The Fires of Spring (18 page)

“Miss Mary Meigs,” Capt. Sousa began. “My friend Mr. Stone, and his friend, Master Harper.” David winced at the appellation. “And this is Klementi Kol, a very fine musician of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Klementi is going to conduct his own orchestra during my vacation. My friends, be seated.” He dropped his hands at them as if they were so many clarinetists. “How’s your orchestra, Klim?” he inquired.

“I can’t get all the men I want,” Kol replied. “You can imagine how it is. Playing with Kincaid and Tabuteau all winter spoils you for the summer.” The tall musician spoke with lovely grace.

“It’s been pleasant up here,” Sousa replied. “I do miss Victor Herbert, though.” He chuckled. “People used to come to me and whisper, “I like you ever so much better than Victor Herbert.’ I’m sure they told him the same.”

“What are you singing tonight, Miss Meigs?” Mr. Stone inquired.

“
Ah
,
Sweet Mystery of Life
and
Just a Kiss
,” the lovely singer replied. David was delighted with the quality of her voice. He thought: “I’ve never seen such fine people. I’ll bet she’s in love with Mr. Kol.” He hoped his surmise was correct.

As the dinner progressed—David’s first in a fine restaurant—Sousa insisted that his guests occupy his private box at the concerts. David was so pleased by such an unexpected pleasure that he actually closed his eyes and bit his lips. Sousa noted this and asked, “Do you like music?” David did not reply and Mr. Stone nudged him.

“Me?” he blurted. “Oh, yes!”

“Then I’ll play the encore for you,” Sousa said graciously. “What would you like?”

David could think of nothing. He knew no music by name, but then he recalled his picnic with Mr. Paxson.
“Stars and Stripes!”
he shouted.

Capt. Sousa laughed and said, “We have to save that for
the last concert.” He became interested in David and bent toward him. “What’s your second choice?” he asked.

There was a wretched moment of silence and Mr. Stone guessed what was the matter. “How about
Semper Fidelis
?” he suggested.

“That’s it!” David fairly shouted. Then, ashamed of himself and determined to retrieve his position, he took a blind stab. “Isn’t that the one that goes …” He hummed very softly. Capt. Sousa smiled and patted him on the hand.

“That’s exactly the way it goes,” he said. “Only louder.” David blushed. He wanted to throw his arms wide and embrace these exciting people. He said to himself: “Mr Stone was right! Suppose I had got mixed up with Max Volo? What if that spotter had caught me? I’d be in jail now.” As on the basketball floor, the thought was horrible. He felt that everyone must be watching him squirm. Only Miss Meigs was. She smiled at him.

“What kind of music do you like best?” she asked.

“All kinds!” he replied expansively.

“Do you like
Carmen
?” she continued. “That’s my favorite.” David gulped. Again he had trapped himself. His mind started to work furiously. “What do I know about
Carmen?
I’ve heard that name before.” Then he saw Old Daniel’s book. There was the woodcut of the passionate gypsy.

“Yes,” he exploded. “About the Spanish gypsy.” Miss Meigs studied the boy’s eager face and liked the frank look of joy it wore. She was about to speak when Capt. Sousa rose.

“In the second concert you’ll hear excerpts from
Carmen
,” he announced.

“
Carmen
! With a full band!” Klementi cried. “Excellent!” He shook Capt. Sousa’s hand with pleasure. In the excitement of leaving the Casino and going to the concert David was forgotten by everyone except Miss Meigs. She continued to watch him and laughed to herself as she saw him studying Klementi Kol so as to know how to behave and how to say the right things, for less than three years ago Klementi had taught her the same things.

Between the first and second concerts Mr. Stone took his friends about the Park. He was careful to explain everything to Miss Meigs, and David clearly saw that Mr. Stone was proud to be seen with the handsome girl. Cool, fixing her hair with her left hand, tilting her chin when she was being watched, she glided along with her three escorts; and David
discovered that he, too, was very proud when he heard visitors whispering, “That’s Sousa’s new singer!”

They rode on the gentler rides and laughed together on the gondola that took them through the dark Canals of Venice. The evening was spoiled, however, shortly after they left Venice, for David’s name was called by a bright, brassy voice. It was Nora. She was dressed in a tight-fitting dress that accentuated her slimness and her full bosom. Her hair was in curls and she had on a good deal of make-up.

“Hello, kid!” she cried, and then, seeing the well-dressed people with David, she put her hand to her bright mouth and said, “I didn’t know you were with a party.”

David was embarrassed and wished that Nora had not seen him. Then he thought: “Well, she’s my friend,” and awkwardly he introduced her. Then he asked, “Whyn’t you join us?” He hoped she would say no.

“Could I?” she asked eagerly. There was a long pause, during which David twisted his toes waiting for Mr. Stone to speak, but the gray cashier stared angrily at the lake. Finally David took Nora by the hand and said, “Sure, come along. It’s not fair for Miss Meigs to have three men. Heh, heh.” But nobody laughed.

On the rides Nora sat with David and put her arm about him, for even short dips frightened her, but she sensed that this embarrassed the boy and she whispered, “I feel rotten with these people. I don’t belong.” David looked at her and winked, even though he knew that the enraged Mr. Stone was watching him. In added perversity he insisted that Nora join them in Capt. Sousa’s box, but this made Mr. Stone so furious that the concert was a chilly failure. That is, it was a failure until the very end of
Stars and Stripes
, when Nora gripped David and cried, “God! The way those flutes tear up and down! It makes you shiver!” and that was precisely how David always felt, but of all the people he would ever know in the world, only Nora would ever react to the music as he did.

He became glad that he had invited her, and in front of everyone he kissed her good night. This was too much for Mr. Stone, and when the others had left, he hauled David down to the lakeside. “You stupid fool!” he exclaimed. He would have struck David, but crowds had gathered for the fountain display. Instead he twisted the boy’s arm until the skin ached. “I introduce you to my friends! Great musicians! And you dig up a cheap, perfumed little whore.” He grew pale
in the face and said harshly, “You’re a poorhouse kid and you don’t know anything. It’s time you learned. There’s two worlds, you stupid ass, and they don’t mix. If you want to throw away your life in Max Volo’s Coal Mine, all right. But you can’t drag that filth into my parties! A cheap South Philadelphia whore!”

That night, when the rest of the poorhouse slept, David tried to write a poem. Sousa, Mr. Stone, Klementi Kol, and Nora were all mixed up in it, and it was terrible. He took a fresh sheet and wrote, almost without effort, a poem of clear and sensitive focus. It began:
“By the dark moss a dog-tooth violet …”
It was his first love poem, but in it no girl appeared. When he finished, dawn had come from the east, and he found that his poem expressed exactly what was in his heart. It was a love poem to the confused wonder of the world, the throbbing, simple things that had been about him since that first cold, silent night when his mother had carried him into the yard to listen for the wild geese flying north.

The day finally came when Capt. Sousa started his vacation, and then Klementi Kol took charge of the music. With a group of musicians from the Philadelphia Orchestra he formed the Kol Symphony. When the first concert was given, David listened attentively and decided firmly that a symphony orchestra was a pretty poor substitute for a band. There wasn’t much noise and the pieces they played were not easy to whistle. He wondered contemptuously what Klementi Kol and his swaying fiddlers could do with a piece like
Field Artillery
! “What would they use for bass drums? Who would fire the pistol?”

At the second concert, however, Klementi started with that good music which David had learned from Capt. Sousa,
William Tell Overture
. Reluctantly David had to admit that this was pretty thrilling stuff, even with a symphony. Then Kol rapped for attention, and the audience leaned forward as if some great thing were to happen. The baton fell with startling suddenness, and from the orchestra came a whisper of strings, then a cascading melody, then flight and retreat, and epic marching. When the drums rumbled softly they seemed to be more like violins than tympani. The flutes and horns did strange, unpredictable things, and always the strings rustled on and danced and cried out. The music was unbearably majestic, and in that moment David swore: “I’ll hear all the music in the world if it’s like that!”

Others in the audience must have felt the same way, for they cheered and stamped and made Klementi take many bows. “What was that music?” David asked. A man in a high stiff collar and black suit smiled.

“You don’t know that, sonny? Well, you just heard the music from
Tannhäuser
.”

“What’s that?” David inquired.

“It’s an opera,” the man beamed.

“I thought people sang in an opera,” David said.

“Oh!” the man quickly explained. “A real opera is twice as good as this. Tonight was just the music.”

“Twice as good?” David queried. When the man nodded enthusiastically, David stuck his eager nose into the night air and stared back. “Hmm,” he said.

After the concert David felt that he must speak with Klementi Kol, so he dawdled by the bandstand until the musicians filed out.

Finally the tall conductor appeared, accompanied by Mary Meigs, fair and beautiful. David hurried up to them and mumbled, “Excuse me. I met you with Capt. Sousa.”

“Of course you did!” the tall man replied, bowing graciously.

“I thought the music was wonderful,” David said quietly.

“Thank you,” Kol replied. “Do you work here in the Park?”

“Yes. I listen to the music whenever I can.”

“Then why don’t you come by some Tuesday or Thursday and help us practice?”

David did not know what to say or do. Obviously he should not shake hands, so he bowed from the waist, very low.

“How sweet!” Mary Meigs said. She smiled at the boy.

On Tuesday David was waiting at the bandstand at nine in the morning. He was still there, alone, at ten and at eleven. At eleven-thirty musicians started to appear, clean, interesting-looking men. Toward twelve Kol himself came onstage and seeing David cried, “Oh, no! You sit up here with me!” He placed David on a chair beside him and the rehearsal started. It was the first movement of Beethoven’s
Seventh Symphony
, and from that noble start David launched into the full, wonderful world of symphonic music. He felt an immediate sympathy between himself and the music and within a week he sensed the perfect structure of the finest symphonies.

Kol insisted that David have lunch with him, and occasionally
Mary Meigs joined them. She called David, “Our young Toscanini,” and from that chance remark David built his knowledge of the leading conductors.

And the things they talked about! One day Klementi said, “I wasn’t much older than you are now, David, when the new century began, and we celebrated wildly. I had just fallen in love with a model who lived near the Seine, and we were in a café when news came: ‘Wilde is dead!’ We knew this great poet, and now he was dead. Persecuted and outcast, he died in Paris. So the model and I went to his funeral and wept for that fine artist.”

“Was he an artist or a poet?” David inquired.

“A poet. A very great one. Do you know his poems?”

“I never heard of him or his poems,” David admitted.

“
Diable!
What do they teach you in school?”

“Sir Walter Scott.”

“Ach, no!” Furiously Klementi left the lunch table and dragged David back to the bandstand, muttering as he went, “Scott! No Keats, I suppose. No Shelley? And of course no Spitteler or Baudelaire! Ah, the corruption of youth!” He rummaged among his personal luggage and produced a dogeared volume of poems. “Read this!” he commanded.

One of the poems David could not understand. He called it
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
. The title was confusing and finally he asked Klementi about it. “It’s simple,” Kol said. “That’s where they put him, in Reading gaol.” David looked at the title again and blushed. “So while he was in gaol,” Klementi continued, “he studied this man who had killed his sweetheart. Now do you understand?”

“Yes.” David said weakly.

Kol brought David many books that summer. He said that if you did not read when you were young, you might never catch the disease and then what would be the use of living? The books were strange and not easy to understand. There was, for example, that twisted thing called
Renée Mauperin
, written by two brothers. Almost nothing happened in it, but you remembered the scenes for a long time. The same was true of that astonishing tale of a madman in Russia who painted his house blue “just because he wanted to.” A sillier story had never been written, but for more than a year David looked at certain persons with a kindlier eye, saying to himself: “Let him alone. He’s painting his house blue.”

The conductor said, “Now’s the time to store up ideas.
Then when you’re a man and something happens! Behold! You have a treasure house with which to compare it. Why do you like
Field Artillery
so much? I’ll tell you. Because you know the drummer is going to fire a pistol. Well, my young friend—and don’t breathe a word of this to Capt. Sousa, bless him—that’s a poor way to win an effect. Now in
Whistler and His Dog
you look for the bark. That’s one degree better. But in
Tannhäuser
, what? Only the divine music. You catch what I mean. You can teach a horse to recognize a pistol shot. A bark is important to another dog, but not to a man. For it takes a mind to remember the rise and fall of music.” He whirled about the empty stage and hummed a few passages from Wagner. At their now-familiar sound David’s eyes brightened, and Klementi cried, “See! The glow of recognition!”