Everybody's Magazine/The Violinist

by George A. Birmingham

The
VIOLINIST

by

GEORGE A. BIRMINGHAM

AUTHOR OF “SPANISH COLD," “GENERAL JOHN REGAN,” ETC.

IT WAS my sister who arranged that I should escort Mrs. Curtis and her daughter to Venice. I did not want to go there, and I had the strongest possible objection to going there with two American ladies whom I did not know; but when Edith settled the matter I gave in. Edith had always managed me. If she had proposed the whole plan at once, I might have resisted her; but she took me, so to speak, by easy stages, letting me in for the expedition first, and then, when I was committed to that, springing the Americans on me.

Young Reinhardt, of Reinhardt and Golding, publishers, met me in the club one day and asked me to write the letter-press of one of his new series of illustrated guide books. He offered me a hundred pounds and explained exactly what he wanted.

“Not a revised Baedeker,” he said, “but a volume of chatty essays.” Venice, it appeared, was the place I was to chat about. “You know the sort of thing I mean,” he went on. “‘Evening Hours in St. Mark’s,’ ‘Morning Strolls Among the Gondolas’.”

“You can’t stroll among the gondolas,” I said. “But I think I understand.”

My idea was to write the book comfortably in London. There was not the slightest necessity for me to go to Venice. I had been there twice, and could buy a guide-book of the orthodox kind so as to get my facts right. It was Edith who put a stop to that plan. She said it would not be honest to write the book without making a special expedition to the place. It surprised me to hear her say this, for Edith is not usually strong on the ethics of authorship. She regards the writing of books as a trade, not an art.

“No great book,” she said, “can be written without serious effort. What you must do is to steep yourself in the atmosphere of the place, wander day after day through the palaces of the old nobility, brood over the traces of the glorious past, and that sort of thing.”

“Very well,” I said. “If you think I ought to, I will, but you can’t make a guide-book literature, no matter what you soak yourself in. And there won’t be much of Reinhardt’s hundred left when I’ve done.”

“The Curtises,” said Edith casually about an hour later, “are going to Venice next week.”

“I start to-morrow,” I said. “Otherwise I should, of course, have liked to travel with them.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Edith. “Next week will suit you quite as well, and Mrs. Curtis told me that she always liked to have a man to travel with. Besides, Bessie is an extremely nice girl.”

“I haven’t met her,” I said, “but I remember your telling me that she’d make an excellent wife for a literary man.”

“So she would. She has a very nice little fortune. The father wasn’t vulgarly rich, but he was comfortable. Mrs. Curtis is doing Europe to complete Bessie’s education. Pictures and statues, you know, and architecture and old furniture—just what a literary man wants in a wife.”

“I’m not really literary,” I said. “After all, guide-books don't appeal to the cultured minority.”

I do not know what other literary men want in their wives, but I am quite clear that I do not want a veneer of Italian art glued over a solid structure of American dollars. The Curtises are Edith’s latest friends. She had only known them about a week when she discovered that Bessie was just the wife for me. This, and all Edith told me about her, prejudiced me against the girl. I successfully avoided meeting the Curtises by refusing all Edith’s invitations for two months; but of course I had to meet them in the end. I did, on the way to Venice.

I did not see anything of them between London and Dover. I put them into one compartment and traveled in another myself on the plea of wanting to smoke. I had no chance of talking to them on the steamer. I was frankly seasick. Mrs. Curtis was what she called “uncomfortable.” Bessie lunched on board and afterward appreciated the beauty of the sea rather unsympathetically.

It was in the train between Calais and Paris that I began to know Mrs. Curtis. My acquaintance with Bessie ripened later. Mrs. Curtis, I discovered, is one of those people who can not travel in a railway carriage unless the window is open. She is also the kind of person who always secures a corner seat with her back to the engine. Open windows do no harm to any one in that position. I had to sit with my face to the engine, and I had a stiff neck before we had ridden an hour. Also my hands, face, and collar were black with smut. Bessie sat beside her mother and slept profoundly.

We dined in Paris and afterward got our berths in the sleeping-car. I was earning a hundred pounds by my excursion, so I felt entitled to such comfort as a wagon-lits affords. Bessie’s berth was paid for, I suppose, out of her “nice little fortune.” But the charges of the International Sleeping Car Company are high, and Bessie’s fortune will not last long if she squanders it in this fashion, unless indeed it is much larger than Edith seems to think. With Mrs. Curtis’s financial position I was not concerned. There was no question of my marrying her. But I hoped that the berths in her compartment would be behind the window. If they were, and if, as I expected, she occupied the lower one, she would have as much smut as she wanted all over her body before morning, and perhaps a bad cold.

At five o’clock in the morning the sleeping-car attendant wakened me to give me some coffee—the kind of coffee which is sold at unhallowed hours on the platforms of French railway stations. It comes to the consumer in large white bowls, and has quantities of sugar in it. I took my bowl gratefully, and heard the attendant knocking at the door of the next compartment, that in which the Curtises were. They too took the coffee, thankfully at first, but a minute later there was a row. Mrs. Curtis opened her door.

“Man, man,” she called.

Then, remembering that she was in France, she called “Garçon, garçon!” This apparently attracted the attention of the attendant, for she went on:

“Jamais, jamais, I never take sugar in my café. Jamais, do you hear?”

It is the boast of the International Sleeping Car Company that its attendants speak all ordinary languages, But Mrs. Curtis tried our man too high. By way of making things easier for him she pronounced her English with an elaborate French accent, saying “nevair” and “soogaar.” This puzzled the man, and Bessie came to her mother’s rescue. I could hear her plainly because she spoke distinctly and very clearly.

“Madame ma mère,” she said, “ne prend dans son—no, sa, no, son—anyhow, dans café.”

I had gathered that Bessie’s education was complete except for the finishing touches to be supplied by Italian art; but it seemed to me that she might with advantage spend a year or two more at French. I felt it my duty to interfere. I am not a good linguist; but I felt tolerably confident that the man would understand English if I spoke it in a natural way. I opened my door and put out my head. The attendant was standing in the corridor in his neat brown uniform. Bessie, in a pale-blue dressing-gown, with her hair in a long pig-tail, was also in the corridor, pushing a bowl of coffee into the man’s hands.

“Cafe sans aucun sucre,” she said. “Sans aucun du tout.”

My impulse was to withdraw, but Bessie saw me and appealed to me for help in her struggle with the dense stupidity of a man who could not understand either English or French. I did not venture to go out, because I had no dressing-gown, only a suit of pajamas; but I told the man that Mrs. Curtis wanted coffee without sugar. He explained quite intelligibly in English that coffee without sugar was unobtainable at that station.

“What nonsense!” she said. “Of course it can be got!”

She walked down the corridor and disappeared through the door at the end of it. I could not see what happened after that, and I do not know whether Bessie actually descended to the platform or contented herself with addressing the coffee vendor from the steps of the sleeping-car; but the train was ten minutes late leaving that station, and just as it began to move Bessie came along the corridor again with a fresh bowl of coffee. She told me as she passed that there was very little, if any, sugar in it.

I began to think that Edith was right in saying that Bessie would make a good wife for a literary man. Young Reinhardt would not have got his Chatty Strolls among Gondolas for a hundred pounds from her husband. He would have had to pay two hundred at least. A girl who would face the crowd on a French railway platform in a blue dressing-gown and drag sugarless coffee from unwilling men to whom she could not speak, all for the sake of an unattractive mother, would defeat any publisher living if she were fighting the battles of a husband whom she really loved.

We had no further adventures until after we left Milan. A restaurant car was hooked on to our train at that city, and I conducted my two ladies into it at about twelve o’clock. Mrs. Curtis at once asked me to open the window. Now the engineer of the International Company which owns the restaurant cars has succeeded in inventing a window which is more difficult than any other in the world to open. I struggled with it in vain, succeeding only in getting my hands disgustingly dirty. When I gave up, bruised and dispirited, Bessie opened it.

A few minutes afterward the waiter came upon us and shut it with a bang. A German who sat at the next table had sent the waiter to do this. I saw him giving his order to the man. So did Mrs. Curtis. She made some very scathing remarks about Germans, in a loud tone, and I could see Bessie’s eyes flashing. I privately sympathized with the German, because my table napkin had been blown away during the short time the window was open.

I explained to Mrs. Curtis that the Italian law forbade the opening of railway carriage windows, and that the penalty attached to the offense is very severe. This may be true. I do not know whether it is or not. It was certainly necessary to say something of the kind. Bessie fully intended to open the window again, and if I had not stopped her there would have been a row with the German.

When lunch was over the German lit a cigar, Bessie’s eyes flashed again. She had no objection whatever to the smell of tobacco, indeed she smokes herself; but she had caught sight of a notice printed over the door of the car, “É Vietato Fumare.” “Fumare” obviously meant “to smoke”; “é” was a very small word not likely to matter one way or the other. Bessie took out a pocket dictionary and looked out “vietato.” She found, as I expected she would, that it meant “forbidden.”

Now any one who is accustomed to the restaurant cars in Italy knows that this only as an ornament. Every one smokes as much and as often as desirable. But Bessie saw her opportunity. She beckoned to the waiter, directed his attention first to the notice and then to the German’s cigar. She demanded in unmistakable pantomime that the German should at once be compelled to quench his cigar in his coffee. The waiter delivered the message.

The German, his cigar in his mouth, turned round and stared in astonishment at Bessie. He had, I must say, an offensive kind of face; and he deliberately puffed at his cigar in a way that I can only call insulting. Bessie did not hesitate for a second. She opened the window to its fullest extent. The train was going at a was going at a high speed and the inrush of air felt like a gale. I clung to our table-cloth and tried to rescue my wine-glass, which was blown away. When I looked round the German was in full flight from the car, pursued by the waiter with the bill for his lunch.

Edith was certainly right about Bessie. German tourists are not the only enemies of the human race. I know editors who return manuscripts much better and in every way more suitable for publication than those which they print. A literary man with a wife like Bessie would, I think, have his revenge every time. The ingenuity of Bessie’s plan and the prompt vigor with which she had carried it out filled me with admiration.

The Curtises stayed in my hotel in Venice; so, oddly enough, did the German whom Bessie had defeated in the train. We saw him at dinner on the evening our arrival, and Bessie nodded to him in the friendliest way. She bore him no malice at all on account of the way she had treated him; which convinced me that she was a young woman of magnanimous spirit. It is very hard to feel kindly toward any one whom you have misused,

Next morning Mrs. Curtis invited me join her and Bessie in making a tour of the city. She proposed, she said, to do St. Mark’s and the Doge’s Palace before lunch. I declined, for several reasons. Edith had said I was to soak myself in the Venetian spirit. I should not succeed in more than damping my skin if I did St. Mark’s and the Doge’s Palace in three hours; and I did not want to go to prison for acquiescing in the methods which Bessie would adopt to get windows open for her mother. She might be reduced to breaking them, and it really is a criminal offense to break stained glass in a cathedral. These were my real reasons for refusing Mrs. Curtis’s invitation.

What I told her was that I must begin writing my book at once because young Reinhardt was clamoring for it. In order to convince her that this was true I went up to my bedroom and brought down a quantity of paper and two pens. Then I settled myself at a writing-table in a corner of what our landlord calls the winter garden of our hotel. Mrs. Curtis and Bessie went off in a gondola. I saw them sail away and heard Bessie urging on the gondolier in good Italian.

“Allegro,” she said. “Con molto spirito! Vivace! Fortissimo!”

Her music, I thought, must be better than her French.

I went peaceably to sleep. Women are different; but a man requires some sleep after traveling straight through from London to Venice. Besides, I had promised Edith that I would soak myself in the atmosphere of the place. I was wakened at eleven o’clock by the sound of the piano. There was a grand piano in the corner of the winter garden, and our German enemy was playing at it, hard.

It is possible, as I have often proved at concerts, to sleep through almost any kind of music. I did a little musical criticism at one time and had some experience even of orchestras. If only the music retains its character it is no real bar to sleep. Soft music is, of course, actually soothing. Dances and marches weave themselves into agreeable dreams. Even the works of the most passionate modern composers do not disturb me so long as they are fairly consistent.

But this German played music of the most variable kind. I should not have complained if it had varied merely by being sometimes loud and sometimes soft. That one expects. But he wandered from Brahms to Wagner; gave me scraps of Chopin and little bits of Mozart. Occasionally he emitted a few phrases of what promised to be a tune, and then, just as I was getting hold of it, he shattered it with a series of violent chords. Sleep became totally impossible.

I composed, with great care, a very polite German sentence in which I asked him to put off his performance until the afternoon, because I was writing a book. I went over to the piano and recited it to him. I began, I remember, “Verehrlich Herr Professor,” which ought to have softened any one’s heart. It means, or was supposed to mean, “Most honorable Mr. Professor,” and all Germans look up to professors.

He looked at me malevolently. “I should,” he said, “much more easily and with less mental effort understand, if you in your own tongue speak. I have the English language fluently and idiomatically acquired.”

I felt less inclined to be polite after that, but I kept my temper. “If you really know English,” I said—“and of course I take your word for it—I shall try to make it plain to you that I am writing a book, a very important book, on Venetian Art, and I find it difficult to concentrate my thoughts on Paul Veronese while you are performing selections from the works of eminent musicians. I should be very much obliged to you, very much indeed, if you’d——”

“In playing the piano,” he said, “in a public room of the hotel, I am my legitimate right well within.”

“I know that,” I said. “I’m not disputing your legal right to play. I know I can’t force you to stop. I was appealing to your sense of courtesy. As a professor you must be able to appreciate the feelings of a literary man, and ordinary courtesy will suggest to you——”

“Courtesy,” he said. “What is that?”

I saw that there was no use arguing with him any more. I went back to my corner. I felt that since I could not possibly sleep I might as well write a few pages of the guide-book for Reinhardt. I thought of beginning with a chapter on tourists of other nationalities. Before I had written a word Bessie Curtis came in. She smiled at the German, who was working through the first movement of the Waldstein Sonata, and then came over to me.

“Mother,” she shouted, “has been obliged to go to her room and lie down.” She had to shout on account of the Waldstein.

“Headache, I suppose?” I yelled.

Bessie nodded. The German turned his attention suddenly to a nocturne of Chopin’s. I was able to speak in an ordinary voice.

“Brought on, I suppose, by the airless condition of the Doge’s Palace.”

“Not a window in the whole place that I could get open. Wouldn’t it be rather nice now, as she has broken down, if you were to take me in a gondola to see them making glass, or else somewhere to eat ices? I suppose you’ve finished your book by this time?”

“I haven’t written a word,” I said. “How could I with that German of yours playing the piano?”

“Shall I stop him?”

“Do,” I said, “if you can.”

I had begun to hate that German bitterly, and I had the greatest confidence in Bessie. I was also curious to see what would happen when he told her that he was well within his rights in playing the hotel piano in a public room. I felt sure he would tell her that, and he did.

She spoke to him quite politely, though she did not call him a Highly Honored Professor. He answered her exactly as he had answered me. Bessie made no appeal to his courtesy. She turned and left the room. The German smiled and began one of Bach’s fugues.

I confess that I felt disappointed. I had expected Bessie to put up some kind of a fight. She had done so much for her mother that I thought she would have faced one small difficulty for me. I sighed. The German played on triumphantly.

Then Bessie returned carrying a violin in her hand. She told me afterward she had borrowed it from the head waiter, using the hall porter as an interpreter, for the head waiter’s English, though ample for all purposes of his proper business, did not run to the names of musical instruments. Bessie sat down behind the German and screwed up her strings. He was so absorbed in the intricacies of the second fugue that he did not notice her. She drew the bow downward across the strings with a sharp jerk, and then, equally sharply, pushed it up again. She succeeded in getting sound out of all four strings.

The German lifted his hands from the piano, turned round, and looked at her with a face of horror. Bessie smiled pleasantly and began to work the bow up and down each string in turn with a series of short but vigorous strokes. I am not very musical, but I felt inclined to shriek. The noise Bessie made was absolutely diabolical. The German, I think, was musical. He stuffed his fingers into both his ears.

“Fräulein,” he said, “gnädiges Fräulein, in the name of the Almighty, stop!”

Bessie fiddled on relentlessly. The German relapsed into his own tongue, and my impression is that he swore abominably. Bessie was gaining a mastery over her instrument every minute, and making noises that I should not before have believed to be possible. The German—he must have been very musical indeed—fell on his knees beside her and reached up supplicating hands.

“Fräulein,” he said, “you are unspeakably terrible discord making. To me it is no longer without frenzy and madness to be borne.”

Bessie stopped. “I am,” she said, “well within my rights in playing the fiddle in a public room in the hotel.”

The German got up from his knees and stumbled out of the room. I never saw him again, so I think he must have left the hotel.

“Now,” said Bessie, “go on with your book. Do you think you can finish it before lunch?”

“I’m inclined to leave this book for the present,” I said. “Let’s go in a gondola, and get ices. I know a shop in the Piazza where they have them really good.”

I am now convinced that Edith was quite right. The literary man who is lucky enough to get Bessie for a wife has fame and fortune within easy grasp. Difficulties simply disappear before her.