“I must make you understand,” I repeated. “To-day, at the very beginning of my work, I find you. I need you more than anything else in the world—and right now. Yet an hour ago I did not know you existed. It is unbelievable. It is a miracle! I must have a phonographic record of a close-interval scale. For years I have dreamed of securing one. I myself can hear the closest intervals, but I can not sing them. Now you—you—shall sing this scale for me—not the artificial half-tones of our barbarous piano keyboard, but quarter-tones, even eighth-tones. With such a scale, the sounds recorded unerringly on a cylinder from which they can be reproduced at will, we shall at last have an absolute standard for the comparison of all tones and scales. Tell me”—I was trembling with eagerness—“do you think you could sing eighth-tones? Do you think you could?”
She just stood there.
“But you must do this!” I cried. “You have no right to withhold such a gift! God has sent you to me, and I shall use you. It will take a little time, but we shall practise, practise, practise! There will be failures, but we shall be patient. My life work is to be a true science at last. They can no longer say that it depends on the caprice of a single human ear. They shall now hear for themselves, they shall make their own comparisons, working with our absolute phonographic scale. Who knows, perhaps we shall yet make the final perfect scale of eighty-one distinct notes to the octave. No voice has yet done that. And no violin. For no living performer has the delicacy of ear and muscle.”
I began chuckling excitedly at this thought. I admit that my condition bordered on hysteria; but has not a man the right to be very slightly hysterical in the great moment of his life?
“We shall make many records,” I said to her, mopping my wet forehead. “Von Stumbostel shall have one, in Berlin—and Boag. Ramel and Fourmont shall have them, at Paris. And de Musseau, at the Sorbonne. And Sir Frederick Rhodes, at Cambridge. The new scale record shall be the basis of volume six—on 'True Intervals and Natural Song.' One copy I shall seal in a metal tube for preservation at the British Museum, together with my other records. And—yes, I shall send one to that miserable little von Westfall, of Bonn. I shall silence him. I shall crush him. It will amuse me to do that.”
I stopped, all glowing.
She looked at me until her lids drooped, and I could see her long lashes against the whiteness of her skin.
She fell back a step, hesitating, and shrinking a little, still clinging to the foot of the bed, and made a listless gesture with her left hand.
“You have broken into my room,” she said, steadily enough, but very low.
Women are literal.