Part 3

"Your baton bring," he said, "und der score _Tristan_."

With profuse apologies for this display of juvenile precocity, the violinist hurried after the boy, and reëntered a moment later with his violin and a music-stand, which he proceeded to set up.

Siegfried followed close on his heels with the full orchestral score of the last act of _Tristan and Isolde_, which almost obscured him from sight. Placing it on the stand, he retired in a dignified manner; and Herr Klotz, taking a chair, seated himself at the left of the stand, and proceeded to tune his fiddle to pitch, varying the proceedings with imitations of French-horns, vagrant clarionets, and irresponsible trombones in the mélange of discord which always precedes the entrance of the conductor. Norman, who had been enjoying the scene to the full, suddenly rose to his feet.

"Herr Klotz," he said sternly, "I protest."

The tuning ceased, and the violinist looked anxiously at his guest. "You do not like dis, zumtimes?" he faltered.

"I object," cried Basil, "to being left out.--Herr Siegfried!" He raised his voice. "Herr Siegfried!"

The little chap walked solemnly in, a baton in his hand. "Yeth?" he said.

"_Mein Herr_, my friend and myself desire to join your orchestra."

The youthful conductor considered, ruminatingly. "You blay goot?" he said.

"Wonderfully. I was comb-and-tissue-paper-player in the Cascade Steam Laundry Orchestra, and my friend----"

"He ith goot alzo?"

"Pest, speak for yourself."

I shrugged my shoulders. "Far be it from me to brag," I said, rather lamely, "but I was first violinist to His Majesty the King of Diddle-doodledums."

"Ah, yes," cried Norman; "and you were dismissed because of your unfortunate habit of playing an octave flat." He leaned over and put his lips to Siegfried's ear. "Let him play the drums," he said in a stage whisper.

Amidst roars of delight from the older Klotz, the youngster left the room, and returned in a minute's time, carrying an immense tin dishpan and a broken broom-handle, which musical impedimenta he entrusted to my tender mercies, and then sedately stalked from the scene once more. With mixed emotions I carried my pan and stick over to the extreme right, and placed a chair beneath the spot where the stage-box would be, calmly surveying the assumed audience with that look of waggish melancholy one associates with gentlemen of the drums. Norman, whom Klotz had armed with the combined ingredients of his instrument, placed a chair halfway between the conductor's stand and myself, and together we joined Herr Klotz in a two-minutes' orgy of discordant preparation. With a desire to increase the variety of my percussion effects, I conscripted an extra chair into service, placed it back towards me, and prepared to use my cane as an auxiliary drumstick.

By common consent we achieved a moment's unanimity of silence, which was seized by Herr Siegfried as the auspicious moment for his entrance. Without the least loss of dignity he clambered onto his chair, as we applauded, perfunctorily, by hammering our alleged music-stands with non-existent bows; and, turning to the audience, he bowed with the restraint of genius--a feat of condescension which appeared to delight the throng hugely, for he was constrained to turn about and acknowledge their plaudits a second time before they would allow him to proceed.

As drummer I assumed an air of morose boredom.

The noise of the audience having subsided, the conductor opened his score and nodded to his _Concertmeister_, Herr Klotz, who carefully found the required place in the orchestration.

"Blay der 'Liebestod' music," said he in his most professional manner to us. We nodded knowingly, and found the required part in the last act of our scores, after turning over a vast number of visionary pages.

"Do we begin at the beginning?" asked Norman.

"Yes," I answered, "and leave off at the end." After which sally I laughed immoderately, and began to understand the instinct which causes a humorist to enjoy his own wit more than any other's.

A rap on the stand brought my mirth to a close. Both arms were extended in the air--a last look at both sides of the orchestra (there must have been a hundred of us)--the left hand slowly poised to indicate "piano"--the right hand gently raised--and then the strings were brought into action. I had intended, as another excellent jest, to give a tremendous crash on the pan at the start, so as to bring down the leader's wrath, but something in the little chap's attitude stopped me. This was not play to him--it was real; and, to my amazement, it seemed no less vivid to my fellow-burlesquers. Herr Klotz was playing the chromatic development of the opening as if it had been Covent Garden and the real Nikisch conducting. The Blower of Bubbles was giving one more proof of his amazing versatility. In some manner he was imitating a cello, and he _knew_ the music. Where he had learned it one could only conjecture--but when did he learn anything?

Silently I watched the serio-comic development. The boy was conducting remarkably, with unerring artistry, sustaining the exact Wagnerian _tempi_, and, with little exaggeration, indicating the crescendo and diminuendo which colors all the great master's composition. How much of it he knew or whether he was following his father's violin I could not make out, but his earnestness fascinated me; and suddenly his eyes turned towards mine. I gripped the broom-handle--but no, it was merely a warning that my time was imminent. I think my breath came short as I waited. Then his eyes sought mine once more, and inclining towards me, his baton called for the drums. It was _I_ he was conducting, and no one else! And I vibrated the broom-handle against the dish-pan, only to stop instantaneously as his baton moved to subtler instruments. He never failed to warn me with that preliminary glance, and when the magic wand followed I gave him all I had. The little beggar was a hypnotist.

Towards the climax I could have sworn the whole orchestra was there. Klotz was playing superbly, and Norman was roaming from one instrument to the other with a remarkable combination of accuracy and imitative versatility. As for me, I supplied dynamic effects that would have satisfied even the great Beethoven, who once asked for guns.

Then it was over.

Herr Siegfried bowed twice to the audience, indicated his entire orchestra with an all-embracing wave of the baton, and ended by solemnly shaking hands with his father, who stood up to accept the honor. After that, with a self-conscious wriggle, he became the boy once more, and removed his spell from us. With roars of delight we gathered about him, making a circle by joining hands, and dancing extempore, we sang a chorus consisting of constant repetitions of "Hilee-hilo! Hilee-hilo!" That may not be the correct spelling, but then we were singing, not writing it--which is one advantage music has over literature.

Before we went, Herr Klotz took us into the room where his wife lay ill, and by her eyes--for she was too weak to speak--she thanked us for our part in making the day a festival one for their lonely little household. With an instinctive gentleness that a woman might have shown, Norman spoke of the things she wanted to hear about: how her husband had been missed at the restaurant, of the desire of every one to make a little present to them, of the great future that lay before their son, and of the genius of Herr Klotz that would some day be recognized. With the cheeriest of good-byes, he lightly touched her shoulder with his hand and said he knew she would soon be well again.

He lied. In half of what he said he lied. He was blowing bubbles that the woman stricken with fever might see in them some little compensation for her life of drudgery.

With the guttural good wishes of Herr Klotz still in our ears (we had pledged eternal friendship in three foaming mugs of beer), we sought the street, to find that dusk was settling over the city. For some moments neither spoke, but feeling that perhaps I had descended too abruptly from my pedestal, I cleared my throat and ventured on a remark.

"A decent fellow," I said patronizingly, and felt my dignity reasserting myself; but Norman failed to hear me. He was lost in some memory. Now that I look back, I wonder was it the picture of the sick woman he saw or his vision of the mother with her two sons; or, with his gift of intuition, could he see, less than a year ahead, Klotz, in a German soldier's uniform, marching through Belgium with an army of lust and rapine, gorged like gluttonous, venomous beasts?

I wonder.

VIII

It was from an aunt of mine that I first heard of Norman's attachment to Lilias Oxley.

Whenever I received a letter from my relative, I had first to realize that its mission was to educate, not to entertain. She was a woman of strong ideas, and, as my mother died very early in my life, she seldom lost an opportunity of impressing a moral--like the Queen in _Alice in Wonderland_. In her correspondence, and to a large extent in her conversation, my aunt was given to dashes, underlines, and exclamation-marks. It is perhaps unnecessary to state that she was a single woman.

I received the letter two months after Christmas; it was dated from the Beacon at Hindhead.

"MY DEAR NEPHEW,--You will find mentholated crystals--carried in a small bottle--a splendid preventive against the present epidemic of cold in the head! Sniff a little every night before going to bed.

"When are you going to marry? For goodness' sake, marry a _dark_ girl when you do. Our family is growing positively colorless!

"Your friend, Mr. Norman, is visiting the Oxleys down here. It seems young Oxley is trying to write a play with some ideas in it, and Norman thinks he can help him! Who in the world wants to see a play with _their_ ideas! It's a pity you couldn't teach him to do something useful--Norman, I mean.--Young Oxley is going into the Church! Why doesn't he go to Canada! I mean _Norman_.

"Do you remember little Lilias Oxley? She had pneumonia last year, though I _warned_ her mother about flannel soaked in goose-oil and turpentine! She always looked like a hothouse flower, and now she is simply _frail_. Of course, she's pretty and has eyes that always makes fools of the men--not that _that_ signifies! Everybody says she's artistic, but all I ever hear her play is by some newfangled foreigner named Debussy, and it's all discord. She's only nineteen and looks sixteen.

"Of course, young Norman comes along, and instead of picking out some healthy _buxom_ girl, he falls in love with this bit of tinsel china! It's criminal, and should not be _allowed_. What kind of children will they have, if any! He calls her his _Beatrice_--Heaven knows why!

"They are together _constantly_. I would write to the _Times_ about it if I thought that Lord Northfellow would publish it. We should have a Minister of _Eugenics_! Surely Winston Churchill would be better employed at that than trying to build up a huge navy we'll never need! By the way, I see he's taken to writing _novels_ now!

"Do talk to young Norman! Tell him your uncle is doing very well with pigs in Canada; and why not induce your friend to go _there_, and get some _common-sense_, because every Canadian I meet has a head on his shoulders? It must be the climate!

"I am going to stay here for a month, and then visit my cousin in Scotland. She has six children. Whatever induced her to marry a minister? He has no money and no _prospects_--except more children, I suppose!

"Does that Mulvaney woman see that your room is kept aired? When you write you should have the window open and a cap on your head.

"I hope you will never write books! It is quite a _distinction_ nowadays not to.

"Where did you go for Christmas?--Your loving aunt,

"HANNAH.

"Feby. 8/1914."

The only way I can account for my aunt's love of exclamation-marks was her delight at seeing a sentence round to a good finish. I have known authors to be so overcome with the dramatic significance of their work that they put them in as a sort of public recognition thereof.

_En passant_.... I wonder why my aunt never wrote a serial story for one of the London dailies.

IX

War.

Our world of artificiality lay like a cracked eggshell. As drowning men, we clutched at everything that seemed stable ... to find nothing that was not made of perishable stuff. Our pens that had criticized so long mocked us as we gazed at the pages which seemed to reject our thoughts before we gave them life. A few of us turned into special war writers and comforted the nation with statistics. We showed that Germany was beaten--it was a mathematical truth that could be proved. While we demonstrated our immense superiority to the enemy in figures, a little British Army was fighting against odds of six to one.

And the Fates stood by with poised shears, ready to cut the thread of Britain's destiny.

It is not pleasant to recall the arraignment of the year 1914. The Boer War had shown our weakness to every nation but ourselves; our educated men had graduated into the world using their abilities as obstructionists. We had discouraged everything that had the very odor of progress.

Yet--we muddled through. Men still use that word as if it were something creditable instead of hideous. We won, because, behind the Britain that muddled and obstructed, there was the Britain of noble mothers and noble sons.

And into the first winter our orgy of statistics went on, like an endless Babylonian feast ... while the British fleet--which we should never need--strained and plunged in the icy gales of the North Sea, grimly, silently, saving the world for Civilization.

Great days. Fateful days. Terrible days.

One Friday night early in December I received a note from Norman, asking me to meet him for dinner at "Arcadia." I had not seen him for six months, but his debonair charm was as potent as ever, and we chatted of the past like friends who had not met for years. As if by mutual consent, we avoided the present until I noticed that the orchestra was different.

"Where is Klotz?" I asked suddenly.

"Gone."

"Where?"

"To the war. He was a German reservist and got away."

"And his wife?"

"She is confined to her bed all the time, but fortunately there is an excellent woman looking after her and young Siegfried. By the way, what a conductor he'll make some day!"

By the subterfuge I knew who was paying for the woman, though his income was always slender. Stimulated by a British-born orchestra that played with a respectability beyond question, we pursued bubbles of conversation for half-an-hour, saying many clever things and arriving at no conclusions; but both of us knew that, behind the badinage, there was the consciousness of war gripping our brains like a fever.

"What do you think," I said at last, "of the question of enlisting?" It would have been a mockery to deny the fever any longer.

"Why should I enlist?" His smile was so disarming that I regretted my move at once.

"Don't misunderstand me," I said hastily. "You are not needed, and you never will be. Besides----" My voice trailed off into the insincere platitudes that always come to the lips when conscience is to be drugged.

He lit a cigarette. "Pest," he said, "most men are participants in life; a few, like myself, are onlookers. It was my choice when I was a mere youngster--wisely or not, I do not know--but the pose has become reality now. I am a jester at the court of the world, a wordy fellow with a touch of melancholy in his humor, watching and commenting on the real things of life. Before there was a war I blew bubbles, and now I am fit for nothing else. Have a cigarette?"

"Thanks."

He passed his hand across his brow with the same weariness I had noticed before.

"To gaze on life," he went on after a pause, "and not to live it, spares one many sorrows. Even love, which comes to most men as an overwhelming passion, stole into my life like a perfume of Cashmere. When I was twelve years of age and living on the south coast, I used to pass a little dream-girl of seven years or so. The purity of her face stayed with me like a melody a mother sings to her child. Then she was ill, and for three weeks I never saw her. Finally she came one day in a chair, and her beauty was the most exquisite thing I had ever seen. It made me think that the God who gave us this beautiful world sometimes cherishes a soul as sweet as hers and keeps it in a body that is frail, so that through life He can watch it like a flower, tenderly, lovingly;... and when He wants it back again He has but to whisper, and, like a violet bending to a summer breeze, it hears and obeys.... I have sometimes thought that even tears shed for such a one have in them the quality of dew, and serve to keep the memory green and pleasant.

"The next day I brought her a rose. Though we had never spoken, she took it, and gave me her face to kiss.... I lost my mother when I was very young, but this dream-girl's kiss supplied that inspiration for the ideal that a child takes from its mother. I could not have been impure after that--I could not have been unkind. The next day she was gone, and I never saw her again until I went to Surrey to visit young Oxley. She was his sister."

"And you found?"

"That the dream-child had become a woman--the charm of Spring had softened to the witchery of Summer."

He shrugged his shoulders and relit his cigarette, which had gone out.

"That, my dear Pest, is how love came to me."

I frowned in an endeavor to pierce his apparently superficial dismissal of the subject.

"Don't you intend to marry her?" I said.

"Marry her?" He laughed, but there was little mirth in the sound. "Does a jester marry?" His eyes hardened, and there was a new ring to his voice. "Who am I to take a wife? A _poseur_, a _flâneur_, in a world of men, I stand discredited beside the poorest workman whose toil brings in a pittance for his wife and kiddies. England is calling for men--for men, I say." He brought his fist with a crash on the table. "What can I offer her--my parlor accomplishments? My minstrel's mummery that shudders at the sight of a sword? Can I blow bubbles in a world where hearts are breaking?"

There were tears in his voice, but his eyes were flashing furiously.

"Hexcuse me." A man had stepped up to us, wearing the armlet of a recruit. His face was oddly familiar, but I could not recall it until a light was switched on just behind him, and I recognized the pumpkin-faced man of Christmas Eve.

"I just thought of 'ow I'd like for to tell you as I've been took for the Army O.K."

We shook his hand and wished him the best of luck.

"Funny thing, sir, as 'ow the 'ole bloomin' time I was planning to sign hup I was a-thinkin' of you and that there fiddle. 'You wouldn't like to meet 'im,' I kind o' sez to myself, 'and you not in the harmy, you wouldn't,' I sez."

"Instead of which," smiled Norman, all trace of his intensity gone, "I am the one who is the slacker."

"But didn't I see you in the line the day we was going for to join hup?"

Norman laughed. "I was probably a hundred miles away," he said. "Pest, have I a double?"

The recruit scratched his head. "I could 'a sworn hit was you," he said, and launched into a graphic description of drill and the absurdities thereof, a recital which appeared to have no prospect of an ending until we were interrupted by the restaurant proprietor, who took Norman to one side for a consultation concerning the medieval cook.

I felt a hand on my arm and turned to see our friend of the pumpkin face making secret and terrifying signs for me to lend him my ear.

"'E's a-'iding something," he whispered hoarsely. "I ain't been a chandlery merchant hall my life, wot does most o' 'is business hon tick, without hit learning me to remember faces. Hit _were_ 'im. 'E was turned down for a bad 'eart!"

Whereupon he made a semi-mystic sign with his thumb and forefinger to indicate that the whole affair was a secret between gentlemen.

That night, in bed, the sensitive, delicate features of Basil Norman remained in my memory. I had surprised his secret which he would admit to no one; not to the girl he loved; not to himself. It was the same spirit that had made him defy the whole of Westminster. We had called him Puck and the Blower of Bubbles, and he himself had said he was lighter than air.... But Basil Norman's life had been one endless battle with an indomitable soul that refused to yield to the body.

I could not sleep well that night.

X

I did not meet Basil Norman for nearly four years. I joined the Artists' Rifles early in 1915, fought for eleven months, and was given a commission. After a short time in England I went out in all the glory of a Sam Browne and one star, but in a few months I was wounded in the chest, which earned me Blighty and a surfeit of Aunt Hannah, who still contended that had we only concentrated on an _army_ instead of a _navy_----

As I write, it all seems a blurred memory of colorless monotony, mud, fatigue, death, and grim humor. In January, 1918, after a term of duty as musketry instructor, I returned to France, and fought through the horrible spring battles until, with cruel coincidence, I was wounded again in the same place, and once more came to England with a bullet in my chest--a bullet they dared not extract. In September I was discharged.

One morning in November I sat by the fire in my den at Sloane Square. I had resumed the tenancy of the rooms, and Mrs. Mulvaney looked upon me as being even less mature than before, warning me about goloshes when it was wet, and umbrellas when it wasn't, but appeared likely to be.

How long I sat there I do not know, but memory began to weave its spell, driving my surroundings into a dim obscurity and bringing back incidents of the past with vivid clarity. I gripped my head with both hands, and, for the hundredth time, sought the truth that lay buried in the holocaust of the nations.... My wound hurt again, and a dizziness crept over me like a fog that rises from the sea and enshrouds the land.

Futile.... Futile....

Had some one spoken? The words sounded distinctly.... I could have sworn I heard them.

Was the whole war a dream, or was it real? Once more I was in Sloane Square; there was my desk with its litter of papers, my pipe-rack, my books.... Had I ever left them? Could it be true that I had led men against machine-gun fire--and that I had killed? Were those boys who died beside me, smiling like children in their sleep, really dead? Was it all some hideous fantasy of an unhealthy brain--a gigantic charade invented by the greatest buffoon of all time?

Futile.... Futile.... Futile.

I cursed, and pressed my brow with my hands. It was a fight for sanity, as so many men have fought in the solitude of their rooms since the hell of Flanders.

Like a panorama the events of the war crossed my mind, and yet those that stood out most clearly were the unimportant things that came as mere incidents during the unfolding of the world's destiny. The senior chaplain's dog, which was shot by an A.P.M. and mourned by a whole division ... the new arrival who thought he was a special charge of the Lord's, and who persisted in looking over the top during the day--we buried him next morning ... the night that the female impersonator from a divisional concert-party lured the colonel into amorous confession ... the little chap who got no mail at Christmas, and said he hadn't received a letter for two years ... one after the other these human trivialities coursed through my brain, forcing the vaster issues aside.