the sound of the telephone bell brought the tuner’s mild blue eyes from his plate.
“f sharp,” he remarked. “same pitch as the bell in my shop.”
“how extraordinary that you can name the pitch of a sound offhand!” exclaimed the professor, eyeing him with interest.
“all in the way of business,” replied the tuner placidly. “no, thank you, ma’arm, no cream on the pudding. i never paint the lily, as father used to say. . . . i’d not have been tuning pianos all over the world with a ‘come again’ always behind me if i hadn’t had something of an ear, would i, now?”
“but accurate to such a degree! i thought one tuned by chords and melodies and—and that sort of thing.”
“chords! melodies!” repeated the tuner with professional scorn. “of course some do muddle along that way, but there’s nothing in it. the octave, there’s the interval to give the test to a man’s ear.”
“you’re greek in your preferences,” commented the professor with a smile. “the greeks, you know, knew nothing of harmony as we understand it. their only interval was the octave—they called it magadizing.”
“well now, to think of it!” said the tuner. “i p. 114wish i’d known. there was a greek sailor on the silvershell, and i might have had a chat with him about his music.”
“i was referring to the ancient greeks,” the professor explained. “i am not familiar with modern greek music, but i imagine it is very much like modern music everywhere.”
“of course,” agreed the tuner cynically. “comic operas, chords that give all ten fingers something to do—that’s music as they write it now. and i’m not saying that it hasn’t its place,” he went on. “it’s human, at least. professionally, i admire the octave, but when i sit down in the evening for a bit of a rest and me daughter nora plays ‘vesper chimes,’ the way those chords pile up on each other don’t hurt me the way it would some. after all, perfection’s apt to be a bit bleak, isn’t it? there was cartwright, for instance. the octave came to be the only perfect interval for him—poor cartwright!”
“cartwright?” repeated the professor curiously.
“haven’t i ever told you about cartwright? hm! well!” he pushed his chair back a little from the table, fixed his eyes thoughtfully on the antics of a pair of orioles building a nest outside the window, and meditated for a moment. we were too wise to break the silence, for we knew that the tuner was digging up from the storehouse of a rich memory some fresh chapter in the odyssey of his wanderings. after a little he began his tale.
what the professor here said about the greeks and their octaves set me thinking about cartwright. p. 115i haven’t often spoken of him, for there’s not much to tell that most people would understand. molly, now, she always speaks of him as that poor crazy mr. cartwright. the perfect interval is nonsense, molly says. red wing’s good enough for her. . . but i’d better begin at the beginning.
it was the time molly and i were taking our wedding trip on the tramp schooner silvershell, and we were cruising about the pacific after copra and vanilla and all those cargoes that sound so romantic when one’s young. one of the ports we were bound for was a place called taku, down in the dangerous archipelago. the captain warned us that it would be a bad trip.
“but you ought to make your fortune there,” he says, “for i’ll lay a wager you’re the first tuner that’s ever visited the place. whether you get home to spend your money or not, that’s another matter. that’s on the knees of the gods,” says the captain, who was an oxford man and had picked up some of his expressions there.
when we got in among the islands i saw what he meant. coral they were, and reefs above water and below. molly and i slept in our life preservers night after night, and daytime we could scarcely go down to meals for wondering how we’d get through that boiling sea of breakers and hidden peaks of coral. we’d some narrow shaves, too, but we made taku, and anchored one evening in a lagoon that looked as if it might have been painted on a colored calendar, palms and parrots and native huts and all.
the silvershell was to be in port some time, and the captain told us to look about as much as we liked.
p. 116“there’s an organ up at the mission,” he says. “it’s got asthma or something. if you can cure it, i’ll gladly foot the bill. i’m a church-going man when i’m ashore,” says the captain, who liked his joke, “but that organ puts me clean off religion.”
well, i made a good job of the organ, and very grateful the ladies were for it, too. then i went up to the british commissioner’s, where i was told there was a piano needing attention. davidson, the commissioner, was an uncommonly decent chap, and he put me in the way of two or three more odd bits of tuning and repairing, besides having his own instrument put into shape. the missionary ladies had suggested that molly and i stay with them while the silvershell was in port, so i could put in a tidy bit of work in a day. but there were only twenty white families in the place, and i’d about gone through the work when one afternoon davidson stopped me as i was going back to the mission, and asked me to step up to the house with him, as a friend of his wanted to talk with me about rather a large job of repairing he wished done.
the friend was cartwright. i shall never forget that first sight of him, not to my dying day. he was standing in the big music room where i’d been working for davidson two or three days before, and as we came in he turned and gave us such a look!
“oh, it’s you!” he said, as if he’d expected something terrible to come in the door. and then, as davidson introduced us, he nodded in an offhand sort of way. he was the only man i’ve ever called beautiful. beautiful was the only word to describe him. “golden lads,”—i once heard an p. 117actor spout about them at a play, and now, when i remember that expression, i think of cartwright. he was a golden lad, for all his haunted, unhappy face.
“i’ve a piano at home that wants looking after,” he says to me after a moment. “rather a large job, but if you are willing to go back with me in the morning i’ll make it worth your while.”
“if it isn’t too far away,” i said. “i’m only stopping here while the silvershell is in port.”
“not so far,” says cartwright. “i could have you back here in three or four days. and i’ll make it worth your while.” in spite of his off-handedness, it was plain he was keen on having me come.
of course i said i’d go, and then cartwright nodded and said something about my being at the wharf about five, and left us, just like that.
“but he never told me what was needed for the piano,” i said to davidson.
“about everything, i fancy,” davidson answers gruffly. “it hasn’t been touched in ten years.”
“ten years!” i said. “he’s no business having a piano if he cares no more for it than that.”
“he cared too much for it, perhaps,” davidson said in a peculiar tone. he took out his pipe and fussed with it, then he went on. “perhaps i ought to tell you. he hasn’t touched the piano since the night his wife drowned herself. . . . i was there at the time. cartwright and charlotte had been singing together.”
“was charlotte his wife?”
“his cousin, sir john brooke’s daughter. sir john is my chief, you know. they are expected back from england almost any day now.”
davidson’s face had gone quite red at the p. 118mention of the girl’s name, and all at once i guessed why he had been so keen about having his piano in shape. i wondered if it was for this charlotte’s sake that cartwright, too, was preparing.
“cartwright’s wife was the daughter of old miakela, the native chief,” was the surprising information davidson offered me next. “she had been educated at a convent in manila, and she was very beautiful in a cold, foreign way. i think, though, it was her voice that first attracted cartwright. it was perfect; it made other quite nice voices sound coarse and shrill. cartwright had come out to taku to visit his uncle, and he met the girl here the evening she came back from manila. the next day he married her—rode over the mountains to ask her father’s permission. that old savage—fancy! there was a huge row with sir john, and cartwright took the girl and went to live on a little atoll about forty miles from here. . . . miss charlotte hadn’t come out from school in england then. she came back the next year. . . that’s how it happened.”
as a matter of fact he really hadn’t told me how it happened at all, but he began to talk of other things, and after a bit i said good-night, and went back to tell molly about my new job.
i wish you could have seen the lagoon the next morning when i went down to meet cartwright. the old coral wharf was flushed with pink that shaded into mauve below the water, and the mauve went amethyst, and then violet blue out where the silvershell slept at her anchor in the middle of the lagoon. and still! not a ripple anywhere until a high-prowed native canoe slipped out from a pool of shadow under the palms along the shore, p. 119cutting through the glassy water like a boat in a dream. as she neared the wharf the sun jumped up from the sea, and cartwright, all in white, stood up in the stern and shaded his eyes with his hand. he was a picture, his haunted beauty above the bronzed backs of the rowers.
he apologized for bringing me out so early, then seemed to forget all about me and sat silent, his eyes on the horizon line. not that i minded. i wanted to be let alone, so i could look about me as we slipped along over a sea that seemed to have no end.
once outside the lagoon, the men bent to their paddles with a will, breaking into a melody that reminded me of some hymn tune. they gave it a foreign twist by ending each line on the octave.
“wonderful pitch!” i said.
“what’s that?” asked cartwright, jerking his head round. i repeated what i’d said. he glared at me wildly, then seemed to pull himself together, and muttered some sort of reply.
“well, if a simple speech has that effect on you, my lad, i’ll sit silent,” i said to myself, and silent i did sit the rest of the trip.
about the middle of the morning a bunch of what looked like feather clusters rose out of the sea in front of us. pretty soon i could see a pinky ridge below, then a line of white. the men put up a brown sail, and in another hour we slid between two lines of breakers into the tiniest lagoon i ever saw, lying in the arms of a crescent-shaped atoll. the whole thing could not have been more than four or five miles long and fifty feet high at the ridge. there was a group of native huts on the beach and a rambling house above, set in a grove p. 120of breadfruit and citron and scarlet flame trees. the rest of the island was bare except for a brush of pandanus along the crest and a group of coconut palms on the point, their trunks leaning seaward, as if they were looking for something on the horizon. a lonely spot, yet with a sharp, gemlike beauty of its own.
“won’t you come up and rest a bit?” cartwright asked. “you had an early start this morning.”
i said i’d rather go right to work. i hadn’t forgotten the way he glared at me in the boat, and i wasn’t going to put myself in the way of another look like that.
“right, then; i’ll show you the piano,” he says. but he didn’t move, only stood staring at me with the look of a small boy that had got himself into some trouble, and was wondering if i could help him out.
suddenly he started off almost on a run, and led me around the shore to the point below the coconut palms, where a pavilion stood in a thick clump of trees. the place looked as if it hadn’t been visited for years. the path was choked with undergrowth, and the doorway was almost hidden by twisted ropes of lianas, growing down serpent fashion from the branches overhead.
“a sweet place to keep a piano,” i thought to myself. i could hardly believe it was the piano he was bringing me to. but as we reached the door i saw it in its wrapping of tarpaulin, half hid under forest rubbish that had filtered through the broken thatch of the roof. as i lifted one corner of the cover, something jumped up with a rush of wings and went screaming past my head. it gave me a proper fright.
p. 121“just a parrot,” cartwright said. “you’ve upset her nest, you see. be careful when you lift the lid. there may be centipedes inside.”
“if you’ll clear the live stock off the outside, i’ll see to the inside,” i said. “i should think a cheaper piano would have done the parrots to nest in, sir.
“it seems odd to you,” he said meekly, wrinkling his forehead a little. “i wish i could explain—”
he caught himself up, and i answered never a word, but began examining the piano. it was a broadwood grand, but the state it was in! i’d hard work not to give him a further piece of my mind.
for three days i worked at the poor thing. hammers eaten off by the white ants, wires that the sea rust had done for, cracked keys, nothing really in shape but the sounding board. and all the time i was working the parrots kept screaming over my head, the trades blew through the torn thatch of palms, the surf beat on the pink and purple reefs beyond the point, and i kept thinking what a queer start it all was and how much i’d have to tell molly when i got back.
now and again cartwright would stop a few minutes in the doorway and make jerky conversation, eyeing the piano like a starving man the while. he stopped quite a time the third morning. i was busy tuning and hadn’t much to say, but gradually he came nearer.
“how’s it coming on?” he asked.
“all in shape but one string,” i said. “try the tone of it, sir.”
“i mustn’t touch it, i mustn’t touch it,” he says p. 122to himself, but all the time he was coming closer, as if something was pulling him on. he put out his hand and struck b flat octave.
“the upper b is mute!” he cries.
i explained that the string had broken twice, and i hadn’t got around to putting another in.
“broken!” he says wildly. “she’s not going to have it there. and now i’ll not get the sound out of my head again!”
i suppose he saw something in my face that made him recollect himself. it was pitiful to see him pull himself together.
“do your best with it, old chap,” he says hurriedly. “i’m depending on you. my uncle and cousin are to be back from england soon. i—i want everything right when my cousin charlotte comes.”
he spoke the girl’s name as if it were a charm.
that evening, as we were smoking, he began to talk of his cousin again. she’d stayed with his people while she was going to school, he told me, and she and cartwright had been great friends.
“she was comforting,” he said. “she made one feel happy and—and normal.” then he said, in a tone that sounded as if he expected me to contradict him: “she had a good ear for music, too. not perfect, of course. . . . did you ever know any one with an ear so perfect that only the eighth interval satisfied them?”
“one or two,” i said, wondering what he was driving at now. “they were cranks, though. one should love music in reason, in my opinion.”
“in reason, that’s it,” cartwright repeated in a low tone. “my cousin loved it in reason. i couldn’t. perfection—i was tortured with the idea.”
p. 123i waited, and after a little he went on.
“i’ve never been able to care for things in reason. i wanted perfection. music, love, i longed to lose myself in them, but couldn’t, because always something jarred, and then i grew cold. my cousin charlotte used to laugh at me. she had a sweet voice. not perfect, though, and sometimes it would irritate me to madness to hear the flaws that most people didn’t even notice. and yet even at sixteen charlotte was dearer to me than any other creature on earth.
“then i came out to taku, and i met lulukuila. she was beautiful beyond anything i had ever dreamed. she made other women look clumsy beside her. she stayed overnight at my uncle’s, and next day an escort came from the old chief, her father—six savages in pandanus kilts and necklaces. those creatures came to take the very flower of womanhood back to uncivilized surroundings. i can’t tell you how horrible it seemed to me. and so i married her.”
cartwright jumped up, and began walking up and down. after a while he switched off on another tack.
“her voice was as perfect as her face,” he said, “and her sense of pitch was absolute. those first days we used to go out to the point where the pavilion stands, and sit looking out over the reefs, and i thought i’d found happiness at last. i liked to hear her answer a certain note that the sea sounds in the reefs yonder when the tide is right. she would take up the note an octave higher, and it was thrilling, the perfection of her pitch. i sent home for the piano, imagining that it would be a bond between us. i thought i’d teach her the songs charlotte and i used to sing together.
p. 124“but she hated the piano,” cartwright brought out in a muffled voice. “i suppose i was rather a fool over it at first. i was so hungry for familiar music. lulukuila couldn’t bear the music i’d grown up with. it brought out alien traits in her, gusts of passion, fits of moodiness. octaves, those she’d listen to. once when i filled in an octave she jumped up and caught my hands. i remember yet how she looked.
“‘you are drawn by the many voices,’ she said. ‘there should, be only one for you.’
“she went off to the pavilion then, and when i went to find her she was singing, following that sound the surf made on the reefs. the perfection of her pitch made me shiver. i began to hate it then. i saw that lulukuila was going to destroy my pleasure in the music i had loved. she was robbing me—”
i don’t believe cartwright was talking to any one in particular by this time. his voice dropped, and i missed a lot till i heard him mention his cousin. he stopped then, and looked at me for the first time.
“my uncle threw me over when i married lulukuila,” he said, “but when my cousin charlotte came out from england she made her father come over with her. she brought davidson too—good sort, davidson.
“i must have been homesick, for the sight of them seemed to wake me from a nightmare. i remember we were very jolly at dinner. afterward charlotte and i sang. i was thinking how good it was to hear the music of home again, when i caught sight of lulukuila’s face in a shaft of light that reached out to where the rest were p. 125sitting. her face was white, and her teeth were biting her lip.
“charlotte stopped playing just then, and asked me why i had broken into the octave. the chord, she said, was so much prettier. i couldn’t tell her that it was lulukuila’s interval haunting me. i hadn’t even known i was singing an octave,” cartwright added with a sudden laugh. then he went on.
“we didn’t sing any more, but went out to join the others. lulukuila wasn’t there. i was just asking davidson where she had gone, when i heard a splash down by the lagoon. all in a flash i remembered how her face had looked in the lamplight, and i started off down the path. . . . i got there too late.”
after a while he began muttering in a disconnected sort of way. “she had her way. i’ve never touched the piano since. surely i have the right now, though, now charlotte’s coming back—a little happiness.”
“that’s the thing to think of now, sir,” i says, wondering if i should call his man or leave him to talk himself out. “you weren’t to blame for what happened. think of your cousin now.”
“my cousin, yes,” cartwright murmured. he pulled himself up with a sharp breath.
“i’m afraid i’ve been talking an uncommon lot,” he said in his ordinary tone. “it’s late. you must be wanting to turn in.”
we commented on the sultriness of the night as we parted. the stars were hidden in a sort of murk, and the air had grown so still that the beetles bumping against the banana leaves overhead startled one like the crack of artillery.
p. 126inside i found simmons, cartwright’s servant, tapping the barometer.
“it’s fallen uncommonly fast,” simmons said to me. “just as it did before the hurricane five years ago.
“the hurricane!” i said. “did it do much damage?”
“not to speak of,” simmons said. “some of the native huts were swept away when the water backed up into the lagoon, but the people had time to get up here. there’s no saying what might have happened if the water had come up two feet higher.”
“i hope there isn’t going to be a hurricane this time,” i said, thinking of molly.
“i hope so, i’m sure,” says simmons, in an undertaker’s voice.
it took more than a falling barometer to put me off sleep those days, and i was off sounder than usual that night. i waked at last in a bedlam of sound, wailing of wind, cracking of branches, and the thunder of surf from the barrier reef.
“it’s the hurricane that owl simmons was wishing on us,” i thought. i struck a match to find my clothes, but a gust of wind puffed it out. i was just trying for the third time, when simmons came in, carrying one of the two ship’s lanterns cartwright kept by the outer door.
“do you know where mr. cartwright is?” simmons says.
“i? no. isn’t he in bed?”
simmons shook his head. “i’m afraid he’s gone down to the pavilion. he began to worry about the piano. i see the other lantern’s gone. i must go after him.”
p. 127“i’ll come with you, then,” i said. “just hold the light while i find my clothes.”
ordinarily that yorkshire face of simmons had no more expression than a granite slab, but he looked human enough now. if he cared for any earthly creature it was cartwright. i’d not been in the house three days without finding that out.
i had a start as we passed through the big room, for the floor was covered with figures stretched out like corpses on the mats. “from the huts on the beach,” simmons explained. “that’s what makes me think it’s going to be a bad storm.”
he braced himself to hold the door open for me, and added in a sudden shout as the roar of the storm came about us: “a little harder than last time, and the pavilion would go.”
the path to the pavilion ran just above the coral shingle along the foot of the ridge. ordinarily it was ten feet above high tide, but as we struggled on, hugging the bank to keep from being blown flat by the wind, i could catch a glimpse of creaming, sullen-looking water not two yards away. slipping up quietly it was, and the soundlessness of its rising was more uncanny than all the bustle and roar on the reefs outside.
we had a struggle to get on, and simmons hung on to me to keep me from being blown into the lagoon. i began to wish i hadn’t come, and i thought of the peaceful mission house in taku and of molly.
“mr. cartwright’s there,” simmons says suddenly in my ear. “i see his light. hang tight. the wind’s worse out here.”
and it was. an awful clap came, driving us to our knees. i saw a huge bulk crash down between us and the pavilion. the light disappeared.
p. 128“the breadfruit tree,” said simmons, in a hoarse voice. he clawed his way over the fallen branches and i managed to follow, shivering to think of what a misstep would do for me. at last we made out cartwright struggling in the wreckage brought down by the fallen tree.
“you, simmons?” he cried. “quick! give a hand with this piano. we must get it to higher ground.”
his voice sounded sane enough, but it was the speech of a crazy man. the only path up the ridge was a mere goat trail, fully exposed to the wind. and cartwright was suggesting our carrying the piano up that! simmons jerked his lantern up to cartwright’s face. there was wildness with a vengeance. but my word! how beautiful he looked with his fair, tossed hair, and his eyes purple black with excitement.
“it’s you we’ve come for, sir,” simmons says to him. “the water’s backing up fast. there’s no time to lose.”
“we must save the piano first,” cartwright says insistently. a lull had fallen, and his voice sounded very clear. simmons made a desperate gesture.
“it’s gathering for worse,” he muttered. i took a hand.
“if that wind comes up again we’ll have to scramble to save our skins,” i shouted. “it isn’t humanly possible for us to move the piano. come, sir, while there’s time!”
“and desert it again?” he asks with a strange little smile. “you’re asking too much of me, old chap. what about charlotte?”
“she won’t care a hang about the piano!” i could have stamped my foot at him. “it’s you p. 129she’ll be worrying about. don’t be an ass.” that shows how beyond myself i was, that i could speak to him that way. a long, ominous roll shook the silence.
“it’s the surf coming over the reefs,” simmons says in a hushed voice.
“by jove, you’re right!” cartwright exclaims, throwing back his head. his voice was boyish and energetic. “come on, we must make a dash for it.” and jerking up the lantern he fairly herded us through the tangle to the cliff.
there the gale broke loose on us again. we lay flat on our faces, clinging for dear life to the stems of the stout little pandanus palms. it was like a beast, that wind. it sucked the breath from our mouths, it pounded us and shrieked at us and mocked us till we were half dead from the sheer, cruel force of it. we could scarcely think. once i had a vision of those huddled figures on the mats, and wondered if the house was still standing, and once i thought of molly, and hoped she was saying a prayer for me. then all thought was wiped out as, with a shaking of the very cliff, the surf came racing into the lagoon, sending the spray up fifty feet, and drenching us where we lay.
“the piano!” cartwright shouted, struggling to get up. simmons hauled him down, crying to him that it was no use to think of the piano. cartwright staved quiet a moment till another of those uncanny silences fell.
“now we can go down,” cartwright said pleadingly. “i can’t lose my chance of happiness again. the piano—”
the words died on his lips. through the thunder of the surf came a single long-drawn note, clear and unearthly sweet.
p. 130“b flat,” i said, scarcely knowing that i spoke. cartwright gave a wild laugh.
“you hear it? the voice from the reefs. why doesn’t lulukuila answer?”
well, i can only tell you what happened next, and you may believe it or not. from below us there came another note, making a perfect octave. never before or since have i heard anything so exquisite or so horrible. then there was a hideous discord—and silence.
“lulukuila!” cartwright cried. “she is taking it from me—my only chance of happiness—”
and before we could stop him he was gone.
we tried to follow him, but the wind caught us again at the edge of the ridge. i’d have been over and lost if it hadn’t been for simmons. i think i must have fainted from the shock of it. there’s a blank about there, though the rest of the night seemed centuries long.
the wind stopped at sunrise, and we made our way home along the ridge, looking down on a beach swept clean of every human mark, pavilion, grove, native huts and all. the house was still standing, but in a wreck of fallen branches and torn lianas. scared servants and ashen-faced women and children came out to meet us, and began asking for their master. simmons, granite faced as ever, did not answer them, but pushed on down to the beach.
cartwright had come home ahead of us. he was lying on the shore, unscarred except for a faint streak of blue across one temple. he looked beautiful as some sleeping creature of the sea. the wreck of the piano was just above him. simmons’ composure gave way when he saw that.
“you’ve broken the thing he loved, and you’ve p. 131killed him, too. i hope you’re satisfied at last!” he snarled, shaking his fist at the lagoon. i wondered if he was talking to lulukuila. it was a terrifying outburst—from a man like simmons.
next morning they came over from taku to look for us. the sea was smiling as ever, and the little launch came dancing over the rose and amethyst water as if there never had been a storm to ruffle it. i caught sight of molly first, then i noticed another woman, sitting between her and davidson. as she leaned forward to search the shore i was startled with the likeness of her face to cartwright’s. yet there was a difference. her beauty was gracious and human, and—well, comfortable is the only word i can think of for it.
as they came near the beach she saw just simmons and me and the staring natives. she cried out sharply and swayed a little. i saw davidson put his arm out as if he would shield her from a blow. faithful fellow, davidson, and he got his reward at last.
it was cartwright’s charlotte, and cartwright was not there to meet her. lulukuila had seen to that.
margaret adelaide wilson.
