I was highly uncertain about this.
Our neighbours never knew at what degree of tautness I’d put such a string. I didn’t myself. I just screwed her up tight enough to make a strong reliable sound. Neither they nor I could tell which string would thus appear in a new rôle each day, nor foresee the profound transformations this would produce in that tune.
All that spring this unhappy and ill-destined melody floated out through my window, and writhed in the air for one hour daily, in sunshine or storm. All that spring our neighbours and I daily toiled to its peak, and staggered over its hump, so to speak, and fell wailing through space.
Things now began to be said to Mother which drove her to act. She explained to Father that the end had come at last. Absolutely. “This awful nightmare cannot go on,” she said.
Father pooh-poohed her.
She cried. She told him what it was doing to her. He said that she was excited, and that her descriptions of the sounds I made were exaggerated and hysterical–must be. She was always too vehement, he shouted. She must learn to be calm.
“But you’re down town, you don’t have to hear it!”
Father remained wholly sceptical.
She endeavoured to shame him. She told him what awful things the neighbours were saying about him, because of the noise I was making, for which he was responsible.
He couldn’t be made to look at it that way. If there really were any unpleasantness then I was responsible. He had provided me with a good teacher and a good violin–so he reasoned. In short, he had done his best, and no father could have done more. If I made hideous sounds after all that, the fault must be mine. He said that Mother should be stricter with me, if necessary, and make me try harder.
This was the last straw. I couldn’t try harder. When Mother told me his verdict I said nothing, but my body rebelled. Self-discipline had its limits–and I wanted to be out: it was spring. I skimped my hours of practice when I heard the fellows playing outside. I came home late for lessons–even forgot them. Little by little they stopped.
Father was outraged. His final argument, I remember, was that my violin had cost twenty-five dollars; if I didn’t learn it the money would be wasted, and he couldn’t afford it. But it was put to him that my younger brother, Julian, could learn it instead, later on. Then summer came, anyhow, and we went for three months to the seashore; and in the confusion of this Father was defeated and I was set free.
In the autumn little Julian was led away one afternoon, and imprisoned in the front basement in my place. I don’t remember how long they kept him down there, but it was several years. He had an ear, however, and I believe he learned to play fairly well. This would have made a happy ending for Herr M. after all; but it was some other teacher, a younger man, who was engaged to teach Julian. Father said Herr M. was a failure.