The Tune Of Time

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Title:     The Tune Of Time
Author: James Huneker [More Titles by Huneker]

Ferval returned to Rouen after a fatiguing trip down the Seine as far as Croisset, the old home of Gustave Flaubert. Here he viewed, not without a dismal sense of fame and its futility, the little garden-house in which the masterpieces of the great Frenchman had been conceived in joy and executed in sorrow. He met the faithful Colange, one-time attendant of Flaubert, and from him learned exacerbating details of the novelist's lonesome years; so he was in a mood of irritation as he went ashore near the Boieldieu Bridge and slowly paced toward his hotel. He loved this Norman Rouen, loved the battered splendour of Notre-Dame Cathedral, loved the church of Saint-Ouen--that miracle of the Gothic, with its upspringing turrets, its portal as perfect as a Bach fugue. And in the Solferino Garden he paid his tribute of flowers at the monuments of Maupassant and Flaubert. Ferval was modern in his tastes; he believed nothing in art was worth the while which did not date from the nineteenth century.

Deplorably bored, he passed his hotel on the Quai and turned into the Rue Jeanne d'Arc, which led by the facade of the Palais de Justice. He had studied it carefully, and it did not, this dull afternoon in September, hold his interest long; he sauntered on, not feeling strong enough to light a cigarette. Decidedly, Rouen was become tiresome. He would go back to Paris by the evening train--or to Dieppe, thence to London, on the morning boat. Presently he found himself nearing the Porte de la Grosse Horloge. Through its opening poured vivacious working girls and men in blouse and cap, smoking, chattering, gesticulating. It was all very animated, and the wanderer tried to enjoy the picture. Then over against the crenellated wall, under the tablet bearing the quaint inscription picked out in choice Latin, Ferval saw a tall girl. Her bare head would not have marked her in a crowd where motley prevailed; it was her pose that attracted him,--above all, her mediaeval face, with its long, drooping nose which recalled some graven image of Jean Goujon. Her skin was tanned; her hair, flame-coloured, was confined by a classic fillet; her eyes, Oriental in fulness, were light blue--Ferval had crossed to the apparition and noted these things. She did not return his stare, but continued to gaze at the archway as if expecting some one. Young, robust, her very attitude suggested absolute health; yet her expression was so despairing, her eyes so charged with misery, that involuntarily he felt in his pocket for money. And then he saw that in her hand she held a tambourine. She wore a faded uniform of the Salvation Army.

Suddenly an extraordinary noise was heard; music, but of such a peculiar and excruciating quality that the young man forgot his neighbour and wondered what new pain was in store for his already taut nerves. The shops emptied, children stopped their games, and the Quarter suspended its affairs to welcome the music. Ferval heard rapturous and mocking remarks. "Baki, Baki, the human orchestra!" cried one gossip to another. And the reverberating music swelled, multifarious and amazing as if a military band from piccolo to drum were about to descend the highway. A clatter and bang, a sweet droning and shrill scraping, and then an old man proudly limped through the gateway of the Great Clock. This was the conjurer, this white-haired fellow, who, with fife, cymbals, bells, concertinas,--he wore two strapped under either arm,--at times fiddler, made epileptic music as he quivered and danced, wriggled, and shook his venerable skull. The big drum was fastened to his back, upon its top were placed cymbals. On his head he wore a pavilion hung with bells that pealed when he twisted or nodded his long, yellow neck. He carried a weather-worn fiddle with a string or two missing, while a pipe that might have been a clarinet years before, now emitted but cackling tones from his thin lips, through which shone a few fanglike teeth. By some incomprehensible cooerdination of muscular movements he contrived to make sound simultaneously his curious armoury of instruments, and the whistling, screeching, scratching, drumming, wheezing, and tinkling of metal were appalling. But it was rhythmic, and at intervals the edge of a tune could be discerned, cutting sharply through the dense cloud of vibrations, like the prow of a boat cleaving the fog. Baki, his face red and swollen by his exertions, moved to the spot where waited the girl.

"Ai, Debora!" cried a boy, "here's the old man. Pass the plate, pass the plate!" To his amazement, though he could give no reason for the feeling, Ferval saw the girl go from group to group, her tambourine outstretched, begging for coppers. Once she struck an insulting youth across the face, but when she reached Ferval and met his inquiring look, she dropped her eyes and did not ask for alms. A red-headed Sibyl, he thought discontentedly, a street beggar, the daughter of an old ruffian. And as he walked away rapidly he remembered her glance, in which there lurked some touch of antique pride and wrath.

II

Rouen lay below him, a violet haze obscuring all but the pinnacles of its churches. The sinking sun had no longer power to pierce this misty gulf, at the bottom of which hummed the busy city; but Ferval saw through rents in the twirling, heat-laden atmosphere the dim shapes of bridges mirrored by the water beneath him; and once the two islands apparently swept toward him, a blur of green; while at the end of the valley, framed by hills, he seemed to discern the odd-looking Transbordeur spanning the Seine.

For twenty-four hours he had not ceased thinking of the girl with the tambourine, of her savage, sullen grace, her magnificent poise and strange glance. He had learned at his hotel that she was called "Debora la folle," and that she was the daughter of the still crazier Baki. Was she some sort of a gypsy, or a Continental version of Salvation Army lass? No one knew. Each year, at the beginning of autumn, the pair wandered into Rouen, remained a few weeks, and disappeared. Where? Paris, perhaps, or Italy or--la bas! The shoulder-shrugging proved that Baki and his daughter were not highly regarded by reputable citizens of Rouen, though the street people followed their music and singing as long as it lasted. Singing? queried Ferval; does the woman sing?

He became more interested. His visits to the country where Pissarro painted and Flaubert wrote revealed other possibilities besides those purely artistic ones in which this amateur of fine shades and sensations delighted. He did not deny, on the esplanade where behind him stood Bonsecours and the monument of Jeanne d'Arc, that souvenirs of the girl had kept his eyelids from closing during the major portion of the night. To cool his brain after the midday breakfast he had climbed the white, dusty, and winding road leading to the Monumental Cemetery wherein, true Flaubertian, he had remained some moments uncovered at the tomb of the master. Now he rested, and the shade of the trees mellowed the slow dusk of a Rouen evening.

A deep contralto voice boomed in his ears. As he had seen but a scant half-dozen persons during the afternoon on the heights, Ferval was startled from his dreams. He turned. Sitting on a bank of green was the girl. Her hands were clasped and she spoke carelessly to her father, who, unharnessed from his orchestra, appeared another man. Rapidly Ferval observed his striking front, his massive head with the long, white curls, the head of an Elijah disillusioned of his mission. He, too, was sitting, but upright, and his arm was raised with a threatening gesture as if in his desolating anger he were about to pronounce a malediction upon the vanishing twilighted town. Ferval moved immediately, as he did not care to be caught spying upon his queer neighbours. He was halted by their speech. It was English. His surprise was so unaffected that he turned back and went up to the two and bade them good-day. At once he saw that the girl recognized him; the father dropped his air of grandeur and put on the beggar's mask. What an actor! thought Ferval, at the transformation. "Would the good gentleman please--?"

The girl plucked at her father's arm imploringly. With her grave, cold expression she answered the other's salutation and fixed him with her wonderful eyes so inquiringly that Ferval began a hasty explanation. "English was rarely spoken here ... and then the pleasure of the music!" The old man burst into scornful laughter.

"The music!" he exclaimed. "The music!" echoed his daughter. Ferval wished himself down in Rouen. But he held his position.

"Yes," he continued, "your music. It interested me. And now I find you speaking my own tongue. I must confess that I am curious, that my curiosity has warrant." Thus was he talking to beggars as if they were his social equals. Unconsciously the tone he adopted had been forced upon him by the bearing of his companions, above all by their accent, that of cultivated folk. Who and what were they? The musician no longer smiled.

"You are a music-lover, monsieur?" he asked in a marked French patois.

"I love music, and I am extremely engaged by your remarkable combination of instruments," answered Ferval. Baki regarded his wretched orchestra on the grass, then spoke to his daughter.

"Debora," he said in English, and his listener wondered if it were Celtic or Scotch in its unusual intonations, "Debora, you must sing something for the gentleman. He loves our art,"--there was indescribable pathos in this phrase,--"so sing something from Purcell, Brahms, or Richard Strauss."

These words were like the sting of hail; they seemed to drop from the sky, so out of key were they with the speaker's ragged clothes and the outlandish garb of his daughter. Purcell! Brahms! Strauss! What could these three composers mean to such outcasts? Believing that he was the victim of a mystification, Ferval waited, his pulses beating as if he had been running too hard. The girl slowly moved her glorious eyes in his direction; light as they were in hue, their heavy, dark lashes gave them a fantastic expression--bright flame seen through the shadow of smoke. He felt his own dilating as she opened her throat and poured out a broad, sonorous stream of sound that resolved into Von ewiger Liebe by Brahms. He had always loved deep-voiced women. Had he not read in the Talmud that Lilith, Adam's first wife, was low of voice? And this beggar-maid? Maybe a masquerading singer with a crazy father! What else could mean such art wasted on the roads, thrown in the faces of a rabble! Ferval kindled with emotion. Here was romance. Brahms and his dark song under the bowl of the troubled blue sky strongly affected him. He took the lean, brown hand of the singer and kissed it fervently. She drew back nervously, but her father struck her on the shoulder chidingly.

"A trifle too dreary," he rumbled in his heavy bass. "Now, Purcell for the gentleman, and may he open his heart and his purse for the poor."

"Father," she cried warningly, "we are not beggars, now!" She turned supplicatingly to the young man and made a gesture of dismissal. He gently shook his head and pretended that he was about to leave, though he felt that his feet were rooted in the earth, his power of willing gone.

"Ay, ay, my girl!" continued the musician, "you can sing as well as the best of them, only you love your sinful old father so much that you have laid aside your ambitions, to follow him in his pilgrimage of expiation about this wicked globe. Ah, sir, if you but knew--I will speak, Debora, for he is a gentleman and a lover of music! If you but knew our history, you would not be surprised at us. Have ye ever been in Wales?"

Ferval stumbled in his answer. It was overlooked; the old man continued: "If ye have, ye must have heard of the sin-eaters. I am one of them, I am an eater of sin--"

Again the girl exclaimed, this time piteously, "Oh, father, remember your vow!"

"Poor lass! Yes, I was a doer of evil, and I became an eater of sin. Some day my sins will be forgiven--this is my penance." He pointed to his instruments. Ferval kept silence. He feared a word would blow away the cobweb foundations of the narrative. The girl had turned and was watching a young tilted moon which with a single star made silvery dents low in the western horizon.

"I am an eater of sin. We still have a few such in Wales. They put a piece of bread and cheese on the breast of a dead man and when the sin-eater eats it, the sins of the dead are passed into the bread and cheese and the soul of the dead is shrived of them. Ay, ay, but it's a grave duty, my friend, to take upon your own soul the crime of another. If you are free from sin yourself, you may walk through life a brave creature; but ... I took his sins, sins, the sins of the wickedest composer of our century, God rest his soul. And for the wicked things he put into his symphonies I must march through life playing on this terrible collection of instruments the Tune of Time--" His daughter faced him.

"Father, we must go; you are only keeping the gentleman." Again she signalled Ferval, but he disregarded her warning. He would not stir. The story and the man who told it, a prophet shorn of his heaven-storming powers, fascinated him.

"I took his sins to myself and they were awful. Once every night I play the Tune of Time in which the wickedness of the dead man is spread out like dry rot in a green field. This man kept his genius so long stagnant that it decayed on his hands, and then into his pestilential music he poured his poison, and would have made the world sick. Oh, for delivery from the crushing transgressions of another! His name? Ah, but that is my secret! I ate his sin, and truth, my son, is stranger than theology! Listen!"

Before his daughter could check him he had hastily donned his armament of instruments and, tramping slowly the broad, smooth path, began playing. Ferval, much disappointed, was about to disappear, for he remembered the racking noises of the previous day. But this music, this Tune of Time!...

III

It was like the flare of lightning which illuminates strange regions beyond the borders of the soul. Ferval no longer heard, he felt; he felt no more, he saw. The white veil was torn asunder, and it showed him a melodious thunder-pool wherein tapering tiny bodies swam, whose eyes were the eyes of Debora. They split and coalesced into other creatures, and to the drummings of spheric harmonies resolved themselves scaly and monstrous. Never did they cease changing. As the music buzzed he saw the great ladder of life, the lowermost rungs resting in lakes of melted amber, the top threatening the remotest rims of the universe. And still the Tune of Time whirred on, as facet after facet of the Infinite wheeled toward creation. Numberless legions of crumpled nightmare shapes modulated into new, familiar forms. Ferval saw plasmic dew become anthropoidal apes, fiercely roaming primeval forests in search of prey. The music mounted ever upward, for the Tune of Time is the Tune of Love--love and its inseparable shadow, hate, fashion the firmament. The solid, circular earth shivered like a mighty harp under this lyric burden of love. The very stars sported in their orbits; and from the fulgurating ovens of the Milky Way there shot forth streams of audible light that touched the heart-strings of the hairy, erect primates and set them chanting; thus were the souls born which crowned them men. This space-bridging music ranged from sun to sun, and its supernatural symphony had no beginning and never shall end.

But the magician or devil who revealed this phantasmagoria of the Cosmos--how had he wrested from the Inane the Tune of Time that in a sequence of chromatic chords pictured the processes of the eternal energy? Was this his sin, the true sin against the Holy Ghost? How had he blundered upon the secret of the rhythmic engine which spun souls through the ages? No man could live after this terrific peep at the Ancient of Days. Debora's eyes peered into Ferval's, filled with the music that enmeshes. And now sounded the apocalyptic trumpets even unto the glittering edges of eternity....

Amid this vertiginous tempest of tones Debora danced the Dance of Space. She revolved in lenten movement to the lilt of the music, her eyes staring and full of broken lights. As her gaze collided with her companion's he saw a disk of many-coloured fire; and then her languorous gestures were transformed into shivering intensities. She danced like the wine-steeped Noah; she danced as danced David before the Ark of the Covenant. And she was Herodias pirouetting for the price of John's head, and her brow was wreathed with serpents. Followed the convulsive curvings of the Nautch and the opaque splendours of stately Moorish slaves. Debora threw her watcher into a frenzy of fear. He crouched under a sky that roofed him in with its menacing blackness; the orbs of the girl were shot with crescent lightnings. Alien in his desolation, he wondered if her solemn leaps, as the music dashed with frantic speed upon his ear-drums, signified the incarnation of Devi, dread slayer of men! The primal charmers affrighted his vision: Lilith, Ourania, Astarte, Ashtaroth, Belkis, Ishtar, Mylitta, Cotytto, and many immemorial figures from before the Flood streamed by and melted into the woven paces of Debora--this new Jephtha's daughter dancing to her doom as her father fingered the Tune of Time. In the whirling patterns of her dance, Ferval discerned, though dimly, the Veil of Maya, the veil of illusion called Space, on the thither side of which are embroidered the fugacious symbols of Time....

... As the delirious music faltered and fainted, he watched the tragic eyes of Debora yellowing cat-like. His senses and imagination had been hypnotized by all this fracas and by the beauty of the girl. With such a mate and such formidable music, he could conquer the earth! His brain was afire with the sweetness of the odour that enveloped them, an odour as penetrating as the music of the nocturnal Chopin.

"Debora," he whispered, "you must never go away from me." She hung her head. The old man was not to be seen; the darkness had swallowed him. Ferval quietly passed his arm about the waist of the silent woman and slowly they walked in the tender night. She was the first to speak:--

"You did not hear a madman's story," she asserted in her clear, candid voice, which had for him the hue of a cleft pomegranate. "It is the history of my father's soul. It is his own sin he expiates."

"But you, you!" Ferval cried unsteadily. "Why must your life be sacrificed to gratify the bizarre egotism of such a--" He cut short the phrase, fearful of wounding her. He felt her body tremble and her arm contract. They reached the marble staircase of the Jeanne d'Arc memorial. She stopped him and burst forth:--

"Would you be willing to share his burden? Would you take upon your shoulders his sin? He may have committed the one unpardonable sin, for he discovered the true philosopher's stone, that can transmute metals, make mountains nod, the stars to stop, and command the throne of Jehovah--oh, what blasphemy has been his in his daring music! If he could persuade one other soul besides mine to help him, he might be released from his woe. Will you be that other?"

She put this question as if she were proposing a commonplace human undertaking. Ferval in his confusion fancied that she was provoking him to a declaration. To grasp his receding reason he fatuously exclaimed:--

"Is this a Salvation Army fantasy?"

With that she called out, in harsh resentment:

"Not salvation for you!"

She then thrust him from her so violently that he tumbled backward down the steps to the very bottom, where, unnerved by the ferocity of the attack and his head bruised by the fall, he felt his consciousness escape like gas from a punctured balloon. When found the next morning, he was barely covered by the old sin-eater's rags, while near by was scattered the entire orchestra of that eloquent wizard. Shudderingly he realized that it had been no dream; shudderingly he wondered if upon his soul had been shifted the unknown crime of the fanatic! The witching, enigmatic Debora haunted his memory; and with dismay he recalled the blistering vision evoked by the music, through which she had glided like some tremulous Lamia. Decidedly his imagination had carried him far. He cursed his easy credulity, he reviled his love of the exotic....

Ferval made inquiry of the authorities, but received little comfort. Salvation Army people they were not, this father and daughter; the tambourine, assumed garb, and prophet's beard had deceived him. Impostors! But of what incredible caliber, of what illusion-creating power! For years he could not see a Salvation Army girl without a sense of cerebral exaltation. If he could have met Debora again, he would have forgiven her sibylline deceptions, her father's chicanery. And how did they spin their web? Ferval, student of the occult, greedy of metaphysical problems, at first set it down to Indian Yogi magic. But the machinery--the hideously discordant human orchestra, the corybantic dancing! No, he rejected the theory. Music is sometimes hypnotic, but not such music; dancing is the most alluring of the spatial arts, and Debora's miming was a delight to the eye; but could it have so obscured his judgments as to paint upon the canvas of his fancy those prodigious frescoes of time and space?

In the iron solitude of his soul he tortured himself with these questions. His stupor lasted for days--was it the abrupt fall or was it the result of his absinthe-like dreams? He was haunted by an odour that assailed his brain like one tune persistently played. The odour! Whence did it come with its sickly sweetness? Perhaps therein lay the secret of his hallucinating visions. Perhaps a drug had perverted his brain. But within the week the dangerous perfume had become dissipated, and with it vanished all hope of solving the riddle. Oh, to sense once more the enchantments of its fragrance, once more revel in the sublimated intoxication of mighty forces weaving at the loom of life! By the cadences of what infernal art had he been vouchsafed a glimpse of the profiles of the gods? Henceforth Ferval became a lover of shadows.

[The end]
James Huneker's short story: Tune Of Time

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