X.
Tired bells jangle out the slowly passing time. An ancient carillon sounds the quarter, an added clang the half, one note more for three quarters. The long black arms reach to the hour, then another and another passes, and night brings rest to the Great Mother. But the soft gentle eyes are no sooner closed than all the children, the white children at her feet, begin to stir and move, just as yours and mine do when mother sleeps.
The old church towers, with sweet grace, wrap about her stately form a mantle of whitest silver, bordered with great lines of black, and away above her head, up in God’s garden, forget-me-nots and heartsease blossom out into twinkling spots of starlit beauty.
The moon rolls languidly on in the gentlest heaven that earth e’er looked upon.
Below, beneath God’s garden, the white children brighten and awaken from the drowsy languor of the long day. Lights flare out, doors open, and streets fill with happy voices, and a white-frocked humanity empties itself into the Plaza to hear yet again the great Military Band of Caracas.
There comes a hush, and then—it must be from the garden away off so far—there drops a veil,—the veil of forgetfulness, in sounds of music so inexpressibly tender and alluring as to catch the soul from earth away up to where white angels gather the forget-me-nots and heartsease. The crumbling city and its disordered sights, the dust and all unpleasantness pass away beyond the veil, and all that remains is covered with the witchery of music.
To make it real, we, too, join the children and press in close, just as our little ones do who fear not the expression of their emotions. We, too, press in where the makers of this wonderful music, sixty of them, stand in a great semicircle at the head of a flight of stone steps, and then we listen to the old, eternally old stories of life and love and joy and tragedy; listen, until our souls are filled to the utmost with the deeps of life!
An intermission comes; we take a deep breath; meanwhile he of the Spanish vocabulary, made bold by enthusiasm, threaded his way to where the leader of the band was nonchalantly smoking a cigarette, wishing to congratulate him on the masterful work done by his musicians, and also to thank him for having just played “The Star Spangled Banner,” in honour of the Americans present.
Shrugging his shoulders, the bandmaster remarked that his men had almost forgotten that American thing, as it was twelve years since last they played it! Thus does the Venezuelan show his love for these United States. But we forget that in the charm of the reawakened melody, for it is the kind of music that speaks real things; that brings the great forgetting of things visible; that brings the great remembering of things eternal. Mellow notes, as from the throat of a blackbird, slip through the liquid night as softly as the splash of feathered warblers in the cool water brooks, and when the strong word is uttered, it comes forth like the voice of a seer, unjarring, made strong through great tenderness.
Closer and closer we press to lose not the slightest note, and we realise that it is the music which comes to our cold Northern senses but once in a lifetime, and our ears plead for more and yet more. No strings could ever have so mellowed themselves into the loveliness of that night as did those liquid oboes, whose sylvan tones filtered through our senses with ineffable sweetness. The wood and brass seemed to have been tempered by long nights of tears and days of smiles, so ripened were they into an expression of the soul of humanity.
At last the Great Mother sleeps, her children are tired and go to rest, and God’s garden blossoms away, away off beyond in the far country.