The Choir Invisible Part 11

"There's no fun in comparing a woman to a cat."

"There is if she doesn't know it. Come, begin!" And the parson laid one long forefinger on one long little finger and waited for the first specification.

"Fineness," said John, thinking of a certain woman.

"Fondness for a nap," said the parson, thinking of a certain cat.

"Grace," said John.

"Inability to express thanks," said the parson.

"A beautiful form," said John."A desire to be stroked," said the parson.

"Sympathy," said John.

"Oh, no!" said the parson; "no cat has any sympathy. A dog has: a man is more of a dog."

"n.o.ble-mindedness," said John.

"That will not do either," said the parson. "Cats are not n.o.ble-minded; it's preposterous!"

"Perfect case of manner," said John.

"Perfect indifference of manner," said the parson."

"No vanity," said John.

"No sense of humour," said the parson.

"Plenty of wit," said John.

"You keep on thinking too much about some woman," remonstrated the parson, slightly exasperated.

"Fastidiousness," said John.

"Soft hands and beautiful nails," said the parson, nodding encouragingly.

"A gentle footstep," said John with a softened look coming into his eyes. "A quiet presence."

"Beautiful taste in music," said John.

"Oh! dreadful!" said the parson. "What on earth are you thinking about?"

"The love of rugs and cushions," said John, groping desperately.

"The love of a lap," said the parson fluently.

"The love of playing with its victim," said John, thinking of another woman.

"Capital!" cried the parson. "That's the truest thing we've said. We'll not spoil it by another word;" but he searched John's face covertly to see whether this talk had beguiled him.

All this satire meant nothing sour, or bitter, or ign.o.ble with the parson.

It was merely the low, far-off play of the northern lights of his mind, irradiating the long polar night of his bachelorhood. But even on the polar night the sun rises--a little way; and the time came when he married--as one might expect to find the flame of a volcano hidden away in a mountain of Iceland spar.

Toward the end of his illness, John lay one night inside his door, looking soberly, sorrowfully out into the moonlight. A chair sat outside, and the parson walked quietly up the green hill and took it. Then he laid his hat on the gra.s.s; and pa.s.sed his delicate hands slowly backward over his long fine straight hair, on which the moonbeams at once fell with a l.u.s.ter as upon still water or the finest satin.

They talked awhile of the best things in life, as they commonly did. At length the parson said in his unworldly way:

"I have one thing against Aristotle: he said the effect of the flute was bad and exciting. He was no true Greek. John, have you ever thought how much of life can be expressed in terms of music? To me every civilization has given out its distinct musical quality; the ages have their peculiar tones; each century its key, its scale. For generations in Greece you can hear nothing but the pipes; during other generations nothing but the lyre. Think of the long, long time among the Romans when your ear is reached by the trumpet alone.

"Then again whole events in history come down to me with the effect of an orchestra, playing in the distance; single lives sometimes like a great solo. As for the people I know or have known, some have to me the sound of bra.s.s, some the sound of wood, some the sound of strings. Only--so few, so very, very few yield the perfect music of their kind. The bra.s.s is a little too loud; the wood a little too m.u.f.fled; the strings--some of the strings are invariably broken. I know a big man who is nothing but a big drum; and I know another whose whole existence has been a jig on a fiddle; and I know a shrill little fellow who is a fife; and I know a bra.s.sy girl who is a pair of cymbals; and once--once," repeated the parson whimsically, "I knew an old maid who was a real living spinet. I even know another old maid now who is nothing but an old music book--long ago sung through, learned by heart, and laid aside: in a faded, wrinkled binding--yellowed paper stained by tears--and haunted by an odour of rose-petals, crushed between the leaves of memory: a genuine very thin and stiff collection of the rarest original songs--not songs without words, but songs without sounds--the ballads of an undiscovered heart, the hymns of an unanswered spirit."

After a pause during which neither of the men spoke, the parson went on:

"All Ireland--it is a harp! We know what Scotland is. John," he exclaimed, suddenly turning toward the dark figure lying just inside the shadow, "you are a discord of the bagpipe and the harp: there's the trouble with you.

Sometimes I can hear the harp alone in you, and then I like you; but when the bagpipe begins, you are worse than a big b.u.mblebee with a bad cold."

"I know it," said John sorrowfully. "My only hope is that the harp will outlast the bee."

"At least that was a chord finely struck," said the parson warmly. After another silence he went on.

"Martin Luther--he was a cathedral organ. And so it goes. And so the whole past sounds to me: it is the music of the world: it is the vast choir of the ever-living dead." He gazed dreamily up at the heavens: "Plato! he is the music of the stars."

After a little while, bending over and looking at the earth and speaking in a tone of unconscious humility, he added:

"The most that we can do is to begin a strain that will swell the general volume and last on after we have perished. As for me, when I am gone, I should like the memory of my life to give out the sound of a flute."

He slipped his hand softly into the breastpocket of his coat and more softly drew something out.

"Would you like a little music?" he asked shyly, his cold beautiful face all at once taking on an expression of angelic sweetness.

John quickly reached out and caught his hand in a long, crushing grip: he knew this was the last proof the parson could ever have given him that he loved him. And then as he lay back on his pillow, he turned his face back into the dark cabin.

Out upon the stillness of the night floated the parson's pa.s.sion-- silver-clear, but in an undertone of such peace, of such immortal gentleness. It was as though the very beams of the far-off serenest moon, falling upon his flute and dropping down into its interior through its little round openings, were by his touch shorn of all their l.u.s.tre, their softness, their celestial energy, and made to reissue as music. It was as though his flute had been stuffed with frozen Alpine blossoms and these had been melted away by the pa.s.sionate breath of his soul into the coldest invisible flowers of sound.

At last, as though all these blossoms in his flute had been used up--blown out upon the warm, moon-lit air as the snow-white fragrances of the ear--the parson buried his face softly upon his elbow which rested on the back of his chair.

And neither man spoke again.

XIII

WHEN Mrs. Falconer had drawn near John's hut on the morning of his misfortune, it was past noon despite all her anxious, sorrowful haste to reach him. His wounds had been dressed. The crowd of people that had gathered about his cabin were gone back to their occupations or their homes--except a group that sat on the roots of a green tree several yards from his door. Some of these were old wilderness folk living near by who had offered to nurse him and otherwise to care for his comforts and needs. The affair furnished them that renewed interest in themselves which is so liable to revisit us when we have escaped a fellow-creature's suffering but can relate good things about ourselves in like risks and dangers; and they were drawing out their reminiscences now with unconscious grat.i.tude for so excellent an opportunity befalling them in these peaceful unadventurous days. Several of John's boys lay in the gra.s.s and hung upon these narratives. Now and then they cast awe-stricken glances at his door which had been pushed to, that he might be quiet; or, if his pain would let him, drop into a little sleep. They made it their especial care, when any new-comer hurried past, to arrest him with the command that he must not go in; and they would thus have stopped Mrs. Falconer but she put them gently aside without heed or hearing.

When she softly pushed the door open, John was not asleep. He lay in a corner on his low hard bed of skins against the wall of logs-- his eyes wide open, the hard white glare of the small shutter-less window falling on his face. He turned to her the look of a dumb animal that can say nothing of why it has been wounded or of how it is suffering; stretched out his hand gratefully; and drew her toward him. She sat down on the edge of the bed, folded her quivering fingers across his temples, smoothed back his heavy, coa.r.s.e, curling hair, and bending low over his eyes, rained down into them the whole unuttered, tearless pa.s.sion of her distress, her sympathy.

Major Falconer came for her within the hour and she left with him almost as soon as he arrived.

When she was gone, John lay thinking of her.

"What a nurse she is!" he said, remembering how she had concerned herself solely his about life, his safety, his wounds. Once she had turned quickly:

"Now you can't go away!" she had said with a smile that touched him deeply.

"I wish you didn't have to go!" he had replied mourningfully, feeling his sudden dependence on her.

This was the first time she had ever been in room--with its poverty, its bareness. She must have cast about it a look of delicate inquiry--as a woman is apt to do in a singleman's abode; for when she came again, in addition to pieces of soft old linen for bandages brought fresh cool fragrant sheets--the work of her own looms; a better pillow with a pillow-case on it that was delicious to his cheek; for he had his weakness about clean, white linen. She put a curtain over the pitiless window. He saw a wild rose in a gla.s.s beside his Testament. He discovered moccasin slippers beside his bed.

"And here," she had said just before leaving, with her hand on a pile of things and with an embarra.s.sed laugh--keeping her face turned away--"here are some towels."

Under the towels he found two night shirts--new ones.

When she was gone, he lay thinking of her again.