OR nearly a hundred years it had stood there in the heart of old New York, until its rafters were blackened with age, its paintings mellowed by time, and its original proprietors, long dead, forgotten. Many times it had been mentioned in more or less inaccurate histories, and had outlived, for the most part, the historians. Its oldest frequenters, and of old ones there were many, could not remember when Schiller's Haus was young. All they could remember was blackened rafters, mellowed pictures, and legends of the founder, who claimed kinship with the great poet. And of it and its antiquity was Herr Schmidt. Not everyone referred to him as Herr Schmidt; the members of the orchestra he directed having for him a title of their own, Herr Wilhelm, expressing familiarity without loss of reverence.
He was not unlike the tavern in outward indication of venerable age. He had shriveled with the years, until he appeared a mere miniature of what had been, and from long bending over the piano keys had acquired a slight stoop of the shoulders. In profile he looked like Liszt, with his big nose and frowning eyebrows,—eyebrows which softened when he played such music as he loved,—and his hair, white and long, fell away from a bald crown to a ridiculous incurling wave about his coat collar.
The oldest patrons could remember when Schiller's had been the most famous place in New York, and that the original orchestra had numbered fifteen pieces, also that the advent of Herr Schmidt had been an occasion of sufficient importance to cause a musical flutter. To have for orchestra leader a man who had been musical director for the King of Saxony was a great event in those far-off times when even music seemed young, and that for decades Schmidt's orchestra was the finest musical organization of the city seemed natural and proper. Could its old admirers forget the fact that when Jenny Lind came to America Herr Schmidt's band left Schiller's without music several nights that it might play for the “nightingale”? Never! It was triumphant proof of their musical judgment!
They might, as they grew old and doddering, forget other triumphs; but not so with Herr Schmidt, the triumphs being milestones in the fifty years of his life which had revolved around Schiller's Haus. Once, in enthusiastic mood, an English Prince destined for a throne had complimented the accomplished fifteen, and on a later occasion a mighty German nobleman had publicly declared that America would not be without fine music so long as Herr Schmidt lived to lead an orchestra. These were encomiums he cherished; for Princes, like Kings, should not know or could not say wrong.
In that half-century it was as if the city had walked away from Schiller's and him. Once he had lived “Down Town,” that vague section bordered by Tenth-st.; now he lived on a Hundred and Tenth. Not from choice, for he had clung to his first apartments for forty-five years—until the clangor of traffic, bellowing and insistent, surrounded and overwhelmed them, and his landlord gave way, with his building, to the march of the skyscrapers.
“Bud where shall I go?” he asked, bewildered, when told of the sale. “Where can I go?”
“Why, anywhere! There's lots of other places.”
“Bud dere is no blace like dis. Ach, Himmel! You don'd understand!”
It was quite natural that he should go to a Hundred and Tenth, its being the nearest, in sound at least, to his old home, and it was not until he moved there that Herr Schmidt realized that he was growing old and that habit had woven him in its snare.
T least a dozen times in that first month in his new abode he turned out at five o'clock, when the short afternoon concert was over, and walked, with absent mind, to the site of his old home. Each time he went humming along, with hands clasped behind his back, and nodding to the children who hailed him, until confronted by the great scaffolding of steel that marred the site of the house he had known. Each time he threw up his hands helplessly and with a sense of bewilderment turned toward the subway, that terrible monster that had steadily burrowed northward since he and Schiller's were young.