pipe again. You see, he stumbled in on me in the dark when I was
pumping away at that old parlour organ to please Mrs. Lockhart
It's her household fetish and I've forgotten how many pounds of
butter she made and sold to buy it. Well, Eric stumbled in, and in
some inarticulate manner made me understand that he wanted me to
sing for him. I sang just the old things, of course. It's queer
to sing familiar things here at the world's end. It makes one
think how the hearts of men have carried them around the world,
into the wastes of Iceland and the jungles of Africa and the
islands of the Pacific. I think if one lived here long enough one
would quite forget how to be trivial, and would read only the great
books that we never get time to read in the world, and would
remember only the great music, and the things that are really worth
while would stand out clearly against that horizon over there. And
of course I played the intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana
for him; it goes rather better on an organ than most things do. He
shuffled his feet and twisted his big hands up into knots and
blurted out that he didn't know there was any music like that in
the world. Why, there were tears in his voice, Wyllis! Yes, like
Rossetti, I heard his tears. Then it dawned upon me that it
was probably the first good music be had ever heard in all his
life. Think of it, to care for music as he does and never to hear
it, never to know that it exists on earth! To long for it as we
long for other perfect experiences that never come. I can't tell
you what music means to that man. I never saw any one so
susceptible to it. It gave him speech, he became alive. When I had
finished the intermezzo, he began telling me about a little
crippled brother who died and whom he loved and used to carry
everywhere in his arms. He did not wait for encouragement. He
took up the story and told it slowly, as if to himself, just sort