Part 25 (1/2)

There were days when the front was really quiet. The thin trickle of rifle-fire only accentuated the stillness of an early summer morning.

Far down the line many a Tommy could be heard singing to himself as he sat in the door of his dug-out, cleaning his rifle. There would be the pleasant crackle of burning pine sticks, the sizzle of frying bacon, the lazy buzzing of swarms of bluebottle flies. Occasionally, across a pool of noonday silence, we heard the birds singing; for they didn't desert us. When we gave them a hearing, they did their cheery little best to a.s.sure us that everything would come right in the end. Once we heard a skylark, an English skylark, and for a while it made the world beautiful again. It was a fine thing to watch the faces of those English lads as they listened. I was deeply touched when one of them said, ”Ain't 'e a plucky little chap, singin' right in front of Fritzie's trenches fer us English blokes?”

It was a sincere and beautiful tribute.

The Professor

_By Calista Halsey Patchin_

The professor had been dead two months. He had left the world very quietly, at that precise hour of the early evening when he was accustomed to say that his ”spirit friends” came to him. The hospital nurse had noticed that there was always a time at twilight when the patient had a good hour; when pain and restlessness seemed to be charmed away, and he did not mind being left alone, and did not care whether or not there was a light in the room. Then it was that those who had gone came back to him with quiet, friendly ways and loving touch. He said nothing of this to the nurse. It was an old friend who told me that this had been his belief and solace for years.

When the professor had first come to town he had spoken of the wife who would follow him shortly, from the East. He did not display her picture, he did not talk about her enough so that the town, though it made an honest effort, ever really visualized her. She would come--without a doubt she would come--but not just yet. It was only that the East still held her. Gradually, he spoke of her less and less often, with a dignified reserve that brooked no inquiry, and finally not at all.

The town forgot. It was only when his illness became so serious that all felt someone should be written to, that it was discovered there was no one. The professor, when he was appealed to, said so. Then also, the hospital nurse noticed that at the twilight hour, when he talked quietly to his unseen friends, there was always One who stayed longer than the rest.

But he had been dead two months now, and the undertaker was pressing his bill, and there were other expenses which had been cheerfully borne by friends at the time, and indeed if there had been no other reason, it remains that something must become of the personal possessions of a man who leaves neither will nor known heirs. So the professor's effects were appraised, and a brief local appeared in the daily paper until it had made a dent in the memory of the public, apprising them that his personal property would be offered at public auction at two p.m. of a Thursday, in his rooms on the third floor of the Eureka Block.

It was the merest thread of curiosity that drew me to this sale. I did not want to buy anything. It was a sort of posthumous curiosity, and it concerned itself solely with the individuality of the dead man. Not having had the opportunity of knowing him well in life, and never having known until I read his obituary what I had missed, I took this last chance of trying to evolve the man from his belongings. All I did know was that he was a teacher of music of the past generation in a Western town which grew so fast that it made a man seem older than he was. More than this, he was a composer, a music master, who took crude young voices, shrill with the tension of the Western winds and the electric air, and tamed and trained them till they fell in love with harmony. When he heard a voice he knew it. One of his contraltos is singing now in grand opera across the sea. A tenor that he discovered has charmed the world with an ”upper note.”

All the same, the professor had grown old--a new generation had arisen which knew not Joseph; he failed to advertise, and every young girl who ”gave lessons” crowded him closer to the wall. Now and then there would appear in the daily paper--not the next morning, but a few days after the presentation of some opera--a column of musical criticism, keen, delicate, reminiscent--fragrant with the rosemary that is for remembrance. When ”Elijah” was given by home talent with soloists imported from Chicago, it was the professor who kindly wrote, beforehand this time, luminous articles full of sympathetic interpretation of the great masters. And at rare intervals there would appear a communication from him on the beauty of the woods and the fields, the suburbs of the town and the country, as though he were some simple prophet of nature who stood by the wayside. And this was no affectation. Long, solitary walks were his recreation.

It was a good deal of a rookery, up the flights of narrow, dirty stairs to the third floor of the Eureka Block. And here the professor had lived and taught. Two rooms were made from one by the sort of part.i.tion which does not reach to the ceiling--a ceiling which for some inexplicable reason was higher in some places than in others.

The voice of the auctioneer came down that winding way in professional cadences. There were in the room about as many people as might come to a funeral where only friends of the family are invited. It was very still. The auctioneer took an easy conversational tone. There was a silent, forlorn sort of dignity about the five pianos standing in a row that put professional banter and cheap little jokes out of the question. The pianos went without much trouble--a big one of the best make, an old-fas.h.i.+oned cottage piano, a piano with an iron frame. One of the appraisers, himself a musician, became an a.s.sistant auctioneer, and kindly played a little--judiciously very little--on each instrument in turn.

Then came the bric-a-brac of personal effects--all the flotsam and jetsam that had floated into these rooms for years. The walls were pockmarked with pictures, big and little. There was no attempt at high art; the professor had bought a picture as a child might buy one--because he thought it was pretty. It was a curious showing of how one artistic faculty may be dormant while another is cultivated to its highest point. But no matter how cheap the picture, it was always conscientiously framed. And this was a great help to the auctioneer.

Indeed, it was difficult to see how he could have cried the pictures at all without the frames.

By this time the rooms were fuller of people. There were ladies who had come in quietly, just to get some little thing for a remembrance of their old friend and teacher. These mostly went directly over to the corner where the music lay and began looking for something of ”his.” If it were ma.n.u.script music so much the better. But there was little of this. It appeared that with the professor, as with most of us, early and middle manhood had been his most productive time, and that was long enough ago for everything to have been duly published in sheet and book form--long enough, indeed, for the books themselves to have gone out of date.

There they were--long, green notebooks, bearing the familiar names of well known publishers, and with such a hydra-head of t.i.tle as ”The Celestina, or New Sacred Minstrel; a Repository of Music adapted to every variety of taste and grade of capacity, from the million to the amateur or professor.”

There were four or five of these. There was sheet music by the pile.

There was an opera, ”Joseph,” the production of which had been a musical event.

Presently the auctioneer came that way. He had just sold a large oleograph, framed, one of those gorgeous historical pictures which are an apotheosis of good clothes. He approached an engraving of an old-fas.h.i.+oned lady in voluminous muslin draperies, with her hair looped away from her face in a ”Book of Beauty” style.

”_He_ liked that,” murmured a lady.

”What do I hear!” cries the auctioneer, softly. ”Oh, such a little bid as that--I can't see it at all in this dark corner. Suppose we throw these peaches in--awfully pretty thing for dining room--and this flower piece--shall we group these three?--now, how much for all? Ah, there they go!”

”Here, ladies and gentlemen, is a gold-headed cane which was presented to the deceased by his admiring friends. It is pure gold--you _know_ they would not give him anything else. How much for this? How much?

No--his name is _not_ engraved on it--so much the better--what do I hear?”

”Look at this telescope, gentlemen--a good one--you know the professor was quite an astronomer in his way--and this telescope is all right--sound and in good condition”--the auctioneer had officiated at a stock sale the day before. ”You can look right into futurity through this tube. Five dollars' worth of futurity? Five--five and a half?