“Dead?” I loosed my grasp on him. “But you play—How can she—When did you—” All my thought and speech were jumbled within me. “Dead?” I finally contrived to get out. “When did she die?”
“On the last day of April. When they told me of it the little children were dancing in the park. She was like a little lovely child herself. They told me she was dead, but it is only at times that I am weak enough to believe them.”
I gazed at him, utterly bewildered. He returned my look with a gaze of infinite despair.
“To-morrow,” he said bravely, “I shall again know that she is alive and loving me.”
Later I learned how the blow had fallen; a grim and brutal experience for so gentle a spirit as his.
Three weeks after his Toinette was admitted to the Samaritan a forlorn-hope operation was determined upon. Happily, Orpheus knew nothing about it until it was all over, with unexpected promise of success and even complete cure. Once a week they let him see her. On the other six days he might call at the office for such information as a stolid and blank official chose to dole out. But no official could interpose his stolidity between Orpheus, piping at dead of night, and his Eurydice lying happily awake in the far upper wing of the hospital, knowing that he made his music for her and perhaps hearing it—who knows?—with the finer ear of the spirit. Vary his choice as he might, he told me, she always knew what he had played and could tell when they next saw each other. So all went well with those two young, brave hearts, and the meager reports grew increasingly hopeful, until one bright spring morning Orpheus paid his unfailing daily visit for information. A brusque young brute of an interne was at the desk, the regular official having stepped out.
“Twenty-one?” he repeated in reply to Orpheus's gentle-voiced question. “That's the heart case. Died yesterday afternoon.”
“But last night I played to her,” protested Orpheus in a piteous, stricken whisper, “and she heard and answered. It cannot be.”
“Nutty!” said the interne to the information official who returned at this point. “Takes'em that way sometimes. Better get him out before he busts loose.”
They got him out without trouble. He wandered into Our Square and watched the children dancing-in the May. They seemed to him like unreal creatures moving in a world of unrealities. More and more unreal grew everything about him until late that night he faced the grim reality of a barred door which kept him from his beloved dead, and that door he attacked with such fury and power that it took two policemen, in addition to the hospital corps, to subdue him. As he was a foreigner and vague and sorrow-stricken, the magistrate naturally gave him two months. He came out dazed but steadied. The one hold he had upon happiness was the delusion to which he so pathetically clung, the pretense, passionately cherished, that she was still alive. Poor Orpheus! He had indeed gone down into Hades for his Eurydice and stayed there. If he could find solace in his limbo of minor madness, perhaps that was best for him.