the summer waned and the autumn began and then a great shock came to toni—two great shocks, in fact. first paul verney, who, next to jacques, was toni’s best friend, was sent away to boarding-school. toni felt a horrible sense of loss and emptiness. in losing paul, he seemed to lose a protector as well as a friend. he had not been so much afraid of other people when paul was about, but now he was more afraid of them than ever. and then, toni, being a strong, robust fellow for his age, it was forced upon madame marcel that, as he would not go to school, he must learn a trade.
madame marcel was ambitious for toni and shed many tears over his determination not to make a walking encyclopedia of himself if he could help it. what was the use of his learning to work, anyhow? when he married denise, as he fully intended to do, they could live over mademoiselle duval’s shop and eat cakes and tarts for dinner and candies for breakfast and supper. there was the bench under the acacia tree close by mademoiselle duval’s shop, and toni expected to spend his adult life sitting on that bench, in the summer time, with denise and eating cakes, and in the winter time sitting in his mother’s warm kitchen licking candy kettles.
it was a very grave matter to select a trade for toni. madame marcel had aspirations for him which were not shared, however, by anybody else; for all the persons with whom she talked concerning toni’s future were quite brutal, so his poor mother thought, and recommended putting the boy to doing hard work for which his strong little legs and arms and back well fitted him. but madame marcel secretly yearned to see her toni a gentleman, though at the same time she had not the courage to advance this proposition in any way. so she thought as a compromise between a trade and a profession she would make toni a musician—a violinist, in short.
when this was broached to toni, he objected to it, as he did to every suggestion that he should do anything except amuse himself, talk with jacques and hang around the horses at the cavalry barracks. his mother, however, for once showed some determination, and toni, finding that he absolutely had to learn to work, begged and prayed that he might be allowed to work about the one livery stable in the town of bienville. toni really did not think he would mind feeding and currying horses, he loved them so much—almost as much as jacques and paul verney—and, like jacques, they were interested listeners—more interested than most of the people he knew. madame marcel would by no means consent to this, and urged on toni the advantage of playing first violin in the orchestra of the theater, like hermann, the yellow-haired swiss, who was first violinist at the bienville theater.
“do you call that work,” asked toni indignantly, as if he were already a captain of industry—“sitting there and fiddling for amusement? why, mama, that isn’t work at all—it’s just amusement.”
“then why do you object to it?” asked madame marcel helplessly.
“because it is not work,” replied toni boldly. “when i work, i want to work—currying horses or something.”
“but have you no ambition?” cried poor madame marcel. “do you want to be a mere hostler?”
toni’s mind had not projected itself very far. he knew that he would have to serve his time in the army, and it had occurred to him that he would certainly be put in the cavalry, and he said as much to his mother. but madame marcel, who could not persuade herself that toni was not an innocent and guileless creature, could not endure the thought of turning him loose in a stable, to bear the kicks and cuffs, the jokes and jeers, of a lot of rough stablemen.
she asked toni if he would be willing to learn the trade of a tailor. clery, the tailor, lived opposite them, and was a very respectable man, who made a good living for his family. but toni hastily objected to this—he was afraid of the five clery boys.
so madame marcel and toni kept going around in a circle for many days and weeks. finally madame marcel one morning, taking toni by his hand, having washed him clean for once, and dressed him in his best sunday suit, carried him off to see monsieur hermann, the swiss, in regard to converting toni into a second sarasate or ysaye. hermann lived in two little rooms at the top of a rickety old tenement, and toni’s heart sank as he climbed the stairs, holding on tightly to his mother’s hand. he did not like hermann’s looks—a big, blue-eyed swiss, who imagined that he resembled lohengrin and siegfried, and dressed the part as well as he was able by cultivating a head of long curly blond hair and a huge blond beard.
madame marcel explained, as mothers are apt to do under similar circumstances, that, finding toni totally unfitted for anything else, she had determined to make a musician of him. hermann smiled. there was nothing of the artistic temperament visible in that tousled head of black hair, those bright, dark eyes which changed their expression as quickly as the little river under the stone bridge changed its look on an april day of sun and rain. and toni had hard, muscular little hands, which did not seem to hermann as if they could ever wield the magic bow. toni himself looked sulky. he had no mind to be a fiddler, and did not mean to learn. however, his mother arranged that he should go the next day to take his first lesson, and then they went down stairs, toni clattering ahead.
he rushed off to the cavalry barracks at the other end of the town. it was the time for feeding the hundreds of horses in the long rows of stalls, and [pg 82]toni had a few happy moments, crawling in and out as the troopers would let him, quite regardless of the sunday suit. oh, if he could only live with horses all the time instead of people! now that paul verney was gone, he felt that it was useless for him to try to have a talking friend. but horses could understand perfectly well, and he could find much greater companionship in a horse than in a fiddle.
he firmly resolved not to go next morning to take his music lesson if he could possibly help it; but when the time came he could not help it, and he started off, at a snail’s pace, for hermann’s lodging. hermann, leaning out of his window, saw toni come slouching along, looking as if he were going to his execution. he scowled at hermann, leaning out of the window. few small boys love lessons on the violin, which is a difficult instrument, but well worth giving one’s days and nights to, thought hermann. when toni finally appeared, he was the image of stolidity and stupidity. hermann put a violin in his hands, and tried to explain the scale to him, but toni was hopelessly inept. he could not understand those queer-looking things called notes. his mind wandered to the riding-school, where he knew the troopers were going through their exercises. he thought of the day he took that glorious wild ride on the old cavalry charger. he began to wonder what paul verney was doing, and reflected that it would be well for him to frame an excuse some time that day to go into mademoiselle duval’s shop, so she would give him a bun.
it may be imagined to what a pass toni’s state of mind reduced poor hermann, who finally rapped him smartly over the head with the violin bow, and told him to go home to his mother and tell her that she had an ass for a son. toni, at the first rap from the bow, which did not hurt him in the least, howled terrifically, and, rushing off home to his mother, told her, between his sobs, a harrowing tale of how hermann had beaten him most cruelly with the violin bow. however, madame marcel could not find a scratch on him to corroborate toni’s sensational tale, and flatly refused to believe him. in spite of toni’s protests, he was sent back to hermann’s lodgings for his music book and the little violin which madame marcel had asked hermann to provide for the boy. he returned home, carrying both music book and violin, those instruments of torture, and seriously considered studying tailoring after all, as two of the clery boys were doing. but clery made his boys work, and toni had great hopes that hermann would never be able to get any work out of him.
little denise, who was soft-hearted, had seen him coming and going in his pursuit of an artistic career, and her heart was touched at the spectacle of toni’s unhappiness. when he came home that second day, denise was sitting on the bench under the acacia tree and was knitting industriously. denise had all the virtues which toni lacked. as toni approached, his head hanging sullenly down, denise held out her hand and in it was a little piece of stale tart. this brightened toni up, and, sitting down by denise, he told her a moving story of the cruelties he had suffered at hermann’s hands, adding several atrocities to the original ones.
“poor, poor toni! i feel so sorry for you.”
“you ought to,” replied toni, deeply touched by his own eloquence, and beginning to cry. “that man will beat me to death some day, i know he will, and i hope he will, too, because then even my mother will be sorry she sent me to learn the fiddle. o-o-o-o-h!”
mademoiselle duval interrupted this tender scene by coming out and calling to toni:
“you good-for-nothing little boy, why don’t you go home and practise the violin and mind your mother? oh, i warrant madame marcel will see trouble with you!”
toni concluded that when he married denise he would see as little as possible of his aunt-in-law as well as his father-in-law.
he went back the next day, and many days after. for weeks and months honest hermann strove with the boy, but toni simply would not learn the violin. however, a strange thing happened—he found he could talk to hermann, and was not afraid of him, and hermann discovered that this lazy, idle, dirty, bright-eyed, insinuating urchin, who had no ear for music, had some strangely companionable qualities. toni even grew intimate enough with hermann to tell him all about jacques, and actually was courageous enough to show that redoubtable warrior to his friend. he told hermann also of his friendships with horses and said to him:
“do you know, i feel as if you were a horse—a great big sorrel cart-horse.”
hermann threw back his head, and opened his great mouth and laughed at this.
“and i am not the least afraid of you,” continued toni, “and that is very queer, because i am so afraid of people, except paul verney.”
“and shall i tell you,” said hermann, laughing and twisting his hands in the boy’s shock of black hair, “what i think you are like? a monkey—except that you have not sense enough to learn to dance, as a monkey does.”
toni was delighted at this. then he said quite gravely:
“do you know, monsieur hermann, of any business a boy can learn that will give him all he wants to eat, and plenty of time to amuse himself, and not make him work, and support him?”
“oh, yes,” said hermann. “marry a young lady with a large fortune. that gives a man enough to do, but yet it is not called work.”
“i had already made up my mind to that,” said toni seriously, “i am going—now don’t tell anybody this—i am going to marry little denise duval, and we are going to live part of the time with mademoiselle duval and eat cakes, and the rest of the time with my mother and eat candies.”
“ho-ho!” laughed hermann, who had a great, big, joyous laugh, “what a clever arrangement—and mademoiselle duval has agreed to this, and her niece, and your mother?”
“my mother will agree to anything i say, and mademoiselle duval will agree to anything denise says, but i have not asked denise yet—she is so young, you know, she doesn’t understand anything about these things, but i shall marry her just the same. if i ever have a wife, i mean that she shall be nice, and clean, and good, and stay at home and work hard. women ought to work hard, you know, monsieur hermann.”
hermann shouted out again—his great roaring laugh.
“you are, after all, not such a little idiot as i supposed,” he said. “mademoiselle denise will no doubt work and keep you in idleness. now play your scale,”—and then toni played his scale—a terrible scale, that began and ended nowhere, and which caused hermann to grind his teeth. he caught toni and shook him.
“play that scale again, you little rascal!” he roared, and toni played it worse than before.
“oh, my god!” cried hermann, “to think of teaching you the violin! i might just as well try to teach one of the horses in the riding-school—i am sure any of the horses could play as well as you do.”
toni listened to this, and was pleased. he had no notion of learning to play the violin, but he had learned to like coming to hermann’s lodging and talking about all sorts of things, particularly as he had no one else whom he could talk to.
meanwhile, madame marcel was delighted when she found that toni, after a while, grew to make no objections to going to take his music lesson. he learned so little, however, that hermann, who was an honest fellow, began to have conscientious scruples about taking madame marcel’s money for toni’s lessons.
at the end of six months hermann went to madame marcel and told her frankly that toni could never become a sarasate or an ysaye, and made the same comparison about teaching a horse to play the fiddle as easily as he could teach toni. madame marcel looked at him with wondering eyes. toni professed to be so anxious to learn. that young person had discovered that spending an hour each day doing nothing, with hermann’s big, kindly face to look into, and being able to tell things to some one who could understand as paul verney did, was really a great scheme. then he would always spend another hour going the half-mile to hermann’s house, and an hour coming back, and he could always invent a plausible excuse for taking so long; and he had no mind in the world to give up his once-dreaded music lessons.
“but he is so fond of his music!” pleaded madame marcel. “he loves to take his lesson.”
“oh, god!” cried hermann. “that boy is fooling you, madame marcel. he fooled me for a little while, but he is not learning anything—he does not mean to learn anything.”
“he likes you so much!” wailed madame marcel.
“and i like him—the idle little rascal!” replied hermann good-humoredly. “he is the queerest little chap, and i like to talk to him. you are paying your good money for that, madame marcel—he is not learning to play the violin—he never will learn.”
madame marcel sighed, and a great gloom fell on her. she thought she had solved the problem of toni’s future, and here it was rising up before her, even more complex and more appalling than before.
“do you think it would do any good,” she asked anxiously, “if i were to whip toni?”
“not a bit, madame,” replied hermann. “perhaps if you let me thrash him—”
this was the second proposal of the kind which madame marcel had received, the other one being that offer of sergeant duval’s to become a father to toni, and to give him all the thrashings he richly deserved. some idea of the same sort flashed into her head, and at the same moment it came into hermann’s mind. he had grown so unreasonably fond of the little rascal, and what a pity it was that the boy should not be made to learn and to behave himself! so he said sentimentally to madame marcel, with almost the same words and exactly the same meaning which sergeant duval had:
“madame, you ought to marry in order that toni may have a man’s strong hand to control him. if i could aspire”—for hermann was as poor as poverty, and madame marcel, with her candy shop, was comfortably off for a widow with one child. madame marcel shook her head. sergeant duval was far more attractive to her than this big, hulking, blond violinist, but not even the dashing sergeant could win her on his promise to give toni his deserts.
“no, monsieur,” said madame marcel, fingering her apron as girlish blushes came into her face, “i am not thinking of changing my condition. my life shall be devoted to toni, and as i firmly believe that he has great talent for music, and really tries to learn, if you will continue to let him go to you, i shall be delighted, and consider it a favor from you!”
“very well, madame,” replied hermann, in a tone of resignation, “if you wish to throw your money away, you may pay it to me, for god knows i need it. but i assure you, i might just as well undertake to teach the town pump to play the violin as your toni, and toni has no more notion of learning to play than the town pump has. good morning, madame.”
toni, in this affair, scored a brilliant victory over his mother and hermann. for two whole years more he kept up this delightful farce of learning to play the violin, and in that time he learned one little air—sur le pont d’avignon—which he played in a most excruciating manner, flatting his notes terrifically, and playing with a reckless disregard of time, which almost broke poor hermann’s heart. when toni played this air for the first time before his mother, on a summer afternoon, the good soul began to doubt, for the first time, whether toni could be made a great musician. sergeant duval, happening to be at home on his annual leave, heard these strange sounds proceeding from madame marcel’s kitchen behind the shop, and came over in great alarm, explaining that he heard weird noises and feared that madame marcel had perhaps fallen into a fit. madame marcel was highly offended at this notion of toni’s performance, and directed toni to play sur le pont d’avignon for the sergeant, who listened gravely to toni’s scraping and caterwauling, his only comment on it being:
“i have known a man to be shot for less than that.”
