by Willa Cather
It was of Bouchalka that we talked upon that last voyage I ever made with Cressida Garnet, and not of Jerome Brown. She remembered the Bohemian kindly, and since it was the passage in her life to which she most often reverted, it is the one I shall relate here.
* * * *
Late one afternoon in the winter of 189—, Cressida and I were walking in Central Park after the first heavy storm of the year. The atmosphere was misty and silvery; around the horizon the buildings and trees looked very soft and slight, like pale violet water colors on a silver ground. The carriage arrived at five, but Cressida sent the driver home to the Tenth Street house with the message that she would dine uptown, and that Horace and Mr. Poppas were not to wait for her. As the horses trotted away we turned up the Mall.
“I won’t go indoors this evening for anyone,” Cressida declared. “Not while the sky is like that. Now we will go back to the laurel wood. They are so black, over the snow, that I could cry for joy. I don’t know when I’ve felt so carefree as I feel tonight. Country winter, country stars—they always make me think of Charley Wilton.”
She was singing twice a week, sometimes oftener, at the Metropolitan that season, quite at the flood-tide of her powers, and so enmeshed in operatic routine that to be walking in the park at an unaccustomed hour, unattended by one of the men of her entourage, seemed adventurous. As we strolled along the little paths among the snow banks and the bronze laurel bushes, she kept going back to my poor young cousin, dead so long.
“Things happen out of season. That’s the worst of living. It was untimely for both of us; and yet,” she sighed softly, “since he had to die, I’m not sorry. There was one beautifully happy year, though we were so poor, and it gave him—something! It would have been too hard if he’d had to miss everything. Yes,” she went on, “I always feel very tenderly about Charley; I believe I’d do the same thing right over again, even knowing all that had to come after.”
We walked until the procession of carriages on the driveway, getting people home to dinner, grew thin. Then we went slowly toward the Seventh Avenue gate, still talking of Charley Wilton. We decided to dine at a place not far away, where the only access from the street was a narrow door, like a hole in the wall, between a tobacconist’s and a flowershop. Cressida deluded herself into believing that her incognito was more successful in such nondescript places. She was wearing a long sable coat, and a deep fur hat, hung with red cherries, which she had brought from Russia. Her walk had given her a fine color, and she looked so much a personage that no disguise could have been wholly effective.
The dining-rooms, frescoed with conventional Italian scenes, were built round a court. The orchestra was playing as we entered and selected our table—something from the latest Puccini opera. It was not a bad orchestra, and we were no sooner seated than the first violin began to speak; to assert itself, as if it were suddenly done with mediocrity.
“We have been recognized,” Cressida said complacently. “What a good tone he has! Quite unusual. What does he look like?” She sat with her back to the musicians.
The violinist was standing, directing his men with his head and with the beak of his violin. He was a tall, gaunt young man, big-boned and rugged, in skin-tight clothes. His high forehead had a kind of luminous pallor, and his hair was jet black and somewhat stringy. His manner was excited and dramatic. At the end of the number he acknowledged the applause, and Cressida looked at him graciously over her shoulder. He swept her with a brilliant glance and bowed again.
“He looks as if he were poor, or in trouble,” Cressida said. “This is a hard winter for musicians.”
The violinist rummaged among some music piled on a chair, turning over the sheets with flurried rapidity, as if he were searching for a lost article of which he was in desperate need. Presently he placed some sheets upon the piano and began vehemently to explain something to the pianist. He bent over him, suggesting rhythms with his shoulders and running his bony fingers up and down the pages. When he stepped back to his place I noticed that the other players sat at ease, without raising their instruments.
“He is going to try something unusual,” I commented. “Looks as if it might be manuscript.”
It was something, at all events, that neither of us had heard before, though it was very much in the manner of the later Russian composers who were just beginning to be heard in New York. The young man made a brilliant dash of it, despite a lagging, scrambling accompaniment by the conservative pianist. This time we both applauded him vigorously, and again, as he bowed, he swept us with his eye.
The usual repertory of restaurant music followed, varied by a charming bit from Massenet’s “Manon,” then little known in this country. After we paid our check, Cressida took out one of her visiting-cards and wrote across the top of it: “We thank you for the unusual music and the pleasure your playing has given us.” She folded the card in the middle, and asked the waiter to give it to the director of the orchestra. Pausing at the door, while the porter dashed out to call a cab, we saw, in the wall mirror, a pair of wild black eyes following us quite despairingly from behind the palms at the other end of the room.
A week later I came upon some curious-looking manuscript songs on the piano in Cressida’s music-room. The text was in some Slavic tongue, with a French translation written underneath. Both the handwriting and the musical script were done in a manner experienced, even distinguished. I was looking at them when Cressida came in.
“Oh, yes!” she exclaimed. “I meant to ask you to try them over, Caroline. Poppas thinks they are very interesting. They are from that young violinist, you, remember—the one we noticed in the restaurant that evening. He sent them with such a nice letter. His name is Blasius Bouchalka (Bou-kalka), a Bohemian.”
I sat down at the piano and busied myself with the manuscript for some time, while Cressida dashed off necessary notes and wrote checks in a large square checkbook, six to a page. I supposed her immersed in sumptuary preoccupations when she suddenly looked over her shoulder and said: “Yes, that legend, Sarka, is the most interesting. Run it through a few times and I’ll try it over with you.”
There was another, “Dans les ombres des fôrets tristes,” which I thought quite as beautiful. They were fine songs; very individual, and each had that spontaneity which makes a song seem inevitable and once for all “done.”
“I wish he’d indicated his tempi a little more clearly,” I remarked as I finished Sarka for the third time.” It matters, because he really has something to say. An orchestral accompaniment would be better, I should think.”
“Yes, he sent the orchestral arrangement. Poppas has it. It works out beautifully—much color in the instrumentation. The English horn comes in so effectively there,” she rose and indicated the passage, “just right with the voice. I’ve asked him to come next Sunday, so please be here if you can.”
* * * *
Cressida was always at home to her friends on Sunday afternoon unless she was billed for the evening concert at the Opera House, in which case we were sufficiently advised by the daily press. Bouchalka must have been told to come early, for when I arrived on Sunday at four he and Cressida had the music-room quite to themselves and were standing by the piano in earnest conversation. In a few moments they were separated by other early arrivals, and I led Bouchalka across the hall to the drawing-room. The guests, as they came in, glanced at him curiously. He wore a dark blue suit, soft and rather baggy, with a short coat, and a high double-breasted vest with two rows of buttons coming up to the loops of his black tie. He spoke hurried, elliptical English, and very good French. I found him a fierce, a transfixing talker. His brilliant eyes, his gaunt hands, his white, deeply-lined forehead, all entered into his speech.
I asked him whether he had not recognized Madame Garnet at once when we entered the restaurant that evening, more than a week ago.
“Mais, cer
tainement! I hear her twice when she sings in the afternoon, and sometimes at night for the last act. I have a friend who buys a ticket for the first part, and he comes out and gives to me his pass-back check, and I return for the last act. That is convenient if I am broke.” He explained the trick with amusement but without embarrassment, as if it were a shift that we might any of us be put to.
I told him that I admired his skill with the violin, but his songs much more.
He threw out his red underlip and frowned. “Oh, I have no instrument! The violin I play from necessity; the flute, the piano, as it happens. For three years now I write all the time, and it spoils the hand for violin.”
When the maid brought him his tea, he took both muffins and cakes and told me that he was very hungry. He had to lunch and dine at the place where he played, and he got very tired of the food. “But since,” his black eyebrows nearly met in an acute angle, “but since, before, I eat at a bakery, with the slender brown roach on the pie, I guess I better let alone well enough.” He paused to drink his tea; as he tasted one of the cakes his face lit with sudden animation and he gazed across the hall after the maid with the tray—she was now holding it before the aged and ossified ’cellist of the Hampfstangle Quartette. “Des Gateaux!” he murmured feelingly. “Ou est-ce qu’elle peut trouver de tels gateaux ici à New York?”
I explained to him that Madame Garnet had an accomplished cook who made them,—an Austrian, I thought.
He shook his head. “Austrichienne? Je ne pense pas.”
Cressida was approaching with the Spanish soprano, Mme. Bartolas, who was all black velvet and long black feathers, with a lace veil over her rich pallor and even a little black patch on her chin. I beckoned them. “Tell me, Cressida, isn’t Ruzenka an Austrian?”
She looked surprised. “No, a Bohemian, though I got her in Vienna.” Bouchalka’s expression, and the remnant of a cake in his long fingers, gave her the connection. She laughed. “You like them? Of course. They must seem of your own soil. You shall have more of them.” She nodded and went away to greet a guest who had just come in.
A few moments later, Horace, then a beautiful lad in Eton clothes, brought another cup of tea and a plate of cakes for Bouchalka. We sat down in a corner, and talked about his songs. He was neither boastful nor deprecatory. He knew exactly in what respects they were excellent. I decided, as I watched his face, that he must be under thirty. His teeth were white, very irregular and interesting. The corrective methods of modern dentistry would have taken away half his good looks.
As we talked about his songs, his manner changed. Before that, he had seemed responsive and easily pleased. Now he grew abstracted, as if I had taken away his pleasant afternoon and wakened him to his miseries. When I mentioned Puccini, he held his head in his hands. “Why is it they like that always and always? A little, oh, yes, very nice! But so much, always the same thing! Why?” He pierced me with the despairing glance which had followed us out of the restaurant.
I asked him whether he had sent any of his songs to the musical publishers, and named one whom I knew to be discriminating. He shrugged his shoulders. “They not want Bohemian songs. They not want my music.”
Most people cannot become utterly poor; whatever happens, they can right themselves a little. But one felt that Bouchalka was the sort of person who might actually starve or blow his brains out. Something very important had been left out of his makeup or his education; something that we are not accustomed to miss in people.
Gradually the parlor was filled with little groups of friends, and I took Bouchalka back to the music-room where Cressida was surrounded by late comers; feathered women, with large sleeves and hats, young men of no importance, in frock coats, with shining hair and the smile which is intended to say so many flattering things but which really expresses little more than a desire to get on. The older men were standing about waiting for a word à deux with the hostess. To these people Bouchalka had nothing to say. He stood stiffly at the outer edge of the circle, watching Cressida with intent, impatient eyes, until, under the pretext of showing him a score, she drew him into the alcove at the back end of the long room, where she kept her musical library. Two persons could be quite withdrawn there, and yet be a part of the general friendly scene. Cressida took a score from the shelf, and sat down with Bouchalka upon the window-seat, the book open between them, though neither of them looked at it again. They fell to talking with great earnestness. At last the Bohemian pulled out a large, yellowing silver watch, held it up before him, and stared at it a moment as if it were an object of horror. He sprang up, bent over Cressida’s hand and murmured something, dashed into the hall and out of the front door without waiting for the maid to open it. He had worn no overcoat, apparently. It was then seven o’clock; he would surely be late at his post in the uptown restaurant.
After supper Cressida told me his story. His parents, both poor musicians—the mother a singer—died while he was yet a baby, and he was left to the care of an arbitrary uncle who resolved to make a priest of him. He was put into a monastery school and kept there. The organist and choir director, fortunately for Blasius, was an excellent musician, a man who had begun his career brilliantly, but who had met with crushing sorrows and disappointments in the world. He devoted himself to his talented pupil, and was the only teacher the young man ever had. At twenty-one, when he was ready for the novitiate, Blasius felt that the call of life was too strong for him, and he ran away out into a world of which he knew nothing. He tramped southward to Vienna, begging and playing his fiddle from town to town. There he fell in with a gipsy band which was being recruited for a Paris restaurant, and went with them to Paris. He played in cafés and in cheap theatres, did transcribing for a musical publisher, tried to get pupils. For four years he was the mouse, and hunger was the cat. She kept him on the jump. When he got work he did not understand why, when he lost a job he did not understand why. During the time when most of us acquire a practical sense, get a half-unconscious knowledge of hard facts and market values, he had been shut away from the world, fed like the pigeons in the bell-tower of his monastery. Bouchalka had now been in New York a year, and for all he knew about it, Cressida said, he might have landed the day before yesterday.
Several weeks went by, and as Bouchalka did not reappear on Tenth Street, Cressida and I went once more to the place where he had played, only to find another violinist leading the orchestra. We summoned the proprietor, a Swiss-Italian, polite and solicitous. He told us the gentleman was not playing there any more, was playing somewhere else, but he had forgotten where. We insisted upon talking to the old pianist, who at last reluctantly admitted that the Bohemian had been dismissed. He had arrived very late one Sunday night three weeks ago, and had hot words with the proprietor. He was a very talented fellow, but wild and not to be depended upon. The old man gave us the address of a French boarding house on Seventh Avenue where Bouchalka used to room. We drove there at once, but the woman who kept the place said he had gone away two weeks before—leaving no address, as he never got letters.
It took us several days to run Bouchalka down, but when we did find him Cressida promptly busied herself in his behalf. She sang his Sarka with the Metropolitan Opera orchestra at a Sunday night concert, she got him a position with the Symphony Orchestra, and persuaded the conservative Hempfstangle Quartette to play one of his chamber compositions from manuscript. She aroused the interest of a publisher in his work, and introduced him to people who were helpful to him.
By the new year Bouchalka was fairly on his feet. He had proper clothes now, and Cressida’s friends found him attractive. He was usually at her house on Sunday afternoons; so usually, indeed, that Poppas began pointedly to absent himself. When other guests arrived, the Bohemian and his patroness were always found at the critical point of discussion—at the piano, by the fire, in the alcove at the end of the room—both of them interested and animated. He was invariably respec
tful and admiring, deferring to her in every tone and gesture, and she was palpably pleased and flattered—as if all this were new to her and she were tasting the sweetness of a first success.
* * * *
One wild day in March Cressida burst tempestuously into my apartment and threw herself down, declaring that she had just come from the most trying rehearsal she had ever lived through. When I tried to question her about it, she replied absently and continued to shiver and crouch by the fire. Suddenly she rose, walked to the window and stood looking out over the Square, glittering with ice and rain and strewn with the wrecks of umbrellas. When she turned again, she approached me with determination.
“I shall have to ask you to go with me,” she said firmly. “That crazy Bouchalka has gone and got a pleurisy or something. It may be pneumonia. I’ve sent Dr. Brooks to him, but I can never tell anything from what a doctor says. I’ve got to see Bouchalka and his nurse, and what sort of place he’s in. I’ve been rehearsing all day and I’m singing tomorrow night; I can’t have so much on my mind. Can you come with me?”
I put on my furs and we went down to Cressida’s carriage. She gave the driver a number on Seventh Avenue, and then began feeling her throat with the alarmed expression which meant that she was not going to talk. We drove in silence to the address, and by this time it was growing dark. The French landlady was a cordial, comfortable person who took Cressida in at a glance and seemed much impressed. Cressida’s incognito was never successful. Her black gown was inconspicuous enough, but over it she wore a dark purple velvet carriage coat, lined with fur and furred at the cuffs and collar. The Frenchwoman’s eye ran over it delightedly and scrutinized the veil which only half concealed the well-known face behind it. She insisted upon conducting us up to the fourth floor herself, running ahead of us and turning up the gas jets in the dark, musty-smelling halls.
