“It’s her range,” he confessed afterward to Flora. “It puts me so on pins and needles. Every time she opens her mouth I’m afraid of losing her to one of the big managers.” He was, indeed, forever finding pearls on ash-heaps, for ultimate confiscation higher up. “Lord, the singers I’ve lost because of a little special talent!” Curry dropped his hands from an expended gesture and wriggled the jewelled fingers helplessly. “They’ll get her—you’ll see. I can’t afford to keep a voice like that.” So life went. “From him who hath not....” Xenophon Curry was a born impresario, carrying in his heart a genuine sense of lift and grace which always touched his poor ragged performances with at least the virtue of lyrical buoyancy; but an impresario, alas, born to mediocrity and the provinces.
Presently Captain Utterbourne’s eyes became riveted upon a couple strolling back from the beach.
“Mr. Curry,” he drawled, his lips curling in mirth, “if I’m not mistaken, that’s the young man you had to dinner at the Pavillon d’Orient.”
“Yes,” laughed the impresario, “and thereby hangs a tale”—which he forthwith told, in his big, human way, omitting some of the more painfully satiric touches and stressing rather the new grip on life and the affairs of the world which the once obscure clerk seemed obtaining.
“Isn’t it simply gorgeous,” murmured the Captain in a tone of softly contemplative ecstasy, “the multiplicity of ever fresh reactions one discovers in the human organism! Here one sees a perfectly ordinary and unimaginative young man—h’m?—going along year after year. Then suddenly he’s carried off by a caprice of fortune and placed in a wholly new environment—h’m? And immediately the mechanism of consciousness begins to act along unpremeditated lines—throws up defences—digs trenches of new affirmation—h’m? h’m? It’s extraordinary—that alertness, that look of vigorous ‘becoming’....”
And the Captain sat there watching Jerome and watching, his eyes half closed in a quizzical, poising way.