"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 the feeling of those who follow to see or hear.
These, and many thoughts had come to him from the unpretentious things of music. … Ben Bolt brought back the memory of some prolonged and desperate sorrow. The lineaments of the tragedy were effaced, but its effect lived and preyed upon him under the stress of its own melody. Once he had heard Caller Herrin' grandly sung, and for the time, the circuit was complete between the Andrew Bedient of Now, and another of a bleak land and darker era. In this case the words brought him a clearer picture—gaunt coasts and the thrilling humanity of common fisher folk. … Many times a strain of angelic meaning and sweetness was yoked to a silly effigy of words; but he rejoiced in opposite examples, such as that little lullaby of Tennyson's, Sweet and Low, which J. Barnby seemed to have exactly tono-graphed. … Once across infantry campfires, Juanita came, with a bleeding passion for home—to him who had no home. There was a lyrical Ireland very dear to him—songs and poems which wrung him as if he were an exile; Tom Moore's Sunflower Song incited at first a poignant anguish, as of a sweetheart's dead face; and Lead Kindly Light brought almost the first glimmer of spiritual light across the desolate distances of the world—like a tender smile from a greater being than man. And there were baleful songs that ran red with blood, as the Carmagnole; and roused past the sense of physical pain, like the Marseillaise. What heroic sins have been committed in their spell! By no means was it all uplift which the songs brought. There was one night when he heard Mandalay sung by some British seaman across the dark of a Japanese harbor. They were going out, and he was coming into port. …
These were his sole adventures in music, but they had bound his dreams together. He had felt, if the right person were near, he could have made music tell things, not to be uttered in mere words; and under the magic of certain songs, that which was creative within him, even dim and chaotic, stirred and warmed for utterance. … So fresh a surface did Bedient bring to the Carreras music-room.
The time had come when his nature hungered for great music. The orchestrelle added to the Island something he needed soulfully. Experimenting with the rolls, the stops and the power, he found there was nothing he could not do in time. Music answered—trombone, clarionet, horn, bassoon, hautboy, flute, 'cello answered. Volume and tempo were mere lever matters. On the rolls themselves were suggestions. Reaching this point, his exaltation knew no bounds. He looked upon the great array of rolls—symphonies, sonatas, concertos, fantasies, rhapsodies, overtures, prayers, requiems, meditations, minuets—and something of that rising power of gratitude overcame him, as only once before in his life—when he had realized that the Bible was all words, and they were for him. From the first studious marvellings, Bedient's mind lifted to adoring gratefulness in which he could have kissed the hands of the toilers who had made this instrument answer their dreams. Then, he fell deeply into misgiving. It seemed almost a sacrilege for him to take music so cheaply; that he had not earned such joy. But he could praise them in his heart, and he did with every sound.
The orchestrelle unfolded to a spirit like this. Doubtless his early renderings of random choice were weird, but more and more as he went on, the great living things righted themselves in his consciousness, for he had ear and soul and love for them. Some great fissure in his nature had long needed thus to be filled. He sent for books about the great composers; descriptions of the classics; how the themes were developed through different instruments. Then he wanted the history of all music; and for weeks his receptivity never faltered. No neophyte ever brought a purer devotion to the masters. His first loves—the Andante in F, the three movements of the Kreutzer Sonata, a prayer from Otello, the Twelfth Rhapsody, the Swan Song and the Evening Star, and finally Isolde's Triumph over Death—these were ascendings, indeed—to the point of wings.
The stops so formidable at first became as stars in the dark. … Little loves, little fears and sins and hopes were all he had known before; and now he entered into the torrential temperaments of the masters—magnificent and terrifying souls who dared to sin against God, or die defying man; whose passions stormed the world; whose dirges were wrung from heaven. Why, these men levelled emperors and aspired to angels, violated themselves, went mad with music, played with hell's own dissonances, and dared to transcribe their baptisms, illuminations, temptations, Gethsemanes, even their revilings and stigmata.
The dirges lifted him to immensity from which the abysses of the world spread themselves below. Two marches of Chopin, and the death-march of Siegfried, the haunting suggestion of a soul's preparation for departure in Schubert's Unfinished; the Death of Aase, the Pilgrim's Chorus, one of Mozart's requiems, and that Napoleonic funèbre from the Eroica—these, with others, grouped themselves into an unearthly archipelago—towering cliffs of glorious gloom, white birds silently sweeping the gray solitudes above the breakers. …
It was during the four days while Captain Carreras remained in Coral City with Jaffier, that Bedient entered into the mysterious enchantment of the Andante movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. He had played it all, forgetting almost to breathe, and then returned to the second movement which opens with the 'celli:
[Illustration: Musical notation]
Again and again it unfolded for him, but not its full message. There was a meaning in it for him! He heard it in the night; three voices in it—a man, a woman and a soul. … The lustrous third Presence was an angel—there for the sake of the woman. She was in the depths, but great enough to summon the angel to her tragedy. The man's figure was obscure, disintegrate. … Bedient realized in part at least that this was destined to prove his greatest musical experience. …
Captain Carreras found