"In case our friends of Toutou's gang should try to attack us," I explained.
But Watkins was as positive as Mr. Bellowes that such things could not transpire in England.
"Oh, sir, sure I am you need not concern yourself for that," he said seriously. "They would never dare. The constabulary, sir—and all that."
"Perhaps," I said. "What is that music?"
He inclined his ear towards the door of a room that opened from the opposite side of the hall to the Gunroom.
"Oh, sir. That's Mister Nikka. 'E's in the music room aplaying to 'imself, sir."
I crossed to the half-open door and peered inside. Nikka was sitting at a pianoforte in a flood of sunshine, and the music poured from his lips and fingers, like the sunshine, passionately intense, warm and vital. It stirred me as I listened, searching out primitive impulses, painting sound-pictures of outlandish scenes, spreading exotic odors over that conventional room. It was rebellious, uncivilized, untamed—and I liked it.
He crooned to himself, rather than sang, but the words and the melody, savage, melancholy, joyously-somber, beat their way into my brain:
Sad is the ache in my heart;
The cities crowd me in.
I may not breath for their stench,
My ears are deaf from their din.
Let me go forth from their ways,
Out where the road runs free,
Twisting over the Balkan hills
Down to the restless sea.