VIOLINS AND CHEESE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LII, Issue 16050, 16 October 1915, Page 1 (Supplement)

VIOLINS AND CHEESE.

BY FRAITX MORTON.

To-day was a glad day. The sky radiant, the sea singing, alt the air surcharged with the honey of Australian spring. This Sydney is, after all and above all, a place to live in, I give you my word. I arose at eight, that earlymorning habit being an eccentricity or vice of mine incurable by age. I raced through a big tumble of surf with fifty other folksgrim- sturdy city fellows, sleek young chaps of the nondescript camp, school girls, slim as twigs and pint as prawns, girls who have left school and are snoddling comfortably up 1 against the world, two or three grandfathers, a pretty actress looting for the nonce quite human, a bevy of children voluble in the shallowsthere we were in the surf, enjoying each others' company, and the great good gifts of God. When one starts the day like that one can scarcely g0 wrong. It is wonderfully difficult to go wrong, in any case, ii only the day starts right. So during j>art of the forenoon I dawdled round second-hanc. bookshops, a thrall to (now, which of 'em is it?) calm Minerva of the quiet eyes. By lunch-time I was the possessor of new treasure —a very quaint and uplifting Quarle and an eighteenth century book on devils, very violent. I lunched quite amicably "with my other Me, the one that watches and suggests, scolds and fondles, a dear thing. My other Me said, "You are mad as mad, of course. You buy books and bits of old crockery when it is boots and shirts you need. I, the keeper of your con- j science, your janitor of dreams, I think ' sometimes that I shall have to sue you for maintenance. All flesh is grass, and the vanities are often very sweet; hut— these beladdered stockings of mine, these gloves that must not be worn for fear of disclosures— nothing ever shame you, 0 comrade of my dreams?" So after, that we determined on work, and w e cuddled the determination hard as we sat philosophic in the sun. At four o'clock, work was still deferred. In the evening I went to a theatre. The play was tine, and the orchestra was ordinary ; but somehow to-night I found myself being swept away by the violins. Mattel" of a mood, no doubt; but if you have ever had a glimpse of those places that resound to the footsteps of the gods you will understand quite well. The cry of the violin is often nothing much : but sometimes it is an irresistible tumultuous tide of green that shimmers. In the tide are gold lights that are merely kisses filched from the lips of the nereids in the shallows. Resistance is impossible, for one is but a cork borne onwards by immensity. Music is marvellous in its beauty, its significance, its intense human appeal; but the i music Oi fiddles is not human—it is a celestial affair somewhat over-thumbed by devils in their moments of innocent play —it is an outrush of the divine amid these grey monotonies—it is the throbbing pulse of invisible legions that march across the dim eternities. The violin music came creeping into my veins to people them to-night. I sat there in the smug plush seat :but the real Me was rollicking with tanned fauns and slender exuberant immortal girls, a thousand, thousand miles away, and then a thousand miles. That is fiddle magic. It defies time and place, and makes a mock of probability. Melinda washing dishes becomes a princess as the greenish tide steals in. Old things become new, and m this newness are first born in beautv. The fiddle : magic may of a sudden heal your ancient wounds, or' it may hammer you to a pulp and leave you a moaning mass of new contusions. Tonight it was all consolation and delicious madness. I also lived in Arcadia again, and in the dear remembered nooks sat down and laughed and whispered. But in the big ferry-boat coming home 1 was amazed to find how violins lead one's thoughts inevitably to cheese. There was a very wheezy one" on the main deck, and the eyes of the fiddler roved greasily over us, and said : "I know it's very silly and annoying, this lamentable imitation of good noise : but I don't do it because I'm wicked or misanthropic, a cynic or a coldblooded natural nuisancel do it because supper supper. and I 'as to earn me cheese." Cheese is, after all, poetry's unexpected essence, the odorous soul "of song. As the dingy fiddler tormented us I looked round. Here and there the people sat. Prim ones, very upright, thinking their sad limp thoughts. Old ones, very genial, having iaunted from tavern to tavern, and realised a midnight mellowness. Privateering ones, very shifty of the eye. Loving ones, in couples, croodling intertwined, ignoring the world in the characteristic Australian manner. Young girls of the wonder age. fifteen to nineteen, the ace at which the young girls of Sydney are the loveliest and cosiest and winsomest and shrewdest and merriest and daringest and sprightliest and most coaxing of any young girls on earth; I know, because I see them in their hundreds every day, and often enough lose my heart ten* times in the course of half an hour's iouraev over the water. Young matrons, "too, shyly proud with the pride of womanhood "that has come into its own. I love the young matrons very much. They dress at evening gaily, thev enioy life with a prodigious zest, they seize life in their slender tearing fingers as eagerly as they seek joy's heart, they inspire me with great thoughts; maybe I admire them so tremendously because they scare me so. Here, then, is the bier crowd on the boat all listening cheerfully to "the murderer of music. And as I look round on the crowd I know again that in the end it all comes to cheese. Bread and cheese and kisses! Bread and wine and kisses wouldn't have the true ring, would it? Bread and pork pies and kisses—ngh! that is unthinkable. In the end it is simplicity that counts, and cheese is somehow the simplest of all foods. It is simple even when it is made in New Zealand and sold in Sydney shops as prime Cheshire at one and nine a pound. It doe 1; not intoxicate like champagne; but it is better than champagne for the stomach, and on the stomach all things hang. If you don't believe me, try to make love when you are wrenched with colic twinges, try to sing subtly to Samanlha when you" are bilious, try to preserve intact your faith in Providence while Mrs. Binks changes the hot compress. Then, cheese is the true predestined food of romance. Meat i' always rather an impropriety, dead flesh of beasts. Bread is, in the end, merely a tolerated monotony lacking charafter. But cheese—-whv, cheese is imprisoned cowslips, the ultimate extract of flowered meadows where the bees croon as they pass. Butter is merely so much grea.se mixed with boracid acid or unclassed fat. But chees is cheese, even at its poorest. Milton's tremendous harmonies. Cleopatra's overwhelming charm, that faith of the Saint of Assisi that wooed the very fishes to his preaching. Napoleon's endless fierce passion for war and a woman or two, Gladstone's pawky power. Disraeli's phrases. D'Orsay's shape all just so much cheese in transformation. There is a sadder reflexion. Were it not for the need of daily cheese there would be vastly fewer murderers of music. The rush for existence is such nowadays that when a man is perfectly useless for anything else he is mighty likely to aim at becoming a musician or a journalist. Having no skill with any instrument. I am a journalist myself, because conscience assures me that to play the violin would in my case be criminal. But it is so seldom that an editor is wanted that the number of bad violinists increases all the time, and this is a great woe in the world. If all cheese were provided by the State, free of charge. .as vaccination is provided- during epidemics, we should have far less bad music to disI tress us. I admit it. To that -e,stept t J