For three long years he had carried his distress about with him all day long, had gone for lonely walks with it, had sat at home with it, had slept with it, had wakened with it. At first he had obtained relief from within: he had fallen back on his own mind’s great reserves of inward entertainment. But now he was no longer self-sufficient, self-supporting. He was utterly barren: without emotion, without love, without the power to write his beloved verses, without a heart, without even despair. He had always been capable of feeling sorrow for, and sympathy with, the griefs of others: he wished now to God that he could lament over his own; but even lamentation was denied him.
Presently, taking up his guitar, he began to sing the first song that came to his head. It was an old Italian refrain to which he had set his own words; and so softly did the strings vibrate under his practised fingers, so sorrowful was his rich voice, that a listener might have imagined him to be a lovelorn minstrel of Florence in the forests of Fiesole. Yet there was no love in his heart.
He sang next a melancholy negro dirge, and, after a long silence, followed on with his own setting of those lines from Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind, which tell of one who, looking down into the blue waters of the bay of Baiæ, saw
... Old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss, and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them.
As he sang there rose before his inward eye a vision of the sun-bathed lands through which he had wandered so happily in the past. He saw again the white houses reflected in the still waters of Mediterranean, the olive-groves passing up the hillsides, the hot roads leading through the red-roofed villages, and the dark-skinned peasants driving their goats along the mountain tracks. He saw the lights of the city of Alexandria twinkling across the bay, and heard the surge of the breakers beating on the rocks. And then, quietly and vaguely, out of the picture there came the serene, mysterious face of a woman, a face he had thought forgotten. Her black hair drifted back into his recollection, her grey eyes seemed to gaze into his, and in his inward ear the one word “Monimé” reverberated like an echo of a dream. And suddenly a door seemed to open within him, and with an overwhelming onset, his captive emotions, his feelings, his long-forgotten joys and sorrows, broke out from their prison and surged through him.
He laid his guitar aside, and for a while sat wrapt in a kind of ecstasy. It was as though he had risen from the grave: it was as though his heart had come back to life within him.
He scrambled to his feet and stood for a moment, staring up at the moon, his fists clenched and drumming upon his breast. Then, to his amazement, he felt his eyes filled with tears—tears which he had not shed since he was a small boy. He uttered a laugh of embarrassment, but it broke in his throat, and all the cynic in him collapsed.