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Winton entered again that house in Mount Street with an emotion, to stifle which required more courage than any cavalry charge. But one whose heart, as he would have put it, is "in the right place" does not indulge the quaverings of his nerves, and he faced those rooms where he had last seen her, faced that lonely little dinner with her husband, without sign of feeling.
Suddenly the three girls broke into song with an adaptation of "Oh, carry me back" which substituted "Louisiana" for "Virginia," but whose absurd quaverings I will not betray in words to a generation that never knew the frantic times to which they belonged. I felt a shamefacedness for them even then, yet when I glanced behind, Miss Harper was singing with us in the most exalted earnest.
The shuffle of the people down onto their knees, and scuffle again onto their feet, the shrill reading of the Mass, and endless unfinished cadences, overtopped by unearthly slightly sickening quaverings of the choir; the ceaseless moving about of all this mass of black backs, veils, cloaks, outlines of cheek and ear presenting every now and then among the various kinds of rusty black; no devotion, no gravity, no quiet anywhere, among these creatures munching chocolates and adjusting opera-glasses.
Incidents long forgotten came back with singular vividness: he saw the Past as he had not seen it while it was the Present; remembrances of home, recollections of infancy, recurred to him with terrible intensity, the artless pleasures and the trifling griefs, the little hurts and the tender pettings, the hopes and the anxieties of those who loved him, the smiles and tears of slaves ... And his first Creole pony, a present from his father the day after he had proved himself able to recite his prayers correctly in French, without one mispronunciation without saying crasse for grace, and yellow Michel, who taught him to swim and to fish and to paddle a pirogue; and the bayou, with its wonder-world of turtles and birds and creeping things; and his German tutor, who could not pronounce the j; and the songs of the cane-fields, strangely pleasing, full of quaverings and long plaintive notes, like the call of the cranes ... Tou', tou' pays blanc! ... Afterward Camaniere had leased the place; everything must have been changed; even the songs could not be the same.
The quaverings of incipient harmony were hushed and the divine sat in speechless and almost terrified astonishment while she undid the door and stood up in the sacred desk from which his maledictions had just been thundered. She then divested herself of the cloak and hood, and appeared in a most singular array.
Had ever such a life so perfectly beautiful an ending? We must regard Parsifal as the last sad quaverings of a beloved friend: after that came peace, immortal peace. Amongst musicians of the first rank stand four commanding, tremendous figures.
But her singing he did not question. It was too wholly her, and he sat always amazed at the divine melody of her pure soprano voice. And he could not help but contrast it with the weak pipings and shrill quaverings of factory girls, ill-nourished and untrained, and with the raucous shriekings from gin-cracked throats of the women of the seaport towns. She enjoyed singing and playing to him.
Whenever Lashman broke out into fresh quaverings of self-pity, Cooney's hands opened and shut again, till the nails dug hard into the palm. He groaned at length, exasperated beyond endurance. "Oh, stow it, George! Hang it all, man! . . ." He checked himself, sharp and short: repentant, and rebuked by the silence of the others.
A cat-bird answered it with a harsh cry; a blue-jay answered him with a still harsher note. But then a brown thrush burst into unaccustomed post-meridian song. Even his throbbing trills and thrilling, liquid quaverings, had not more melody in them, however, than had her ringing laughter. Her laugh, too, roused more than vagrant birds into attention.
A wondrous voice, and a wondrous song, full of trills and quaverings indescribable, but full also of sweetness and true musical swing.
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