'We like' he remarked in his quaint idiom, 'to hear music at scattered times.' He was trying to affect indifference. But his gruff voice shook, and I knew then that music hath charms to cash the savage check.
This essay has rambled on an unconscionable while. The shades of editorial night are already descending; and still I have not yet described one of those unexpected and perfect orgies of chamber music,--one of those little earthly paradises full of
Soul-satisfying strains--alas! too few,--
which true fiddlers errant hope to find in each new place they visit, but which usually keep well in advance of them, like the foot of the rainbow.
One such adventure came to me not long ago in a California city, while I was gathering material for a book of travel. On my first evening there I was taken to dine with a well-known writer in his beautiful home, which he had built with his own two hands in the Spanish mission style during fourteen years of joyous labor. This gentleman had no idea that I was to be thrust upon him. But his hospitality went so far as to insist, before the evening was over, that I must stay a week. He would not take no for an answer. And for my part I had no desire to say no, because he was a delightful person, his home with its leaf-filled patio was most alluring, and I had discovered promising possibilities for fiddlers errant in the splendid music-room and the collection of phonograph records of Indian music which mine host had himself made in Arizona and New Mexico. Then too there were rumors of skillful musical vagabonds in the vicinity.
Such an environment fairly cried aloud for impromptu fiddling. So, armed with a note to the best violinist in that part of California, I set forth next morning on the trail of the ideal orgy. At the address given I was told that my man had moved and his address was not known. That was a setback, indeed! But determined fiddlers errant usually land on their feet. On the way back I chanced to hear some masterly strains of Bach-on-the-violin issuing from a brown bungalow. And ringing at a venture I was confronted by the very man I sought.
Blocking the doorway, he read the note, looking as bored as professionals usually do when asked to play with amateurs. But just as he began to tell me how busy he was and how impossible, and so forth, he happened to glance again at the envelope, and a very slight gleam came into his eye.