Anthony The Absolute

Peking, April 5th, Midday

THAT Crocker affair haunts me with the power of a bad dream.

I do not like this at all.

I was too sympathetic with that man. I opened the gates of my mind to his ugly story; now I can not thrust it out and close those gates. My first impulse, to hold him at arm’s length, was sound. I should have done that. But at least, and at no small cost, I have again learned my little lesson; from now on I purpose dwelling apart from the tangle of contemporary life. It has no bearing on my work, on my thoughts. None whatever. It merely confuses me.

Yet, through momentary weakness, I have permitted my precious line of pure thought to be clouded with the vision of a strong man’s face with tears on it. I see it at night. And, worse, I can not stop myself from hunting for the woman he is going to kill. The mere sight of a youngish couple sets my pulse to racing. I watch – on trains, in station crowds, on the street – for a beautiful woman with a sad face. That she will be beautiful I am certain; for Crocker would have had nothing less in that house of which he felt himself so strongly and dominantly the master. And I think she will be sad.

I study the throats of the beautiful young women I see. She will have the full, rather broad throat of the singer. And the deep chest and erect bearing. And I think her head will be well poised.

There is a woman here in the hotel – a particular woman, I mean – on this second floor. Though, for that matter, there are only the two floors. I have passed her twice, in the hall. But the light is dim, and I have been unable to observe her throat or her face. She is of a good height, for a woman, – quite as tall as I, – and she steps firmly on the balls of her feet. Her figure is slim. The chest, I think, is deep. And in a way that I, as a man (and a man who knows little of woman outside the psychology books), can not explain in any satisfactory way, she conveys, even in this dim light, the impression of being exquisitely dressed.

I think she has her meals served in her room. At least, I have on three occasions met a waiter coming upstairs with a tray; and I can not make out that if would be for any other.

As Sir Robert intimated, these other guests are a queer lot. There can not be more than twelve or fourteen, in all. The men are seedy, and rather silent. They sit about a good deal, reading the papers (copies of the more suggestive French weeklies are strewn about on every chair and sofa in the lounge), and they eye me and one another with a sort of cool distrust. The women, three or four in all, seem to come and go rather freely. And each has the eye, the manner, even the physical bearing, of the woman for whom the halfworld has no secrets. Then, there is a discreet, drifting class of transients – men from the Legation Quarter, I believe (often, indeed, they come in full uniform), who are always accompanied by young women. Sometimes, as it may happen, these are the familiar women of the place; but quite as often they are strangers to my eyes. And always, day and night, there is in the manner of the guests and in that of the little French manager and his half-caste clerk an air of carefully refraining from questions. It is as if every one said to every one else: “You are here, but you are quite safe, for I make it a rule never to see who comes or what goes on here. Perhaps one day I may have to ask the same discreet courtesy from you. It is quite all right, believe me.”

In this odd atmosphere I live and have my being. The building is a mere rambling collection of mansardes. The chairs in the bedrooms – at least, in my own – are of the common bent-iron variety usually seen in gardens. The beds are of the most simple iron sort, once painted with a white enamel that has been largely chipped off. The linen is threadbare, even ragged, – there is a hole in my nether sheet through which my foot slips at night, not infrequently catching there and waking me from dreams of the pillory and chains, – but it is not unclean. There would be no excuse for that, in a whole world of laundry-men. On each mantel and iron-legged table is an ash-tray that blatantly advertises a Japanese whisky.

Yes, in this odd atmosphere I live and, in a manner, breathe – I and the slim, beautifully dressed woman who walks so firmly on the balls of her feet. Whoever she may be, she belongs here no more than I.

Of course, the chances are all against – yet I wonder! For one thing, she is alone. I am positive of this. All the other guests I have seen, now, coming and going. But she never comes or goes – excepting apparently for a short walk each afternoon, and always unaccompanied. He would not have deserted her – away out here. Surely a man would not do that to a woman he has loved.

But wait – I am forgetting the sort of world this is. There is nothing – nothing – man does not do to woman. Or that woman does not do to man. Nothing is too subtly selfish, nothing too cruel.

To-day I mean to time my own walk with hers. I must see her in the light. I must observe her throat and her face… At the thought of what I may see my nerves behave abominably. My forehead burns. My heart beats with an absurd irregularity. These facts alone appear to indicate that my place is not in this wild world of passion and conflict.

It is not wholly unpleasant here in my dingy little room – though the carpet is a rag, and the door between me and my next neighbor has shrunk its lock out of alignment and appears to be blocked off, on the farther side, by some bulky piece of furniture. This door opens on my side of the partition.

No, it is not so unpleasant. Outside, the sun is shining. To my nostrils comes floating the quaint, pungent odor that has in the minds of so many travelers characterized the East. Over the low-tiled roofs of a row of Chinese houses I can see – beyond an open space – the masonry wall of the fortified Legation Quarter, with a sentry-box peeping above it, and the flag of Italy, and trees.

April 5th – night

IT is she.

This afternoon I was revising my notation of the Japanese music; quite late, five o’clock or so. Suddenly I heard a voice – a woman’s voice – singing very softly, in the next room, beyond that shrunken door and the bulky piece of furniture. It is a bureau, I think, with a mirror above it that is nearly as high as the door.

She was singing “Aus Meinen Grossen Schmerzen” of Robert Franz, that saddest and most exquisite of German lieder. The voice is a full, even soprano. It is a big voice, I am sure, though she sang so softly. The impression I received was that she was carefully holding it down to a pianissimo. It is, I should say, a remarkable organ. Even in her softest voice there is what the great singers call an “edge” – that firm, fine resonance that will send the lightest thread of tone floating out over all the volume of sound of a full orchestra.

She sang the little song with a tone color of poignant sadness – as if her heart were throbbing with all the sorrow of the world, and yet as if she could not keep from singing. She has plainly studied much. The impulse to sing and the habit of singing are strong within her.

But the voice, so beautiful and under such fine control, was not what suddenly caused me to leap up from my chair and tiptoe to that rather useless door, and then to turn to my kit-bag and fumble wildly for my tuning-fork. No; what excited me – for it did excite me out of all reason – was her sense of pitch. The mezzo-soprano or baritone transposition of that Franz song is in the key of f-major, ending in d-minor. I stood by her door, the c-fork resting lightly against my teeth, waiting for that lovely voice to descend the final minor third, linger, tenderly and sadly, on the d. Then I bit the fork. She was singing a perfect d. Certainly there was no piano in any of these miserable little rooms. And she had employed no other instrument; she had simply and naturally broken into song because she could not help singing. She has absolute pitch!

The great regret of my life is that my own sense of pitch is not absolute. It is very nearly but not quite perfect, despite my extremely delicate ear for close intervals. Yet this young woman, who to my own knowledge has not sung a note for several days, and who can not conceivably have heard any Occidental music whatever, breaks into song, and casually and unconsciously employs the correct pitch to the twentieth part of a tone.

My first thought was that it might be an accident. So I waited, tuning-fork in hand.

Having begun to sing, of course she could not stop. I am thinking now that probably it was the first time she had released her voice for a considerable period, and that at last she simply could not help making use of what was the natural outlet for her emotions.

She next hummed a few bars of “Im Herbst,” also by Franz. Evidently she is fond of the work of this fine lyric composer. This is in the key of c-minor. Again I tested her with my tuning-fork, and again she was correct to the minutest shade of a tone. Her voice had leaped the interval between the two keys apparently without a conscious thought on her own part.

This second song perhaps failed as a vehicle for her mood; at any rate, she stopped it abruptly, and was silent for a time. Standing there close to the door, I could hear her moving about with light, restless feet. Myself, I held my breath at moments. Then the sound of her footsteps ceased, and there was a sudden creaking sound, as if she had thrown herself upon the bed. But still I waited, breathless, balancing there with my left hand against the door-frame, the right clutching the tuning-fork. I was sure she would sing again.

She did. But it must have been after quite a. long time, for I realized afterward that my feet ached and that the arm I held up against the door frame had, as we say, gone to sleep.

Finally there came another creaking. She was getting up. Doubtless she was quite too restless to lie down long. Again I heard the quick, light sound of her feet moving about the room. Then the voice again. And again it was that saddest and most exquisite of songs.

she sang, very low. I felt nearly certain that she had slipped naturally back into the key of f-major, but not absolutely certain.

It was disturbing, this partial uncertainty on my part. No person in the world – not a single living being – has quite so great a need for absolute pitch as I. With that, coupled with my ear for intervals, I would stand as the one scholar perfectly equipped for my own line of investigation. As it is, I am not unlike an astronomer with enthusiasm, exhaustive knowledge, a fine mathematical brain, and a marvelous seeing eye, but with a very slight – oh, – very slight – touch of color-blindness. And I never before missed this one attribute quite so keenly as I miss it now, out here on the ground for the great first-hand investigation of my whole life.

So at last I had to give up my effort to place precisely the key in which she was singing, and sound the fork. As I supposed, she was right again. There was no doubt now. Not the slightest. As I have already written down, she has it – a sheer, prodigal gift of nature. And, of course, it is of no particular value to her. She is not even, at present, a professional singer; and, if she were, she could do very well without this precise gift… I have supposed for years that I had a philosophy. I long ago realized that to waste time and tissue in concerning myself with the one defect in my equipment would be simply by that much to impair my actual effectiveness. But to-day my philosophy failed me, as I thought of that sad little woman who has what I lack, and who does not need it. I even had a wild notion of knocking on the door and making myself known to her.

As for what actually did follow, I think I will try to set down just as simply and naturally as I can, reconstructing the curious scene more or less coolly as I recall it now, with my excitement spent and my mind reasonably steady. That is surely the best way, in the case of such an extraordinary occurrence – just write it down and let it go at that.

She was silent for a little time, perhaps standing at her dresser. I wonder if it is like mine, a rickety chest of drawers, sadly in need of paint, with a narrow mirror above it. My mirror is broken in the right-hand lower corner; and at that point I see, instead of the reflection of the dingy room, only an irregular triangle of pine backing. I should like to think that hers is at least a little fresher and brighter, and that the mirror is not broken. These things mean a great deal to a woman, I think. I might have observed all this for myself, doubtless; but at the moment I was too full of the thrill of my discovery to indulge in a single personal thought.

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.