“We’ll see,” I returned. “I haven’t written a bar of music for such a long while that I don’t know how hard I shall find it. But I used to make a daily practice of writing from memory, because it increases one’s facility for sight-reading.”
I hummed the first two or three phrases softly to myself, beating time with my fingers; then drew up to the writing-table and commenced to set them down. At the outset I had considerable difficulty, was obliged, so to speak, to spell my way along note by note, and committed several blunders which I had to go back to and correct. But gradually my path grew smoother and smoother, until I was no longer conscious of effort; and at last I became so much absorbed and so much interested by what I was doing, that my hand sped across the paper like a machine performing the regular function for which it was contrived. I suppose mental activity always begets mental exhilaration; and that mental exhilaration in turn, when allowed to attain too high a pitch, always approaches the borderland of its antipode, on the principle that extremes meet. At any rate such was my experience in the present instance. At first, both mind and fingers were sluggish and moved laboriously. Then mind got into running order, and fingers lagged behind; then fingers caught up with mind, and for a while the two kept pace; then, finally, fingers spurted ahead and it was mind’s turn to acknowledge itself left in the rear. Mental exhilaration gave place to bewilderment, as I saw that my hand was forging along faster than my thought could dictate, in apparent obedience to an independent will of its own—which bewilderment ripened into thoroughgoing mystification, as the hand dashed forward and back like a shuttle in a loom, with a velocity that seemed ever to be increasing. I had precisely the sensation of a man who has started to run down a hill, and whose legs have acquired such a momentum that he can not stop them: on and on he must submit to be borne until some outside obstacle interferes, even though a yawning chasm await him at the bottom. Toward the end I scarcely saw the paper on which I was writing; I am sure I saw nothing of the matter that I wrote. I said to myself, “Of course you will find that all this stuff is incoherent and meaningless when you get through.” But I waited passively till my hand should get through of its own accord, I made no endeavor to draw the rein upon it. Eventually it came to a standstill with a round turn. I was quite winded. I needed leisure in which to recover my equilibrium.
Merivale—of whose presence I had become oblivious—crossed over and began gathering the scattered sheets of paper from the table. The sight of him helped to bring me to myself.
“Well,” I said, “there it is. I don’t suppose you can read it. I got so excited I hardly knew what I was about.”
“That’s all right,” he answered reassuringly. “I’m much obliged to you for the trouble you’ve taken. But what,” he added abruptly, “but what is all this that you have written?”
“Why, what do you fancy? The music, of course, that you asked me to.”
“No, no; I mean this writing, this text, with which you have wound up?”
“Writing? Text? What are you driving at?”
“Why, here—this,” he said handing me the paper.
“Mercy upon me!” I exclaimed, thoroughly amazed. “I was not aware that I had written any thing.”