"I made it up as I went along," he said; "music's like a language.
When a man's heard a lot of the words and the idioms he can make a
bluff at talking it; but I can only speak a few words. I've only got a
child's vocabulary. I can only say, 'I'm hungry,' or 'I'm sleepy,' or
'I want a set of carpenter's tools,' or 'Brown swiped my tennis bat and
I'm going to punch his head,' or 'The little girl over the fence has
bright blue eyes and throws a ball like a boy and climbs trees.'"
He had to laugh himself at the idea of being able to express such
things in musical terms, but when he had sponged up a long glass of
very darkly mixed Bourbon and Apollinaris, the picture of the little
girl over the fence must have been still in his mind, for having left
us abruptly for the piano, he preluded and then began to improvise upon
that theme. He talked rather than sang, but always in tune and with
the clearest enunciation, and any amount of experience.
He began merrily, and in no time had us both laughing; I think the
first air which he tortured to fit his unrhymed and unrhythmical words
belonged once to Mozart, but I am not sure. It was made out of
merriness, sunshine, and dew.
"The little girl over the fence, the fence
Has bri-i-i-ight blue-ooo eyes
And throws a ball like a boy, a boy,
And cli-i-i-i-i-i-imbs trees."
He repeated in the minor, modulated into a more solemn key, and once
more talked off the words. He left you with a slight feeling of
anxiety. You began to be afraid that the little girl would fall out of
the trees and hurt herself. But no, instead he grabbed something by
the hair right out of a Beethoven adagio, and began to want that little
girl with the blue eyes as a little girl with blue eyes has seldom been
wanted before; she became Psyche, Trojan Helen, a lover's dream; all
that is most exquisite and to be desired in the world--and then
suddenly he lost all hope of her and borrowed from Palestrina to tell
about it, and the last time she climbed trees it was plump on up into
Heaven that she climbed, and from hell below, or pretty close to it,
there arose the words "And climb trees" like a solemn ecclesiastical
amen.
It was an astounding performance, almost demoniac in its cleverness and
in its power to move the hearer.
Lucy's eyes were filled with tears.
"I wish he wouldn't," she said.
There was quite a long silence, but as we did not hear him moving
about, he probably sat on at the piano, for presently, in a whisper,
you may say, more to himself than to us, he sang that Scotch song,
"Turn ye to me," which to my ear at least stands a head and shoulders
taller and lovelier than any folk song in all the world, unless it's
that Norman sailor song that Chopin used in one of the Nocturnes.
"The waves are dancing merrily, merrily,
Ho-ro, Whairidher, turn ye to me:
The sea-birds are wailing, wearily, wearily,
Horo Whairidher, turn ye to me.
"Hushed be thy moaning, love bird of the sea,
Thy home on the rocks is a shelter to thee;
Thy home is the angry wave, mine but the lonely grave,
Horo Whairidher, turn ye to me."
Lucy rose abruptly and left the room. I could hear her whispering to
him, pleading.
Surely he must have sung that song to her when she was only the little
girl with blue eyes over the fence, and it must have had something to
do with making her love him. But the qualities of his voice that could
once make her heart beat and fire her with love for him could do so no
more. He had left, poor fellow, only the power to torture her with
remorse and make her cry.