The lights go out suddenly.
CHAPTER ONE
Edward R. Williams was not listening. He was studying a tailor’s advertisement in the Saturday Evening Post showing a group of high-colored, high-bosomed young men discussing a dog whose skin had obviously been bought from the same tailor as the young men’s clothes. Edward Williams turned to a story which showed how a good young clerk served one millionaire by overreaching another and in the end became a millionaire himself, thus winning the affections of “the Right Girl.”
Edward Williams felt intelligent and contemptuous—a rare feeling for him. “Makes one thank God one’s English,” he thought and then, because he was in the habit of refuting morbidly every statement he himself made, he thought of certain guides to British taste in periodical literature and his mind fell sheepishly silent. He looked out of the window.
I do not know how many hills lift up the dramatic city of San Francisco from the level of her sea and her bay. To the precipitous shoulder of one of these hills clung the house in which Edward sat. It was night-time and the great California stars hung out of a thick dark sky. Perhaps the stars gave the waters of the bay and of the Golden Gate their luminous look, as if there were light set in the floor of the world, a great light overlaid by fathoms of dark vivid water. Lights were spread like a veil over the hills on the near side of the bay and, on the far side, the mountains stood ankle deep in stars.
The music began again in the room. Music to Edward Williams had no connection with words or rules or understanding. He could not have been at all musical, for he never thought of saying: “You know Scriabine is clean, my dear, clean like a scrubbed olive,” or, “It has been wittily said that Moussorgski is the spiritual son of Ouida and Charlemagne,” or any of the things sounding rather like that, that we expect to hear from musical people as the Victrola falls silent. Edward Williams was a person of no facts at all; probably he was the only person in the world so afflicted, or at any rate the only man. Music to him was always anticipation even when it was over. Now, listening, he thought vaguely, “If the treble echoes the bass the way I hope it will, that will be too good to bear—indeed it will be as good as I expected, and that, of course, is impossible....” The treble did that very thing and Edward was blind with delight for several seconds; he breathed in pleasure; there was a sense of actual contraction in the roots of his hair.
The music paled like a candle and went out, and Edward said, “What was that?” for he was anxious to pursue that pursuing theme again across a world of scant opportunity. He would not have remembered the name even had he been told it, but at any rate nobody heard him. In America this often happened to Edward Williams.
A woman’s sharp voice said, “Well say listen, what was that? It was a dandy piece.” And Edward heard the man with a cocktail shaker between his knees reply, “That was the song of the twelve eagles after the emeralds of the South Sea lost their fragrance.” Someone added, “They were crushed the day the love-tinker died on a hill of violets in Vienna.” Edward Williams was pleased with this conversation, although, of course, he knew that it had not taken place. He knew well that he was more than half deaf and in many moods he welcomed the insight that his infirmity gave him into matters that did not exist. His two friends had been telling each other facts that both knew and that Edward did not wish to know. Neither would, of course, dream of mentioning emeralds or hills of violets except when it was really necessary and helpful to do so. Edward did not care. He felt that his mind’s eye had acquired one picture the more without the trouble of acquiring a fact.
Some music that did not interest Edward began and Edward thought, “I wish I were really musical, but if I wear this grave half-shut expression everybody will think I am very musical indeed.” Nobody looked at him, but he persisted in his selected expression.