The Spawer showed a sunny glint of teeth.
"Hardly," he replied. "As soon as the railway people remember where they saw it last, I hope to have one of my own."
"One of your own. Ha!" Father Mostyn's eye glistened to enthusiasm again. "I judged so. Beautiful! Beautiful!" The ebony staff shook to internal humor at a thought. "Fancy Mozart on an Ullbrig piano! ... or Bach! ... or Beethoven! ..." He wagged the unspeakable with his head. "I 'm afraid you won't find any music hereabouts."
"Thank Heaven!" the Spawer breathed devoutly. "I was afraid perhaps I might!"
"Ha!" Father Mostyn caught quickly at the inference and translated it. "I see; I see. A musical monastic! Coming into retreat at Cliff Wrangham to subject his soul to a course of artistic purification and strengthening!"
The Spawer accepted the illustration with a modest laugh.
"Well, yes," he said. "I suppose that 's it—only it 's rather more beautiful in idea than in actuality. I should have said myself, perhaps, that I 'd come into the country to be able to work in shirt-sleeves and loosened braces, and go about unshaved, in baggy-kneed trousers, without fear of friends. I 'm half a monastic and half refugee. In towns so many of us are making music that one never gets a chance to hear or think one's own; one's ears are full of other people's. So I 've run away with my own little musical bone to a quiet place, where I can tackle it all to myself and growl over the business to my heart's content without any temptation to drop it for unsubstantial shadows. Instead of having to work in a stuffy room, with all the doors and windows closed and somebody knocking at you on the next house wall, I have the sea, the cliff, the sands ... and the whole sky above me for my workshop. It will take me all my time to fill it. If a melody comes my way, I can hum it into shape without causing unpleasant remarks. Nobody ever hears me, for one thing; and for another, they would n't bother to listen if they did." Father Mostyn's glance flickered imperceptibly for a moment, and then burned with an exceeding steady light. "I can orchestrate aloud in the open air, singing flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon, ophicleide ... tympani ... just whatever I please, without any risk of an official tap on the shoulder. In a word, I can be myself ... and it 's a treat to be oneself for a while. One gets tired of being somebody else so long, and having to go about in fear of the great Unwritten."
"We have our great Unwritten here too," Father Mostyn told him. "I doubt if any of us could write it if we tried. Ullbrig is weak in its caligraphy. We do most of our writing in chalk. It suits our style better. The pen has an awkward habit of impaling the paper, we find, and carrying it back to the ink-pot."
"Don't teach me anything of Ullbrig's great Unwritten," the Spawer put in quickly. "Let me violate it with an easy conscience."
"By all means," Father Mostyn invited him genially. "It will be a chastening mortification to our pride. We are swollen with local pride—distended with the flatulence of dissent. A little pricking will do us no harm. I should have thought, though," Father Mostyn went on, "that you would have sought to feed your muse on richer fare than turnip-fields. I imagined that mountains and valleys, with castles looking over lakes and waterfalls by moonlight, were more the sort of stuff for stimulating a musician's fancy. Is it possible there can be music lying latent in our Ullbrig soil?"