The Turmoil (17 page)

“I’ll keep on talking,” Bibbs continued, cheerfully, “and you keep on laughing. I’m amounting to something in the world this afternoon. I’m making a noise, and that makes you make music. Don’t be bothered by my bleating out such things as that. I’m really frightened, and that makes me bleat anything. I’m frightened about two things: I’m afraid of what I’ll think of myself later if I don’t keep talking— talking now, I mean—and I’m afraid of what I’ll think of myself if I do. And besides these two things, I’m frightened, anyhow. I don’t remember talking as much as this more than once or twice in my life. I suppose it was always in me to do it, though, the first time I met any one who didn’t know me well enough not to listen.”

“But you’re not really talking to me,” said Mary. “You’re just thinking aloud.”

“No,” he returned, gravely. “I’m not thinking at all; I’m only making vocal sounds because I believe it’s more mannerly. I seem to be the subject of what little meaning they possess, and I’d like to change it, but I don’t know how. I haven’t any experience in talking, and I don’t know how to manage it.”

“You needn’t change the subject on my account, Mr. Sheridan,” she said. “Not even if you really talked about yourself.” She turned her face toward him as she spoke, and Bibbs caught his breath; he was pathetically amazed by the look she gave him. It was a glowing look, warmly friendly and understanding, and, what almost shocked him, it was an eagerly interested look. Bibbs was not accustomed to anything like that.

“I—you—I—I’m—” he stammered, and the faint color in his cheeks grew almost vivid.

She was still looking at him, and she saw the strange radiance that came into his face. There was something about him, too, that explained how “queer” many people might think him; but he did not seem “queer” to Mary Vertrees; he seemed the most quaintly natural person she had ever met.

He waited, and became coherent. “YOU say something now,” he said. “I don’t even belong in the chorus, and here I am, trying to sing the funny man’s solo! You—”

“No,” she interrupted. “I’d rather play your accompaniment.”

“I’ll stop and listen to it, then.”

“Perhaps—” she began, but after pausing thoughtfully she made a gesture with her muff, indicating a large brick church which they were approaching. “Do you see that church, Mr. Sheridan?”

“I suppose I could,” he answered in simple truthfulness, looking at her. “But I don’t want to. Once, when I was ill, the nurse told me I’d better say anything that was on my mind, and I got the habit. The other reason I don’t want to see the church is that I have a feeling it’s where you’re going, and where I’ll be sent back.”

She shook her head in cheery negation. “Not unless you want to be. Would you like to come with me?”

“Why—why—yes,” he said. “Anywhere!” And again it was apparent that he spoke in simple truthfulness.

“Then come—if you care for organ music. The organist is an old friend of mine, and sometimes he plays for me. He’s a dear old man. He had a degree from Bonn, and was a professor afterward, but he gave up everything for music. That’s he, waiting in the doorway. He looks like Beethoven, doesn’t he? I think he knows that, perhaps and enjoys it a little. I hope so.”

“Yes,” said Bibbs, as they reached the church steps. “I think Beethoven would like it, too. It must be pleasant to look like other people.”

“I haven’t kept you?” Mary said to the organist.

“No, no,” he answered, heartily. “I would not mind so only you should shooer come!”

“This is Mr. Sheridan, Dr. Kraft. He has come to listen with me.”

The organist looked bluntly surprised. “Iss that SO?” he exclaimed. “Well, I am glad if you wish him, and if he can stant my liddle playink. He iss musician himself, then, of course.”

“No,” said Bibbs, as the three entered the church together. “I—I played the—I tried to play—” Fortunately he checked himself; he had been about to offer the information that he had failed to master the jews’-harp in his boyhood. “No, I’m not a musician,” he contented himself with saying.

“What?” Dr. Kraft’s surprise increased. “Young man, you are fortunate! I play for Miss Vertrees; she comes always alone. You are the first. You are the first one EVER!”

They had reached the head of the central aisle, and as the organist finished speaking Bibbs stopped short, turning to look at Mary Vertrees in a dazed way that was not of her preceiving; for, though she stopped as he did, her gaze followed the organist, who was walking away from them toward the front of the church, shaking his white Beethovian mane roguishly.

“It’s false pretenses on my part,” Bibbs said. “You mean to be kind to the sick, but I’m not an invalid any more. I’m so well I’m going back to work in a few days. I’d better leave before he begins to play, hadn’t I?”

“No,” said Mary, beginning to walk forward. “Not unless you don’t like great music.”

He followed her to a seat about halfway up the aisle while Dr. Kraft ascended to the organ. It was an enormous one, the procession of pipes ranging from long, starveling whistles to thundering fat guns; they covered all the rear wall of the church, and the organist’s figure, reaching its high perch, looked like that of some Lilliputian magician ludicrously daring the attempt to conrol a monster certain to overwhelm him.

“This afternoon some Handel!” he turned to shout.

Mary nodded. “Will you like that?” she asked Bibbs.

“I don’t know. I never heard any except ‘Largo.’ I don’t know anything about music. I don’t even know how to pretend I do. If I knew enough to pretend, I would.”

“No,” said Mary, looking at him and smiling faintly, “you wouldn’t.”

She turned away as a great sound began to swim and tremble in the air; the huge empty space of the church filled with it, and the two people listening filled with it; the universe seemed to fill and thrill with it. The two sat intensely still, the great sound all round about them, while the church grew dusky, and only the organist’s lamp made a tiny star of light. His white head moved from side to side beneath it rhythmically, or lunged and recovered with the fierceness of a duelist thrusting, but he was magnificently the master of his giant, and it sang to his magic as he bade it.

Bibbs was swept away upon that mighty singing. Such a thing was wholly unknown to him; there had been no music in his meager life. Unlike the tale, it was the Princess Bedrulbudour who had brought him to the enchanted cave, and that—for Bibbs—was what made its magic dazing. It seemed to him a long, long time since he had been walking home drearily from Dr. Gurney’s office; it seemed to him that he had set out upon a happy journey since then, and that he had reached another planet, where Mary Vertrees and he sat alone together listening to a vast choiring of invisible soldiers and holy angels. There were armies of voices about them singing praise and thanksgiving; and yet they were alone. It was incredible that the walls of the church were not the boundaries of the universe, to remain so for ever; incredible that there was a smoky street just yonder, where housemaids were bringing in evening papers from front steps and where children were taking their last spins on roller-skates before being haled indoors for dinner.

He had a curious sense of communication with his new friend. He knew it could not be so, and yet he felt as if all the time he spoke to her, saying: “You hear this strain? You hear that strain? You know the dream that these sounds bring to me?” And it seemed to him as though she answered continually: “I hear! I hear that strain, and I hear the new one that you are hearing now. I know the dream that these sounds bring to you. Yes, yes, I hear it all! We hear— together!”

And though the church grew so dim that all was mysterious shadow except the vague planes of the windows and the organist’s light, with the white head moving beneath it, Bibbs had no consciousness that the girl sitting beside him had grown shadowy; he seemed to see her as plainly as ever in the darkness, though he did not look at her. And all the mighty chanting of the organ’s multitudinous voices that afternoon seemed to Bibbs to be chorusing of her and interpreting her, singing her thoughts and singing for him the world of humble gratitude that was in his heart because she was so kind to him. It all meant Mary.

But when she asked him what it meant, on their homeward way, he was silent. They had come a few paces from the church without speaking, walking slowly.

“I’ll tell you what it meant to me,” she said, as he did not immediately reply. “Almost any music of Handel’s always means one thing above all others to me: courage! That’s it. It makes cowardice of whining seem so infinitesimal—it makes MOST things in our hustling little lives seem infinitesimal.”

“Yes,” he said. “It seems odd, doesn’t it, that people down-town are hurrying to trains and hanging to straps in trolley-cars, weltering every way to get home and feed and sleep so they can get down-town to-morrow. And yet there isn’t anything down there worth getting to. They’re like servants drudging to keep the house going, and believing the drudgery itself is the great thing. They make so much noise and fuss and dirt they forget that the house was meant to live in. The housework has to be done, but the people who do it have been so overpaid that they’re confused and worship the housework. They’re overpaid, and yet, poor things! they haven’t anything that a chicken can’t have. Of course, when the world gets to paying its wages sensibly that will be different.”

“Do you mean ‘communism’?” she asked, and she made their slow pace a little slower—they had only three blocks to go.

“Whatever the word is, I only mean that things don’t look very sensible now—especially to a man that wants to keep out of ‘em and can’t! ‘Communism’? Well, at least any ‘decent sport’ would say it’s fair for all the strong runners to start from the same mark and give the weak ones a fair distance ahead, so that all can run something like even on the stretch. And wouldn’t it be pleasant, really, if they could all cross the winning-line together? Who really enjoys beating anybody—if he sees the beaten man’s face? The only way we can enjoy getting ahead of other people nowadays is by forgetting what the other people feel. And that,” he added, “is nothing of what the music meant to me. You see, if I keep talking about what it didn’t mean I can keep from telling you what it did mean.”

“Didn’t it mean courage to you, too—a little?” she asked. “Triumph and praise were in it, and somehow those things mean courage to me.”

“Yes, they were all there,” Bibbs said. “I don’t know the name of what he played, but I shouldn’t think it would matter much. The man that makes the music must leave it to you what it can mean to you, and the name he puts to it can’t make much difference—except to himself and people very much like him, I suppose.”

“I suppose that’s true, though I’d never thought of it like that.”

“I imagine music must make feelings and paint pictures in the minds of the people who hear it,” Bibbs went on, musingly, “according to their own natures as much as according to the music itself. The musician might compose something and play it, wanting you to think of the Holy Grail, and some people who heard it would think of a prayer-meeting, and some would think of how good they were themselves, and a boy might think of himself at the head of a solemn procession, carrying a banner and riding a white horse. And then, if there were some jubilant passages in the music, he’d think of a circus.”

They had reached her gate, and she set her hand upon it, but did not open it. Bibbs felt that this was almost the kindest of her kindnesses—not to be prompt in leaving him.

“After all,” she said, “you didn’t tell me whether you liked it.”

“No. I didn’t need to.”

“No, that’s true, and I didn’t need to ask. I knew. But you said you were trying to keep from telling me what it did mean.”

“I can’t keep from telling it any longer,” he said. “The music meant to me—it meant the kindness of—of you.”

“Kindness? How?”

“You thought I was a sort of lonely tramp—and sick—”

“No,” she said, decidedly. “I thought perhaps you’d like to hear Dr. Kraft play. And you did.”

“It’s curious; sometimes it seemed to me that it was you who were playing.”

Mary laughed. “I? I strum! Piano. A little Chopin—Grieg— Chaminade. You wouldn’t listen!”

Bibbs drew a deep breath. “I’m frightened again,” he said, in an unsteady voice. “I’m afraid you’ll think I’m pushing, but—” He paused, and the words sank to a murmur.

“Oh, if you want ME to play for you!” she said. “Yes, gladly. It will be merely absurd after what you heard this afternoon. I play like a hundred thousand other girls, and I like it. I’m glad when any one’s willing to listen, and if you—” She stopped, checked by a sudden recollection, and laughed ruefully. “But my piano won’t be here after to-night. I—I’m sending it away to-morrow. I’m afraid that if you’d like me to play to you you’d have to come this evening.”

“You’ll let me?” he cried.

“Certainly, if you care to.”

“If I could play—” he said, wistfully, “if I could play like that old man in the church I could thank you.”

“Ah, but you haven’t heard me play. I KNOW you liked this afternoon, but—”

“Yes,” said Bibbs. “It was the greatest happiness I’ve ever known.”

It was too dark to see his face, but his voice held such plain honesty, and he spoke with such complete unconsciousness of saying anything especially significant, that she knew it was the truth. For a moment she was nonplussed, then she opened the gate and went in. “You’ll come after dinner, then?”

“Yes,” he said, not moving. “Would you mind if I stood here until time to come in?”

She had reached the steps, and at that she turned, offering him the response of laughter and a gay gesture of her muff toward the lighted windows of the New House, as though bidding him to run home to his dinner.

That night, Bibbs sat writing in his note-book.

Music can come into a blank life, and fill it. Everything that is beautiful is music, if you can listen.

There is no gracefulness like that of a graceful woman at a grand piano. There is a swimming loveliness of line that seems to merge with the running of the sound, and you seem, as you watch her, to see what you are hearing and to hear what you are seeing.