My heart and my flesh

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

“Some day I aim to smash that old fiddle plumb into the middle of perdition.”

“You’ll never get your hands on it.”

“In two months from now I aim to get you. Take your time and get ready. And if that old music box gets in my way....”

“You’ll never get your hands on it.” She bent her eyes to the strings where the hair lines of the bow sang over them. He was already a whirlwind under her flying fingertips.

“You get good and ready. When I come I’ll come like a roaren lion.”

His strength assailed her, and going about her unsettled routines in the early February cold she rested upon his decision where it suffused her mind. She thought of her grandfather as the chief witness of her achievement with the fiddle; he represented a throng of watchers, there to scrutinize her skill. She held inwardly an intense wish to show him what the fiddle could do in her hands, and as she brought a study to completion and played it with her master she thought of Anthony as the listener, as he was, as he sat over his mellow fire, or she would stop often by his chair and talk with him of the music, retelling all or much of what the teacher had brought her in interpretation.

Or, remembering that the music must come out of the spirit, the soul, she would search inwardly for some token or glimpse of this shadowy substance, this delicate eidolon. The question arose again and again. The soul, where and what was it? She observed that the preachers in the churches had souls for their commerce, and that there one learned that all souls were of equal value. But in the novel or the poem the lover said, “I love you from the depths of my soul,” or the author said, “He was stirred to the depths of his soul,” or “He was frightened in his soul.” Striving to divide her being, to set bounds upon parts, she would turn a half-whimsical gaze inward as she strove to achieve the singing tone and to bow the indefinite legato. “Does the music come out of me really, out of some inner unit, myself, all mine?” she would question, “or do I simply imitate, skilfully or not, what the teacher does?” She wanted to lay her finger on this integer and say, “This is mine.” She wanted to go past the bounding of blood in arteries and the throb of her pride in her grandfather’s witnessing of her advancing skill. The tone sang more true and she took a great, impatient joy in it, searching, as she was, more deeply for the answer to the riddle. Or, in the coming of Albert into her senses, her questioning thought would swim in a pool of inattention and semi-consciousness.

Toward the end of February Anthony Bell sickened of a cold and kept continually in his room sitting over his fire. The sound of his coughing went through the house, and of his scolding voice as he assailed Siver for, as he named them, his trifling ways. After a week he was no better, and the fact came to Theodosia in her preoccupation as a vague trouble. A vague sense of impending demands weighted her bow and her pencil. Writing chords all morning at her table a load bore heavily upon her hand, unrecognized or undefined. A dream-like unrest followed her as she passed her grandfather’s door or mounted the staircase, as she turned back to her studies after the departure of her friends. She went to his room often between her goings and comings. She would stand beside his fire and offer sympathy or question him. Had he tried this remedy or that? Unprepared for care she met this small demand with a slight vexation, or she set herself to prepare some comfort for him, or some diversion. He would soon be better, she assured him.

But there came a day when he was worse, when he kept his bed, and Theodosia called a physician, Dr. Muir. She went often to his bedside, offering to read, to talk, to prepare foods. Anthony seemed troubled, and as the days went by he continually called for papers from his desk or for letter-files from a cupboard in a back room upstairs. He seemed unable to find some paper although he searched endlessly, or he would fall asleep with the documents scattered over his bed or falling from his lax hands. One day an old friend, a Mr. Reed, from the bank, called and sat with him for an hour. When the visitor had gone Anthony seemed more than ever troubled, searching again for the missing paper, falling asleep.