Robin's music was a source of great delight to both of them. There was
such a sense of time, infinite and unlimited, that they ceased to be
the hurrying mortals of earth. The joy of life crept into their
hearts, and they grew young with the new world.
One evening they watched the full moon come up over the mountains. She
had been playing a few desultory airs, and looking up asked,--
"Who is it says 'music is love in search of a word'?"
"If you don't know, I'm sure I don't," answered Adam, laughing. "Do
you know that you quote entirely too much?"
"Oh, yes," she said lightly. "I always knew that if I ever should
break into print, the critics, supposing they ever deigned to notice
me, would say, as they said of Lubbock's 'Beauties of Life,' that it
wasn't a book, but a compendium of useful quotations. But do you
really dislike quoting? I think it takes as much or nearly as much
originality to quote well as to invent."
"Oh, no!" he interposed.
"No? Well, it seems so to me. I think the thing first myself, that is
original so far as I am concerned, though it may be old as the hills,
and then it comes to me afterward, in a dozen ways, perhaps, as other
people have said it. I realize that in the kaleidoscope of life the
pattern before my mind's eye approximates that which others have seen.
We don't say a man knows too many synonyms or antonyms, and I don't
see much difference."
"I have a misty memory that quotation is said to be a confession of
inferiority," answered Adam.
"That's Emerson," she said, laughing; "but he also says, 'genius
borrows nobly,' and I am willing to confess inferiority to a great
many people; all that implies is that one should only quote well. If
it wasn't that I'm not sure of the words, and that I can't verify
them, I should confound you with a citation from Disraeli."
"Go on," said Adam, lazily; "I don't mind being crushed."
"It is to the effect that people think that where there is no
quotation there must be great originality. Then he says, 'the greater
part of our writers, in consequence, have become so original that no
one cares to imitate them; and those who never quote are seldom
quoted.' That's about it. Now are you answered?" She laughed
gleefully. "It is delicious to disagree with you. I had almost
forgotten that it was possible."
He echoed her laugh with the carefree heartiness of a boy. "I am going
to make a riddle," he said. "Prepare yourself; this is the first
conundrum of the new world. Why is it better to disagree than to
differ?"
She made a little grimace. "It's a wonder the Sphinx does not rise
from the other side of the world and eat you," she said with derision.
"Anybody who loved anybody could answer such a poor little excuse for
a riddle as that; besides, it sounds like an extract from somebody's
'First Easy Lessons in Rhetoric.' Don't you see that I can disagree
_with_ you, while I must differ _from_ you? That is too disgracefully
easy. Indeed, Adam, that riddle of yours brings back every doubt, for
they say--scientists and ologists and learned people, you know--that
there is hope for delinquents and defectives, but none for
degenerates, and that is an awfully degenerate joke."
"Play for me," he said, "and don't call names."
She lifted the bow and drew it across the strings in a series of
cadences so wildly mournful that he shuddered. She put the bow down,
and laid her hand upon the strings to still them. In the old days she
had been given to sudden changes of mood, but of late she had been
almost serene.
"What is it?" he asked gently.
"Oh, nothing,--everything! I was thinking of another thing which those
wise ones said," she answered, with more bitterness than she had shown
for many months. "It was that word 'degenerate' brought it back. You
know birds are a very low order of being, a branch of the reptile
family, in truth, and I have heard people say that musicians are
generally lacking in something. They either have no moral or financial
sense, and cannot be bound by ordinary rules. And I am musical to the
very tips of my fingers. It is as if I could hear the song of the
silence,--I feel its vibrations like those of a great organ."
She walked up and down, her hands back of her head, and the moonlight
shining on her upturned, troubled face.
"There is another scientific fact you forget," he said.
She stopped to listen, and he went on.
"When a race has run its course, nature cries 'habet,' and nothing can
alter its fate. It was not alone the merciless onslaughts of the white
man that exterminated the buffalo. They died, and none came to take
their places. They vanished, less on account of man's cruelty than by
reason of their own sterility. Degenerates or regenerates, can't we
leave the decision with a power that forever builds or destroys, in
accordance with a law we do not understand, a higher law that comes
from the source of all law, whatever that source may be? Don't think
any more, but play for me. In spite of my lecture, I will quote too;
my mother used to sing a hymn that went like this,--
'I'd soar and touch the heavenly strings,
And vie with Gabriel while he sings,'--