The fall, the air of the swamp, and the inward drenching of brandy had left Carl looking much as usual; the tenacious disease that held him swallowed the lesser ills. But for the time, at least, his wandering footsteps were staid.
"I suppose there is no use in my asking, Carl, why you went in there?" said Deal, after a while.
"No, there isn't. I'm haunted—that's all."
"But what is it that haunts you?"
"Sounds. You couldn't understand, though, if I was to talk all night."
"Perhaps I could; perhaps I can understand more than you imagine. I'll tell you a story presently; but first you must explain to me, at least as well as you can, what it is that attracts you in South Devil."
"Oh—well," said Carl, with a long, impatient sigh, closing his eyes wearily. "I am a musician, you know, a musician manqué; a musician who can't play. Something's the matter; I hear music, but can not bring it out. And I know so well what it ought to be, ought to be and isn't, that I've broken my violin in pieces a dozen times in my rages about it. Now, other fellows in orchestras, who don't know, get along very well. But I couldn't. I've thought at times that, although I can not sound what I hear with my own hands, perhaps I could write it out so that other men could sound it. The idea has never come to anything definite yet—that is, what you would call definite; but it haunts me persistently, and now it has got into that swamp. The wish," here Carl laid down his great pipe, and pressed his hand eagerly upon his brother's knee—"the wish that haunts me—drives me—is to write out the beautiful music of the South Devil, the sounds one hears in there"—
"But there are no sounds."
"No sounds? You must be deaf! The air fairly reeks with sounds, with harmonies. But there—I told you you couldn't understand." He leaned back against the wall again, and took up the great pipe, which looked as though it must consume whatever small store of strength remained to him.
"Is it what is called an opera you want to write, like—like the 'Creation,' for instance?" asked Deal. The "Creation" was the only long piece of music he had ever heard.