others? I can talk to him; he seems quite like a human being.”
“Well,” said Wyllis, meditatively, “I don’t read Bourget as much as
my cultured sister, and I’m not so well up in analysis, but I fancy
it’s because one keeps cherishing a perfectly unwarranted suspicion
that under that big, hulking anatomy of his, he may conceal a soul
somewhere. Nicht wahr?”
“Something like that,” said Margaret, thoughtfully, “except that
it’s more than a suspicion, and it isn’t groundless. He has one, and
he makes it known, somehow, without speaking.”
“I always have my doubts about loquacious souls,” Wyllis remarked,
with the unbelieving smile that had grown habitual with him.
Margaret went on, not heeding the interruption. “I knew it from the
first, when he told me about the suicide of his cousin, the
Bernstein boy. That kind of blunt pathos can’t be summoned at will
in anybody. The earlier novelists rose to it, sometimes,
unconsciously. But last night when I sang for him I was doubly sure.
Oh, I haven’t told you about that yet! Better light your pipe again.
You see, he stumbled in on me in the dark when I was pumping away at
that old parlor organ to please Mrs. Lockhart. It’s her household
fetish and I’ve forgotten how many pounds of butter she made and
sold to buy it. Well, Eric stumbled in, and in some inarticulate
manner made me understand that he wanted me to sing for him. I sang
just the old things, of course. It’s queer to sing familiar things
here at the world’s end. It makes one think how the hearts of men
have carried them around the world, into the wastes of Iceland and
the jungles of Africa and the islands of the Pacific. I think if one
lived here long enough one would quite forget how to be trivial, and
would read only the great books that we never get time to read in
the world, and would remember only the great music, and the things
that are really worth while would stand out clearly against that
horizon over there. And of course I played the intermezzo from
‘Cavalleria Rusticana’ for him; it goes rather better on an organ
than most things do. He shuffled his feet and twisted his big hands
up into knots and blurted out that he didn’t know there was any
music like that in the world. Why, there were tears in his voice,
Wyllis! Yes, like Rossetti, I
me that it was probably the first good music he had ever heard in
all his life. Think of it, to care for music as he does and never to
hear it, never to know that it exists on earth! To long for it as we
long for other perfect experiences that never come. I can’t tell you
what music means to that man. I never saw any one so susceptible to
it. It gave him speech, he became alive. When I had finished the
intermezzo, he began telling me about a little crippled brother who
died and whom he loved and used to carry everywhere in his arms. He
did not wait for encouragement. He took up the story and told it
slowly, as if to himself, just sort of rose up and told his own woe
to answer Mascagni’s. It overcame me.”
“Poor devil,” said Wyllis, looking at her with mysterious eyes, “and
so you’ve given him a new woe. Now he’ll go on wanting Grieg and
