I was still standing there by the door, my left hand quite numb, my feet a little cold from remaining motionless so long, when she began lightly to run over those remarkable exercises of hers.
She began by striking octaves. Her voice flew ever so lightly, yet firmly and surely, from lower a to middle a to upper a. Then the two octaves of a-sharp. Then b. And so on, until she was touching, in that same light, sure way, the d-sharp above high c.
Next she sang an ordinary chromatic scale, no differently from the performance of other singers I have heard excepting perhaps for the remarkable evenness and firmness and pure, floating quality of her pianissimo tone. It was after all this that the remarkable gift that amazed me came to light.
She returned to singing octaves. Only, as if testing and trying her own precision of pitch, she began striking the upper octave note, in making the leap from the lower to the higher, first correctly according to the accepted tempered scale of the Western world, then a fraction of a tone fiat, then a fraction of a tone sharp, then back to the normal octave. She played with, these fractional tones as easily and surely as the ordinary good singer plays with mere semitones. She actually took them in succession, quite as easily as she had, a little earlier, taken the semitones of the chromatic scale.
This was too much. I could not stand still any longer. In all my experience I had never found a white person with anything approaching my fineness of ear in merely hearing close intervals.
But I can not sing them as I hear and know them. I have no voice at all; my vocal chords will not obey my will with any degree of precision. Yet here, in this queer, rather unpleasant little French hotel in the great, barbaric city of Peking, in the next room to mine, is an American woman who can actually sing the intervals that I can only hear.
I knocked on the door.
There was instant and utter silence in the next room.
I knocked again.
She must have been holding her breath. I could not hear so much as the rustle of her skirt.