Anthony The Absolute. Merwin Samuel
do not know why I found myself unable to stay. Perhaps in another place and at another time ‘t would have been different. Perhaps the beauty and charm of the house and the pleasant attractiveness of the little person herself had raised me too high above the ordinary sordid plane of this transaction, and emphasized the ugliness of it.
Perhaps, too, the fact (extraordinary in my lonely experience) that she had given up smiling at me, and now plainly wanted me to stay, was among the curious psychological forces that drove me away. As to why she wanted me, I can not say. I have puzzled over that part of it all the evening (it is now a quarter to midnight) without arriving at any conclusion. It may be that by unconsciously permitting her, through my deep interest in her music, to show something of her own enthusiasms and of the emotions that stirred them, I had flattered her more subtly than I knew. Who can say?
I turned right back to my boxes. She called a boy to carry them, and I went away. My last glimpse, as I closed her door, was of a quaint little slant-eyed person, whose hair had become disarranged and was tumbling about her ears, whose lips were parted in a breathless smile.
One thing is sure: I shall never let Crocker know that I came away like that. If he believed me at all, which I doubt, he would certainly think me weaker than I am. I may be a complicated, finicky person; but I do not believe I am as weak as he would think me if he knew.
As I was walking along the corridor I heard other footsteps, and looking across the dim, flower-scented court, just managed to distinguish a rather ponderous figure proceeding slowly among the shadows on the other side. We met at the top of the stairs. It was Sir Robert.
I felt myself coloring furiously; and he wore a shamefaced expression. For such is the curious hypocrisy of man when caught in his more or less constant relationship with the one completely universal and unchangeable of his institutions.
“Well,” said he, rather awkwardly, “it is a very pleasant place, the way they keep it up.”
“Very,” I replied.
“And what is all this?” He was looking at my boxes, in the arms of the boy at my elbow. “Purchases? Here?”
“That is my phonograph,” I explained, quite unnecessarily.
“Your what?” He said this much as Crocker had said it.
“My phonograph,” I repeated.
He stood looking at me, with knit brows. Then, “Ah, ha!” he said, musing. “So that was it! I could n’t explain that music – hours of it – and the repetitions. I begin to see. You are the authority on Oriental music.”
I bowed coldly.
Sir Robert began smiling – an old man’s smile. I started down the stairs, but he kept at my side.
We went on to the outer door together without a word, and waited while the boy called rickshaws for us. I looked at Sir Robert. He was still smiling.
“Let me congratulate you,” he said then, rather dryly. And his left eyelid drooped in what was grotesquely like a wink. “You have the distinction, I believe, of being quite the most practical man in the world. You will go far.”
Thank God, the rickshaw is the most unsociable of vehicles. Each of us stepped into his own and rolled away through a dim street bordered by rows of gay paper lanterns, which were lighted now.
As my rickshaw turned the corner, we nearly collided head on with another one. By the light of the lanterns I made out its occupant – the fat vaudeville manager from Cincinnati.
He waved a cheerful hand at me as we passed.
“Number Nine?” he called.
“Number Nine,” I replied. I felt depressed and ashamed; but he took it very easily.
I have, however, confirmed a conclusion tonight, so the experience has its value. I shall push on to China, where the ancient music may still be caught in its pure form, uncorrupted and unconfused by the modern touch. For my purposes, time spent in Japan would be wasted. And I shall hurry past the treaty ports to Peking. The treaty ports, they tell me, are not really Chinese at all. For that matter, how could they be?
Grand Hotel, Yokohama, March 30th, Early Afternoon
CROCKER has not yet appeared. I borrowed his key from the office, just before lunch, and looked in his room. His bed had not been, slept in. There is certainly no indirection about Crocker, no introspective uncertainty; he meets life as it presents itself, roughly and squarely.
On the whole, I find I like him much better than I expected. He is really a companionable chap. He is not so eager to tell his troubles as I had thought he would be. In fact, barring that one moment on the ship, he has not even referred to them; and I myself drew that out by telling him he was drinking too much.
Sir Robert came over and sat with me just now in the dining-room while I finished my lunch. I cut the meal as short as I could. He was distinctly affable. He asked point-blank where I am going, and I had to tell. It seems that he is bound for Peking also, via Shanghai and Nanking. Fortunately, he announced his route before asking about mine. I decided on the spot to go around by the Korean and Chinese Imperial Railways, through Fusan, Mukden, and Shanhaikwan.
However, he perhaps did me a service by telling me of a pleasant little French hotel at Peking, on the Italian glacis, whatever that is. The big hotel in the Legation Quarter, he says, is rather expensive and at this time of year will be swarming with tourists. The little Hôtel de Chine, on the other hand, is frequented only by queer types of the Coast, and is really very cheap.
“The cuisine,” said Sir Robert, “is atrocious. But, being French, they serve excellent coffee, which does for breakfast and one can, in a pinch, put together a fair luncheon there. For dinner, the Wagon-lits, of course. Above all, make no experiments with the cellar of the Hôtel de Chine. They will show you an imposing wine-card. Shun it!”
I merely bowed at this. It was no use telling Sir Robert that I should certainly not know one alleged vintage from another.
There is one difficulty. Sir Robert himself, affecting a taste for the quaint, will be stopping at our less pretentious hostelry; again, with my eyes closed at night, I shall see that bad old face with the one drooping eyelid; again that loose voice will sound in my ears. But then, I shall be very busy.
Some one is knocking at my door. Crocker is calling.
Midnight – Still the 30th
CROCKER was in the worst shape I have seen him in so far. His eyes were red. And when he dropped on my couch, the first thing he did was to stretch out his right hand and watch it critically. It was decidedly unsteady.
“Ring up a boy, old chap, will you?” he said. I did so. He ordered a quart bottle of whisky and a half-dozen bottles of Tan San.
“Steady my nerves,” he observed, half to himself. “It’s that dam’ saké. Gets to me like absinthe.” He chuckled. “I must have a quart of the stuff in me. Some night, my boy!”
Curiously, a few drinks of the whisky did seem to steady his nerves. After a while he came over to the table, sat down opposite me, and lighted a cigar. We talked for an hour or two – until I finally explained that I really had to get at my work. Then he returned to the sofa, stretched out comfortably, with the whisky and an ash-tray on a chair beside him, and watched me, with only an occasional good-natured interruption.
He seemed greatly interested in my method of musical notation. Of course, the ordinary staff of five lines would not serve me at all, since I find it necessary to indicate intervals much closer ===than the usual half-step. I use large sheets of paper, ruled from top to bottom with fine lines, every sixteenth line being heavier. Thus I can record intervals as fine as the sixteenth of a tone. In fact, as I told Crocker, and as Rameau and von Stumbostel both recognize, I have actually done so! I undoubtedly possess the most delicate aural perception of any scientist that has ever investigated the so-called primitive music. My ears are to me what the eyes of the great astronomer are to him. This is why all my contemporaries, particularly the great