HE used to play to me in the magic hour before bedtime, when, in the
summer, the red sun threw long shadows across the lawn, and in winter the
fire burned brighter and brighter in the hearth. This was the hour when
all the interminable squabbles of the schoolroom were forgotten, and even
the noisiest of us would hush his voice to listen drowsily to a
fairy-tale, or to watch the palaces raise aloft their minarets, and
crumble to dull red ash in the heart of the fire. It was then that I
would see him sitting astride of the fireguard and puffing out his cheeks
over his shining flute. Even in the most thrilling moments of fairy
stories, when Cinderella lost her crystal slipper or Sister Ann saw the
cloud of dust from the summit of Bluebeard’s tower, his shrill melodies
would ring in my ears and quicken my sleepy senses with the desire to
hear more of this enchanted music. I knew that it was real magic, but I
did not find it strange, because as far as I knew I had heard it all my
life. Perhaps he had played to me when I yet lay in my cradle, and
watched the night-light winking on the nursery ceiling; but I did not try
to remember whether this was so. I was content to accept my strange
musician as a fact of my existence, and to feel a sense of loss on the
rare evenings when he failed me. I did not know how to dance, but
sometimes I would tap my feet on the floor in time to the music, till
some one would tell me not to fidget. For no one else would either see
him or hear him, which proved that it was real magic, and flattered my
sense of possession. It was evident that he came for me alone.
The years passed, and in due course the imaginative graces of my
childhood were destroyed by the boys of my own age at school. They
compelled me to exchange a hundred star-roofed palaces, three distinct
kingdoms of dreams, and my enchanted flute-player for a threadbare habit
of mimicry that left me cold and unprotected from the winds in the large
places of life. There was something at once pathetic and ridiculous in
our childish efforts to imitate our elders, but as it seemed that our
masters and grown-up relatives were in the conspiracy to make us
materialistically wise before our time, a boy would have needed a rare
force of character to linger with his childhood and refuse to ape the
man. So, for a while, I saw my glad musician no more, though sometimes I
thought I heard him playing far away, and the child within me was warmed
and encouraged even while my new-found manhood was condemning the
weakness. I knew now that no man worthy of the name was escorted through
life by a fairy flute-player, and that dreamers and wool-gatherers
invariably sank to be poets and musicians, persons who wear bowler-hats
with frock-coats, have no crease in their trousers, and come to a bad
end. Fortunately, all education that is repressive rather than
stimulating is only skin-deep, and it was inevitable that sooner or later
I should meet the flute-player again. One Saturday afternoon in high
summer I avoided cricket and went for a long walk in the woods, moved by
a spirit of revolt against all the traditions and conventions of
boy-life; and presently, in a mossy clearing, all splashed and wetted by
little pools of sunlight, I found him playing to an audience of two
squirrels and a redstart. When he saw me he winked the eye that
glittered over his parading fingers, as though he had left me only five
minutes before, but I had not listened long before I realised that I must
pay the price of my infidelity. It was the old music and the old magic,
but try as I might I could not hear it so clearly as I had when I was a
child. The continuity of my faith had been broken, and though he was
willing to forgive, I myself could not forget those dark years of doubt
and denial; and while I often met him in the days that followed, I never
won back to the old childish intimacy. I sought his company eagerly and
listened passionately to his piping, but I was conscious now that this
was a strange thing, and sometimes when he saw by my eyes that I was
moved by wonder rather than by the love of beauty, he would put his flute
in his pocket and disappear. The world is an enchanted place only to the
incurious and tranquil-minded.
Nevertheless, though like all boys I had been forced to discard my
childish dreams before I had really finished with them, the lovely
melodies of the flute-player served to enrich my latter years at school
with much of the old enchantment. Often enough he would play to me at
night during preparation, and I would spend my time in trying to set
words to his tunes instead of doing my lessons. It was then that I
regretted the lost years that had dulled my ear and prevented me from
winning the inmost magic of his song, compared with which my verses
seemed but the shadow of a shadow. Yet I saw that he was content with my
efforts, and gradually made the discovery that while great achievement is
granted to the fortunate, it is the fine effort that justifies a man to
himself. What did it matter whether my songs were good or bad? They
were the highest expression I could find for the rapture of beauty that
had filled my heart as a child when I had been gifted to see life with
clean and truthful eyes. For the songs the flute-player played to me
were the great dreams of my childhood, the dreams that a wise man
prolongs to the day of his death.
I do not hear him often now, for I have learnt my lesson, and though my
hands tremble and my ear deceives me, I am by way of being a flute-player
myself. This article, it is clear, is a child’s dream, and so have been,
and will be, I hope, all the articles I shall ever write. What else
should we write about? We have learnt a few long words since we grew up,
and a few crimes, but no new virtues. That is why I like to get back to
the nursery floor, and play with the old toys and think the old thoughts.
We knew intuitively then a number of beautiful truths that circumstance
appears to deny now, and we grown men are the poorer in consequence. It
is folly to find life ugly when the flute lies within our reach and we
can pipe ourselves back to the world of beauty with a song made of an old
dream.
As for the flute-player, if I see him no more with wakeful eyes, I know
that he is never very far away. Likely enough one of these wintry
evenings, in the hour before bedtime, when the fire burns brighter and
brighter in the hearth, I shall look up and see him sitting astride of
the fireguard and puffing out his cheeks over his shining flute. Not
many nights ago I heard some one playing the flute out in the street, and
I went down and found a poor fellow blowing his heart out for rare
_sous_. There was not much enchantment about him—he had been dismissed
from a music-hall orchestra for drinking red wine to excess—but he was a
real flute-player, and I could well imagine that such a man might be
driven to intemperance by the failure to achieve those “unheard melodies”
not to be detected by the sensual ear. To be a bad flute-player must be
rather like being a bad poet, a joyous but sadly finite life. He was a
sad dog, this earthly musician, and he frankly conceived the ideal state
as a kind of communal Bodega where thirsty souls could find peace in
satiety. I gave him fivepence to help him on his way, and left him to
make doleful music in the night till he had enough money to supply his
crimson dreams. But he ought not to have said that my flute-player was
only an amateur.