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awake and conscious and self-possessed. justs it as naturally as he does, or

During the whole evening the young man's temples never become moist for a moment.

There he stands, holding his violin almost horizontally in front of him, never changing his posture or the position of his instrument by a hairbreadth and plays.

You sit in the audience listening and are overwhelmed with his bravura, his genius in handling the bow, his masterly work with the left hand, his command over beauty and nobility of tone. Yet in the midst of all this richness you yearn for a note of deep feeling, and hunger for a little soulfulness. It is true that this incredible skill itself has something splendid in it, and that this sovereign art in mastering the most humanly worthy of all instruments has its own power of enchantment. Certainly one is frequently enough carried off one's feet by Jascha Heifetz dazzled by the brilliance of his virtuosity and excited to the point of exultation by the magnificence of his execution. But the brilliance has no warmth in it, the exultation is without the intensity that comes when one's heart has been touched. One is amazed, of course, as by some rare phenomenon. Yet one's emotions are not engaged, not quite stirred to the depths as one expects them to be- nay, demands nay, demands that they be when a man can play the violin, the instrument that has the greatest spirituality of all, as Jascha Heifetz can.

How masterfully he played Bach's Chaconne! How nobly under his hands sounded the 'Ave Maria' of Schubert! It was a burst of pure melody that would have to be called holy if a spark of strong feeling had glimmered in it. No one else knows how to make the bow hover over the strings so immaterially, with such entrancing lightness, as Jascha Heifetz. No one ad

releases it as simply. No one else has this marvelous sonority, this command over an almost unearthly technique. But all other players have more soul than he has, and they all arouse more feeling. Not to speak of Fritz Kreisler and his fine expansiveness, or of Huberman and his heart-rending demoniac power, even Vasa Prihoda, bizarre as his execution is, has more soul.

As one sits and listens, one cannot help reflecting that the most wonderful thing about a child prodigy is that he sometimes develops into a great and mature artist. In Jascha Heifetz this much has been accomplished - he has become a great artist. To-day, in spite of his extreme youth, he is the greatest technician among the violinists of the world. It is hoped that he will become a mature artist, that his inner being will sometime reach the heights that his external skill has already reached. When this happens, he will be able to play the Kreutzer Sonata so that the very spirit of Beethoven will seem to be present to him and to his listeners, instead of playing it as he does now, the sake of technical bravura.

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One remembers that Jascha Heifetz was once a poor little Jewish boy in Wilna, or somewhere or other in that vicinity. What a good thing that there has been no pogrom there for the last twenty years or so! If there had been, young Jascha might have been flung against a wall and murdered by some hooligan.

Now he stands there on the platform, young, slender, and a little, a very little, too elegant. He plays the Tarantella of Sarasate and makes that terribly difficult piece seem like the simplest selection for beginners. This apparent effortlessness is based on the expenditure of infinite effort — and of whole childhood. Such stupendous perfection could be attained only by

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stupendous labor. Talent of course counts for much, but it comes to practically nothing unless it is accompanied by the talent for hard work, by a capacity for persistence, by the lash of a strong will that forces the tiring feet ahead, by the steel energy that enables one to make light of fatigue. All this can be read in the countenance of the performer up there-in his highvaulted forehead, which flushes under the dark-brown, curly, carefully brushed-back hair; in the mouth, which shuts tight with an indrawing movement of the lips; in the taut seriousness of his expression; all can be read the overcoming of the hardest obstacles, the triumph over every seduction of indolence, the mastery of his own destiny.

While still a child, he left his Polish ghetto home to emigrate to America. It is said that he is now the only violinist who satisfies the demands of the American audience for technical virtuosity. It may be so. As he stands

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there breaking records, so to speak, in violin-playing, as he finishes his magic labors with perfect composure and acknowledges the applause with dry courtesy, as if to say, 'I have done my work; you are only paying your debt,' he seems to incorporate in his person the whole spirit of modern youth. His contemporaries know that in any calling it is only technical expertness that gets anywhere, and they strive with all their might to break records: if they have no illusions, if they betray no deep feeling, it is because they are trying to realize difficult aims. There is much that is enigmatic in this generation, and much that seems lacking in warmth and tenderness; but one comprehends it when one has heard and seen Jascha Heifetz. It is a generation that deserves admiration, a generation whose spirit is hard at work behind its calm exterior, at work like a motor, and it is everywhere building a new world about us.

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THORNS ON THE HIBISCUS 1

BY ELIZABETH BAKER

It was a damp, sunless autumn in England that year. The mornings were drowned in mist that rose reluctantly for a few hours at midday, to disclose a dun-colored earth and sky, and then closed in again for the night. London was soaked in rain and mud. The wind sighed in perpetual dreariness as if a million Mrs. Gummidges were for ever groaning for 'the old 'un.'

1 From the Spectator (London ModerateConservative weekly), February 6 and 13

Inside the book was perpetual summer. The skies were always blue; the trees never lost their leaves and stood shivering in icy blasts, but remained thick and green the year round. There were golden sands on which one could lie in the shade of palms and gaze on a sapphire sea. There was an opalescent lagoon in which you bathed. The wind never sighed, but sang dulcet airs. There was rain certainly, - or else how account for the evergreen vegeta

tion? but it fell in an orderly manner, according to the calendar, and not just when it chose, as in England. Luscious fruits dropped into your lap, and everything planted in that rich soil yielded a hundredfold, and that within a few weeks.

Other countries, of course, might offer similar delights, but elsewhere the delights were so apt to be counteracted by serious drawbacks such as lions and tigers and other wild beasts, prodigious serpents, cannibal spiders, voracious insects, and intimidating diseases. But on this South Sea island, shaded by coco palms, decked with hibiscus, there were none of these drawbacks. There were mosquitoes, it is true, but they were not malarial, and the reader was assured they need not be considered. The native residents added to the general picturesqueness by going about in colored beads and wreaths of hibiscus, and not, as in England, perpetually in mackintoshes. Instead of hanging on to straps in trains, they sat about in groups beneath mangoes and frangipanni, playing the tomtom and making night melodious with sweet choruses. There was no fear of being run down by motor-cars, or of being told there was only room outside the bus on a wet night and only room inside it on a fine one.

We looked up from the book out into the mud-colored landscape, and then back into the book.

'Let us go there,' we said.

So we went.

We had a few surprises on the journey. It was not quite the sailing of a 'painted ship upón a painted ocean' that we had imagined. Either the writers about the Southern Seas go by some other route not known to steamship offices, or they have always been more fortunate in their weather. Within a day's run of the equator on either side we found it could be surprisingly

chilly. There was much more of emerald than of sapphire about the ocean, and, though it was a beautiful emerald, we can give quite a good show of that round Old England, and we had expected sapphires. It appeared to be the wrong season for phosphorescent fish, and, though it was thrilling to see sharks stealthily slipping here and there in the clear water, they are not peculiar to the Pacific and were a disappointing substitute for sunfish.

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But within twelve hours of our island the prospect became more in accord with the book. It was warm enough even for us. The women changed hurriedly into the thinnest raiment they could wear with decorum, — and happily the latitude allowed by modern fashion is wide, and all the males appeared in dazzling white duck. Unfortunately the time of our arrival was not of the best, for the rainy season was still on and fulfilling its place in the calendar very thoroughly. We approached close to the shores without seeing them, for land was hidden in as thick a mist of rain as ever hangs over the West Coast of Britain or the Thames Valley. However, it rose more rapidly and at more frequent intervals than it does in those localities, and in the intervals we stood with other admiring passengers along the ship's rail gazing upon a wondrously green isle, banded by opalescent lagoon and gleaming sands, shaded by palms, basking in golden sunlight beneath a sky the color of harebells. There was no hibiscus in sight, but no doubt beyond that belt of bush it was a riot of vivid color. The air was as soft as any book could invent. The surf boomed drowsily. It was impossible to believe that the same world could hold this fairy isle and the mud-soaked isles of Britain. When we drew near to the landing-stage the laughing brown natives came out of the book and greeted us in the friend

liest fashion. It is true they wore dungaree or khaki instead of beads, but quite a number sported the famed hibiscus in their hair or wreathed round their old felt or straw hats.

'Are you really going to live there?' asked fellow passengers, half in wonderment, half in envy.

We said we were.

'What shall you do with yourselves?' We did not know, except that we meant to lounge beneath coco palms, eat fruit, and perhaps crown ourselves also with hibiscus.

We hired a native hut down by the seashore. According to the book this was the most sensible as well as the most attractive form of residence on South Sea islands. Being made of coconut thatch for roof and walls of native bark in narrow slats placed perpendicularly, it was said to be cooler than the European type of bungalow built of concrete. Our hut was as native as it could be, with the floor and verandahs made of shingle brought from the beach. The hut was new, and it was a shock to hear that it had been built as a weekend cottage, being some three miles from the main village. Who could have anticipated meeting anything so sophisticated as a week-end cottage on that remote island? Such things we had regarded as peculiar to the Home Counties.

Our hut was most picturesque. It was also disconcerting. Rats swarmed in the thatch and bred huge families there. We adopted a cat to cope with them, which he did by rushing up and down the thatch, night and day, chasing them, and incidentally churning up the thatch more disastrously than did the rats themselves. All kinds of creatures besides the rats and ourselves chose the hut as a residence. Lizards, the little shining green ones, and the spawling ungainly croaker' variety, ran in and out of the slats and flattened

themselves over the beams of the roof. Centipedes and mantes, spiders and cockroaches, ants and hornets, frolicked in their different ways and made themselves as much at home as we did ourselves, or even more so. At first I was much intrigued at meeting so many strange creatures and had little aversion to them, and I never much objected when lizards fell down my neck, big handsome gold-and-black cockroaches banged into my face, huge spiders had to be chased out of my clothes before I could dress, and great dragon-flies, buzzing threateningly, blocked up the doorways; but when long sinuous mantes crawled up my arms, hornets entangled themselves in my hair, spiteful centipedes might at any moment be discovered in beds or boots, and ants of all sizes and colors spoiled the food, life became a little difficult. The book had said nothing about these things.

Indeed, housekeeping in a native hut was a difficult business altogether. The shingle, which looked so picturesquely primitive when we first saw it, was disconcerting as a floor. It secreted vast quantities of débris and refused to be swept. How can one sweep shingle? The slatted walls certainly let in the air, when any, but they also let in a lot of other things. Whirling leaves and drifting sand came in with wind and rain and mingled themselves on our floor with the falling thatch, which the harried rats and Snowdrop, our cat, perpetually scattered. We put down large mats of native grass, but it was impossible to forget the débris that constantly drifted beneath them, and they themselves were never free from a top dressing of sand. Our shingle floor was also the happy hunting-ground for insects innumerable, and in addition was discovered to be actually alive in itself; we found it was formed largely of tiny crabs who, in the dead of night,

when humans were supposed to be asleep, came to life and made tracks, with mysterious tap-tappings, plinkplinklings and plop-ploppings, for their homeland on the beach. Charming little creatures they were, all delicate carving and dainty colorings, but as a floor not to be recommended, for table or chair would suddenly describe an awkward angle because a portion of the floor had deserted in the night and left a hole. Finally we had to chain the floor down with a top layer of concrete.

The view from either side of the hut was exquisite. Inland there were acres of coco palms and orange groves stretching to the foot of peaked hills whose tops, clothed in vivid green, towered into an azure sky. Seaward through a frame of coco palms one gazed across coral beaches to a blue lagoon, a belt of tossing white surf, and the vast Pacific shimmering blue and gold to a misty horizon.

I suppose there are people, philosophers and poets and such, who can sit for days looking out over coco palms without being bored. Why merely sit? asks someone. It was too hot to do anything else. It is amazing to one going to the tropics for the first time to discover how hot they can be. Possibly the native hut was cool, as coolness goes in that latitude, but if it was cool, I often thought to myself during those first weeks, what in the name of the equator was hot! I stuck my lounge chair in the doorway, in a draught, if any, and stared inland, and, when bored by the coco palms there, took my chair and stared at those at the back. To sit on the shingle verandahs was not very successful, because they were constructed to accommodate natives who squat. Rain, instead of running off our thatch, came through, and the verandah became untenable.

If only one could have climbed those peaked hills and had a change of view!

But there was no path, no track. Rarely did even a native penetrate the forest of fern, banyan, liana, and innumerable twisted, sinuous forbidding growths which clothed those soaring heights. Report had it that once now and again, at Christmas time, some white man would clamber would clamber up, hand over hand, like his hairy forefathers - which was the only way of getting up. Why he chose Christmas, by the way, when the sun is at its hottest, is one of those mysteries that make life so fascinating. Perhaps, being of British blood, it annoyed him to sit and look at a hill that people said he could n't climb; or perhaps it was merely a reaction to home habits when on Christmas morning so many males go for a walk or do something strenuous to get up an appetite for the Christmas dinner. In the comparatively cool period of the island year when the south wind blows we ourselves essayed an ascent of that formidable and challenging mountain, only to sink beaten on one of the lowest slopes and drink innumerable coconuts.

Wondrous white nights when the moon rose over the peaked hills and sailed high in a purple sky out over a purple sea! How much more to be enjoyed if they had brought a little coolness. The book had said nothing about hot nights. As it was, I don't think I was ever really cool save when in the lagoon. Oh, those languorous noons in the book-lying on golden sands beside an opalescent lagoon! But the sands are not golden. They are glitteringly, blindingly white at noon with the rays of a sun that would scorch up any romantic lounger who tried to bask in them. Not even a native lies out in the sun during an island noon. Oh, those wonderful hours - in the book of idly floating on the translucent waters of the aforesaid opalescent lagoon, with the sun high

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