The Blower of Bubbles Part 9

"Wait.... I have kept a surprise for you."

A minute later I saw his wife at the end of the path as she waved to him. She came through the leafy garden with a grace of movement that made the scene a delicate, colorful picture, and even before she had reached us I could see that her beauty was as exquisite, as perfect, as an orchid's. All sacrificed to an invalid....

With the tenderest of smiles in her eyes, which were blue as the sky, she advanced towards us and kissed him; and I, who detest things sentimental as I would the plague, thought it was the loveliest tribute I had ever seen. Before he could speak, she turned and gave me both her hands.

"I won't apologize," she said, and her voice was as sweet as a brook's, "because I know you both enjoyed your talk of old times the better for my absence."

"It was a wonderful afternoon," I said, "but it would have been doubly so with you here."

And then I, the Pest, the cynic, the modernist, stooped and kissed her hand. It seemed the natural thing to do, and she accepted it with the understanding heart that Nature had given her.

"But, Lilias, where is the lad?"

"Oh," she laughed gaily, "the station-master kept him a moment to show him an entirely new b.u.t.ton he had thought of. But here he is now."

Coming up the path, carrying a couple of parcels, was a boy of, perhaps, ten years of age. His hair was golden and curly, and his eyes had a dreamy look that contrasted strangely with the strength of his chin. He had the poise and the appearance of a thoughtful, well-bred youth; but there was something, I could not say what, that told me he was not English.

He touched his cap to me as he came on the lawn and smiled cordially to Basil.

"Do you remember the gentleman?" asked Norman.

The boy shook his head and unconsciously moved nearer to the woman, who placed her hand on his shoulder.

"You shouldn't forget each other," laughed Norman, "for once he played the drums under your baton."

A few minutes later we went in for tea, the boy and Mrs. Norman going first. I waited while Sindbad prepared to move the invalid, and then turned to him for an explanation.

"Klotz was killed," said Norman swiftly, "and his wife died a month later, after she heard of his death. We have adopted Siegfried as our ward."

XIII

That night a storm came up from the sea, and the house rattled and shook in the clutch of a November gale. The trees that looked like palms swayed and bent before the wind, and the many-colored leaves in the garden fled like refugees before an attack, and covered the ground with their quivering bodies.

We were gathered in the music-room, the cosy warmth from a fire of logs making pleasant contrast to the snarling wind outside. The evening had been a memorable one. The woman whose beauty was so delicate had charmed us with her voice, her playing; charmed us without effort or knowing how.

From a lounge, Norman's vivacity, which always had in it the quality of sympathy, illuminated everything that happened. When she sang a little extract of the eighteenth century, "_Bergere Legere_," it was he who knew that it had been a favorite of Marie Antoinette's. When she played the love theme which Puccini gives the strings in the first act of _Madame b.u.t.terfly_, it was Norman who, by a dozen deftly chosen words, created the atmosphere of j.a.pan and brought before us the cruel tenderness of Pinkerton's love for Cho Cho San. After Siegfried had played MacDowell's conception of "Mid-ocean," Norman recalled in a moment the genius of America's greatest composer, the genius that had finally crossed the thin barrier to insanity. From that we talked of the sea, while the wind howled outside, and I spoke of the many moods of blue that colored it in a single day, and, without giving the effect of quotation or of monologue, he brought his artistry into play with three lines of Keats's sonnet "Blue."

Whenever any of us spoke, his sensitive rhythmic intellectuality seemed to hover about us, acknowledging thought where it struggled to the surface, adding some subtle touch of color when our efforts seemed too drab. Under its influence we talked our best, we thought our best, we were our best.

At nine o'clock Siegfried rose to go to bed, and advanced to shake hands with me.

"Well," I said, "and do you still intend to be a conductor?"

He smiled a little self-consciously.

"There is much to learn," he said, "and--I do not want to leave my home."

Norman lit a cigarette--his old mannerism when emotions were taut.

"Parents," he said, "and quasi-parents like us, march straight towards loneliness. Our greatest concern is to have our children ready to leave us as soon as they hear the call of the world, knowing that such a moment will be the proudest and the saddest of our lives."

"Good-night," said Siegfried to me. "Goodnight, Uncle Bubbles." He turned wistfully to Mrs. Norman, who smiled and linked her arm in his.

"Won't you come along?" she said to me. "Siegfried is very proud of his room, and would like you to see it." It was her way of hiding her knowledge that the little chap was frightened by the storm. So we saw him safely in bed, and admired his books, and wished him pleasant dreams. We had just left his room and were about to descend the stairs, when we paused as the sound of rain beating against the house came to our ears. We hurried about for a few moments seeing that all windows were closed, and were going to rejoin Norman, when I stopped her.

"Mrs. Norman," I said haltingly, "it is never easy for an Englishman to express the emotion he feels, but may I tell you how touched I am by your devotion to your husband? Without you, his life would be--unbearable."

She did not smile or protest, but her eyes looked straight into mine.

"To live day by day," she said slowly, her fingers playing with a necklace that hung about her full white throat, "near a soul like Basil's, to commune with a brain like his ... to feel the inspiration of his nature that is so in tune with the beauty of the world, is a happiness few women can experience. If it were not too cruel, I could feel thankful for his wound that has given him so completely to me."

I stood by her on the creaking stairs as the rain swept in torrents against the house, and her murmuring tones mingled with the sounds of the storm.

"Perhaps you cannot understand," she said gently, "but loving Basil as I do, and having him dependent on me, is a selfish happiness that only a woman could really know."

And out of the night a truth came to me that, though it never, never could be mine, the most precious thing in this world is a woman's heart.

XIV

It was eleven o'clock, and Basil Norman and I were alone. The storm had subsided, and, through the sound of the rain, we could hear the waves breaking against the sh.o.r.e.

"I do not want Siegfried to go to school yet," he was saying; "he is so full of promise and latent genius that I dread the risk of having it all standardized into what we call a public-school man. I am coaching him in languages and the three R's, but more than anything else I want him to form his own conception of the scheme of the universe, so that when he takes his position among the world's musicians--as I am confident he will--he'll have the echo of what he interprets in his own breast. Music is so vast, yet musicians, as a cla.s.s, are people of little depth."

"Has the lad a chance in England with his German name?"

"Yes. England must realize that genius has no nationality."

"What was Siegfried like when you took him first?"

"He was arrogant, sullen, and in his child's brain was the knowledge that his father had fought against us. To make him forget his unhappy past, and partly to satisfy a caprice of my own, I--well, you would say I blew bubbles. We invented a little city of make-believe. From the hill at the back of the house you can look down on all these houses, and at dusk, when the mist rises from the sea and the windows begin to glow with light, it is quaint enough for a study by Rackham. In our little City of Bubbles there dwelt such celebrities as Aladdin, Jack the Giant Killer, Midshipman Easy, Peter Pan, poor Wilde's Happy Prince, and Heaven knows how many more. They were very real to Siegfried and me, and Lilias used to have many a laugh over the troubles of our little family. But I had not counted on Sindbad; he was filling Siegfried with stories of buried treasure and men forced to walk the plank (all of them absolutely authenticated by the narrator), and the lurking Prussian began to appear. He stole down to Ventnor and bought books on the war ... he began to glory in the stand Germany was making. So I was not surprised when, one day, he suggested that we should play soldiers.

"Pest, you should have been there. Siegfried was Napoleon, and I was Hindendorff, his chief of Staff. Sindbad was given command of a naval brigade, and was also in charge of a large fleet lying in hiding to cope with the Spaniard, should he emerge. In addition to these modest duties, he had to wheel my chair. Lilias came along as a composite representative of all the women's services. Napoleon's plans were that we should attack the City of Bubbles, which was being defended by a heavy force on the fringe of the hill. I omitted to mention our flying cavalry in the person of Mr. Jones; but owing to a misunderstanding of our objective he waged separate war on birds all afternoon, inflicting no casualties, but covering an immense area of ground. We began the attack about half-a-mile back; but when Napoleon ordered Sindbad's naval brigade into action, we were unable to find him, until Mr. Jones discovered him behind a rock, scrutinizing a pa.s.sing merchantman through the inevitable telescope. After some persuasion, we induced Sindbad to attack, but half-way to his objective he remembered that he had left his pipe in the kitchen, to which he repaired, leaving his troops in the air, as we used to say in France, and taking away the mobility which, as Chief of Staff, I needed urgently. There is no question that Sindbad possesses imagination, but it is an unreliable one.

"To make the story short, we won by a brilliant ruse of Napoleon's, who got word to the enemy that the tuck-shops in Ventnor were being evacuated, which was as effective as his famous "_Sauve qui peut_"

at Waterloo, for they fled ignominiously, and we captured the city, after inflicting heavy casualties."

I looked at him and waited. Behind the nonsense I could see some serious thought was lurking, but what I could not conjecture.

"The next day," he resumed, "Siegfried was tired, and asked me to tell how Peter Pan frustrated the pirates. 'Peter is dead,' said I.

Siegfried suppressed a sob, and asked when he died. 'He was killed in our attack,' I said. After a long pause, he mentioned the probability of Mr. Midshipman Easy being at home. 'He is dead,' said I. Again his question, and again my answer: 'He was killed in our attack.' He went out; but on going to bed that night he asked if Cinderella was really very pretty. 'Not now,' I said, 'for she is lying dead.' Does it seem ludicrous, Pest? That night he cried himself to sleep, and it is not easy to listen to a youngster's sobs when you know that a word from you will do away with them. For two long dreary weeks our City of Bubbles was a City of the Dead.... Then I suggested that we play soldiers again and make another attack. After all, Pest, it isn't every Tommy gets a chance of being Chief of Staff. I wish you could have seen his face. It was as though I had struck him with a whip, and he left me without a word. That afternoon the Wizard of Oz visited our city and brought them all back to life. That was some months ago, and our little dream-world is only a serio-humorous memory for Siegfried and me now. But during that night he cried himself to sleep I think the Prussian in him died."

For several minutes we listened to the rain.

"The greatest of the Arts," said Norman, very slowly, "is life. I don't think our writers, our painters, our men who dream in bronze realize that. If they did, it would not be said that the English are the least artistic people in the world; for you and I know that is not true.

Scott going to his death in the Antarctic snow was a great artist. The sailor standing to one side when the last boat is filled, and those six Tommies at Grieswald in Germany, holding their ground against a row of bayonets and taking a sentence of two years' imprisonment rather than aid the Hun in making munitions--are they not artists? Where we fail as a race is in our authors, composers, painters, who divorce themselves from the real spirit of England and wonder that the products of their brains quicken no pulse and stir no imagination. Our educationists, our leaders in every movement allied with culture, have too often striven to choke the imaginativeness and blind the eyes of our youth to the beauty of life, which is one of its greatest truths. One has but to read the despairing lines written by bereaved mothers for their sons who have fallen, to feel the sorrow of England crying for expression; instead of which, our triumph, our courage, our artistry are mute and inarticulate."