The Key Note. Burnham Clara Louise
apron strings. My father had spent some time with us every year and at last secured a living salary and took us to town. The first thing I did in the glitter of the blinking lamp-posts was to fall in love. I prayed every night for a long time that I might marry that girl. She had long curls and I reached just to her ear. I received her wedding cards a year or so ago. I was always praying for something, but only one of my prayers has ever been answered. I was always very devout in a thunderstorm, and I prayed that I might not be struck by lightning and I never have been yet."
"When was your wonderful voice discovered?"
"Look here, Miss Wilbur, you are tempting me to a whole biography, and it isn't interesting."
"Yes, I am interested in – in your mother."
"My poor mother," said Philip, in a different tone. "When I was twelve years old my father was taken ill and soon left us. My mother had to struggle and I had to stop school and go to work. The first job I got was lathing a house. I walked seven miles into the country and put the laths on that house. I worked hard for a whole week and received twelve dollars and seventy-five cents. It was a ten-dollar gold piece, two silver dollars, fifty cents, and a quarter."
Diana lifted sympathetic eyes.
"I bought a suit of clothes and gave up the gold piece. The perfect lady clerk failed to give me credit for it and six months afterward the store sent the bill to my mother. I put up a heated argument, you may be sure, and before the matter was settled, the perfect lady clerk skipped with another woman's husband. So the powers inclined to believe me rather than her."
"Poor little boy," put in Diana. "But your music?"
"Yes. Well, our minister's wife took an interest in me and gave me lessons on the organ. I never would practice, though. I would pick out hymns with one finger while I stood on one foot and pumped the pedal with the other. It was results I was after; but the cornet allured me, and I learned to play that well enough to join the Sunday-School orchestra.
"A cousin of my mother's came to our rescue sufficiently to let me go to school, and in all my spare time I did odd jobs, some of them pretty strenuous; but I was a strong youngster, and evidently bore a charmed life, for I challenged fate on trains, on top of buildings, and in engine rooms. But I'll spare you the harrowing details. At the spring commencement of the high school, I was invited to sing a solo. I warbled good old 'Loch Lomond' and forgot the words and was mortified almost to death, but the audience was enthusiastic, I have always believed out of pity."
"No no," breathed Diana.
"Well, at any rate, they insisted on an encore, and I was so braced up by the applause and so furious at myself that I gave them 'The Owl and the Pussy Cat."'
"Oh."
"I see you don't know it. Well, next day I met a lady on the street who was very musical, it seemed, and she invited me to come to her house and talk over studying music. She said I had a great responsibility. Oh, you don't want to hear all this!"
"I do, I do."
"My mother passed away soon afterward, and the musical friend in need – good friend she was, and is – told me of a town a hundred miles away where there were vacancies she knew of in choir positions. She would give me a letter of introduction and she believed I could qualify for one of them. I didn't tell her the slimness of my cash after my dear mother's funeral expenses were paid, and she didn't know. So I traveled that hundred miles on a freight train. When I first boarded it, I crawled into the fire-box of a new engine that was being transported over that line. It grew very cold before we had gone far, and I crawled out and climbed over the coal tender and opened the hole where they put the water in. I climbed down into that empty place and lighted a match only to find that there were about twenty bums there ahead of me. I didn't stay there long, for I was good and plenty afraid; some of them looked desperate. I climbed out again and went along the train till I came to a flat-car loaded with a new threshing machine. I saw a brakeman coming along with a lantern, and I knew if he saw me he'd put me off. So I climbed into the back of the threshing machine and down into its very depths, and after a while, when I had become chilled to the marrow, the train came to a halt. I crawled out and down to the ground and ran around to get warm. They were doing some switching and I saw they added two cars to the train. One had stock in one end and hay and grain in the other. They had to leave the door open to let in air for the stock, and up I climbed and hid under the straw and slept soundly the rest of the journey. Oh, I was dirty when I arrived! But my precious letter was safe in an inside pocket, and with the contents of the little bundle I had, and the expenditure of part of my small stock of money, I made myself decent and presented my letter of introduction. The organist of one of the churches tried me out. He liked my voice so much that he engaged me and was even interested enough to let me live at his house; but three dollars a Sunday was the salary and the voice lessons I engaged would be four dollars a week, so, of course, I had to go to work at once, and I got a job in a big sash and door factory where I worked like a horse ten hours a day."
"Why, Mr. Barrison," sighed Diana, "you are a hero."
Philip laughed. "I had no leisure to think about that. Times grew very slack and there began to be great danger that I would lose my job in the factory. They said they would have to lay me off unless I would whitewash an old building they had bought to store lumber. So I was given a brush and a barrel of lime-water and told to go at it. If I lost my job, I wouldn't be able to live. So I wrapped my feet in sacks to try to keep warm – it was late November – and went at it: and there were girls, Miss Wilbur, girls! And I couldn't put it over them after Tom Sawyer's fashion. Well, I had sung there just thirteen Sundays when the blow fell. The committee told me very kindly that they wanted to try another tenor. I went home from that talk with a heart heavy as lead. I could not sleep, and near midnight I began to cry. Yes, I did cry. I was twenty-one and I had voted, but I was the most broken-hearted boy in the State. I must have cried for two or three hours, pitying myself to the utmost, up three flights of stairs in that little attic room, with the rain pouring on the roof over my head, when all at once I jumped out of bed as dry-eyed as if I'd never shed a tear and, lifting my right hand as high as possible, I made a vow. I said – So help me, God, I will become a singer if I have to walk over everybody in the attempt. I will learn to sing, and these mutts will listen to me and pay to hear me, too. Then I jumped back into bed and fell asleep instantly."
"Splendid!" said Diana. "And how did you keep the vow?"
"Well, next morning I began to figure what I must do. I knew I hadn't enough education. I remembered that three years before I had won a scholarship for twenty weeks' free tuition in a business college in Portland, and I decided that I would need fifty dollars. The same cousin who had helped me before to go to school, came across. I quit my job, paid my bills, and left for Portland, getting there at Christmas. I sang at the Christmas-tree exercises in my home church. I went to school as I planned, took care of the furnace for the rent of my room, took care of three horses, got the janitorship of a church – "
Diana looked up with a sudden smile. "And forced up the thermometer when you overslept."
Philip burst into a hearty laugh. "Did Miss Burridge give me away? I tell you I saved that church lots of coal that winter."
"Oh, continue. I did not mean to interrupt you, for now you are coming to the climax."
"Nothing very wonderful, Miss Wilbur, but I found I had that to give that people were willing to pay for, and I began going about in country places giving recitals, mixing humorous recitations in with the groups of songs, playing my own accompaniments and sometimes having to shovel a path through the snow to the town hall before my audience could come in. I wonder if Caruso ever had to shovel snow away from the Metropolitan Opera House before his friends could get in to hear him! After that I worked my way through two years at college, studying with a good voice teacher. Then came the war. I got through with little more than a scratch and was in one of the first regiments to be sent home after the armistice was signed. The lady who first discovered my voice had influential musical friends in New York. She sent me to them, and, to make a long story a little shorter, last winter I was under an excellent management, obtained a church position, and have sung at a good many recitals. The coming winter looks hopeful." Philip put his hand on his heart and bowed. "Thanking you for your kind attention – here we are at Grammy's."