Part 2

This piano solo was the nearest approach to chamber music that a thorough search and research revealed in the island of Trinacria. But afterwards, recollecting the misadventure in tranquility, we concluded that it was as absurd to look for chamber music in Sicily as to look for 'Die Wacht am Rhein' among the idylls of Theocritus.

V

SCENE: a city composed of one department store and three houses, on the forbidding shores of Newfoundland.

TIME: one of those times when a fellow needs a friend,--when he's in a stern, strange land on pleasure bent--and has to have a check cashed. I don't know why it is that one always runs out of ready money in Newfoundland. Perhaps because salmon flies are such fleeting creatures of a day that you must send many postal orders to St. Johns for more. Perhaps because the customs officials at Port au Basques make you deposit so much duty on your fishing tackle. At any rate, there I was penniless, with the burly storekeeper scowling in a savage manner at my check and not knowing at all whether to take a chance on it. Finally he thought he wouldn't, but conceded that I might spend a night under his roof, as there was really nowhere else to go.

At this pass something made me think of music. Perhaps it was the parlor piano which, when new, back in the stone age, had probably been in tune. I inquired whether there were any other instruments. The wreckage of a violin was produced. With two pieces of string and a table fork I set up the prostrate sound-post. I glued together the bridge and put it in position. The technique of the angler proved helpful in splicing together some strange-looking strings. The A was eked out with a piece of salmon leader, while an old mandolin yielded a wire E.

When all was at last ready, a fresh difficulty occurred to me. The violin was an instrument which I had never learned to play! But necessity is the mother of pretension. I thought of that check. And placing the small fiddle carefully between my knees, I pretended that it was a 'cello.

So the daughter of the house seated herself at the relic of the stone age, and we had a concert. Newfoundland appeared not to be over-finicky in the matter of pitch and tone-quality. And how it did enjoy music! As the audience was of Scotch-English-Irish descent, we rendered equal parts of 'Comin' Through the Rye,' 'God Save the King,' and 'Kathleen Mavourneen.' Then the proprietor requested the Sextette from _Lucia_. While it was forthcoming he toyed furtively with his bandana. When it ceased he encored it with all his might. Then he slipped out storewards and presently returned with the fattest, blackest, most formidable-looking cigar I ever saw, which he gravely proffered me.

'We like' he remarked in his quaint idiom, 'to hear music at scattered times.' He was trying to affect indifference. But his gruff voice shook, and I knew then that music hath charms to cash the savage check.

VI

This essay has rambled on an unconscionable while. The shades of editorial night are already descending; and still I have not yet described one of those unexpected and perfect orgies of chamber music,--one of those little earthly paradises full of

Soul-satisfying strains--alas! too few,--

which true fiddlers errant hope to find in each new place they visit, but which usually keep well in advance of them, like the foot of the rainbow.

One such adventure came to me not long ago in a California city, while I was gathering material for a book of travel. On my first evening there I was taken to dine with a well-known writer in his beautiful home, which he had built with his own two hands in the Spanish mission style during fourteen years of joyous labor. This gentleman had no idea that I was to be thrust upon him. But his hospitality went so far as to insist, before the evening was over, that I must stay a week. He would not take no for an answer. And for my part I had no desire to say no, because he was a delightful person, his home with its leaf-filled patio was most alluring, and I had discovered promising possibilities for fiddlers errant in the splendid music-room and the collection of phonograph records of Indian music which mine host had himself made in Arizona and New Mexico. Then too there were rumors of skillful musical vagabonds in the vicinity.

Such an environment fairly cried aloud for impromptu fiddling. So, armed with a note to the best violinist in that part of California, I set forth next morning on the trail of the ideal orgy. At the address given I was told that my man had moved and his address was not known. That was a setback, indeed! But determined fiddlers errant usually land on their feet. On the way back I chanced to hear some masterly strains of Bach-on-the-violin issuing from a brown bungalow. And ringing at a venture I was confronted by the very man I sought.

Blocking the doorway, he read the note, looking as bored as professionals usually do when asked to play with amateurs. But just as he began to tell me how busy he was and how impossible, and so forth, he happened to glance again at the envelope, and a very slight gleam came into his eye.

'You're not by any chance the fellow who wrote that thing about fiddlers in the _Atlantic_, are you?' he inquired. At my nod he very flatteringly unblocked the doorway and dragged me inside, pumping my hand up and down in a painful manner, shouting for his wife, and making various kind representations, all at the same time. And his talk gradually simmered down into an argument that of course the only thing to do was to fiddle together that very night.

I asked who had the best 'cello in town. He told me the man's name, but looked dubious. 'The trouble is, he loves that big Amati as if it were twins. I doubt if he could bring himself to lend it to any one. Anyway, let's try.'

He scribbled a card to his 'cellist friend and promised, if I were successful, to bring along a good pianist and play trios in the evening. So I set forth on the trail of the Amati. Its owner had just finished his noonday stint in a hotel orchestra and looked somewhat tired and cross. He glanced at the card and then assumed a most conservative expression and tried to fob off on me a cheap 'cello belonging to one of his pupils, which sounded very much as a three-cent cigar tastes. At this point I gave him the secret thumb-position grip and whispered into his ear one of those magic pass words of the craft which in a trice convinced him that I was in a position to dandle a 'cello with as tender solicitude as any man alive. On my promising, moreover, to taxicab it both ways with the sacred burden, he passed the Amati over, and the orgy of fiddlers errant was assured.

And that night how those beautiful Spanish walls did resound to Beethoven and Dvorák and Brahms, most originally interspersed with the voice of the Mexican servant's guitar, with strange, lovely songs of the aboriginal West and South,--and with the bottled sunshine of Californian hill-slopes; while El Alcalde Maiore, the lone gnarled tree-giant that filled the patio, looked in through the open windows and contributed, by way of accompaniment, leafy arpeggios _sotto voce_. And sometimes, during rests, I remembered to be thankful that I had once snapped my fingers at the howling wolf, and at fat pot-boilers, while I scribbled for the _Atlantic_ that little essay on fiddlers which had gained me this priceless evening.

Turtle Eggs for Agassiz

By Dallas Lore Sharp

It is one of the wonders of the world that so few books are written. With every human being a possible book, and with many a human being capable of becoming more books than the world could contain, is it not amazing that the books of men are so few? and so stupid!

I took down, recently, from the shelves of a great public library, the four volumes of Agassiz's _Contributions to the Natural History of the United States_. I doubt if anybody but the charwoman, with her duster, had touched those volumes for twenty-five years. They are an excessively learned, a monumental, an epoch-making work, the fruit of vast and heroic labors, with colored plates on stone, showing the turtles of the United States, and their embryology. The work was published more than half a century ago (by subscription); but it looked old beyond its years--massive, heavy, weathered, as if dug from the rocks. It was difficult to feel that Agassiz could have written it--could have built it, grown it, for the laminated pile had required for its growth, the patience and painstaking care of a process of nature, as if it were a kind of printed coral reef. Agassiz do this? The big, human, magnetic man at work upon these pages of capital letters, Roman figures, brackets, and parentheses in explanation of the pages of diagrams and plates! I turned away with a sigh from the weary learning, to read the preface.

When a great man writes a great book he usually flings a preface after it, and thereby saves it, sometimes, from oblivion. Whether so or not, the best things in most books are their prefaces. It was not, however, the quality of the preface to these great volumes that interested me, but rather the wicked waste of durable book-material that went to its making. Reading down through the catalogue of human names and of thanks for help received, I came to a sentence beginning:--

'In New England I have myself collected largely; but I have also received valuable contributions from the late Rev. Zadoc Thompson of Burlington; ... from Mr. D. Henry Thoreau of Concord; ... and from Mr. J. W. P. Jenks of Middleboro'.' And then it hastens on with the thanks in order to get to the turtles, as if turtles were the one and only thing of real importance in all the world.

Turtles no doubt are important, extremely important, embryologically, as part of our genealogical tree; but they are away down among the roots of the tree as compared with the late Rev. Zadoc Thompson of Burlington. I happen to know nothing about the Rev. Zadoc, but to me he looks very interesting. Indeed any reverend gentleman of his name and day who would catch turtles for Agassiz must have been interesting. And as for Henry Thoreau, we know he was interesting. The rarest wood-turtle in the United States was not so rare a specimen as this gentleman of Walden Woods and Concord. We are glad even for this line in the preface about him; glad to know that he tried, in this untranscendental way, to serve his day and generation. If Agassiz had only put a chapter in his turtle book about it! But this is the material he wasted, this and more of the same human sort, for the Mr. Jenks of Middleboro' (at the end of the quotation) was, years later, an old college professor of mine, who told me some of the particulars of his turtle contributions, particulars which Agassiz should have found a place for in his big book. The preface says merely that this gentleman sent turtles to Cambridge by the thousands--brief and scanty recognition. For that is not the only thing this gentleman did. On one occasion he sent, not turtles, but turtle _eggs_ to Cambridge--_brought_ them, I should say; and all there is to show for it, so far as I could discover, is a sectional drawing of a bit of the mesoblastic layer of one of the eggs!

Of course, Agassiz wanted to make that mesoblastic drawing, or some other equally important drawing, and had to have the fresh turtle egg to draw it from. He had to have it, and he got it. A great man, when he wants a certain turtle egg, at a certain time, always gets it, for he gets someone else to get it. I am glad he got it. But what makes me sad and impatient is that he did not think it worth while to tell about the getting of it, and so made merely a learned turtle book of what might have been an exceedingly interesting human book.

It would seem, naturally, that there could be nothing unusual or interesting about the getting of turtle eggs when you want them. Nothing at all, if you should chance to want the eggs as you chance to find them. So with anything else,--good copper stock, for instance, if you should chance to want it, and should chance to be along when they chance to be giving it away. But if you want copper stock, say of C & H quality, _when_ you want it, and are bound to have it, then you must command more than a college professor's salary. And likewise, precisely, when it is turtle eggs that you are bound to have.

Agassiz wanted those turtle eggs when he wanted them--not a minute over three hours from the minute they were laid. Yet even that does not seem exacting, hardly more difficult than the getting of hen eggs only three hours old. Just so, provided the professor could have had his private turtle-coop in Harvard Yard; and provided he could have made his turtles lay. But turtles will not respond, like hens, to meat-scraps and the warm mash. The professor's problem was not to get from a mud turtle's nest in the back yard to the table in the laboratory; but to get from the laboratory in Cambridge to some pond when the turtles were laying, and back to the laboratory within the limited time. And this, in the days of Darius Green, might have called for nice and discriminating work--as it did.

Agassiz had been engaged for a long time upon his _Contributions_. He had brought the great work nearly to a finish. It was, indeed, finished but for one small yet very important bit of observation: he had carried the turtle egg through every stage of its development with the single exception of one--the very earliest--that stage of first cleavages, when the cell begins to segment, immediately upon its being laid. That beginning stage had brought the _Contributions_ to a halt. To get eggs that were fresh enough to show the incubation at this period had been impossible.

There were several ways that Agassiz might have proceeded: he might have got a leave of absence for the spring term, taken his laboratory to some pond inhabited by turtles, and there camped until he should catch the reptile digging out her nest. But there were difficulties in all of that--as those who are college professors and naturalists know. As this was quite out of the question, he did the easiest thing--asked Mr. Jenks of Middleboro' to get him the eggs. Mr. Jenks got them. Agassiz knew all about his getting of them; and I say the strange and irritating thing is, that Agassiz did not think it worth while to tell us about it, at least in the preface to his monumental work.

It was many years later that Mr. Jenks, then a gray-haired college professor, told me how he got those eggs to Agassiz.

'I was principal of an academy, during my younger years,' he began, 'and was busy one day with my classes, when a large man suddenly filled the door-way of the room, smiled to the four corners of the room, and called out with a big, quick voice that he was Professor Agassiz.

'Of course he was. I knew it, even before he had had time to shout it to me across the room.

'Would I get him some turtle eggs? he called. Yes, I would. And would I get them to Cambridge within three hours from the time they were laid? Yes, I would. And I did. And it was worth the doing. But I did it only once.

'When I promised Agassiz those eggs I knew where I was going to get them. I had got turtle eggs there before--at a particular patch of sandy shore along a pond, a few miles distant from the academy.

'Three hours was the limit. From the railroad station to Boston was thirty-five miles; from the pond to the station was perhaps three or four miles; from Boston to Cambridge we called about three miles. Forty miles in round numbers! We figured it all out before he returned, and got the trip down to two hours,--record time:--driving from the pond to the station; from the station by express train to Boston; from Boston by cab to Cambridge. This left an easy hour for accidents and delays.

'Cab and car and carriage we reckoned into our time-table; but what we didn't figure on was the turtle.' And he paused abruptly.

'Young man,' he went on, his shaggy brows and spectacles hardly hiding the twinkle in the eyes that were bent severely upon me, 'young man, when _you_ go after turtle eggs, take into account the turtle. No! no! that's bad advice. Youth never reckons on the turtle--and youth seldom ought to. Only old age does that; and old age would never have got those turtle eggs to Agassiz.

'It was in the early spring that Agassiz came to the academy, long before there was any likelihood of the turtles laying. But I was eager for the quest, and so fearful of failure, that I started out to watch at the pond, fully two weeks ahead of the time that the turtles might be expected to lay. I remember the date clearly: it was May 14.

'A little before dawn--along near three o'clock--I would drive over to the pond, hitch my horse near by, settle myself quietly among some thick cedars close to the sandy shore, and there I would wait, my kettle of sand ready, my eye covering the whole sleeping pond. Here among the cedars I would eat my breakfast, and then get back in good season to open the academy for the morning session.

'And so the watch began.

'I soon came to know individually the dozen or more turtles that kept to my side of the pond. Shortly after the cold mist would lift and melt away, they would stick up their heads through the quiet water; and as the sun slanted down over the ragged rim of tree-tops, the slow things would float into the warm, lighted spots, or crawl out and doze comfortably on the hummocks and snags.

'What fragrant mornings those were! How fresh and new and unbreathed! The pond odors, the woods odors, the odors of the ploughed fields--of water-lily, and wild grape, and the dew-laid soil! I can taste them yet, and hear them yet--the still, large sounds of the waking day--the pickerel breaking the quiet with his swirl; the kingfisher dropping anchor; the stir of feet and wings among the trees. And then the thought of the great book being held up for me! Those were rare mornings!

'But there began to be a good many of them, for the turtles showed no desire to lay. They sprawled in the sun, and never one came out upon the sand as if she intended to help on the great professor's book. The embryology of her eggs was of small concern to her; her contribution to the Natural History of the United States could wait.

'And it did wait. I began my watch on the 14th of May; June first found me still among the cedars, still waiting, as I had waited every morning, Sundays and rainy days alike. June first was a perfect morning, but every turtle slid out upon her log, as if egg-laying might be a matter strictly of next year.

'I began to grow uneasy,--not impatient yet, for a naturalist learns his lesson of patience early, and for all his years; but I began to fear lest, by some subtile sense, my presence might somehow be known to the creatures; that they might have gone to some other place to lay, while I was away at the school-room.

'I watched on to the end of the first week, on to the end of the second week in June, seeing the mists rise and vanish every morning, and along with them vanish, more and more, the poetry of my early morning vigil. Poetry and rheumatism cannot long dwell together in the same clump of cedars, and I had begun to feel the rheumatism. A month of morning mists wrapping me around had at last soaked through to my bones. But Agassiz was waiting, and the world was waiting, for those turtle eggs; and I would wait. It was all I could do, for there is no use bringing a china nest-egg to a turtle; she is not open to any such delicate suggestion.

'Then came a mid-June Sunday morning, with dawn breaking a little after three: a warm, wide-awake dawn, with the level mist lifted from the level surface of the pond a full hour higher than I had seen it any morning before.

'This was the day: I knew it. I have heard persons say that they can hear the grass grow; that they know by some extra sense when danger is nigh. That we have these extra senses I fully believe, and I believe they can be sharpened by cultivation. For a month I had been watching, brooding over this pond, and now I knew. I felt a stirring of the pulse of things that the cold-hearted turtles could no more escape than could the clods and I.

'Leaving my horse unhitched, as if he, too, understood, I slipped eagerly into my covert for a look at the pond. As I did so, a large pickerel ploughed a furrow out through the spatter-docks, and in his wake rose the head of an enormous turtle. Swinging slowly around, the creature headed straight for the shore, and without a pause, scrambled out on the sand.

'She was about the size of a big scoop-shovel; but that was not what excited me, so much as her manner, and the gait at which she moved; for there was method in it and fixed purpose. On she came, shuffling over the sand toward the higher open fields, with a hurried, determined see-saw that was taking her somewhere in particular, and that was bound to get her there on time.

'I held my breath. Had she been a dinosaurian making Mesozoic footprints, I could not have been more fearful. For footprints in the Mesozoic mud, or in the sands of time, were as nothing to me when compared with fresh turtle eggs in the sands of this pond.

'But over the strip of sand, without a stop, she paddled, and up a narrow cow-path into the high grass along a fence. Then up the narrow cow-path, on all fours, just like another turtle, I paddled, and into the high, wet grass along the fence.

'I kept well within sound of her, for she moved recklessly, leaving a trail of flattened grass a foot and a half wide. I wanted to stand up,--and I don't believe I could have turned her back with a rail,--but I was afraid if she saw me that she might return indefinitely to the pond; so on I went, flat to the ground, squeezing through the lower rails of the fence, as if the field beyond were a melon-patch. It was nothing of the kind, only a wild, uncomfortable pasture, full of dewberry vines, and very discouraging. They were excessively wet vines and briery. I pulled my coat-sleeves as far over my fists as I could get them, and with the tin pail of sand swinging from between my teeth to avoid noise, I stumped fiercely, but silently, on after the turtle.

'She was laying her course, I thought, straight down the length of this dreadful pasture, when, not far from the fence, she suddenly hove to, warped herself short about, and came back, barely clearing me, at a clip that was thrilling. I warped about, too, and in her wake bore down across the corner of the pasture, across the powdery public road, and on to a fence along a field of young corn.

'I was somewhat wet by this time, but not so wet as I had been before, wallowing through the deep, dry dust of the road. Hurrying up behind a large tree by the fence, I peered down the corn-rows and saw the turtle stop, and begin to paw about in the loose, soft soil. She was going to lay!

'I held on to the tree and watched, as she tried this place, and that place, and the other place--the eternally feminine!--But _the_ place, evidently, was hard to find. What could a female turtle do with a whole field of possible nests to choose from? Then at last she found it, and whirling about, she backed quickly at it, and, tail first, began to bury herself before my staring eyes.

'Those were not the supreme moments of my life; perhaps those moments came later that day; but those certainly were among the slowest, most dreadfully mixed of moments that I ever experienced. They were hours long. There she was, her shell just showing, like some old hulk in the sand alongshore. And how long would she stay there? and how should I know if she had laid an egg?

'I could still wait. And so I waited, when, over the freshly awakened fields, floated four mellow strokes from the distant town clock.