A Village Stradivarius
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Kate Douglas Wiggin >> A Village Stradivarius
This etext was produced from the 1904 Gay and Bird edition by
David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
A Village Stradivarius
by Kate Douglas Wiggin
CHAPTER I
"Goodfellow, Puck and goblins,
Know more than any book.
Down with your doleful problems,
And court the sunny brook.
The south-winds are quick-witted,
The schools are sad and slow,
The masters quite omitted
The lore we care to know."
EMERSON'S April.
"Find the three hundred and seventeenth page, Davy, and begin at the
top of the right-hand column."
The boy turned the leaves of the old instruction book obediently, and
then began to read in a sing-song, monotonous tone:
"'One of Pag-pag'" -
"Pag-a-ni-ni's"
"'One of Paggernyner's' (I wish all the fellers in your stories
didn't have such tough old names!) 'most dis-as-ter-ous triumphs he
had when playing at Lord Holland's.' (Who was Lord Holland, uncle
Tony?) 'Some one asked him to im-provise on the violin the story of
a son who kills his father, runs a-way, becomes a high-way-man, falls
in love with a girl who will not listen to him; so he leads her to a
wild country site, suddenly jumping with her from a rock into an a-b-
y-s-s'"
"Abyss."
"'--a--rock--into--an--abyss, where they disappear for ever.
Paggernyner listened quietly, and when the story was at an end he
asked that all the lights should be distinguished.'"
"Look closer, Davy."
"'Should be EXtinguished. He then began playing, and so terrible was
the musical in-ter-pre-ta-tion of the idea which had been given him
that several of the ladies fainted, and the sal-salon-sAlon, when
relighted, looked like a battle-field.' Cracky! Wouldn't you like
to have been there, uncle Tony? But I don't believe anybody ever
played that way, do you?"
"Yes," said the listener, dreamily raising his sightless eyes to the
elm-tree that grew by the kitchen door. "I believe it, and I can
hear it myself when you read the story to me. I feel that the secret
of everything in the world that is beautiful, or true, or terrible,
is hidden in the strings of my violin, Davy, but only a master can
draw it from captivity."
"You make stories on your violin, too, uncle Tony, even if the ladies
don't faint away in heaps, and if the kitchen doesn't look like a
battle-field when you've finished. I'm glad it doesn't, for my part,
for I should have more housework to do than ever."
"Poor Davy! you couldn't hate housework any worse if you were a
woman; but it is all done for to-day. Now paint me one of your
pictures, laddie; make me see with your eyes."
The boy put down the book and leaped out of the open door, barely
touching the old millstone that served for a step. Taking a stand in
the well-worn path, he rested his hands on his hips, swept the
landscape with the glance of an eagle, and began like a young
improvisator:
"The sun is just dropping behind Brigadier Hill."
"What colour is it?"
"Red as fire, and there isn't anything near it--it's almost alone in
the sky; there's only teeny little white feather clouds here and
there. The bridge looks as if it was a silver string tying the two
sides of the river together. The water is pink where the sun shines
into it. All the leaves of the trees are kind of swimming in the red
light--I tell you, nunky, just as if I was looking through red glass.
The weather vane on Squire Bean's barn dazzles so the rooster seems
to be shooting gold arrows into the river. I can see the tip top of
Mount Washington where the peak of its snow-cap touches the pink sky.
The hen-house door is open. The chickens are all on their roost,
with their heads cuddled under their wings."
"Did you feed them?"
The boy clapped his hand over his mouth with a comical gesture of
penitence, and dashed into the shed for a panful of corn, which he
scattered over the ground, enticing the sleepy fowls by insinuating
calls of "Chick, chick, chick, chick! COME, biddy, biddy, biddy,
biddy! COME, chick, chick, chick, chick, chick!"
The man in the doorway smiled as over the misdemeanour of somebody
very dear and lovable, and rising from his chair felt his way to a
corner shelf, took down a box, and drew from it a violin swathed in a
silk bag. He removed the covering with reverential hands. The
tenderness of his face was like that of a young mother dressing or
undressing her child. As he fingered the instrument his hands seemed
to have become all eyes. They wandered caressingly over the polished
surface as if enamoured of the perfect thing that they had created,
lingering here and there with rapturous tenderness on some special
beauty--the graceful arch of the neck, the melting curves of the
cheeks, the delicious swell of the breasts.
When he had satisfied himself for the moment, he took the bow, and
lifting the violin under his chin, inclined his head fondly toward it
and began to play.
The tone at first seemed muffled, but had a curious bite, that began
in distant echoes, but after a few minutes' playing grew firmer and
clearer, ringing out at last with velvety richness and strength until
the atmosphere was satiated with harmony. No more ethereal note ever
flew out of a bird's throat than Anthony Croft set free from this
violin, his liebling, his "swan song," made in the year he had lost
his eyesight.
Anthony Croft had been the only son of his mother, and she a widow.
His boyhood had been exactly like that of all the other boys in
Edgewood, save that he hated school a trifle more, if possible, than
any of the others; though there was a unanimity of aversion in this
matter that surprised and wounded teachers and parents.
The school was the ordinary district school of that time; there were
not enough scholars for what Cyse Higgins called a "degraded" school.
The difference between Anthony and the other boys lay in the reason
for as well as the degree of his abhorrence.
He had come into the world a naked, starving human soul; he longed to
clothe himself, and he was hungry and ever hungrier for knowledge;
but never within the four walls of the village schoolhouse could he
seize hold of one fact that would yield him its secret sense, one
glimpse of clear light that would shine in upon the darkness of his
mind, one thought or word that would feed his soul.
The only place where his longings were ever stilled, where he seemed
at peace with himself, where he understood what he was made for, was
out of doors in the woods. When he should have been poring over the
sweet, palpitating mysteries of the multiplication table, his vagrant
gaze was always on the open window near which he sat. He could never
study when a fly buzzed on the window-pane; he was always standing on
the toes of his bare feet, trying to locate and understand the buzz
that puzzled him. The book was a mute, soulless thing that had no
relation to his inner world of thought and feeling. He turned ever
from the dead seven-times-six to the mystery of life about him.
He was never a special favourite with his teachers; that was scarcely
to be expected. In his very early years, his pockets were gone
through with every morning when he entered the school door, and the
contents, when confiscated, would comprise a jew's-harp, a bit of
catgut, screws whittled out of wood, tacks, spools, pins, and the
like. But when robbed of all these he could generally secrete a
fragment of india-rubber drawn from an old pair of suspenders, and
this, when put between his teeth and stretched to its utmost
capacity, would yield a delightful twang when played upon with the
forefinger. He could also fashion an interesting musical instrument
in his desk by means of spools and catgut and bits of broken glass.
The chief joy of his life was an old tuning-fork that the teacher of
the singing-school had given him, but, owing to the degrading and
arbitrary censorship of pockets that prevailed, he never dared bring
it into the schoolroom. There were ways, however, of evading
inexorable law and circumventing base injustice. He hid the precious
thing under a thistle just outside the window. The teacher had
sometimes a brief season of apathy on hot afternoons, when she was
hearing the primer class read, "I SEE A PIG. THE PIG IS BIG. THE
BIG PIG CAN DIG"; which stirring phrases were always punctuated by
the snores of the Hanks baby, who kept sinking down on his fat little
legs in the line and giving way to slumber during the lesson. At
such a moment Anthony slipped out of the window and snapped the
tuning-fork several times--just enough to save his soul from death--
and then slipped in again. He was caught occasionally, but not
often; and even when he was, there were mitigating circumstances, for
he was generally put under the teacher's desk for punishment. It was
a dark close, sultry spot, but when he was well seated, and had grown
tired of looking at the triangle of black elastic in the teacher's
"congress" shoe, and tired of wishing it was his instead of hers, he
would tie one end of a bit of thread to the button of his gingham
shirt, and, carrying it round his left ear several times, make
believe he was Paganini languishing in prison and playing on a violin
with a single string.
As he grew older there was no marked improvement, and Tony Croft was
by general assent counted the laziest boy in the village. That he
was lazy in certain matters merely because he was in a frenzy of
industry to pursue certain others had nothing to do with the case, of
course.
If any one had ever given him a task in which he could have seen
cause working to effect, in which he could have found by personal
experiment a single fact that belonged to him, his own by divine
right of discovery, he would have counted labour or study all joy.
He was one incarnate Why and How; one brooding wonder and
interrogation point. "Why does the sun drive away the stars? Why do
the leaves turn red and gold? What makes the seed swell in the
earth? From whence comes the life hidden in the egg under the bird's
breast? What holds the moon in the sky? Who regulates her shining?
Who moves the wind? Who made me, and what am I? Who, why, how,
whither? If I came from God but only lately, teach me his lessons
first, put me into vital relation with life and law, and then give me
your dead signs and equivalents for real things, that I may learn
more and more, and ever more and ever more." These were the
questions his eager soul was always asking of the outer world.
There was no spirit in Edgewood bold enough to conceive that Tony
learned anything in the woods, but as there was never sufficient
school money to keep the village seat of learning open more than half
the year, the boy educated himself at the fountain head of wisdom and
knowledge the other half. His mother, who owned him for a duckling
hatched from a hen's egg, and was never quite sure he would not turn
out a black sheep and a crooked stick to boot, was obliged to confess
that Tony had more useless information than any boy in the village.
He knew just where to find the first Mayflowers, and would bring home
the waxen beauties when other people had scarcely begun to think
about the spring. He could tell where to look for the rare fringed
gentian, the yellow violet, the Indian pipe. There were clefts in
the high rocks by the river side where, when every one else failed,
he could find harebells and columbines.
When his tasks were done, and the other boys were amusing themselves
each in his own way, you would find Tony lying flat on the pine-
needles in the woods, listening to the notes of the wild birds, and
imitating them patiently, till you could scarcely tell which was boy
and which was bird; and if you could, the birds couldn't, for many a
time he coaxed the bobolinks and thrushes to perch on the low boughs
above his head, where they chirped to him as if he were a feathered
brother. There was nothing about the building of nests with which he
was not familiar. He could have helped in the task, if the birds had
not been so shy, and if he had possessed beak and claw instead of
clumsy fingers. He would sit near a beehive for hours without
moving, or lie prone in the sandy road, under the full glare of the
sun, watching the ants acting out their human comedy; sometimes
surrounding a favourite hill with stones, that the comedy might not
be turned into tragedy by a careless footfall. The cottage on the
river road grew more and more to resemble a museum and herbarium as
the years went by, and the Widow Croft's weekly house-cleaning was a
matter that called for the exercise of Christian grace.
Still, Tony was a good son, affectionate, considerate, and obedient.
His mother had no idea that he would ever be able, or indeed willing,
to make a living; but there was a forest of young timber growing up,
a small hay farm to depend upon, and a little hoard that would keep
him out of the poorhouse when she died and left him to his own
devices. It never occurred to her that he was in any way remarkable.
If he were difficult to understand, it reflected more upon his
eccentricity than upon her density. What was a woman to do with a
boy of twelve who, when she urged him to drop the old guitar he was
taking apart and hurry off to school, cried, "Oh, mother! when there
is so much to learn in this world, it is wicked, wicked, to waste
time in school."
About this period Tony spent hours in the attic arranging bottles and
tumblers into a musical scale. He also invented an instrument made
of small and great, long and short pins, driven into soft board to
different depths, and when the widow passed his door on the way to
bed she invariably saw this barbaric thing locked to the boy's
breast, for he often played himself to sleep with it.
At fifteen he had taken to pieces and put together again,
strengthened, soldered, mended, and braced, every accordion, guitar,
melodeon, dulcimer, and fiddle in Edgewood, Pleasant River, and the
neighbouring villages. There was a little money to be earned in this
way, but very little, as people in general regarded this "tinkering"
as a pleasing diversion in which they could indulge him without
danger. As an example of this attitude, Dr. Berry's wife's melodeon
had lost two stops, the pedals had severed connection with the rest
of the works, it wheezed like an asthmatic, and two black keys were
missing. Anthony worked more than a week on its rehabilitation, and
received in return Mrs. Berry's promise that the doctor would "pull a
tooth" for him some time! This, of course, was a guerdon for the
future, but it seemed pathetically distant to the lad who had never
had a toothache in his life. He had to plead with Cyse Higgins for a
week before that prudent young farmer would allow him to touch his
five-dollar fiddle. He obtained permission at last only by offering
to give Cyse his calf in case he spoiled the violin. "That seems
square," said Cyse doubtfully, "but after all, you can't play on a
calf!" "Neither will your fiddle give milk, if you keep it long
enough," retorted Tony; and this argument was convincing.
So great was his confidence in Tony's skill that Squire Bean trusted
his father's violin to him, one that had been bought in Berlin
seventy years before. It had been hanging on the attic wall for a
half-century, so that the back was split in twain, the sound-post
lost, the neck and the tailpiece cracked. The lad took it home, and
studied it for two whole evenings before the open fire. The problem
of restoring it was quite beyond his abilities. He finally took the
savings of two summers' "blueberry money" and walked sixteen miles to
the nearest town, where he bought a book called "The Practical
Violinist." The supplement proved to be a mine of wealth. Even the
headings appealed to his imagination and intoxicated him with their
suggestions--On Scraping, Splitting, and Repairing Violins, Violin
Players, Great Violinists, Solo Playing, &c.; and at the very end a
Treatise on the Construction, Preservation, Repair, and Improvement
of the Violin, by Jacob Augustus Friedheim, Instrument Maker to the
Court of the Archduke of Weimar.
There was a good deal of moral advice in the preface that sadly
puzzled the boy, who was always in a condition of chronic amazement
at the village disapprobation of his favourite fiddle. That the
violin did not in some way receive the confidence enjoyed by other
musical instruments, he perceived from various paragraphs written by
the worthy author of "The Practical Violinist," as for example:
"Some very excellent Christian people hold a strong prejudice against
the violin because they have always known it associated with dancing
and dissipation. Let it be understood that your violin is
'converted,' and such an objection will no longer lie against it . .
. Many delightful hours may be enjoyed by a young man, if he has
obtained a respectable knowledge of his instrument, who otherwise
would find the time hang heavy on his hands; or, for want of some
better amusement, would frequent the dangerous and destructive paths
of vice and be ruined for ever. I am in hopes, therefore, my dear
young pupil, that your violin will occupy your attention at just
those very times when, if you were immoral or dissipated, you would
be at the grogshop, gaming-table, or among vicious females. Such a
use of the violin, notwithstanding the prejudices many hold against
it, must contribute to virtue, and furnish abundance of innocent and
entirely unobjectionable amusement. These are the views with which I
hope you have adopted it, and will continue to cherish and cultivate
it."
CHAPTER II
There is no bard in all the choir,
. . .
Not one of all can put in verse,
Or to this presence could rehearse
The sights and voices ravishing
The boy knew on the hills in spring,
When pacing through the oaks he heard
Sharp queries of the sentry-bird,
The heavy grouse's sudden whir,
The rattle of the kingfisher."
EMERSON'S Harp.
Now began an era of infinite happiness, of days that were never long
enough, of evenings when bedtime came all too soon. Oh, that there
had been some good angel who would have taken in hand Anthony Croft
the boy, and, training the powers that pointed so unmistakably in
certain directions, given to the world the genius of Anthony Croft,
potential instrument maker to the court of St. Cecilia; for it was
not only that he had the fingers of a wizard; his ear caught the
faintest breath of harmony or hint of discord, as
"Fairy folk a-listening
Hear the seed sprout in the spring,
And for music to their dance
Hear the hedge-rows wake from trance;
Sap that trembles into buds
Sending little rhythmic floods
Of fairy sound in fairy ears.
Thus all beauty that appears
Has birth as sound to finer sense
And lighter-clad intelligence."
As the universe is all mechanism to one man, all form and colour to
another, so to Anthony Croft the world was all melody.
Notwithstanding these many gifts and possibilities, the doctor's wife
advised the Widow Croft to make a plumber of him, intimating
delicately that these freaks of nature, while playing no apparent
part in the divine economy, could sometimes be made self-supporting.
The seventeenth year of his life marked a definite epoch in his
development. He studied Jacob Friedheim's treatise until he knew the
characteristics of all the great violin models, from the Amatis,
Hieronymus, Antonius, and Nicolas, to those of Stradivarius,
Guarnerius, and Steiner.
It was in this year, also, that he made a very precious discovery.
While browsing in the rubbish in Squire Bean's garret to see if he
could find the missing sound-post of the old violin, he came upon a
billet of wood wrapped in cloth and paper. When unwrapped, it was
plainly labelled "Wood from the Bean Maple at Pleasant Point; the
biggest maple in York County, and believed to be one of the biggest
in the State of Maine." Anthony found that the oldest inhabitant of
Pleasant River remembered the stump of the tree, and that the boys
used to jump over it and admire its proportions whenever they went
fishing at the Point. The wood, therefore, was perhaps eighty or
ninety years old. The squire agreed willingly that it should be used
to mend the ancient violin, and told Tony he should have what was
left for himself. When, by careful calculation, he found that the
remainder would make a whole violin, he laid it reverently away for
another twenty years, so that he should be sure it had completed its
century of patient waiting for service, and falling on his knees by
his bedside said, "I thank Thee, Heavenly Father, for this precious
gift, and I promise from this moment to gather the most beautiful
wood I can find, and lay it by where it can be used some time to make
perfect violins, so that if any creature as poor and as helpless as I
am needs the wherewithal to do good work, I shall have helped him as
Thou hast helped me." And according to his promise so he did, and
the pieces of richly curled maple, of sycamore, and of spruce began
to accumulate. They were cut from the sunny side of the trees, in
just the right season of the year, split so as to have a full inch
thickness towards the bark, and a quarter-inch towards the heart.
They were then laid for weeks under one of the falls in Wine Brook,
where the musical tinkle, tinkle of the stream fell on the wood
already wrought upon by years of sunshine and choruses of singing
birds.
This boy, toiling not alone for himself, but with full and conscious
purpose for posterity also, was he not worthy to wear the mantle of
Antonius Stradivarius?
"That plain white-aproned man who stood at work
Patient and accurate full fourscore years,
Cherished his sight and touch by temperance
And since keen sense is love of perfectness,
Made perfect violins, the needed paths
For inspiration and high mastery."
And as if the year were not full enough of glory, the school-teacher
sent him a book with a wonderful poem in it.
That summer's teaching had been the freak of a college student, who
had gone back to his senior year strengthened by his experience of
village life. Anthony Croft, who was only three or four years his
junior, had been his favourite pupil and companion.
"How does Tony get along?" asked the Widow Croft when the teacher
came to call.
"Tony? Oh, I can't teach him anything."
Tears sprang to the mother's eyes.
"I know he ain't much on book learning," she said apologetically,
"but I'm bound he don't make you no trouble in deportment."
"I mean," said the school-teacher gravely, "that I can show him how
to read a little Latin and do a little geometry, but he knows as much
in one day as I shall ever know in a year."
Tony crouched by the old fireplace in the winter evenings, dropping
his knife or his compasses a moment to read aloud to his mother, who
sat in the opposite corner knitting:
"Of old Antonio Stradivari--him
Who a good century and a half ago
Put his true work in the brown instrument,
And by the nice adjustment of its frame
Gave it responsive life, continuous
With the master's finger-tips, and perfected
Like them by delicate rectitude of use."
The mother listened with painful intentness. "I like the sound of
it," she said, "but I can't hardly say I take in the full sense."
"Why, mother," said the lad, in a rare moment of self-expression,
"you know the poetry says he cherished his sight and touch by
temperance; that an idiot might see a straggling line and be content,
but he had an eye that winced at false work, and loved the true.
When it says his finger-tips were perfected by delicate rectitude of
use, I think it means doing everything as it is done in heaven, and
that anybody who wants to make a perfect violin must keep his eye
open to all the beautiful things God has made, and his ear open to
all the music he has put into the world, and then never let his hands
touch a piece of work that is crooked or straggling or false, till,
after years and years of rightness, they are fit to make a violin
like the squire's, a violin that can say everything, a violin that an
angel wouldn't be ashamed to play on."
Do these words seem likely ones to fall from the lips of a lad who
had been at the tail of his class ever since his primer days? Well,
Anthony was seventeen now, and he was "educated," in spite of sorry
recitations--educated, the Lord knows how! Yes, in point of fact the
Lord does know how! He knows how the drill and pressure of the daily
task, still more the presence of the high ideal, the inspiration
working from within, how these educate us.
The blind Anthony Croft sitting in the kitchen doorway had seemingly
missed the heights of life he might have trod, and had walked his
close on fifty years through level meadows of mediocrity, a witch in
every finger-tip waiting to be set to work, head among the clouds,
feet stumbling, eyes and ears open to hear God's secret thought;
seeing and hearing it, too, but lacking force to speak it forth
again; for while imperious genius surmounts all obstacles, brushes
laws and formulas from its horizon, and with its own free soul sees
its "path and the outlets of the sky," potential genius for ever
needs an angel of deliverance to set it free.