Part 20
My train was to leave Paris in the evening, and my faithful friend and companion of the last five weeks, Lieutenant Weill, came to the station to bid me good-by. There were no regular sleeping-cars on this train but only what the French call “couchettes”—four bunks in each compartment, two on each side. The names of the occupants were carefully written on a slip of paper and pasted on the outside of each door, and Lieutenant Weill informed me that a French general occupied the lower bunk opposite mine. Sure enough, a handsome, youngish-looking general presently appeared and, politely touching his cap, entered our compartment and seated himself in his bunk. Weill, in French fashion, kissed me good-by on both cheeks, and as I had still ten minutes to spare, I stood outside and saw an American naval commander coming toward me with rather unsteady steps. He told me that he had had thirty-six hours’ leave and that he and his two aides had decided to spend it by going to Paris. As the train took twelve hours each way this gave them only twelve hours in the city of delights and he had evidently taken full advantage of every minute of it. He told me that his two aides had not yet turned up, that they had all the tickets and all his money; he also confided to me that one of them was so rich that he could have bought the entire train. I finally found his name on the list of our coupé, his bunk being directly over the French general’s, and as it was getting late, I advised him to enter. Just at that moment two handsome young naval lieutenants rushed up, and he received them with enthusiasm, for they had his railroad tickets. I helped him into our compartment, where he presently sat down right next to the general, who wrapped his cloak about him and cuddled up into his own corner. I said to my compatriot: “I think you are in the French general’s bunk. Yours is the one above.” Whereupon he said: “The French general can go to hell!” I was frightened out of my wits, as I expected an immediate international encounter which might have the most serious consequences. Luckily the general understood no English, and I finally induced my new naval friend to climb up into his own bunk, but I made a solemn vow that I would never again try to interfere where the army and navy of two different countries were concerned.
I turned into my own bunk and slept well until next morning, when I found the commander also awake and possessed of a thirst which knew no bounds. There was, of course, no drinking-water on the train, but I rushed him to the restaurant of the next station where we stopped, and he seized a carafe of water and put it to his lips with such avidity that you could almost hear the water sizzle as it passed down his throat. He turned out to be a delightful fellow. He was commander of a destroyer and had spent dreary and terrible weeks in his little craft watching for submarines. The monotony and discomfort of such a life cannot be imagined, as these ships are so small that their motion is incessant and they have to go out in the dirtiest of weather. There is hardly ever a chance to cook meals, and those on board must eat what and how they can. For weeks and weeks nothing happens, but my commander had had the good luck on his last trip to get a sub, and had received his thirty-six hours’ leave in consequence. Small wonder that he and his colleagues sought some relief in honor of the great event!
At the next station my French general and I got a cup of coffee. Sugar was at that time taboo, and as, thanks to my army friends, I had my pockets full of this precious stuff, I offered him some in place of the awful saccharine, which he accepted gratefully and then told me that he was going on his first vacation in two years to spend with his family in a little watering resort this side of Brest. Sure enough at the next station, as he got out, a charming boy and girl, browned by the sun, rushed up to him and fairly smothered him with kisses. It looked for all the world like a scene at a Long Island station in August, when the various New York fathers commute on a Friday afternoon to spend Saturday and Sunday with their families by the sea.
I found my daughter Alice waiting for me at the station in Brest, and on the way to the little apartment which she and Miss McKim occupied together, she told me that Admiral Wilson wanted to meet me before my departure on the transport the same evening. She begged me to support her if he denounced jazz music, against which he had a particular hatred, for she had always insisted to him that the sailors loved it and that in time of war they certainly should have anything they wanted.
In the afternoon the admiral’s band gave a concert in the public square, and I, of course, attended it and met the bandmaster and his players, who did very good work, several of them having been members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. They begged me to conduct them in one of the numbers, and I took up the stick and solemnly played through the “William Tell Overture” with them. At the end I saw Admiral Wilson on the balcony of his apartment applauding vociferously, and he presently came running, bareheaded, across the square to greet me. Almost the first thing he said was: “Doctor, don’t you think jazz music is horrible? It destroys all taste for real music.” “Indeed I heartily agree with you,” I answered. Whereupon my daughter Alice turned on me and said, “Coward!” implying that as the admiral was the autocrat of Brest I did not wish to brave his wrath even in order to please my daughter. But indeed I was thoroughly in accord with him; and I wish that either some popular substitute could be found for the interminable jazz that is ravaging not only our country but all Europe, or that a genius would come along who would pour into this very low form of art some real emotion which, welling from the very heart of man, might give life to what is at present but a nervous excitement.
That evening I went on board the transport _America_, and sailed for home. I found the voyage exceedingly interesting. The ship had been a Hamburg passenger liner, the _Amerika_, taken over after her internment by our navy; the “k” having been carefully removed and an American “c” substituted. Various German signs had been scratched out, but the table and bed linen, as well as the knives and forks, still bore the mystic initials, _H. A. P. A. G.—Hamburg Amerika Paketfahrt Actien Gesellschaft_.
I was the proud occupant of a cabin and bathroom of the so-called “Roosevelt” suite, which the ex-President had occupied during his trip around the world, and the faucets over the bathtub still bore the signs “Kalt,” “Warm,” and “Gemischt.” The various luxurious furnishings of the ship showed the wear and tear of army-transport usage. The marble was cracked and the electric bells did not ring.
The first-class cabins were occupied by several hundred officers, a curious mixture of men, some returning on leave or to become instructors in the officers’ camps, or being mustered out of service, either for ill health, drunkenness, or incompetence. For days I was pursued, even into my cabin, by a man from a Western city who had enlisted as a dentist. He was evidently out of his mind and was to be mustered out of the service on his return home. He had conceived the mysterious idea that I could influence the powers that be to have him reinstated, and I finally found the glitter in his eye so ominous that I reported him to the colonel in command and he promptly had him put under medical observation. Two days later his companions in the hospital ward, whom he had already annoyed and frightened by suddenly grabbing their legs at night, found him in the bathroom with his throat partly cut by his razor; and I confess that I was glad when I heard that he had been put into a cabin by himself, with a soldier guarding the door.
We were, of course, under army regulations and in many respects life was much stricter than on the passenger liners. We were compelled to wear life-preservers almost the entire voyage and no lights were permitted after sundown. We were not told at which American port we were to land, and I was much astonished one morning to find our ship anchored in Boston Harbor alongside the old 1812 frigate _Constitution_, whose broadside-guns looked delightfully picturesque and inefficient compared with the modern monsters I had seen in France.
During the following winter my wife and I often received visits from navy officers and sailors bearing greetings from our daughter Alice in Brest, and I remember one red-cheeked youngster who made so agreeable an impression on my wife that she invited him to return the following day, which was Sunday, for luncheon. On that morning the telephone rang. It was our old friend, Admiral William Rodgers, who asked whether he could come to luncheon. My wife said we would be delighted, but my youngest daughter Anita, who was well versed in the etiquette of the navy, called out: “Oh, we can’t have the admiral lunching with us to-day. An admiral can’t sit down at the same table with a gob!” My wife repeated this to the admiral, who insisted that it made no difference and that in war time everything was possible; that he certainly wanted to come and would be very glad to meet the “gob” who had brought greetings from Alice, of whom he was very fond. The sailor boy arrived first, and when we told him that our other guest was to be an admiral he grew pale as death, but when Rodgers arrived he was so kind to the boy that luncheon passed off fairly well, except that the boy became rigid at attention whenever the admiral spoke to him. During the luncheon Admiral Rodgers said to him: “You have just seen Mrs. Pennington in Brest?” “Yes, sir.” “And what was she doing when you saw her?” “She was selling postage-stamps, sir,” was the answer. And I have no doubt this was true, as Alice in her capacity of naval “Y” worker not only took the sailors out to picnics with swimming contests, arranged vaudeville entertainments and concerts, but in between times sold them chocolate, cigarettes, postage-stamps, picture postal-cards, lemon-drops, and ginger ale.
After luncheon my daughters discreetly took the young sailor into the front parlor in order to relieve the tension a little, and Rodgers asked me about an orchestration of the “Star-Spangled Banner” which I had made at the beginning of the war and which had aroused some attention. I had always felt that this good old English tune had a fine ring to it, provided it was played in the proper tempo, and I had given it an orchestration which developed into quite a climax on the last two lines of each verse. I sat down at the piano and played it for him, explaining the difference between this version and the old one which had been generally used before the war. He was much interested and wanted to introduce it in the navy.
The sailor boy finally took his departure, and my daughters came smiling into the music-room and told us that while they were sitting talking with the sailor, he suddenly jumped up from his chair and stood at rigid attention. He had heard the strains of the national anthem coming from our room and, remembering the admiral, knew his duty! Who shall, after that, deny the power of music in peace or in war?
XVI
THE EUROPEAN TOUR
In the spring of 1919 I received a letter from M. Lafere, then _Ministre des Beaux Arts_ in France, which interested the directors of the New York Symphony Society and myself exceedingly. In this letter he referred to the services of the New York Symphony Orchestra and myself to French art in America and invited us to make a professional visit to France the following year. He promised every assistance from the French Government and assured us of a warm welcome.
Mr. Flagler immediately decided that this invitation must be accepted inasmuch as it was the first time a foreign government had extended such a courtesy to an American musical organization. He also thought that our visit coming so soon after the war and including possibly the countries of the other allies in the war, such as Belgium, Italy, and England, would not only make a good impression but would help to establish musical relations with Europe on a more equal basis. Up till then the current had been all the other way. European singers and instrumentalists had been coming to America in a steady stream for many years, but in the meantime America had developed several orchestras of her own which could compare favorably with those of Europe; and he was very proud that the organization of which he was president and supporter should have been singled out for so great an honor and opportunity.
I sailed for Europe in the spring of 1919 to confer with the Beaux Arts about arrangements for our visit to Paris and other cities in France, and at the same time I also received invitations from the governments of Belgium and Italy to visit their countries with the orchestra. In London Augustus Littleton, the publisher, head of the old house of Novello & Co., also received me very cordially and insisted that our visit to Europe would not be complete if we did not include London. As England, like our country, has no Ministry of Fine Arts and can therefore take no official cognizance of musical affairs, he immediately and energetically set to work to form a committee of invitation, headed by King George and composed of all the foremost composers and conductors of Great Britain.
Affairs began to shape themselves very favorably, and our manager, Mr. George Engles, began to map out a tour of seven weeks, during which we were to visit five countries and play, in all, twenty-seven concerts. But in the meantime foreign exchange sank lower and lower and reports of transportation conditions in Europe were so gloomy that I began to be seriously doubtful of the possibility of the proposed tour in the spring of 1920. I finally decided in January to send our manager to Europe personally to look over the ground, and at the same time I expressed my fears to Mr. Flagler.
I told him that we would have to pay enormous sums for travelling expenses, the item of steamer passage alone amounting to fifty thousand dollars, and that while we would have to pay our orchestra salaries in American dollars, our receipts in Europe would be in francs, lire, etc. The dollar was then selling for seventeen francs in France and for twenty-three lire in Italy. I suggested to him to postpone the tour until a time when war-torn Europe would be economically in a better condition and when her transportation system would again be more nearly on a pre-war basis.
Mr. Flagler listened to me and said: “I do not see how we can possibly postpone the acceptance of these official invitations from four countries to a later period. Now is the psychological moment to do it. How much do you think the tour will cost?”
I had made a kind of general calculation and mentioned the amount, which seemed to me large.
“Isn’t that curious?” he answered. “That is exactly what I thought it would cost. Go right ahead with your preparations.”
I was naturally delighted at his decision. I knew that American orchestras had achieved a perfection of ensemble which but few, if any, European orchestras could equal. I was proud of our organization and anxious to demonstrate it as a standard of American musical culture.
The members of the orchestra were wild with excitement at the marvellous news. Many of them had been born in America and had never seen Europe. It was the wonderland of their imagination. Others had been there as soldiers during the war, and still others had left Europe years before to found their fortunes and families in the New World and had not been back since. They immediately appointed a committee to agree upon a minimum salary schedule which, while giving them a fair recompense for their time, would yet make that part of it not too difficult for us. To this sum, however, Mr. Flagler later added ten dollars a week more for each player, as he thought that their hotel expenses might be greater than we had calculated.
The managerial work of constructing the tour was beset with many difficulties, as the war had disorganized many of the regular concert organizations in Europe under whose auspices we would have played under normal conditions. The railroads, also, made much slower time than formerly. But gradually the tour began to assume shape and the first concert was scheduled to be given on May 6 at the Grand Opera in Paris, which the _Ministère des Beaux Arts_ had offered to us, and the last concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London on June 20. In order that this tour might be representative in every way of the best in American music, Mr. Flagler suggested that we take along two young American-born soloists of distinction—Albert Spalding, violinist, and John Powell, composer-pianist. I immediately set to work to prepare a series of appropriate programmes which should serve the double purpose of demonstrating the fine qualities of our orchestra and soloists, and also pay proper tribute to the great composers of the countries we proposed to visit.
We were to open with three concerts in Paris, and as I was conversant with all the details in connection with Paris especially, I preceded the orchestra and arrived there April 22. At my hotel, the “France et Choiseul,” I found a letter from my old friend, Robert Underwood Johnson, who had just left Paris to go to Rome as American ambassador to Italy. He said:
DEAR WALTER:
It is pleasant to think that, within a few days, you will be occupying the “ambassadorial suite” in which I am writing these lines (Davis of London had it also). We leave day after tomorrow and shall be very happy to see you all when you come to Rome. We are looking forward with pride and agreeable anticipation to the invasion of Italy by the Symphony and its director and the assisting artists. We have no Embassy, alas! being “all dressed up (or nearly so) with no place to go to” and so we shall slum it at the Grand Hotel until the money seems to be giving out.
Don’t let any of your party perish by stumbling over the torn carpet at the entrance to this apartment. I have tried to have it mended, but my failure shows that I am no diplomat—yet.
Au revoir. Bientôt à Rome.
My first act was to have that carpet mended, and I immediately sent a telegram to the American Embassy in Rome announcing the important news. And then the affairs of the tour began to engulf me to such an extent that until Mr. Engles arrived and relieved me with able hands of a great deal of that burden, I thought that I was back again in the old days of the Damrosch Opera Company, when I was owner, director, orchestral conductor, stage-manager, and prima donna pacificator all in one.
To add to my worries, a railroad strike was announced for May 1, the day on which the orchestra were to arrive at Le Havre, and not content with that, the dock workers of Le Havre intended also to lay down their “tools,” whatever they may be, and stop working on that date. When I thought of the musical instruments and trunks of my orchestra in the hold of the steamer _Rochambeau_, which was to arrive on or about May 1, my heart stopped beating. However, I had been in too many close shaves on my great Western orchestral tours to be altogether dismayed, for even if the railroad stopped running there would always be motor-trucks and airplanes. We had made arrangements with Thomas Cook and Sons to take care of all transportation matters from the day the orchestra arrived in France until their sailing for home from England, and they assured me that, if necessary, they would have camions, such as were used during the war, to carry my whole orchestra, together with their baggage and musical instruments, from Le Havre to Paris.
Luckily the ship docked several hours before the dock workers’ strike began, and double-basses, kettledrums, and innumerable music boxes were safely landed from the hold of the ship. I had intended to go to Le Havre to meet the orchestra, but the strike conditions were too uncertain and I thought it better to remain in Paris and direct operations from there.
The government was moving several trains, and the telegram that the orchestra had started for Paris cheered me up considerably. I was at the station at 3.30 that afternoon, to be met with the news that the train was delayed and would be in at six. At six there was no sign of it, and, as is usual at French stations, there was absolutely no one who had any idea when it might arrive. I stayed there till eight o’clock—no train. Finally there was a whistle. Every one dashed out. It was a freight-train, but, like the dove from Noah’s Ark, I saw the “man from Cook’s,” a little man, attired then and during the entire tour in a very small derby hat and an exceedingly long double-breasted frock coat, sitting on top of one of the cars. He was tired, dirty, but triumphant, for all our musical instruments and music boxes were in these cars. He had passed the orchestra half-way at Rouen, where they were held up by a hot box. This sounded like home to me, as I had heard those magic words only too often when our train, coming through Idaho or Arizona on our way to or from California, would be held up for hours and we would wonder whether we could “make” the concert that evening.
The orchestra had rehearsed our repertoire with me so thoroughly before we sailed that but little more was necessary. I gave them three rehearsals, however, before our first concert, the first two at the _Salle du Conservatoire_, to shake them together again after their long voyage, and the last on the afternoon of the concert, May 6, at the Opera House in order to accustom them to its acoustics. The orchestra played so superbly at the two first rehearsals that I was jubilant and proud of them. The ensemble was perfect and each man played as if the success of the concert depended on him—which it certainly did. But when we began rehearsing at the Opera House the tone of the orchestra suddenly seemed so thin and lifeless that I was nearly beside myself with anxiety. The orchestra was placed on the stage, but the local management had not seen fit to provide us with any proper scenic setting or roof, so that the sound of our large and noble orchestra was completely dissipated in the flies. When I remonstrated, I was told that they had a roof for the stage but that it was in the storehouse, situated beyond the fortifications of Paris, and that this was the first time in many years the Opera House had been used for a concert. They finally agreed to have at least half a roof up for our concert and to set a smaller scene, which would contain the sound and throw it into the audience-room in more compact fashion. After twenty minutes or so of rehearsing, I threw down my stick and told the men to call it a day. I went back to my hotel very depressed, as so much depended on the first impression which our orchestra would make that evening.
The programme was as follows:
1. Overture, “Benvenuto Cellini”............................... Berlioz 2. Symphony No. 3, “Eroica”.................................... Beethoven 3. “Istar,” Variations symphoniques............................ d’Indy 4. “Daphnis et Chloe” (Fragments symphoniques)................. Ravel
The reader will notice that we placed on it two works by living French composers, both of whom were to be at the concert. The house was completely sold out, and greeted me in very friendly fashion when I came on the stage.