I was too sympathetic with that man. I opened the gates of my mind to
his ugly story; now I can not thrust it out and close those gates. My
first impulse, to hold him at arm's length, was sound. I should have
done that. But at least, and at no small cost, I have again learned my
little lesson; from now on I purpose dwelling apart from the tangle of
contemporary life. It has no bearing on my work, on my thoughts. None
whatever. It merely confuses me.
Yet, through momentary weakness, I have permitted my precious line of
pure thought to be clouded with the vision of a strong man's face with
tears on it. I see it at night. And, worse, I can not stop myself from
hunting for the woman he is going to kill. The mere sight of a youngish
couple sets my pulse to racing. I watch--on trains, in station crowds,
on the street--for a beautiful woman with a sad face. That she will be
beautiful I am certain; for Crocker would have had nothing less in that
house of which he felt himself so strongly and dominantly the master.
And I think she will be sad.
I study the throats of the beautiful young women I see. She will have
the full, rather broad throat of the singer. And the deep chest and
erect bearing. And I think her head will be well poised.
There _is_ a woman here in the hotel--a particular woman, I mean--on
this second floor. Though, for that matter, there are only the two
floors. I have passed her twice, in the hall. But the light is dim, and
I have been unable to observe her throat or her face. She is of a good
height, for a woman,--quite as tall as I,--and she steps firmly on the
balls of her feet. Her figure is slim. The chest, I think, is deep. And
in a way that I, as a man (and a man who knows little of woman outside
the psychology books), can not explain in any satisfactory way, she
conveys, even in this dim light, the impression of being exquisitely
dressed.
I think she has her meals served in her room. At least, I have on three
occasions met a waiter coming upstairs with a tray; and I can not make
out that if would be for any other.
As Sir Robert intimated, these other guests are a queer lot. There can
not be more than twelve or fourteen, in all. The men are seedy, and
rather silent. They sit about a good deal, reading the papers (copies of
the more suggestive French weeklies are strewn about on every chair and
sofa in the lounge), and they eye me and one another with a sort of cool
distrust. The women, three or four in all, seem to come and go rather
freely. And each has the eye, the manner, even the physical bearing,
of the woman for whom the halfworld has no secrets. Then, there is a
discreet, drifting class of transients--men from the Legation Quarter,
I believe (often, indeed, they come in full uniform), who are always
accompanied by young women. Sometimes, as it may happen, these are the
familiar women of the place; but quite as often they are strangers to
my eyes. And always, day and night, there is in the manner of the guests
and in that of the little French manager and his half-caste clerk an air
of carefully refraining from questions. It is as if every one said to
every one else: “You are here, but you are quite safe, for I make it a
rule never to see who comes or what goes on here. Perhaps one day I may
have to ask the same discreet courtesy from you. It is quite all right,
believe me.”
In this odd atmosphere I live and have my being. The building is a
mere rambling collection of _mansardes_. The chairs in the bedrooms--at
least, in my own--are of the common bent-iron variety usually seen in
gardens. The beds are of the most simple iron sort, once painted with a
white enamel that has been largely chipped off. The linen is threadbare,
even ragged,--there is a hole in my nether sheet through which my foot
slips at night, not infrequently catching there and waking me from
dreams of the pillory and chains,--but it is not unclean. There would be
no excuse for that, in a whole world of laundry-men. On each mantel and
iron-legged table is an ash-tray that blatantly advertises a Japanese
whisky.
Yes, in this odd atmosphere I live and, in a manner, breathe--I and the
slim, beautifully dressed woman who walks so firmly on the balls of her
feet. Whoever she may be, she belongs here no more than I.
Of course, the chances are all against--yet I wonder! For one thing, she
is alone. I am positive of this. All the other guests I have seen, now,
coming and going. But she never comes or goes--excepting apparently for
a short walk each afternoon, and always unaccompanied. He would not have
deserted her--away out here. Surely a man would not do that to a woman
he has loved.
But wait--I am forgetting the sort of world this is. There is
nothing--nothing--man does not do to woman. Or that woman does not do to
man. Nothing is too subtly selfish, nothing too cruel.
To-day I mean to time my own walk with hers. I must see her in the
light. I must observe her throat and her face.... At the thought of what
I may see my nerves behave abominably. My forehead burns. My heart beats
with an absurd irregularity. These facts alone appear to indicate that
my place is not in this wild world of passion and conflict.
It is not wholly unpleasant here in my dingy little room--though the
carpet is a rag, and the door between me and my next neighbor has shrunk
its lock out of alignment and appears to be blocked off, on the farther
side, by some bulky piece of furniture. This door opens on my side of
the partition.
No, it is not so unpleasant. Outside, the sun is shining. To my nostrils
comes floating the quaint, pungent odor that has in the minds of so many
travelers characterized the East. Over the low-tiled roofs of a row of
Chinese houses I can see--beyond an open space--the masonry wall of the
fortified Legation Quarter, with a sentry-box peeping above it, and the
flag of Italy, and trees.
_April 5th--night._
|IT is she.
This afternoon I was revising my notation of the Japanese music;
quite late, five o'clock or so. Suddenly I heard a voice--a woman's
voice--singing very softly, in the next room, beyond that shrunken door
and the bulky piece of furniture. It is a bureau, I think, with a mirror
above it that is nearly as high as the door.
She was singing “_Aus Meinen Grossen Schmerzen_” of Robert Franz, that
saddest and most exquisite of German _lieder_. The voice is a full, even
soprano. It is a big voice, I am sure, though she sang so softly. The
impression I received was that she was carefully holding it down to
a _pianissimo_. It is, I should say, a remarkable organ. Even in her
softest voice there is what the great singers call an “edge”--that firm,
fine resonance that will send the lightest thread of tone floating out
over all the volume of sound of a full orchestra.
She sang the little song with a tone color of poignant sadness--as if
her heart were throbbing with all the sorrow of the world, and yet as
if she could not keep from singing. She has plainly studied much. The
impulse to sing and the habit of singing are strong within her.
But the voice, so beautiful and under such fine control, was not what
suddenly caused me to leap up from my chair and tiptoe to that rather
useless door, and then to turn to my kit-bag and fumble wildly for
my tuning-fork. No; what excited me--for it did excite me out of
all reason--was her sense of pitch. The mezzo-soprano or baritone
transposition of that Franz song is in the key of _f_-major, ending in
_d_-minor. I stood by her door, the _c_-fork resting lightly against my
teeth, waiting for that lovely voice to descend the final minor third,
linger, tenderly and sadly, on the _d_. Then I bit the fork. She was
singing a perfect _d_. Certainly there was no piano in any of these
miserable little rooms. And she had employed no other instrument; she
had simply and naturally broken into song because she could not help
singing. _She has absolute pitch!_
The great regret of my life is that my own sense of pitch is not
absolute. It is very nearly but not quite perfect, despite my extremely
delicate ear for close intervals. Yet this young woman, who to my
own knowledge has not sung a note for several days, and who can not
conceivably have heard any Occidental music whatever, breaks into
song, and casually and unconsciously employs the correct pitch to the
twentieth part of a tone.
My first thought was that it might be an accident. So I waited,
tuning-fork in hand.
Having begun to sing, of course she could not stop. I am thinking now
that probably it was the first time she had released her voice for a
considerable period, and that at last she simply could not help making
use of what was the natural outlet for her emotions.
She next hummed a few bars of “_Im Herbst_,” also by Franz. Evidently
she is fond of the work of this fine lyric composer. This is in the key
of _c_-minor. Again I tested her with my tuning-fork, and again she
was correct to the minutest shade of a tone. Her voice had leaped the
interval between the two keys apparently without a conscious thought on
her own part.
This second song perhaps failed as a vehicle for her mood; at any rate,
she stopped it abruptly, and was silent for a time. Standing there close
to the door, I could hear her moving about with light, restless feet.
Myself, I held my breath at moments. Then the sound of her footsteps
ceased, and there was a sudden creaking sound, as if she had thrown
herself upon the bed. But still I waited, breathless, balancing there
with my left hand against the door-frame, the right clutching the
tuning-fork. I was sure she would sing again.
She did. But it must have been after quite a long time, for I realized
afterward that my feet ached and that the arm I held up against the door
frame had, as we say, gone to sleep.
Finally there came another creaking. She was getting up. Doubtless she
was quite too restless to lie down long. Again I heard the quick, light
sound of her feet moving about the room. Then the voice again. And again
it was that saddest and most exquisite of songs.=
```”_Aus meinen grossen Schmerzen_
```_Mach' ich die kleine Lieder_...”=
she sang, very low. I felt nearly certain that she had slipped naturally
back into the key of _f_-major, but not absolutely certain.
It was disturbing, this partial uncertainty on my part. No person in the
world--not a single living being--has quite so great a need for absolute
pitch as I. With that, coupled with my ear for intervals, I would stand
as the one scholar perfectly equipped for my own line of investigation.
As it is, I am not unlike an astronomer with enthusiasm, exhaustive
knowledge, a fine mathematical brain, and a marvelous seeing eye, but
with a very slight--oh,--very slight--touch of color-blindness. And I
never before missed this one attribute quite so keenly as I miss it
now, out here on the ground for the great first-hand investigation of my
whole life.
So at last I had to give up my effort to place precisely the key in
which she was singing, and sound the fork. As I supposed, she was right
again. There was no doubt now. Not the slightest. As I have already
written down, she has it--a sheer, prodigal gift of nature. And,
of course, it is of no particular value to her. She is not even, at
present, a professional singer; and, if she were, she could do very well
without this precise gift.... I have supposed for years that I had
a philosophy. I long ago realized that to waste time and tissue in
concerning myself with the one defect in my equipment would be simply
by that much to impair my actual effectiveness. But to-day my philosophy
failed me, as I thought of that sad little woman who has what I lack,
and who does not need it. I even had a wild notion of knocking on the
door and making myself known to her.
As for what actually did follow, I think I will try to set down just as
simply and naturally as I can, reconstructing the curious scene more
or less coolly as I recall it now, with my excitement spent and my mind
reasonably steady. That is surely the best way, in the case of such an
extraordinary occurrence--just write it down and let it go at that.
She was silent for a little time, perhaps standing at her dresser. I
wonder if it is like mine, a rickety chest of drawers, sadly in need
of paint, with a narrow mirror above it. My mirror is broken in the
right-hand lower corner; and at that point I see, instead of the
reflection of the dingy room, only an irregular triangle of pine
backing. I should like to think that hers is at least a little fresher
and brighter, and that the mirror is not broken. These things mean
a great deal to a woman, I think. I might have observed all this for
myself, doubtless; but at the moment I was too full of the thrill of my
discovery to indulge in a single personal thought.
I was still standing there by the door, my left hand quite numb, my feet
a little cold from remaining motionless so long, when she began lightly
to run over those remarkable exercises of hers.
She began by striking octaves. Her voice flew ever so lightly, yet
firmly and surely, from lower _a_ to middle _a_ to upper _a_. Then the
two octaves of _a_-sharp. Then _b_. And so on, until she was touching,
in that same light, sure way, the _d_-sharp above high _c_.
Next she sang an ordinary chromatic scale, no differently from the
performance of other singers I have heard excepting perhaps for the
remarkable evenness and firmness and pure, floating quality of her
_pianissimo_ tone. It was after all this that the remarkable gift that
amazed me came to light.
She returned to singing octaves. Only, as if testing and trying her own
precision of pitch, she began striking the upper octave note, in making
the leap from the lower to the higher, first correctly according to the
accepted tempered scale of the Western world, then a fraction of a tone
fiat, then a fraction of a tone sharp, then back to the normal octave.
She played with, these fractional tones as easily and surely as the
ordinary good singer plays with mere semitones. She actually took them
in succession, quite as easily as she had, a little earlier, taken the
semitones of the chromatic scale.
This was too much. I could not stand still any longer. In all my
experience I had never found a white person with anything approaching my
fineness of ear in merely hearing close intervals.
But I can not sing them as I hear and know them. I have no voice at all;
my vocal chords will not obey my will with any degree of precision. Yet
here, in this queer, rather unpleasant little French hotel in the great,
barbaric city of Peking, in the next room to mine, is an American woman
who can actually sing the intervals that I can only hear.