The Three Furlongers

by Sheila Kaye-Smith

Then suddenly he noticed something in the corner—it was his fiddle-case, wrapped in green baize. Nigel had always passed for something of a musician, and during a few stormy years spent in London with his father had been fairly well taught. Farming and scheming had never made him forget his fiddle, though occasionally it had lain for weeks as it lay now, wrapped up in dusty cloths in the corner.

He stooped down and took it out of its many covers. It was a fairly good instrument of modern make, best in its low tones. All the strings were broken except the G, but he found a coil of the D in the case, and screwed it on. By means of harmonics and the seventh position he could manage fairly well with two strings.

It seemed a terribly long time since he had felt a fiddle under his chin, and sniffed its peculiar smell of sweet varnished wood and rosin. He lifted his arm slowly, and the bow dropped on the strings. It was scratchy, and he felt horribly stiff, but in course of time matters improved a little, and Len and Janey, together in the Dutch barn, smiled at each other as the strains of Handel's "Largo" drifted out to them.

"He'll feel better now," said Leonard.

Nigel forgot the "Largo" in the middle, and started "O Caro Nome," from Rigoletto. His taste in music had always been the despair of his teachers. He had never seemed able to appreciate the modern school, or, indeed, the more advanced of the ancients. He had a desperate fondness for Balfe and Donizetti, for the most sugary moods of Verdi and Gounod. He revelled in high notes, trills and tremolo—"O Caro Nome" and "I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls" appealed to a side of him which was definitely sentimental. He stood there by the window, swaying sentimentally from side to side, shaking shrill colorature from his violin, regardless of the squeaking of a nearly rosinless bow.

What appealed to Nigel was never the technique of a composition, but its emotional quality. Music was to him not so much sound as feeling—he did not value a piece for its own intrinsic beauty, but for the emotions it was able to call forth. As he played that morning whole cycles of experience passed before him. All the old dreams that for three years had lain dead in his violin now revived—but a new quality was added to them, a soft twang of sorrow. Before his imprisonment his dreams had been winged and shod with fire, wild things compounded of desire and endeavour, tender only in their background of the seasons' moods, rain and sunshine and wind and shadows and stars. But to-day longing took in them the place of endeavour, and all their desire was for forgetfulness. Stars and rain were in them still, but the stars and rain of the new heavens and the new earth which suffering had created—the rain which is tears, and the stars which spring from the dumb desire of sorrow brooding over the formless deep of its own immensity—"Let there be light." And there was light—one or two faint dream-like constellations, burning over and reflected in the swirling waters of the abyss.... A great wind passed over the face of the waters, and parted them, and out of them rose a little island for a man to stand upon—so the dry land came out of the water. And the suffering man can stand on the island, where there is just room for his feet, and he can see the stars above him—and when he is too weary to lift his head he sees them reflected in the surging waters beneath....

Nigel dropped his violin, and looked out with dream-filled eyes at the fields, seen dimly through the rain-drops dripping from the eaves. In the front garden stood a little girl—a little dirty girl with a milk-can.

"Hullo!" said Nigel.

He felt an unaccountable desire to talk to this child; not because he liked her particularly—indeed, she was rather an unattractive object—but because he realised suddenly that he was very fond of children. He had never known it before, never imagined that he cared about kids; but, whether it was his long exile in prison he could not tell, he felt quite overwhelmed this morning by his love for them, and realised that he absolutely must make friends with the highly unfavourable specimen before him.

"Hullo!" he repeated.