Mrs. Harter looked straight in front of her while she was singing, her hands behind her back. The silence in the room had a very peculiar character; it was strangely intent.
Even old Carey, who, after all, was by no means a fool, was perfectly motionless, and he, like everybody else, was looking at the woman on the stage.
It was with a perfectly conscious effort that I turned my eyes away from Mrs. Harter and looked across to where Captain Patch stood.
Bill was leaning against the wall, his back half turned to the stage, both hands thrust into his pockets. He seemed to be looking fixedly down at the floor, and he never once raised his eyes or turned round while the strong sound of Mrs. Harter’s singing vibrated in the room.
There are six verses to the absurd song, and the air is repeated again and again. For days afterwards we all of us hummed it and sang it at intervals and execrated it for the persistent way in which it haunted us.
I can remember every note of it, and no doubt everybody else can, too, for everybody, now, avoids humming or singing it. Even the least impressionable people are susceptible to the powers of association that lie in sound, and the Bulbul Ameer song belongs eternally, so far as Cross Loman is concerned, to the affair of Mrs. Harter and Captain Patch.
Mrs. Fazackerly played the final verse slowly and then rattled off the refrain for the last time with a swing:
“But, of all, the most reckless of life or of limb,
Was Abdul, the Bulbul Ameer—
Was Abdul, the Bulbul Ameer.”