The music stopped. The Sphinx turned to me with the soul of Wagner in her eyes, and then she turned to the waiter: 'Would it be possible,' she said, 'to persuade the bandmaster to play that wonderful thing over again?'
The waiter seemed a little doubtful, even for the Sphinx, but he went off to the bandmaster with the air of a man who has at last an opportunity to show that he can dare all for love. Personally, I have a suspicion that he poured his month's savings at the bandmaster's feet, and begged him to do this thing for the most wonderful lady in the world; or perhaps the bandmaster was really a musician, and his musician's heart was touched—lonely there amid the beef—to think that there was really some one, invisible though she were to him, some shrouded silver presence, up there among the beefeaters, who really loved to hear great music. Perhaps it was thus made a night he has never forgotten; perhaps it changed the whole course of his life—who knows? The sweet reassuring request may have come to him at a moment when, sick at
heart, he was deciding to abandon real music for ever, and settle down amid the beef and the beef-music of Old England.
Well, however it was, the waiter came back radiant with a 'Yes' on every shining part of him, and if the Tannhäuser had been played well at first, certainly the orchestra surpassed themselves this second time.
When the great jinnee of music had once more swept out of the hall, the Sphinx turned with shining eyes to the waiter:
'Take,' she said, 'take these tears to the bandmaster. He has indeed earned them.'
'Tears, little one!' I said. 'See how they swim like whitebait in the fishpools of your eyes!'
'Oh, yes, the whitebait,' rejoined the Sphinx, glad of a subject to hide her emotion. 'Now tell me something nice about them, though the poor little things have long since disappeared. Tell me, for instance, how they get their beautiful little silver waterproofs?'
'Electric Light of the World,' I said, 'it is like this. While they are still quite young
and full of dreams, their mother takes them out in picnic parties of a billion or so at a time to where the spring moon is shining, scattering silver from its purse of pearl far over the wide waters,—silver, silver, for every little whitebait that cares to swim and pick it up. The mother, who has a contract with some such big restaurateur as ours, chooses a convenient area of moonlight, and then at a given sign they all turn over on their sides, and bask and bask in the rays, little fin pressed lovingly against little fin—for this is the happiest time in the young whitebait's life: it is at these silvering parties that matches are made and future consignments of whitebait arranged for. Well, night after night, they thus lie in the moonlight, first on one side, then on the other, till by degrees, tiny scale by scale, they have become completely lunar-plated. Ah! how sad they are when the end of that happy time has come!'