INTO THE WORLD OF SOUND

BY FREDERICK R. BURTON

I

IN the most spacious chamber of the royal palace at Schoenfeld a young man lay unconscious. Tall was he, and well formed, his features regular and refined almost to the degree of femininity, his hair flaxen and wavy; the picture of perfect health in sleep.

This was Ferdinand, King of Agraria. Gathered about the table on which he lay were some of the wisest men of the kingdom. Conspicuous, though not of those nearest to the young monarch, was the Count von Hillern, prime minister. The minister of finance, Graf Eulenberg, and the Herr Ritter von Wagram, minister of public works, stood at either side of the Count. Between them and the table was a clear space, so that they might have unimpeded view of the scientific function that all had assembled either to witness or conduct. In less favored positions were white bearded savants from the University, men whose books had borne their names where those of the ministers were unrecognized; and back of them all, but none the less eager, and, as it proved, highly important participants in the scene, were Herr Franz Mueller, the court capellmeister, and four musicians.

Standing beside the table, the most important figure in the chamber, excepting always his Majesty, was the venerable Dr. Conrad Cornelius. He it was who had officiated at the birth of the King, who had attended him in all his infantile ailments, and who had delved deeply into universal science that he might discover somewhere the means to bestow upon the King one common gift that Nature had denied him; for Ferdinand was lacking in a sense; he had come into the world of sunshine and shadow with eyes that drank in gladly all the manifold beauties of form and color; he had come into the world of flowers with keen appreciation of their fragrance; the whole world of tangible things was comprehensible to his tongue and sensitive fingers; but he had come into the world of sound totally deaf.

II

Partly by reason of his deprivation, which he understood not, but more because of his kindly nature, Ferdinand was the best beloved prince that ever approached the Agrarian throne. The people, high and low, pitied him for his affliction, which he appreciated not, and worshipped him for his benevolence. He could not hear the wailing of the poor, but he

could see their distressful conditions, and while Ludwig the Second, his father, was on the throne Ferdinand brought pleading influence to bear to alleviate them. It was from this that the Ministry of Public Works came to be such an important department in the government; for, when Ferdinand came upon a village of hovels, he besought his royal father to authorize the building of a road that the people might be employed and thus gain the wherewithal to house themselves more comfortably. The noisome odors from the congested districts of Schoenfeld and other cities in the kingdom led him to demand extensive systems of sewers. In every way he was considerate of his people, and, if all the subtle truth were known, they had infinite reason to thank God for the deafness of their Crown Prince. By this I mean that sympathy for him, desire to gratify that imperfect life all unconscious of its imperfection, had quite as much to do with influencing the potent men of the kingdom to effect improvement in material conditions as did the patent necessity for the reforms.

So, as Ferdinand grew to vigorous manhood, he grew steadily also in the affections of his people. They idolized him, and he returned their devotion with ingenuous satisfaction at their good will. When he rode through the streets of the capital his subjects not only cheered, as is customary in the presence of royalty, but they tossed their caps in air, waved kerchiefs and scarfs, even leaped up and down extravagantly so as to be sure to impress upon him the joyful greetings that their voices expressed in unheard words. And Ferdinand, perceiving the agreeable tumult, bowed, and smiled, and sometimes framed his lips to the utterance of words expressive of his pleasure; at which times any who were very near him heard odd, misshapen vocables issue from his throat. Could he have heard, he could have spoken as other men speak, for his vocal organs were as sound as his limbs, than which none were sounder in all Agraria.

It may be inferred, and correctly, that all that education could do for Ferdinand was done, and that was a great deal. No sooner was it established beyond peradventure that the royal baby could not hear his own cries, than Dr. Cornelius applied himself to the study of those interesting methods by which even the dumb have been made to talk. Anxious and loyal to an extraordinary degree, the good doctor would not leave the kingdom to consult with specialists in other countries, for he gave his whole life to caring for the child; but money was never lacking to summon specialists to Schoenfeld, and many were the learned men from England, and even from far away America, who profited by long vacations in pleasant Agraria, instructing Dr. Cornelius in the methods by which he was to train the Prince to the greatest possible use of his limited faculties. In due time, therefore, Ferdinand grasped the principles of language

as did other children, and he learned to converse with no difficulty on his part provided only that he could see his companion's lips, and with no difficulty on the part of the other save for the oddity of the guttural sounds the Prince made and which it required a little experience to interpret without error.

There were many incidents of his boyhood that touched upon the comic on account of his affliction, though no one but himself ever saw anything save the pathos of them. For example, he was inordinately inquisitive as to the real significance of the word "sound"; he never ceased to marvel at the attention the royal family and their visitors bestowed upon the men who drew bows of white horse hair across strings, or who puffed themselves red in the face blowing into straight or crooked tubes. They all told him that these men made music, a species of systematized sound. One day he crept close to the bass player, and when the bow was drawn across the lowest open string, he touched it, starting away hastily as his fingers tingled.

"Mamma," said he, in his quaint gutturals, "is that sound?"

His royal mother, who was unusually sensitive to music, could not answer him for the grief that stopped her voice, but Dr. Cornelius patiently told him of vibrations, a new word that he understood readily in so far as the demonstration appealed to his eyes and tingling fingers.

"It is very funny," he said, looking at the singing strings with fascinated interest.

One day he strayed, as even a royal baby will, if healthy, away from his attendants, and there was a great to-do to find him. Consternation seized upon the whole household when Dr. Cornelius pointed out to those who were running from chamber to chamber, calling, that all the kingdom might shout for His Royal Highness without eliciting a response. "Listen," said the good doctor. So they bent their heads and tiptoed about the palace. Presently they heard a drumming in the music hall, and some supposed that the tympani player was practising. They found the Prince at the kettledrums. One he had raised to as high a pitch as he could gain with his tiny hands upon the screws, the other was as slack as possible. Upon the drum heads he had set his toy soldiers and dolls, and as he thumped the sounding skin, the puppets danced until they fell over, when he set them up again and made those disconcerting noises that his people recognized as laughter. The attendants would have interrupted, so great was their relief at finding him, but Dr. Cornelius bade them wait. The doctor was ever on the watch for any phenomenon that might have scientific value. So they observed the happy child transfer the puppets from one drum to the other, modifying the pitch from time

to time, and noting evidently how the differing quantity of vibrations modified the dancing of the figures. At last the doctor drew near.

"See!" cried the Prince; "I give my dolls a concert."

"They like it, do they not?" the doctor responded, pursing his lips carefully to indicate the word formations.

"Yes," said the Prince, "it's fine fun. Why-now-why-" he hesitated as even a future king will when trying to shape the idea that struggles for expression, "I want to know why real people do not bob up and down when the music sounds ?"

Later, this infantile curiosity about the phenomena of sound developed into insatiate interest in acoustics. He learned to rattle off the laws of vibration as readily as any student in the gymnasium, and nothing in the laboratory experiments attracted him more than the ocular demonstration of how a string is divided and subdivided into nodes as its number of vibrations is made to increase. Sympathetic vibration, too, never failed to excite him eagerly. He would draw a bow vigorously across one tuning fork, and then apply his finger tips to another of the same pitch to assure himself that it, too, was in vibration. The wise men of the university were deeply interested. They were agreed that, while the nature of sound was beyond the appreciation of his lively imagination, just as normal man cannot conceive a fourth dimension, he was interested in it as others concern themselves with the unfathomable mysteries of life and death.

"Our relation to the infinite universe," said the Herr Professor Holzmann, "is the profoundest problem we have to solve. We see innumerable manifestations of the universe, and we bend our greatest energies to discovering what lies beyond them. In the case of his Royal Highness, the larger problem has not yet appealed to him. The mystery most patent to him now consists of manifestations perceptible in some strange way to his fellow-men, and he seeks to apprehend their nature by discovering an analogy that may make them comprehensible through his other

The Herr Professor wagged his head contentedly, satisfied that he understood it all. And who shall say that he did not? One question put by the Prince appeared to justify the speculation.

"Tell me, doctor," he said, after a long session with acoustical instruments in the laboratory, "do people derive pleasure from music by counting the vibrations of the instruments and perceiving that the numbers correspond to the laws ?"

As he came to mature manhood, and the failing health of his father warned him that he must assume the responsibilities of the throne ere

long, the Prince gave more and more attention to the study of statecraft, but his interest in sound was unabated though submerged under weightier matters. This was manifested strikingly in his regular attendance upon all court functions wherein music played an important part. He never failed to sit through the chamber concerts directed by Capellmeister Mueller for the pleasure of the Queen; he went at stated times to the opera and decorously led the applause from the royal box at the end of an act. It was his duty as a Prince, he maintained with charming simplicity, to encourage what evidently gave his people harmless pleasure. Many a shallow observer, shrewd in his own conceit, remarked upon the marvel that, whereas deaf persons are often soured in disposition, Prince Ferdinand was as free from jealous suspicions and as light hearted as any whole person in the kingdom. Such observers failed to take into account that the ordinary deaf are conscious of their loss, and seldom are wholly deprived of an aggravating semi-susceptibility to sound by which their ears ring with meaningless murmurs, whereas the Prince could not by any possibility realize what it was he missed.

An incident of his coronation demonstrated his latent interest in the matter. He stood very near a huge cannon when it was fired. Pressing his hand to his chest and paling a little, his Majesty turned to Dr. Cornelius.

"Doctor," he asked with pathetic eagerness, "was that sound I felt ?"

III

The doctor never had ceased to seek for something that might effect not the restoration of Ferdinand's hearing, for there was nothing to restore, but the completion of the physical man whom Nature had left so sadly unfinished. There had been many experiments, many superficial examinations of the Prince's ears-all to no purpose. It was shortly after the coronation that the scientific world was stirred by the achievement of Roentgen, and Dr. Cornelius immediately took a new lease of hope. No long time elapsed before charts representing the internal arrangement of his Majesty's cranium were the subject of anxious study by the most eminent aurists and surgeons in the kingdom. They made, first, independent examinations, and all substantiated the theory of Dr. Cornelius that it might be possible to readjust the auricular organs behind the tympanum so that sensibility to sound should result. Then they studied the charts in consultation. Apparently it was necessary merely for surgery to correct certain abnormal conditions, so as to make His Majesty's ears like those of other men. King Ferdinand was more than willing that the attempt should be made.