The song and the singer; a setting forth, in words, of certain movements in a latter-day life: prelude-allegro; andante con moto; scherzo; presto con brio-coda

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“Faust/’ Act III. — Gounod.

“All the words ’n music of the opry ! Fifteen cents ! Cost ya quarter inside! Book, mister?”

Ordway recoiled a bit before the insistence of the seedy individual who stood in his way and flaunted a libretto before his eyes. He wanted one, but he could do without it. So he assumed not to see or hear this tradesman of the streets, and pushed on.

“Cost ya quarter inside,” repeated the dealer, falling in beside Ordway, and still holding the flimsy pamphlet where the cheap gilt cover design with the magnetic word “Faust” could not but be seen.

“No!” said Ordway, groutily.

The man instantly wheeled about and offered his stock to another.

“How does he know that I am going to the opera?” mused Ordway. “And what makes him infer so confidently that the saving of ten cents is material to me ?”

Annoying question to a sensitive nature. There was once a man who so shrank from the acknowledgment io The Song and the Singer.

of impecuniosity that, under the stinging influence of a libretto dealer’s economical argument, he bought a parquette seat for two dollars and a half, and a twenty-five-cent libretto from the boy in the aisle, when it had been his intention to take standing room for a dollar ; and, if he had been pinned down to it, he would have had to confess that he could not afford as much as standing room.

The second query rankled little with Ordway. It was framed in his thoughts because the impulse operated swiftly, but it was as swiftly lost in the significant phrase of the first query — “Going to the opera.” It was hardly credible. There was a sensation in his breast that made him catch his breath and repeat dogmatically: “It is so! It is so!” Yes, he was going to the opera, and that this more than pleasure should be his was cause for wonder. It was not impossible, for here was he at the very entrance to the imposing building; here was he — Herbert Ordway — actually elbowing his way in, one of the throng to which the event was agreeably commonplace. With what elation did he take his position at the end of the line reaching to the box office ! With what ingenuous pride, wholly untainted by envy, did he observe the onward procession of gorgeous cloaks that gave fleeting and enchanting glimpses of the gowns beneath, a yards-long wreath of fur now and again slipping to muffled shoulders and thus displaying a handsome face! There was the flash of jewels, too, from bared heads ; and there was the embodiment of the

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crushing force that makes possible the wearing of jewels in the square-shouldered men who strode under high hats and behind shields of diamond-studded white, beside the women. It was all well, and as it should be ; and he, for the moment, was a part of it.

Slowly the space between him and the ticket window decreased. At last he could see the passing in of money and the output of red and green slips. One man protested at the place assigned him, and there was delay while the imperturbable man inside effected an exchange. The man behind Ordway grumbled. To Ordway, eager though he was to be within the walls of this abode of wonders, all this was but part and parcel of the experience. He smiled, not because he enjoyed the delay as such, but because it came to him under such exhilarating circumstances.

At last there was but one ahead. Ordway heard the conversation.

“Nothing for two dollars !” said the functionary within.

“What ! All sold ?” queried the patron.

“Orchestra chairs only.”

“Well ” and the patron grudgingly handed in an-

other dollar.

It was Ordway’s turn.

“One for a dollar, please,” said he.

“Gallery entrance around the corner,” was the icily serene response from behind the window, and the ticket seller’s eyes turned inquiringly to the man next in line.

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Truly, to the box-office magnate all men are the same. It matters not to him that one patron would have a place for a dollar, and another for two. He is there to dispense exact justice at so much per, and he will pass out a slip entitling you to a chair behind a pillar without one throb of emotion.

Nevertheless, Ordway blushed. It was not that he was going to the gallery, or that the place was so named. He had figured on that in his weeks of anticipation ; but there was a sense of maladroitness, a consciousness of rusticity, that made him lower his eyes as he faced the incoming procession of the richly garbed, and hurried from the main entrance. The same seedy book dealer who had accosted him before seized upon him again. Ordway bought a libretto this time, perhaps as a sop to a vague sense of disappointment, and fled around the corner.

There was no long line of purchasers before the gallery ticket window. Three or four stragglers ahead slapped their dollars on the ledge and fairly ran with their oft-thumbed pasteboards to the beginning and up the first of the many flights of stairs.

It seemed to Ordway that never should he arrive at the top. As it was apparently the fashion to hurry along this avenue to the heights, he also ran. Three steps at a time hardly sufficed him for the first flight, but two served for the second; and when at length he came to a morose-looking man who sat beside a gaping tin box, and who dropped his ticket into it, Ordway was breathing hard. There were yet other winding stairs to climb. He was content now to put a foot on each step, and he was still panting when at last he saw the great chandelier, dimly lit, the curving rows of seats, the distant top of the proscenium arch, and when for the first time he smelt the atmosphere, rich with escaped gas, that is most delicious near the roof of a theatre. He filled his lungs with it, as he had to, there being no less tainted air at command, and liked it. Without fully realizing it, he yet perceived that this, too, was as it should be ; the very atmosphere of art was different from that of the commercial, libretto-selling world he had left behind and some unmeasured distance below. For a long time after that memorable evening his heart never failed to respond with a thrill of deep content when his nostrils recognized the characteristic odor ; and if he were to go to the gallery to-night, such is his retention of impressionable buoyancy, his heart would thrill much as it did then — not so exultantly, doubtless, but in the same way.

Ordway had snatched a programme from a pile on the way up, and now he sought for a seat. Every place in all the rows toward the front was taken. Far over on the other side were vacant places where the listener bade fair to bump his head against the roof if he stood up. He considered, and declined the opportunity they offered; some portion of the stage would likely be concealed from such a viewpoint. So he clambered into an extension of the gallery that rose up, and up, and back

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so far that the end of it seemed to be over the street, and there, on the very back row, he found a place. From it, as he sat down, he saw a conical hood on the front of the stage, and wondered what it was.

As time went on, for it was yet early, a few more straggled into the gallery. Ordway studied his programme. Had he been in a front row he might have been more occupied in observing the yawning vastness of the place, and he might have found entertainment in the gradual filling of orchestra chairs far beneath, and the more gradual filling of the box tiers a little nearer,. As it was, he could not see a single box, and for a time the programme was his only relief.

There was, first, the sprawling announcement on the cover page to be read, and then, after a hasty glance at several pages devoted to the glorification of certain pianofortes, bonbons and dentists — what is the bond between the opera and dentistry that brings to the performance of one the unaesthetic announcement of the other? — he found the cast. This interested him deeply. There were names that, by dint of faithful reading of one musical periodical and the musical department of one Sunday paper, had become to him as household words. Was it actually possible that he was about to see and hear these great personages?

It seemed as if he had been transported to an unreal land, or translated to a bygone age ; for, though the years were few since first he had learned these names, they had been long years to him, and the persons thus identified were ‘like heroes from the misty past. That they were living, contemporaneous creatures had hardly occurred to him. There were Signor Thisini and Signor Thatolo, as Faust and Mephisto, respectively ; and Herr Somebodyski, as Valentin; Mile, de Whichere, as Margaret — Margarita, according to the programme; Marguerite, according to the libretto ; Madame Whatin, as Martha, and, oddly conspicuous among the foreign names, Miss Julia Ward, as Siebel. He had not heard of her. Young as he was, he could not but feel a special interest in this one person who, of all the cast at an American opera house, had a name that suggested her as a compatriot. He felt proud that one of his countrywomen had risen so high.

Eventually, when the lights in the big chandelier were turned on to their fullest, so that the really fashionable folk then pouring in might be seen of men and women, Ordway took one long, comprehensive look at the hundreds in the great gallery, and wondered if all there were as happy as he was. For an instant he was conscious of apprehension lest calamity — a fire, for example — should arise to snatch the cup from him ere it touched the lips. Then he dismissed the sensation as childish, and next moment his elbows were on his knees, his head bowed, his attention concentrated, for he heard the sombre tones of the violoncelli mourning in the unseen depths of the hollow beyond the front row.

In all the realm of music there is little that suggests the charm of mysticism so well as the first few measures in the introduction to “Faust.” Ordway felt it, and when the curtain rose he was prepared. There was the unkempt scholar, with his one absurd desk and his one solitary volume, and the same shabby pretence of a scene that you and I have long since chosen to accept without even mental protest as an incorrigible evil in the production of this opera. The shabbiness, the incompleteness of the picture, did not disturb him. The message of the poet was more than absorbing to him as it was voiced by the composer. The wabbling gentleman behind the grey beard was Faust, and the plaints he uttered were those of the universal human soul.

Then, presently, came Mephistopheles. Happy observer on the topmost back row, that on this occasion the distinguished barytone consented to effect his entrance by way of a trap ! A lurid glow at one side of the stage, and, presto ! the devil, with his sonorous :

“Sono qui !”

How much more impressive than a conventional entrance from the wings, or through a spring door in the drop! Ordway thinks so. Not since he arrived at the point where he could make comparisons has he ceased to long for the appearance of Satan from regions beneath the surface.

It was not that he was unduly impressed by the theatrical device, not that he suffered the slightest illusion. He observed the scene from the viewpoint of the creator thereof ; he accepted the devices of the stage as so many symbols of the profound inner drama that wrought its way straight to his soul through the music.

And thus it continued to the end.

Between acts he read the libretto and pondered, and silently sung the fragments of tunes that posed in his fifteen-cent book as “all the music of the opry,” and pondered again. He did not realize that the waits were long, though it is safe to say that none among the thousands there assembled was more eager than he for the resumption of the performance.

Not once did he stir from his lofty place. He stood up when the principals trailed, hand in hand, several successive times across the stage to the plaudits and shouts of the crowd, and he exulted at the marks of approval bestowed upon Siebel’s flower song. In fact, that morceau made a more distinct impression upon him, musically considered, than did any other single feature of the presentation. That, doubtless, was because of his preconceived interest in Miss Julia Ward as a straightforward American. The charm of the story was broken by her entrance. That is, he could dissociate his absorption in the drama from his curiosity about her personally. But this was for a moment only. Another, and she was to him the graceful embodiment of a boy’s innocent and hopeless love.

Ordway was not in a critical frame of mind. All was to him as it should be, for he had never seen or heard anything like it. The one great work he had heard previous to “Faust” was “The Messiah,” and that deeply-stirring oratorio is hardly suited to be the criterion of opera. Yet, when the curtain descended for the last time, and the revived Margarita, the erstwhile hell-bent Faust, and the debonnaire Mephisto had made their last bows, hand in hand and smiling, he marveled that an opera should be so short. It had occurred to him that an operatic representation should be at least half as long as that of an oratorio.

When he glanced at a clock on a neighboring tower, as he issued from the building, his amazement knew no bounds. It was almost midnight.

The spell was heavy upon him as he walked to his lodging. Some fleeting strains haunted him in turn, the easily remembered flower song rising above the recent memories of the exalted trio in the prison; but it was not as so many details that he recalled the performance. Its weight as a dramatic, harmonious, artistic whole was upon him. He was profoundly melancholy.

II. There is no friend like the old friend

— Oliver Wendell Holmes.

From force of habit Ordway awoke early. There had been dreams of heavenly choirs and diabolical orchestras ; he had been alternately on the stage and off it ; and once he had swung the baton while a beautiful girl in blue tights sang of love and flowers.

The awakening from these confusions was wholly agreeable. He laughed as he reviewed such hazy fragments as clung to his memory, and his heart swelled with renewed delight as he went clearly over the opera he had actually heard. Was there anything in the world that could equal it ? Certainly, emphatically, not ! What could the smart writers mean who spoke disparagingly of Gounod? Had they forgotten “Faust”?

Ordway wrought himself into something akin to rage while he was dressing and thinking over the detractions of the Frenchman’s genius that had come his way. He would like to answer such fellows as they deserved.

The melancholy of midnight had fled before splendid exaltation and a wholesome physical appetite. He ate the heartiest kind of a breakfast and went forth to see the town.

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It was not wholly unfamiliar to him. He knew the way, and he presented himself early at the ticket office of a hall where a famous pianist was to give a recital in the evening. Not again would he take the risk of finding all the desirable places in the gallery pre-empted by early comers. At that, his diligence was rewarded by nothing better than a place nearly as close to the roof as he had been the evening before j but that place was secured, and he was content. He journeyed downtown, walked across the great bridge and back, and about noon shot skyward in an elevator to the editorial rooms of a newspaper.

“Well?” said the uncommonly severe youth whose duty it was to meet visitors at the gate and give them hints of the perils of direct contact with journalism.

Ordway was properly impressed, and inquired in the most subdued way if he could see Mr. Jameson.

“Ain’t in yet,” snapped the boy, and slouched to the row of pastepots that, much to the impairment of his sense of dignity, he had been required to fill in the absence of a colleague.

The caller would have liked to ask permission to wait, but he forbore to intrude unnecessarily on so important a personage as this prematurely soured Janus. He waited without consent, and looked with no small degree of awe upon a spectacled man in the far corner who was cutting pieces out of a newspaper. He was interested, too, in a younger man who sat with his feet on a desk, reading, and in a portly, solemn-looking gentle-

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man in shirt-sleeves, who was writing, and who kept tab of his pen by barking a loud “Ahem !” every time he dipped it in ink. Ordway wondered if he were the editor-in-chief.

Save for the periodical “Ahem !” and the shuffling feet of Janus, the room was very still until a brisk young fellow entered, slammed the gate behind him, went to a desk, raised the cover and began to throw things around inside it. Nobody paid any attention to him, though the portly gentleman said “Ahem!” when the time came. Presently the brisk young fellow shut the desk, wrinkled his brows at it, and lifted a book or two and some papers that were lying there.

“Damn!” said he.

“Amen !” said the man who was reading, without looking up.

“Jimmy !” called the brisk fellow, and Janus looked up from his pastepots. “Where the devil are my scissors?”

“Oh !” responded Jimmy, and, with astonishing alacrity, he caught up the implement needed and ran with it to the inquirer.

“You’re an infernal nuisance, Jimmy!” remarked the young man, feelingly. “I’ve told you time and again to let my scissors alone. Sponge on somebody else; d’ye hear?”

Janus Jimmy evidently heard, for he looked doubly sour as he shuffled back to his distasteful employment. Ordwav exulted at the severe young person’s discomfiture.

“Ahem!” barked the portly gentleman, and all was still again.

A moment later Ordway heard a voice that he knew at the door behind him. He turned and grasped the hand of the most surprised reporter in the city.

“Bert !” he cried.' “Bert, by all that’s good, and true, and beautiful ! How are you ? Glad to see you, old fellow. Wait a second, will you? I’ve got to tell the old man something about a story I was on last night. Then we’ll have breakfast. Here, Jimmy, get a chair for this gentleman.”

“Certainly, Mr. Jameson,” responded Janus, as the reporter strode past him.

It came over Ordway, then, that Janus had no enviable position in the world’s affairs. Subject to the orders of many, without recourse from tyranny and abuse, what wonder that he should vent his repressed resentment upon shy visitors from the country? So, when Jimmy passed a chair over the rail, “Thank you, sir,” said Ordway, kindly.

“Keep the change,” said Janus.

Ordway smiled and watched the reporter stalk up to the desk of the spectacled man and make his report. He of the spectacles nodded two or three times, and the reporter departed abruptly.

“Come on,” said he, as he issued from the gate, and took Ordway by the arm.

“Ahem !” said the portly man.

The reporter made no further remarks until he had ushered his friend into the elevator car. Then he squared off and looked him over.

“Gee !” he exclaimed, admiringly ; “what a peach it is ! How are things in East Wilton, Bert? Same old weather-beaten benches on the common? Is old Daddy Witherspoon still asleep with his feet on the rail of the hotel porch ? And how are the Muses, and all the little Muses, eh?”

“See here, Billy,” cried Ordway, grasping his friend by the shoulders and shaking him with affectionate violence, “this is no way to conduct a conversation. You answer your questions by the very asking ”

“Except about the Muses.”

“The Muses are doing very well, thank you. Tell me about those fellows in the office. What is the capacity of the gentleman in his shirt-sleeves ?”

“Fatty Miller? Oh, I should say about a gallon a day.”

“I mean what does he do for the paper.”

“No! Did you mean that, Bert?” and the reporter affected surprise. “Same old Bert,” he added, with mock gravity — “just the same old, serious, prematurely aged Bert !”

“Answer the question, Billy.”

“Fatty Miller is the crop reporter, a man after your own heart, Bert. It is his distinguished privilege in journalism to inform an anxious public about the state of the weather in Kansas, and its probable effect on corn; likewise the price current of potatoes. At this

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impressive moment he is probably engaged upon an account of the most recent importation of Bermuda onions.”

They had been schoolmates, Bert Ordway and Will Jameson, and the most intimate of companions until the time, three or four years agone, when Will broke from the restraints of a country village and ventured forth to conquer the city. Since then they had met but once, and the correspondence bravely, aye, ardently, begun had dwindled to naught, owing on the one side to Ordway’s increasing consciousness that there was nothing in East Wilton life that could interest Will, and on the other to the inability or unwillingness of a writer to write.

Jameson was somewhat the elder, but that fact affected their intimacy not at all, for Ordway had been gifted with bookish precocity which brought it about that his associations were ever with boys who were his seniors. They thought of and referred to each other — these sprigs in their twenties — as “old” friends, and each stoutly believed that the other could be counted a firm ally in any emergency. Let it not be doubted that both were right.

The walk was so crowded it was not the easiest thing for them to keep side by side after they left the newspaper building, but the crush was no damper upon the reporter’s volubility. He kept up a brisk descriptive commentary on the men in the office, turning quite around at times to enable his companion to hear, until, still talking, he opened a door and entered a place that had the somewhat deceptive word “Cafe” inscribed on the windows.

“It’s one of the evils of the system,” he was saying. “You get your orders from the day city editor and make your report to the night city editor. Meantime things may happen to make your orders look like thirty cents, and the night city editor may have ideas of his own. What will you have?”

He came to this self-interruption with one elbow negligently against the bar.

“Nothing,” said Ordway. “I’m not thirsty.”

“Unhappy being!” sighed the reporter. “I’ve got a thirst on this morning that I wouldn’t exchange for a column story. Been nursing it all the way downtown and looking forward to this glorious moment. Manhattan cocktail, John.”

This latter was to the urbane bartender, who bowed and looked inquiringly at Ordway. There was one brief, fleeting instant when Jameson looked and acted as nearly embarrassed as it was possible for him to be. Then he added, easily: “Thirst loves company, Bert. Have a glass of seltzer, warranted innocuous.”

Ordway took the seltzer and tried to swallow with it his rustic sense of discomfort at his friend’s conduct. Shortly afterward they were in a restaurant discussing what was breakfast to one and luncheon to the other.

“You’ve made me do all the talking thus far,” said Jameson. “Tell me about yourself,”

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“Willingly,” replied Ordway; “it’s so easy! I’ve come to the city for a week of music.”

“I heard 'Faust’ last night.”

“Bully for you ! And where away to-night ?”

Ordway told him.

“That’s right,” and Jameson nodded vigorously. “Tomorrow night opera again, I suppose ; and Thursday night?”

“There’s an embarrassing choice of recitals.”

“That must be a grateful novelty for you. I suppose the musical life of East Wilton still finds its highest and only expression in the psalms” (Billy pronounced it “sams”) “at the First Church, with its wheezy old organ ”

He stopped abruptly. Ordway had consciously tried to hold his face immovable, and, of course, he had failed.

“I beg your pardon, old fellow/’ said Jameson. “I suppose you still play the organ there and lead the choir ?”

“Yes ; but don’t think I’m idiot enough to be sensitive of any fun you can get out of it.”

“No one said you were sensitive, Bert. Perish the thought! What else do you do in a musical way? You canYgive your whole time to it, I suppose?”

“No; the field isn’t big enough for that. I’m still keeping#the books in the shoe factory. Evenings I look after a few pupils in piano and voice. I practice a great deal.”

“And compose still ?”

“I couldn’t help that,” said Ordway, simply. “I write anthems for the choir, and I’ve got the singers so well trained that they read from manuscript only a little worse than they do from print.”

“They sing your music, do they?”

“Pretty often — more often than is compatible with good taste, I fear ; but when a fellow has written something, you know, it’s pretty hard to keep it back.”

“Yes,” laughed the reporter, “you need a city editor. But, seriously, Bert, I have more respect for the musical atmosphere of East Wilton after hearing that. There’s hope for it. Tell me what you get out of it.”

“In a money way?”

“Sure! What other way is Oh! your artistic

soul leaps to the reply that the best reward is the doing, eh ?”

“I’m inclined to think so. I do long for performance, for appreciation. I can’t help that any more than I can help writing; and I must say that the ducks and drakes my choir makes of my anthems at times is not wholly calculated to encourage desire for performance.”

Ordway laughed gently, as if stirred by comical reminiscences.

“Well, but what’s the money return?”

“I get a dollar a Sunday for playing in church, and my pupils pay fifty cents a lesson.”

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“Do you mean it?” demanded Jameson, with sudden sharpness of tone.

“Yes; why shouldn’t I? What’s the matter?”

The rustic musician smiled tranquilly, but he forbore to ask the newspaper man more particularly just then, for Billy was swearing softly all to himself, and it seemed a pity to disturb him. When he had soothed himself sufficiently, he made reply in his own peculiar way.

“It’s a damned outrage — that’s what it is !” he said.

“I don’t know,” responded Ordway, still smiling. “I have managed to provide for myself and mother, and T have pinched sufficiently to give myself this week’s glorious vacation.”

“Relatively speaking, that’s better than I’ve done,” said Billy; “but it makes my blood boil to think of it, just the same. You ought to be in New York.”

Ordway’s face flushed and his eyelids quivered.

“Pooh, Billy !” said he. “What could a man like me do in New York? What place is there ”

“A man like you!” echoed Billy. “Why, you could own the town in time. This is where the money is, Bert. Now, you’re a genius ”

“Rubbish!” interrupted Ordway; but there was a pleased glow in his eyes. He added: “I understand that every man you meet on the streets is a finished pianist.”

“Yes; and you can’t swing a stick without hitting a composer; but that’s all the more reason why a man

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with real talent See here, Bert, you can’t possibly

dream how much is accomplished in this blessed burg by assurance, impudence, gall — anything you care to call i* except talent. Behold the fakirs of the town! They know not the fiddle, neither do they sing, and yet

I say unto you Hang the text ! My paraphrase

halts; but this is the point, old fellow: New York is the place for you. Don’t rust in that sleepy village any longer. Come here and make your bid for fame and fortune. Think it over.”

Ordway’s heart beat faster. The supreme confidence of his friend excited him. There is nothing like it, the confidence of under thirty. It is dangerously contagious to others under thirty. Billy’s own career was stimulative. Had he not gone from a country village, unknown and unheralded, to the city, and had he not “got on,” as the saying is ?

The musician did think it over. He thought while Billy gabbled, and a little later began tentatively: “I suppose the problem would be more than half solved by getting a start. If I had any influence, or friends, it might be worth thinking of.”