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MR. WAITH,

"The music in my heart I bore, long after it was heard no more."

One of the branches of my learnings about life, about people, feelings, actions, and about expression, came to me from Mr. Waith, my music teacher.

After I passed the "Happy Farmer" stage on the piano with someone so pale, so vague, so insignificant in my experience that I cannot remember who it was, my mother arranged for me to go for my music lessons down to the Seminary where Mr. Waith lived, in one corner of the old, grey stone building far down Delaware Avenue, below Grandma Ganson's but above the Carys'. The Seminary was a private day school where the girls went who did not go to St. Margaret's. Among my friends, Nina and Mildred Gratwick went there, and Mildred Rumsey and Evelyn Rumsey.

Mr. William Waith was a tall, thin man, always dressed in a cutaway coat and a high starched collar. His fingers were long and thin and small-boned, with pads on the tips that, as he raised them high from his hands, hit the keys like soft, strong hammers. He looked down his nose at one from a head thrown back and his skin drew back in leathery folds from his beaming white smile. His head was always a little to one side. When he opened his door, in silence, at one's knock, his teeth showed in a sparkling flash of

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welcome. Once inside his rooms, one was in the
world of delicate "tones". "Tone" was what he lived
for. In the front room, which was on the corner
of the low building, there was a beautiful piano
that one came to regard with awe, with love, with
veneration, as he did. That and some comfortable chairs,
a large photograph of Beethoven over the mantle piece,
the tiny coal fire beneath, and many, many volumes of
music made up that room for me. Back of it was his
bedroom, a dark place with a small mahogany bed in it,
and some vague things, all shaded by the large tree
outside the single window on the side street. Mr. Waith
taught me to hear "tones". He struck notes on the piano,
his head on one side, his eyes closed, a listening smile
on his face, while his collar remained independently
perpendicular. With my vicarious sense of life, I
listened and heard what he heard. When I remembered, I
struck the notes as he did and produced for him the
"tones" he listened for and which, alone, he would accept.
When I forgot or when my stiff fingers would not obey me
I made only sounds that drew a look of suffering from his
sensitive person. He was slightly grotesque, with his
tall, skinny body, but there was something that singled him
out among men, something that they did not have, however
attractive or handsome they might be in that was his delicate,

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fine ear for "tone" and his mastery of it. This
built him up in one's fancy, made him distinguished,
revered, even fascinating.

He played the organ over at the First Church on
North Street, a rich Unitarian denomination. For me
it was mainly an organ loft. I was never in the main
body of the church, but after I grew to know Mr. Waith
well and he came to regard me as having a certain importance,
he used to have me come over and sit near the organ before
which he sat, his long arms and legs fairly dancing in a
Dionysian frenzy all over the keys and stops and pedals, as
he drew the gorgeous fabric of music from the great waiting
instrument in front of him, so mute except when he played
all over it.

His head a little to one side, his arms appearing so
long at full length, his lips pursed up as he gazed down
his nose to the keys, the queer-looking man became some-
how imbued with a certain grandeur, a majesty of artic-
ulation, the majesty, more powerful than any other, of
domination, control, the mastery over material. He filled
the air about me with bound so voluminous, so full in its
rich depths, that I felt borne up by it, supported and enriched,
and at the same time blotted out.

It passed right through one, in great waves, amulling
one's sense of I, making one as nothing filled dissolved
and then distributed away into the church along its rolling
vibrations. Mr. Waith knew how this affected me. He liked me

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there, small, attentive, and all turned to music
by his dance upon the organ. He liked to turn me
first into an ear, that my only faculty be hearing,
until nothing was left of me but listening, and then
he liked to melt me away into waves of sound.

The quartette stood at the edge of the organ loft with
their backs to us : a soprano, a tenor, a contralto, and
a bass. But the only one of these men and women who
existed for Mr. Waith, except as parts of the music he
made, and consequently the only one I was aware of, was
Clara Barnes Holmes, the contralto.

What, concretely, was between them, I never knew.
Certainly I could not have understood their relation
had it been revealed to me. But with the extremely del-
icate perceptions that were awake in me, I felt the
unseen forces of their two natures directed upon each
other. She was a beautiful woman of thirty-five years, I
suppose, with large brown eyes and golden hair! gilded hair !
She was an ardent woman who wore broad-brimmed black hats
with curling feathers on them and dresses cut low enough
to show her thick white contralto throat. She was a deli-
cious woman, I felt. Her husband was a business man. He
had an inscrutable face and a black beard. He seemed
too commonplace to think about. And yet, pursuing Clara
Barnes Holmes into her little apartment ( as I have
always followed up any new fragrance, like a bee gathering

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honey), the picture comes back to me of the Sunday
after-dinner hour of those two married people. He
sat there, the Sunday papers strewing the floor about
him, and Clara Barnes Holmes was giving him a cup of
coffee, with the same sweetness, the same lovely
smile on her face, that I had come to know in the
organ loft. Her hat was off and her metallic/gilded
hair was parted and fell on her round head into symmetri-
cal waves. She smiled and was happy there in that room
with the bald-headed husband who had a black beard and
an indifferent, inscrutable look.

The organ loft was a holy place. Music was important.
Mr. Waith dancing and sweating before the great pipes
was demonic as he summoned sound from that silent, empty
instrument, and Clara Barnes Holmes, and the others singing
with her. She was part of the enchantment of my magician.
She was his instrument too, I thought, as, ear bent to her,
he drew by his attention such tone from her throat that
one's heart fairly turned over to hear it. With the clair-
voyance of childhood, I knew Mr. Waith played upon Clara
Barnes Holmes as he played upon his organ, and when he
summoned her own incalculably intimate and living sound
from her, I heard it with his own ear. That was "honey, honey,
that live sound like the fire and water of the heart; that was
what we had to listen for. The rest of the quartette, they
had beautiful voices too and they were manipulated by

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Mr Waith so that the ensemble was of a technical
perfection that drew more people to the First
Church than did Dr. Frost, the preacher. Every-
body went to that church for music. But the life
of it, the irresistible magic of it, came from the
body of Mr. Waith as he pounced upon the organ, and
from the body of Clara Barnes Holmes as he, with his
listening ear, drew "tone" from her pipes, even as
he drew it from the other organ before him. He was
really a musician.

They communicated straßgely, those two, by voice
and ear. They may have had other nodes of meeting that
I never saw, but this one I shared and experienced.
He knew to a hair's breadth the degree of her feeling,
the life of her spirit, the expenditure of her power.
He had grown to appraise her so quickly by the tone
of her singing voice that he could hear her heart speak-
ing; as blind men learn to read by the sense of touch,
so he knew her by ear. I remember how, one Sunday at
Wespers, he suddenly frowned slightly and seemed to become
more attentive, more aware, as, bending and swaying over
his keys and looking down his nose at them, the quartette
in perfect unison poured out the opening words of that
compassionate hymn, "And He shall wipe away all tears"

And while it all sounded as united and I seemed as
full as ever, there was just a little difference in the

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effect upon me - a diminution of the usual feeling
one had, something less moving and poignant about
it. It always hit upon the raw of one's heart but
this morning the listening nerve didn't leap in
response. The music was dead. In vain Mr. Waith, at
the organ, challenged the other pole of audition;
Clara Barnes Holmes was singing but not responding
with her life. The current between those two was not
running like an invisible flame, back and forth between
them. The man who was all Ear was alone. The woman
who was incarnate Sound was silent. That service passed
like a blur to Mr. Waith and to me, his small extension,

After the service was over, he did not wait to speak
a few words with the choir as usual. Hastily he gathered
his hat and coat and, with a glance at me to go, he sped
down the stairs to the street. Moody, his long face longer
than usual, he strode quickly over North Street to Delaware
Avenue and down the hill. I followed in silence until we
came to Grandma Ganson's, where I was going to supper. He
left me at the gate with hardly a glance.

The next day I went to him at half-past two for my
music lesson and while I was seated at the piano a knock
came at the door. He opened it and there stood Clara Barnes
Holmes in her big black hat. He bowed, a little coolly, and she
looked at him, smiling but beseeching a little. " I have a
lesson," he said, indicating me on the piano stool, and she

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said :" I will come back later." So he nodded and she left. As he closed the door, he looked hard, all tightened up. He said : "She plays with me." Just as though I were not there, he said it. "And always expects me to be ready when she comes to herself again." Then he said :" We won't have any lesson today. First I'll make you something nice and then I will play a little for you." He went out into his bedroom and jingled glasses and things, and presently he came back with two glasses of some golden drink and each had a red cherry in the bottom of it.
"What is it ?" I exclaimed in delight. " You taste it and see," he replied. Now he was beginning to loosen up a little and smile and not be so hard-looking. I tasted the golden drink and it was sweet and bitter and powerful. "What is it ?" I asked again. I had tasted the wine left in the glasses after dinner parties at home but this tasted different from anything I had known.
"That is called a cocktail," Mr. Waith said, flashing a breathery smile, and he quaffed his down, all at once.
I sipped mine and I began to feel it all over me in warm, queer waves. He went to the piano and his fingers flew up and down the keys in long, angry, hot, protesting, arpeggios. I listened, standing at his side. His playing was bitter and sweet and strong, like the drink he had given me.
He played for himself first, and when he had finished, he

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remembered me there. And when he saw my face, he
put out a long, thin arm and drew me to him. It
felt like a steel thing. He took my hand in his
and the palm of it was warm and damp and it vibrated
and quivered, with the blood of it quickened by his
playing. His hand felt more alive than any other
hand I had ever felt in mine. I trembled a little,
I think. He was so near and so strange to me now.
I could feel music in him, I thought. He bent his
face down to mine and kissed me and his own face
was damp against my cheek. The man was all fire and
water from music. The life of him was of music and
fire and water. I was throbbing with it all; my
heart beat hard. No man had ever kissed me before,
besides Uncle Carlos, except for duty, and this was
not duty. This was in recognition of my understanding
of his mood. People have always been grateful to me
for my ability, since I was a child, to put myself in
their places, to sense, without knowing causes, the
multitudinous fluctuations of the human psyche. This
natural sympathy that I could feel was not voluntary
exactly, any more than the changing colors of the
chameleon who takes on the tone of whatever he comes
in contact with, are voluntary. I was just naturally
fluctuating and flowing all the time, wherever I found

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myself, in and out of the people I was with. I
have always been myself and, at the same time,
someone else; always able to be the other person,
feel with them, think their thoughts, see from the
angle in which they found themselves.

This has caused me many inward conflicts, and
it has always drawn people to me in the same degree
that I flowed out to them and identified myself with
them, and it always made people want to kiss me, to
manifest an actual nearness and union, finding it
comforting and consolatory. It is the only genius
I have ever had but it has been enough, and these
pages are given to recording its progress.

Soon he turned to the piano again and played, with
me leaning against him. He played something that was
different now. It was not made of hard, angry, separate
notes. It was a flowing, soft sweetness like wine in
the blood, or like perfume. A delicious mood came on
us both from it: ease and gentleness, and happy peace.
"You know, Mabel," he said, his head on one side. "You
know music. I wish I could teach you to play."

He never could teach me. I went for many, many lessons
but I never learned to play because I wouldn't work.
Without work, without hours of patient, single effort
with one finger lifted after another like tiny hammers,
or of slow, pedestrian pilgrimages up and down from

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treble to bass of hard, firm arpeggios, that easy
flow of music could not come out of me, and I
could not work. I could not sit at home alone
and do what he told me to do. I learned to play a few
slow pieces, "Träumeri" of Schuman, "Chanson Trioste"
of Tchaikowsky, and I played them so that even he
liked to listen, for I drew the "tone" that he listened
for out of the keys. But that was all, though to please
me, and to limber up my fingers, he wrote me a little
piece of music called "Dawn", all made up of arpeggios,
with a melody from a few full notes that the pedal
held after each one was sounded. Capricious and sad,
wistful and gay at once, the notes at the end sounded
a question; buried in the notes and the musical signs
was written, as in a code, the words, "C'est pour Mabel,
n'est ce pas ?"

I learned it and it is the only thing that today,
I can play on the piano, but it didn't make me work, and
it didn't lead to anything except more playing of his
own for me. I loved to go to him and he grew fond of
me. He didn't teach me to play the piano but he taught me
how to listen. He used to kiss me a little sometimes,
when he was unhappy, and he always played for me. Once in
a blue moon he made two little cocktails and gave me one. At
that time I had a book of red morocco leather in which I
wrote quotations that I read in books of poetry or when-

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ever I saw anything that I particulary answered
to. It had a lock and key. I took it to him and
asked him to write something in it for me, so
that I would remember him always. And this is what
he wrote. I am copying it from this small book
that is dated, on the outside, 1895.

"She is singing an air that is known to me,
A passionate ballad, gallant and gay,
A martial song like a trumpet's call !
Singing alone in the morning of life,
In the happy morning of life and May,
Singing of men that in battle array | ---|---

space

* * * * *

"Silence, beautiful voice!
Be still, for you only trouble the mind
With a joy in which I cannot rejoice,
A glory I shall not find."

* * * * *

And on the opposite page he wrote, in beautiful script :

"Grief counts the seconds;
Happiness forgets the hours.

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It is easy to find a lover and to retain
a friend; what is difficult is to find a
friend and to retain a lover."

Love - sweet misery."

De Musset.

I thought this was all wonderful poetry. It does
not seem so wonderful to me today, but it is beyond
the very texture of
judgment a small part of my life that criticism
cannot touch any more than it touches those landmarks
of our town that are become so familiar that they are
accepted, so deeply accepted that they are really a
part of me. What chance has any aesthetic or literary
criterion to influence me about the deficiencies of
Forest Lawn, where I played and gathered violets between the graves?