Part 8 (1/2)
”Yes, unfortunately, it IS just like her,” replied the doctor, with a hostile note in his voice. ”Whenever I am dining here, she always goes in and kicks up that racket. She knows I hate it.”
”Oh, you mean that it is she who is playing,” remarked Theron. ”I thought you referred to--at least--I was thinking of--”
His sentence died off in inconsequence. He had a feeling that he did not want to talk with the doctor about the stained-gla.s.s likeness. The music had sunk away now into fragmentary and unconnected pa.s.sages, broken here and there by abrupt stops. Dr. Ledsmar stretched an arm out past him and shut the window. ”Let's hear as little of the row as we can,” he said, and the two went back to their chairs.
”Pardon me for the question,” the Rev. Mr. Ware said, after a pause which began to affect him as constrained, ”but something you said about dining--you don't live here, then? In the house, I mean?”
The doctor laughed--a characteristically abrupt, dry little laugh, which struck Theron at once as bearing a sort of black-sheep relations.h.i.+p to the priest's habitual chuckle. ”That must have been puzzling you no end,” he said--”that notion that the pastorate kept a devil's advocate on the premises. No, Mr. Ware, I don't live here. I inhabit a house of my own--you may have seen it--an old-fas.h.i.+oned place up beyond the race-course, with a sort of tower at the back, and a big garden. But I dine here three or four times a week. It is an old arrangement of ours.
Vincent and I have been friends for many years now. We are quite alone in the world, we two--much to our mutual satisfaction. You must come up and see me some time; come up and have a look over the books we were speaking of.”
”I am much obliged,” said Theron, without enthusiasm. The thought of the doctor by himself did not attract him greatly.
The reservation in his tone seemed to interest the doctor. ”I suppose you are the first man I have asked in a dozen years,” he remarked, frankly willing that the young minister should appreciate the favor extended him. ”It must be fully that since anybody but Vincent Forbes has been under my roof; that is, of my own species, I mean.”
”You live there quite alone,” commented Theron.
”Quite--with my dogs and cats and lizards--and my Chinaman. I mustn't forget him.” The doctor noted the inquiry in the other's lifted brows, and smilingly explained. ”He is my solitary servant. Possibly he might not appeal to you much; but I can a.s.sure you he used to interest Octavius a great deal when I first brought him here, ten years ago or so. He afforded occupation for all the idle boys in the village for a twelve-month at least. They used to lie in wait for him all day long, with stones or horse-chestnuts or s...o...b..a.l.l.s, according to the season.
The Irishmen from the wagon-works nearly killed him once or twice, but he patiently lived it all down. The Chinaman has the patience to live everything down--the Caucasian races included. He will see us all to bed, will that gentleman with the pigtail!”
The music over in the church had lifted itself again into form and sequence, and defied the closed window. If anything, it was louder than before, and the sonorous roar of the ba.s.s-pedals seemed to be shaking the very walls. It was something with a big-lunged, exultant, triumphing swing in it--something which ought to have been sung on the battlefield at the close of day by the whole jubilant army of victors. It was impossible to pretend not to be listening to it; but the doctor submitted with an obvious scowl, and bit off the tip of his third cigar with an annoyed air.
”You don't seem to care much for music,” suggested Mr. Ware, when a lull came.
Dr. Ledsmar looked up, lighted match in hand. ”Say musicians!” he growled. ”Has it ever occurred to you,” he went on, between puffs at the flame, ”that the only animals who make the noises we call music are of the bird family--a debased offshoot of the reptilian creation--the very lowest types of the vertebrata now in existence? I insist upon the parallel among humans. I have in my time, sir, had considerable opportunities for studying close at hand the various orders of mammalia who devote themselves to what they describe as the arts. It may sound a harsh judgement, but I am convinced that musicians stand on the very bottom rung of the ladder in the sub-cellar of human intelligence, even lower than painters and actors.”
This seemed such unqualified nonsense to the Rev. Mr. Ware that he offered no comment whatever upon it. He tried instead to divert his thoughts to the stormy strains which rolled in through the vibrating brickwork, and to picture to himself the large, capable figure of Miss Madden seated in the half-light at the organ-board, swaying to and fro in a splendid ecstasy of power as she evoked at will this superb and ordered uproar. But the doctor broke insistently in upon his musings.
”All art, so-called, is decay,” he said, raising his voice. ”When a race begins to brood on the beautiful--so-called--it is a sign of rot, of getting ready to fall from the tree. Take the Jews--those marvellous old fellows--who were never more than a handful, yet have imposed the rule of their ideas and their G.o.ds upon us for fifteen hundred years. Why?
They were forbidden by their most fundamental law to make sculptures or pictures. That was at a time when the Egyptians, when the a.s.syrians, and other Semites, were running to artistic riot. Every great museum in the world now has whole floors devoted to statues from the Nile, and marvellous carvings from the palaces of Sargon and a.s.surbanipal. You can get the artistic remains of the Jews during that whole period into a child's wheelbarrow. They had the sense and strength to penalize art; they alone survived. They saw the Egyptians go, the a.s.syrians go, the Greeks go, the late Romans go, the Moors in Spain go--all the artistic peoples perish. They remained triumphing over all. Now at last their long-belated apogee is here; their decline is at hand. I am told that in this present generation in Europe the Jews are producing a great lot of young painters and sculptors and actors, just as for a century they have been producing famous composers and musicians. That means the end of the Jews!”
”What! have you only got as far as that?” came the welcome interruption of a cheery voice. Father Forbes had entered the room, and stood looking down with a whimsical twinkle in his eye from one to the other of his guests.
”You must have been taken over the ground at a very slow pace, Mr.
Ware,” he continued, chuckling softly, ”to have arrived merely at the collapse of the New Jerusalem. I fancied I had given him time enough to bring you straight up to the end of all of us, with that Chinaman of his gently slapping our graves with his pigtail. That's where the doctor always winds up, if he's allowed to run his course.”
”It has all been very interesting, extremely so, I a.s.sure you,” faltered Theron. It had become suddenly apparent to him that he desired nothing so much as to make his escape--that he had indeed only been waiting for the host's return to do so.
He rose at this, and explained that he must be going. No special effort being put forth to restrain him, he presently made his way out, Father Forbes hospitably following him down to the door, and putting a very gracious cordiality into his adieux.
The night was warm and black. Theron stood still in it the moment the pastorate door had closed; the sudden darkness was so thick that it was as if he had closed his eyes. His dominant sensation was of a deep relief and rest after some undue fatigue. It crossed his mind that drunken men probably felt like that as they leaned against things on their way home. He was affected himself, he saw, by the weariness and half-nausea following a mental intoxication. The conceit pleased him, and he smiled to himself as he turned and took the first homeward steps.
It must be growing late, he thought. Alice would be wondering as she waited.
There was a street lamp at the corner, and as he walked toward it he noted all at once that his feet were keeping step to the movement of the music proceeding from the organ within the church--a vaguely processional air, marked enough in measure, but still with a dreamy effect. It became a pleasure to identify his progress with the quaint rhythm of sound as he sauntered along. He discovered, as he neared the light, that he was instinctively stepping over the seams in the flagstone sidewalk as he had done as a boy. He smiled again at this.
There was something exceptionally juvenile and buoyant about his mood, now that he examined it. He set it down as a reaction from that doctor's extravagant and incendiary talk. One thing was certain--he would never be caught up at that house beyond the race-course, with its reptiles and its Chinaman. Should he ever even go to the pastorate again? He decided not to quite definitely answer THAT in the negative, but as he felt now, the chances were all against it.
Turning the corner, and walking off into the shadows along the side of the huge church building, Theron noted, almost at the end of the edifice, a small door--the entrance to a porch coming out to the sidewalk--which stood wide open. A thin, pale, vertical line of light showed that the inner door, too, was ajar.
Through this wee aperture the organ-music, reduced and mellowed by distance, came to him again with that same curious, intimate, personal relation which had so moved him at the start, before the doctor closed the window. It was as if it was being played for him alone.
He paused for a doubting minute or two, with bowed head, listening to the exquisite harmony which floated out to caress and soothe and enfold him. There was no spiritual, or at least pious, effect in it now.