Fate Knocks at the Door. Will Levington Comfort

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СКАЧАТЬ contributors, but the love of man and woman which the stories in general exploited, struck him of Indian ideals as shifty and pestilential. The woman of fiction was equipped with everything to make her as common as man. She was glib, pert, mundane, her mind a chatter-mill; a creature of fur, paint, hair, and absurdly young. The clink of coins was her most favorable accompaniment; and her giving of self was a sort of disrobing formality. The men who pursued her were forward and solicitous. There was something of sacrilege about it all. The minds and souls of real women—such were not matters for American story; and yet the Americans wrote with dangerous facility. Bedient, who worshipped the abstraction, Womanhood, felt his intelligence seared, calcined. … Only here and there was a bit of real literature—usually by a woman. The men seemed hung up to dry at twenty-five. There was no manhood of mind.

      Bedient's sense of loneliness became pervasive. Apparently he was outside the range of consciousness—for better or worse—with the country to which he had always hoped to give his best years. His ideals of the literary art were founded upon large flexible lines of beauty into which every dimension of life fell according to the reader's vision. He felt himself alone; that he was out of alignment with this young race from which he had sprung, to wander so far and so long.

      And yet there was a Woman up there for him to know. This was imbedded in his consciousness. Soon he should go to her. … He should find her. And as the Hindu poets falteringly called upon the lotos and the nectars; upon the brilliance of midday athwart the plain, and the glory of moonlight upon mountain and glacier and the standing water of foliaged pools; upon the seas at large, and the stars and the bees and the gods—to express the triune loveliness of woman (which mere man may only venture to appraise, not to know)—so should he, Bedient, envision the reality when the winds of the world brought him home to her heart.

      * * * * *

      There was much to do at the hacienda. The Captain was past riding a great deal, and the large hill and river property—the coffee, cacao, cotton, cane and tobacco industries profited much better with an overseer. Still Bedient slowly realized that the hundreds of natives in touch with Captain Carreras' plantations worked about as well for him as they knew. Single-handed, Carreras had done great things, and was loved as a good doctor is loved. In spite of his huge accumulation of land, the Captain was the least greedy of men. He had been content to improve slowly. His incalculable riches, as he had early confided to Bedient, were in the river-beds. Only a few of these placer possibilities were operated. There was a big leak in the washings. Still, the natives were not greedy, either. They were home-keepers, and had no way to dispose of bullion.

      Carreras had managed all his affairs so as to keep the government on his side, and his revenues were no little part of the support of the Capitol. This was his largest outlay, but in return he was protected. … Deep disorder brooded in the present political silence; all recalcitrants were gathering under Celestino Rey—but this situation was only beginning to be understood.

      At certain times of year, Carreras had in his employ the heads of five hundred families, and had shown himself unique in paying money for labor. This was un-Spanish. It gave him the choice of the natives. He represented therefore a stable and prosperous element of the population. His revenues were becoming enormous. The Hollanders paid him a fortune annually for raw chocolate. This, with tree-planting and culture, would double, for the soil seemed to contain the miraculous properties of alkahest. The point of all this is, that Captain Carreras had come to be regarded as the right wing of the government. He arranged all his dealings on a friendly rather than a business basis; his good-will was his best protection. … Bedient had been in Equatoria for several months when Jaffier sent for the Captain.

      "I don't feel like it, but I'd better go," the old man said. "Something amiss is in the air. Damme, I've got all delicate to the saddle since you came, sir. … I used to think nothing of the ride down town—and now it's a carriage. … Ah, well, you can try out a new symphony—and tell me what it says when I get back."

      As it turned out, Bedient did exactly this thing. … Time could not efface the humor evoked by the sight or sound of the magnificent orchestrelle. During one of the Captain's New York trips, he had heard a famous orchestra. The effect upon him was of something superhuman. The Captain went again—followed the musicians to Boston and Philadelphia. The result was more or less the same. Soul flew in one direction; mind in another; and, inert before the players—a little fat man, perspiring, weeping, ecstatic. What came of it, he had told Bedient in this way:

      "The Hatteras was to sail at night-fall, but on that morning I went into a music-store, not knowing what I wanted exactly—but a souvenir of some kind, a book about orchestras. It appears, I told a man there how I'd been philanderin' with the musicians; how I had caught them in an off day at Springfield, Mass., and bought cornucopias of Pilsner until they would have broken down and wept had they not been near their instruments. … It was a big music-store, and he was a very good man. He sold me the orchestrelle that morning. You think I had an electric plant installed down here to light the house and drive my sugar-mill, don't you? It wasn't that at all, but to run the big music-box yonder. The man had smoothly attached a current, but he said I could just as well pump it with my feet. Then he called in a church organist—to drive the stops. Between them, they got me where I was all run down from that orchestra crowd. They said a child could learn the stops. … You should have heard my friends on the Hatteras—when the orchestrelle was put aboard that afternoon. They never forget that. Then we had a triple ox-cart made down in Coral City, and four span were goaded up the trail—and there she stands.

      "Andrew, they finally left me alone with it and a couple of hundred music-rolls. … It was hours after, that I came forth a sick man to cable for power. … About those music-rolls—I had called for the best. One does that blind, you know. But the best in music matters, it appears, has nothing to do with retired sea-captains. … It's a pretty piece of furniture. The orchestra had died out of me by the time we had the electric-plant going. … I take it you have to be caught young to deal with those stops. … You go after it, Andrew. It scares me and the natives when it begins to pipe up. I had a time getting my household back that first time. Maybe, I didn't touch the right button—or I touched too many. You go after it, my boy—it's all there—appassionato—oboe—'consharto'—vox humana and the whole system—"

      … It is hard for one to realize how little music Bedient had heard in his life. Just a few old songs—always unfinished—but they had haunted the depths of him, and made him think powerfully. Certain strains had loosed within him emotions, ancient as world-dawns to his present understanding, but intimate as yesterday to something deeper than mind. And so he came to ask; "Are not all the landmarks of evolution identified with certain sounds or combinations of sounds? Is there not an answering interpretation in the eternal scroll of man's soul, to all that is true in music?"

      Long ago, one night in Korea, he had been wakened by the yammering of a tigress. His terror for a moment had been primal, literally a simian's helpless quaking. Earlier still, he had heard a hoot-owl, and encountered through it, his first realization of phantom horrors; he knew then there was an Unseen, and nether acoustics; here was a key to ghostly doors. A mourning-dove had brought back in a swift passage of consciousness the breast of some savage mother. Night-birds everywhere meant to him restless mystery. … Is sound a key to psychology? Is the history of our emotions, from monster to man, sometime to be interpreted through music—as yet the infant among the arts?

      The answer had come—why the unfinished songs had the greater magic for him. So diaphanous and ethereal is this marvellously expressive young medium, music, that the composers could only pin a strain here and there to concrete form—as a bit of lace from a lovely garment is caught by a thorn. So they build around it—as flesh around spirit. But it was the strain of pure spirit that sang in Bedient's mind—and knew no set forms. So an artistic imagination can finish a song or a picture, many times better than the original artist could with tones or pigments. Too much finish binds the spirit, and checks СКАЧАТЬ