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Henry Harland
A Jewish Musician's Story
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It seems almost as though Chopin must have had Veronika in mind when he composed it. Its color, its passion, its vague dreamy sadness, and withal its transparent simplicity, make it for me a perfect musical portrait. Those were the traits which most constantly and conspicuously abode in my thought of her. Her simplicity, her child-like simplicity, and her naturalness, and the serene purity of her soul, made her as different from other women that I had seen—though, to be sure, I had seen but few women except as I passed them in the street or rode with them in the horse-car—made her as different from those I had seen, at any rate, as a lily plucked on the hillside is different from a hothouse flower, as daylight is different from gaslight, as Schubert’s music is different from Liszt’s. In every thing and from every point of view, she was simple and natural and serene. Her great pale face, and the dark eyes, and the smile that came and went like a melody across her lips, and the way she wore her hair, and the way she dressed, and the way she played, sang, spoke, and her gestures, and the low, sad, musical laughter that I heard only once or twice from the beginning to the end—all were simple, and natural, and serene. And yet there was a mystery attaching to each of them, a something beyond my comprehension, a something that tinged my love for her with awe. A mystery that would neither be defined nor penetrated nor ignored, brooded over her, as the perfume broods over a rose. I doubt whether an American woman can be like this unless she is older and has had certain experiences of her own. Veronika had not had sufficient experience of her own to account for what I have described: but she was a Jewess, and all the experience of the Jewish race, all the martyrdom of the scattered hosts, were hers by inheritance.
No matter how I was occupied, whether teaching, or practicing, or reading, or writing, or walking, or talking to other people, I was always conscious of the love of Veronika astir in my heart. Just as through all the vicissitudes of a fugue the subject melody will survive in one form or another and be at no minute altogether silenced, so through all the changes of my busy day the thought of Veronika lingered in my mind. I can not tell how completely the whole aspect of the world had been altered since the night I first saw her standing in the moonlight. It was as if my life up to that moment had been passed beneath gray skies, and suddenly the clouds had dispersed and the sunshine flooded the earth. A myriad things became plain and clear that had been invisible until now, and old things acquired a new significance. My heart welled with tenderness for all living creatures—the overflow of the tenderness it had for her. All my senses, all my capacities for pain and pleasure, were more acute than before. Suddenly music, which had been my art, became my religion: she had glorified it by her devotion. I looked forward to my next visit with her as a benighted traveler looks forward to the glowing window that promises rest and shelter: only in my case the light illuminated my whole pathway and made the progress toward its source a constant delight instead of a perfunctory labor. But this is the common story of a man in love, and stands without telling. Suffice it that before our acquaintance was a month old I had got upon the most intimate terms with Mr. Tikulski and Veronika, spending not only every Wednesday evening at their house but also each Sunday afternoon, and accompanying her to Hoboken as regularly as she had to go. Never was there a prouder man than I at those junctures when, with her hand pressed tightly under my arm, I felt that she was trusting herself entirely to my charge and that I was answerable for her safety and well-being. The Hoboken ferry-boats became to my thinking vastly more interesting than the most romantic of Venetian gondolas; and to this day I can not sniff the peculiar stuffy odor that always pervades a ferry-boat cabin without being transported back across the years to that happy, happy time. I actually blessed the necessity that forced her to journey so far for her livelihood; and it was with an emphatic pang that I listened to the plans which she and Tikulski were prone to discuss whereby she was shortly to get an engagement nearer home: though the sight of her pale, tired cheek reproached me the moment after. On her side she made no concealment of a most cordial regard for me. Her face always lighted up at my arrival; she was always eager to share her ideas with me and to call forth my opinion of her work, appearing pleased by my praise and impressed by my criticism. She set me an admirable example of frankness. She would say precisely what she thought of my renditions, sparing not their blemishes and indicating how an effective point might be improved.
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