They were sitting on the steps when he finished and his heel was denting the sod. She was entranced by what she saw in his eyes.
“Of course, Kenyon,” she answered finally. “Girls are–oh, different, I guess. I dream things like that, and sometimes mornings when I’m wiping dishes I think ’em–and drop dishes–and whoopee! But I don’t know–girls are not so woozy and slazy inside them as boys. Kenyon, let me tell you something: Girls pretend to be and aren’t–not half; and boys pretend they aren’t and are–lots more.”
She gazed up at him in an unblinking joy of adoration as shameless as the heart of a violet baring itself to the sun. Then she shut her eyes and the lad caught up his instrument and cried:
“Come on, Lila,–come in the house. I’ve got to play out something–something I found out on the prairie to-day about ‘mine eyes unto the hills’ and ‘the eyes of the dove’ and the woozy, fuzzy, happy, creepy thoughts of you all the time.”
He was inside the door with the violin in his hands. As she closed the door he put his head down to the brown violin as if to hear it sing, and whispered slowly:
“Oh, Lila–listen–just hear this.”
And then it came! “The Spring Sun,” it is known popularly. But in the book of his collected music it appears as “Allegro in B.” It is the throb of joy of young life asking the unanswerable question of God: what does it mean–this new, fair, wonderful world full of life and birth, and joy; charged with mystery, enveloped in strange, unsolved grandeur, like the cloud pictures that float and puzzle us and break and reform and paint all Heaven in their beauty and then resolve themselves into nothing. Many people think this is Kenyon Adams’s most beautiful and poetic message. Certainly in the expression of the gayety and the weird, 453vague mysticism of youth and poignant joy he never reached that height again. Death is ignored; it is all life and the aspirations of life and the beckonings of life and the bantering of life and the deep, awful, inexorable call of life to youth. Other messages of Kenyon Adams are more profound, more comforting to the hearts and the minds of reasoning, questioning men. But this Allegro in B is the song of youth, of early youth, bidding childhood adieu and turning to life with shining countenance and burning heart.
When he had finished playing he was in tears, and the girl sitting before him was awestricken and rapt as she sat with upturned face with the miracle of song thrilling her soul. Let us leave them there in that first curious, unrealized signaling of soul to soul. And now let us go on into this story, and remember these children, as children still, who do not know that they have opened the great golden door into life!