though less able musician.
The shop of Ramirez, the luthier, was down the hill, and to this, thoroughly satisfied about the excellence of his instruments, we went, Perez grumbling to us in undertones.
"That fellow La Branche—he does not play Spanish music. No—he comes from Toulouse. That explains it. It is the talent of the South of France, all on the top, all lively and excitable and showing off—that is how it is. Now I tell you, Monsieur and Madame Gordon, just because of that the Frenchman never will be able to understand our music. You English are nearer to us. You, when you have acquired ability, will play our music with much more insight and much more sensibility than that La Branche."
This comforted us exceedingly, for one day in wrath Modigliani, the Italian painter, had said that it was mere impertinence for an Englishman to think that he could understand the subtleties of the music of Spain.
Ramirez almost makes his guitars out in the street. His workshop was about ten feet square with a door six feet wide. Here was a piece of pure Spain, though we could not recognize it (at the moment having no data), ten feet square, thrust bodily into the lower floor of a French house. The only light came in from the door, but the door was nearly as broad as the room. Almost blocking up the entrance, Ramirez, a burly, blue-jowled Spaniard, with something of the physical construction of a boxer, was working at delicate shavings of wood. Behind him the wall was hung with templates, cut from white wood, of the parts of the instruments he was making, guitars and lauds and bandurrias, strange instruments which Europe, outside of Spain, scarcely knows. On a shelf at the back of the small shop were heaped unfinished bandurrias bound with string, for the glue to become hardened in them. The workshop of Ramirez was not what we had expected. One is, I think, justified in expecting a neatness, a delicacy, about the place where fine musical instruments are made. Had Ramirez been a maker of chairs, or even of cartwheels, his workshop, though small, would have appeared appropriate; but that, from this rough place, could come out "the most difficult of musical instruments to make" disturbed one's sense of suitability.
The greeting which Ramirez gave us touched with doubt the picture which we had conceived of the amiability of the Spaniard. There was no cordiality in him. Some of his aloofness cleared away when he had penetrated through the disguise of a dandy to the real Perez beneath, but he continued his occupation, and to the statement that we wished him to make a guitar for Jan he shrugged his fat shoulders. He declared that he had already too much work.
"Those two instruments, for instance," he said, pointing to two unfinished guitars elaborately ornamented standing in a corner, "I have already been nine months over those, and have not had time to finish them. It is true they are exhibition instruments, for shops, and therefore have little if any interest for me."
Perez led him on with compliments, thawing away his frostiness gradually with Jan's admiration for the guitar of M. La Branche. Suddenly Ramirez put down his tools.
"Look here," he said, "I'll make the Señor a guitar. Three hundred francs is the price, and it will be finished in three months."
The bargain concluded, Ramirez picked up one of the unfinished instruments. He handed it to Jan, exhorting him to explore with a finger the exquisite workmanship of its interior. He rapped on the belly with his knuckle, and at the sound of its deep musical boom he smiled for the first time. Ramirez, having thawed, did not freeze up again. He began explaining the novel shape of his instrument, a shape which had been worked out for him by a mathematical philosopher. He said that the guitar was the most difficult of musical instruments to make, requiring a volume of tone which had to be produced from strings easy to pluck and finger. A problem very difficult to solve.
"And the guitar I made for you," he said, turning to Perez, "you gave it to S——?"
"Yes," said Perez.
"See here," said Ramirez, turning to us, "I make a guitar, an excellent one, one of my best. This fellow comes to see me, he hears the instrument. He says to me, 'Ramirez, keep that guitar for me, and I will at once go to work in a French munition factory, and I will work like a slave, and every week I will send you money until the guitar is paid for.' And I agree. And he goes and makes aeroplanes, and does honest work for the first time in his life, I believe, and every week he sends money to me. And the week it is all paid up he stops work and goes off with the guitar. And he is crazy about the instrument. And he goes back to Spain and then he hears S—— playing. He is so enraptured by the wonderful playing of the man, that he runs home, fetches his guitar, and thrusts it into S—— 's hands, exclaiming: 'Here is an instrument worthy of you. It is too good for me, for I am a mere bungler beside you.' And so he gives away the guitar that he has laboured for. Ah yes, you villain, I have heard of you."
As we went down the hill, Perez tried to explain away this generosity so characteristic of his impulsive nature.
"It is not as though I would have played on the instrument again after having heard S—— touch it. Every time that I wished to play I would have thought, 'Ah yes, but if only he were playing it and not I.' And I had to give it to him, or perhaps I would never have been able to play again."
He asked us to come that evening to a certain small café in the Rue Campagne Premier; some other Spaniards were to come also and there was to be playing and singing. We were to come after the legal closing time, and we were to thump on the shutters.
In the night, in the dark, we rapped upon the rusty iron shutters, and one by one, like conspirators, were admitted into the dimly-lit café. It was a small place, characteristic of Paris, a combination of buvette with zinc bar, and cheap restaurant with marble-topped tables. Five years ago a good meal could be bought here for less than a franc. Behind the bar bottles and glass vats reached up to the ceiling; upon the dirty, green, oil-painted walls, cheap almanacs and trivial popular prints hung, together with excellent drawings and sketches, presented to Madame by her clients. One by one the invités slipped in. Madame and her two girl waitresses laughed and giggled at the kitchen door, while the patron, grey-moustached, hollow-eyed and cadaverous, uncorked the bottles of wine behind the bar.
Here again for several hours the Spaniards re-created Spain. Perez is a player of temperament. Half of his skill and art he appears to suck from his audience. Thus at first he plays but indifferently well; but any music will rouse a crowd of Spaniards. To the growing excitement Perez responds, playing the better for it, thus creating more enthusiasm, and these interchanges continue, until he reaches the limit of his ability. But he is so sensitive to his audience that one indifferent person can take the edge off all his power. This night there was no one unresponsive. The playing of Perez became more and more brilliant. With his nails be rasped deep chords from his responsive instrument; to and fro he beat the strings in the remorseless rhythm of Jota Arragonesa. In the dimly lit café the dark figures and the sallow faces of the Spaniards were crowded about him in an irregular circle. "Olé! Olé!" they cried, and clapped their hands in time with the music. The air within the café throbbed and pulsated with the music. "Mais, c'est très bien," exclaimed Madame at intervals from her corner. "C'est très amusant, hein?" Two of the younger men were murmuring to the waitresses and were making them titter.
"Come," exclaimed Perez at last, "enough of this piece playing. Let us have a song. Vamos! who will sing?"
But something, possibly my presence, deterred the Spaniards from singing. They were shy as a group of schoolboys. One at last began to chant in a high quavering falsetto, but before the first half of his copla was ended he broke down into a laugh of hysterical shyness.
"Why then," cried Perez, "I'll have to sing myself, and Heaven knows I've got no voice."
The Spaniard believes that any singing is better than no singing. One of his chief pursuits in life is that of happiness—"allègre" he calls it. This allègre is produced not by perfect results but by evidence of good intentions. He would rather have a bad player who plays from his heart than a good player who plays for his pocket. Any singing, then, so long as it is of the right nature, will suffice, no matter what its musical effect. Perez's singing had allègre, but no music. He lowed like a calf, rising up into strange throaty hoarseness like a barrow merchant who has been crying