Kitty raised her eyes in frank astonishment. There was a fiercely proud expression on Hawksley's face. It was not the man, it was the artist who was angry.
"Forgive me! I was dreaming a little," she apologized with quick understanding. "I am not quite - myself."
"Neither am I. I will play something to fit your dream. But wait!
When I play I am articulate. I can express myself - all emotions.
I am what I play - happy, sad, gay, full of the devil. I warn you. I can speak all things. I can laugh at you, weep with you, despise you, love you! All in the touch of these strings. I warn you there is magic in this Amati. Will you risk it?"
Ordinarily - had this florid outburst come from another man - Kitty would have laughed. It had the air of piqued vanity; but she knew that this was not the interpretation. On the streets he had been the most amusing and surprising comrade she had ever known, as merry and whimsical as Cutty - young and handsome - the real man.
He had been real that night when he entered through her kitchen window, with the drums of jeopardy about his neck. He had been real that night she had brought him his wallet.
Electric antagonism - the room seemed charged with it. The man had stepped aside for a moment and the great noble had taken his place.
It was not because she had been reared in rather a theatrical atmosphere that she transcribed his attitude thus. She knew that he was noble. That she did not know his rank was of no consequence.
Cutty's narrative, which she had pretended to believe, had set this man in the middle class. Never in this world. There was only one middle class out of which such a personality might, and often did, emerge - the American middle class. In Europe, never. No peasant blood, no middle-class corpuscle, stirred in this man's veins. The ancient boyar looked down at her.
"Play!" said Kitty. There was a smile on her lips, but there was fiery challenge in her slate-blue eyes. The blood of Irish kings - and what Irishman dares deny it? - surged into her throat.
We wear masks, we inherit generations of masks; and a trivial incident reveals the primordial which lurks in each one of us.
Savages - Kitty with her stone hatchet and Hawksley swinging the curved blade of Hunk.
He began one of those tempestuous compositions, brilliant and bewildering, that submerge the most appreciative lay mentality - because he was angry, a double anger that he should be angry over he knew not what - and broke off in the middle of the composition because Kitty sat upright, stonily unimpressed.
Tschaikowsky's "Serenade Melancolique." Kitty, after a few measures, laid aside her stone hatchet, and her body relaxed.
Music! She began to absorb it as parched earth absorbs the tardy rain. Then came the waltz which had haunted her. Her face grew tenderly beautiful; and Hawksley, a true artist, saw that he had discovered the fifth string; and he played upon it with all the artistry which was naturally his and which had been given form by the master who had taught him.
For the physical exertions he relied upon nerve energy again.
Nature is generous when we are young. No matter how much we draw against the account she always has a little more for us. He forgot that only an hour gone he had been dizzy with pain, forgot everything but the glory of the sounds he was evoking and their visible reaction upon this girl. The devil was not only in his heart, but in his hand.
