It was at moments
unmanageable, being untrained, yet he seemed to do as much with it as
if it had been bass and barytone and tenor all in one. It had grown
a little thick in the last year, but he brought out of its very
thickness a brooding, yearning passion and an intolerable pathos.
The song, overladen with emotion, appealed to him; it expressed as
nothing else could have expressed the passions that were within him at
that moment. It swept the whole range of his experiences, there were
sheep in it and a churchyard and children (his lady could never be
anything more to him than a child).
"'Oh, that we two-oo were ly-ing
In our nest in the chu-urch-yard sod,
With our limbs at rest on the quiet earth's breast,
And our souls--at home--with God!'"
That finished it. There was no other end.
And as he sang it, looking nobly if a little heavily over the heads of
his audience, he saw Essy Gale hidden away, and trying to hide herself
more, beside her mother in the farthest corner of the room.
He had forgotten Essy.
And at the sight of her his nobility went from him and only his
heaviness remained.
It didn't matter that they shouted for him to sing again, that they
stamped and bellowed, and that he did sing, again and again, taking
the roof off at the last with "John Peel."
Nothing mattered. Nothing mattered. Nothing could matter now.
And then something bigger than his heart, bigger than his voice,
something immense and brutal and defiant, asserted itself and said
that Come to that Essy didn't matter.
Pages:
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132