After my experience with the church bell I could sympathize with the insect, weeping perhaps "walrus tears" upon its death-bed. But the problem of how one could disinfect a guitar was worrying. The case had no cracks for vermin-harbouring, so we shut up the instrument; and after some indecision Jan decided to trust to luck and leave it alone.
On Sunday night we gave a party to Emilio, his wife, the little Professor and other afficianados of the guitar. We played to them selections of genuine classical music, Bach, Beethoven, Handel on the gramophone. Don Feliz sat by himself in a corner, his head in the air, tapping his foot to the metre.
"All that, all that I have heard before," he said.
Emilio listened with delight on his rugged face. Every few minutes he whispered to his wife:
"Shut up talking. This is worth listening to."
Then we tried an experiment. We had just received from El Señor a plate of Stravinsky's "Oiseau du Feu." We put it on to the machine. The audience kept an intense silence.
"But that is marvellous!" they exclaimed as soon as the record was over. "Play it once more, Señor."
"Señor," said one of Emilio's friends, "what can I do for you? Have you any milk—no?"
He ran downstairs and out of the house. In ten minutes he came back, thrust a milk-can into Jan's hands.
"There!" he exclaimed. "And if you want any more cow's milk, come to me. I keep a milk-shop, you know." Then he went on more seriously: "But you are indeed lucky to have bought that old guitar of Don Feliz. He would never sell it to me. I have offered a hundred pesetas for it; and there are others who have offered more."