Anthony The Absolute

Hôtel de Chine, Peking, April 5th – or 6th

TIS sometime in the very early morning. Peking is still. Even in this rookery of night birds every light is out but mine. I had to stop writing a while back and go for a long hard walk – around the Legation Quarter, outside the walls. But now I shall force myself to write down the rest of it. I shall not go to bed until it is done. It is too absurd that a scientist of proved ability and of highly trained will power should be overcome by his emotions in this way.

I have just tiptoed to the shrunken door that so inadequately separates her room from mine. I heard her irregular breathing: and, while I stood there, caught a low jumble of words spoken with the thick tongue of the sleeper.

And she stirs restlessly in her bed. Even from my chair I can hear that.

But I must tell what happened this afternoon.

I opened her door. I was quite beside myself.

Behind it not quite blocking off the opening, the unpainted, dusty back of her bureau confronted me. I looked through the narrow space between the mirror post and the door frame, and saw her.

She was standing by the foot of the bed.

I laid hands on the creaky old bureau and moved it aside. It was heavy, and it had no castors. I had to exert all my strength, tugging and pushing at it. Then I had to wait a moment to recover my breath.

She was standing rigidly, very white, holding with one hand to the bent iron tube over the foot of the little bed. She has long, slender fingers.

She never moved. Her wide eyes were fixed on me.

The sweat was breaking out on my forehead. A drop fell on the right lens of my spectacles. I took them off and fumbled for my handkerchief. Then I said —

“You have absolute pitch!”

She did not move or speak.

“But that is not all,” I went on, more rapidly. “You have the finest sense of intervals of any one in the world. Excepting myself.”

Her eyes narrowed a very little. And she glanced toward the other door, the one that led into the hall. It seemed to me that her tense muscles relaxed somewhat.

But when I had put on my spectacles and, now quite myself, came forward into the room, she swung back a step and flashed her eyes on me again. And I saw her fingers tighten around the iron tube at the foot of the bed.

This would n’t do. I had frightened her dreadfully. Of course she could n’t possibly know how mistaken she was in this. The thing to do was to explain everything to her.

“My name is Eckhart, Anthony Ives Eckhart,” I began; then paused, thinking that she, being a musical person, might have heard the name. But there was no light of recognition in her eyes.

“You can not imagine what it means to me to find you,” I went on. It seemed to me that from moment to moment she was on the point of interrupting me, so I talked very rapidly, trying at the same time to make my voice and manner as easy and matter-of-fact as possible.

“I have come all the way to China to make phonographic records of Chinese music. I shall make at least two thousand such records, and when I have finished my work will be recognized as the one great contribution to the study of the Oriental tone sense. For I shall secure and preserve on my cylinders the primitive scale intervals that underlie all natural musical expression.”

For some reason this explanation did not seem to get me anywhere. Excepting that now she looked bewildered as well as frightened. But I could not retreat. For here before me was a woman who had the great gift and who could understand. At this thought my mind began racing excitedly ahead. I thought of what she could do for me. And it was so absurdly simple, so little to ask! My forehead was burning now, and the hand that pressed the handkerchief against it was shaking perceptibly. It was a great moment – the greatest, perhaps, in my life.

“God has sent you to me!” I cried, my voice rising and becoming shrill. “I must make you understand!”

She was glancing again toward the hall door. I could n’t make her out at all. But I lowered my voice.

“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.

But it was so. I had done just that. Doubtless it was an outrageous thing to do, but it had not seemed outrageous. It had come about quite naturally.

Still, she confused me. I had been talking volubly; now, all of a sudden, I could not speak at all. For the first time I fully realized how pale she was. And she looked tired about the eyes, where nervous exhaustion always shows first. It occurred to me, too, that her eyes were very blue and distinctly beautiful. I never saw longer lashes.

So I stood stupidly there, looking at her. I had flown too high. Now my spirits were dropping fast into a pit of depression. She suddenly appeared to me as a helpless, pitiful creature. God knows there was little enough privacy for her in this shabby hotel with its thin partitions and its ill-fitting doors and its drifting, dubious class of guests; and what little privacy she had I had violated. I looked at the dilapidated bureau that had stood across our common door. It had taken all my strength to push it aside. I wondered if she herself had moved it there. What a pitiful effort, if she had, to shield her tired, hunted soul from intrusion! “Will you please go!” she breathed.

I am afraid this nettled me a little At least, my coming in that wild way had not been a personal matter I had tried to make that much plain to her. Then why make it so personal! But that, of course, is the woman of it. And God knows I was wrong – all wrong.

“Will you please go!” she breathed again.

I bowed and turned to the door. But then I occurred to me as likely that I would no more than get my door closed before she would be in a frantic hurry to move the bureau back. And that bureau was too heavy for her, or for any woman. It was almost too heavy for me.

So I stepped back into her room and began tugging at the bureau again. When I saw the fresh concern on her face, I nodded toward the hall door and said, “I’ll go out that way.”

She understood this. She even came over and watched me as I worked at the thing. It would n’t move. Having no castors, the feet had caught in the matting. I went to the other end and pushed, but only succeeded in tipping it up, and spilling several articles to the floor. I let the bureau drop, and went down on my knees to pick them up. There was a hair brush and a nail buffer, both with heavy silver backs bearing the initials “H. C.” Then there was a small bottle with a glass stopper that came out and let the contents of the bottle run over the matting. And there was a wide tortoise-shell comb, of the sort that you pick up at Nagasaki.

I put all these things back on the bureau, and pushed again. She stood beside me in apparent hesitation, then, as if on an impulse, caught hold and pulled with me. But it was no use. The matting was by this time hopelessly wrinkled up about the feet. And after a moment of this we both stepped back and looked at it. I simply had to stop anyway and mop off my forehead and wipe my spectacles. I was all out of breath.

Then, after a moment, I took off my coat and dropped it on a chair.

“If you don’t mind helping once more,” I began —

She inclined her head.

“ – I’ll have to lift it over those wrinkles.”

So I caught hold and lifted with all my strength. She went around to the other side and threw her weight against it. Together we finally got it back squarely across the doorway.

“I’ve made you a great deal of trouble,” I said, “and I’m sorry.” I could n’t resist adding the question, “Did you move it here before, by yourself?”

She looked at me; then, slowly and guardedly, nodded.

I shook my head, ruefully I think. “You are a strong woman.”

“No,” she said, without any change of expression, with not the slightest animation of manner, “but it did n’t catch in the matting that time.”

I walked toward the door, with my coat thrown over my arm. It was hard to go away like that. I wonder why it is that I seem always to be walking away from women.

At the door I turned and glanced back at her. She was still there by the bureau, watching me go. I felt that she was looking rather intently at the coat on my arm, and it suddenly occurred to me that I must not leave her room like that, in my shirt sleeves. I felt the color come rushing to my face as I struggled into the coat.

I have read in works on the psychology of women that they often tell with a look what they are unable or unwilling to frame in spoken words. Certainly I knew that she had told me to put my coat on, and she knew that I had understood. And so, even as she drove me out of her room there was an understanding between us that was not wanting in subtlety. She had even asked me to make an effort to protect her; and she was no longer angry.

I had my coat on now, and was reaching for the door knob when a sound outside arrested my hand. Men were coming up the stairs to our hall.

She heard them too. She was rigid again, her hand resting on the bureau.

I could hear the Chinese porter talking pidgin-English as he came along the hall. Behind him sounded a ponderous step. Then came another voice, as the heavy step paused right near us – at my door, I thought.

“Here, boy, this is number nineteen.”

It was a loose throaty voice, unlike any other in the wide world. I should have recognized it anywhere, in a drawing-room or blindfolded at the bottom of a mine. It brought rushing to my mind pictures of a ship’s smoking-room where sat an old man with a wrinkled skin and one drooping eyelid who held forth on every subject known to man – pictures of the absurdly Anglo-Saxon hotel at Yokohama, and of a strange evening at the notorious “Number Nine” where an old man had smiled cynically at me.

Sir Robert had arrived at Peking. He had come to this hotel. He was to occupy room number nineteen, directly opposite the closed door behind which I stood, motionless, breathless.

I felt momentarily ill. Which was foolish.

For what is he to me or I to him! But he had stirred a confusion of thoughts in my mind. I saw the face of another man – a strong face, even when flushed with drink – I saw that face with tears on it, working convulsively. And directly behind me stood the woman. There she was, and there, with her, was I myself. I felt the strange, rushing drama of life whirling about me. I suddenly knew that every man is entangled in it – and every woman… Oh, God, why does she have to be so beautiful! And so terribly alone!

The porter was opening the door of number nineteen, just across the hall. Sir Robert was still at my door, swearing to himself.

“Number nineteen this side,” the porter was saying. “That number sixteen.”

So Sir Robert came heavily along the hall and entered the opposite room. We, the woman and I, heard the porter set down his hand baggage. We heard him order hot water. We heard the door close and the porter rustle away in his robe and his soft Chinese shoes and go off down the stairs.

Then, hardly knowing what I was about, I reached for the knob. But she came swiftly across the floor and caught it ahead of me, holding the door shut. Our hands touched. She looked very lovely, and very tired. My eyes wandered aimlessly over the kimono she wore, of gray crepe silk. It was embroidered from neck to hem in a wistaria pattern of the same soft gray color. I never saw such exquisite embroidery.

“Don’t go out there,” she said, low but very positive.

“But,” I whispered lamely, “but – but – ”

“The other door,” she said.

So we went back and moved that cursed bureau again. It was even more of a task this time, as we had to be careful about making any noise.

Again I lingered in our common doorway.

“Do you know that man?” I asked, in the guarded tones we were both employing now.

“No,” she replied simply, “but it is quite evident that you do.”

Still I lingered. And she did not drive me out. She quietly busied herself rearranging the innumerable little articles on the bureau. She was very natural and unconscious about it. There was no hint in her manner that she was aware of the curious interest I felt in all those intimate little accessories of her life. Though I find myself wondering if my crudely concealed masculine emotions are not an open book to her, even so soon. The perceptions of women are finer than ours. I have read that in the psychology books, and I believe it. They feel more deeply and see farther. And it is when they feel most deeply and see farthest that they do and say the inconsequential little things that puzzle us so.

She had the bureau arranged to her taste now, and moved slowly over toward the round table with the bent iron legs. There were a few books on this table – a little red “Guide to Peking,” Murray’s “Japan,” Dyer Ball’s “Things Chinese.” – her shopping bag, her wrist watch propped up to serve as a clock, and the inevitable ash-tray advertising a Japanese whisky.

Still I lingered there, half in her room, half in mine. She did not look at me. She hesitated at the table and fingered that absurdly vulgar little ash-tray. For the life of me I could not divine what she was thinking or what she wished me to do. I had meant to go straight into my own room and close the door. But I had done nothing of the sort.

It came to me that perhaps she was ready to have me pick up the shattered mood of my musical enthusiasm and carry it forward. Perhaps she would respond to it now. But I could not reconstruct that mood. In a desperate sort of way I was trying from moment to moment to do precisely that, and failing. For across my menial vision was floating, tantalizingly vague, the flushed desperate face of Crocker, as I had last seen him, at the Yokohama station. If this girl only knew it, we have a common interest that binds us a million times closer than the mere gift we both have.

I see I have called her a girl. She seemed so to me at that moment, standing there by the crooked-legged table, slim of body, softly, appealingly feminine in her outlines. I found myself thinking how lonely she must be, and what terrors must lurk ambushed in the byways of her thoughts, particularly at night. I fell to wondering about the man who had brought her out here and left her. Where was he? Did he leave her any money? Not a great deal, surely, or she would not be living in this shabby place. And yet, sad as she is, she does not know what I know! I am sure of that. She did not see Crocker’s face, there at the Yokohama station. She does not dream that he is scouring the Coast for her from Mukden to Singapore – that in his heart, where pity should be, there is outraged pride, and the exhausting bewilderment of a man who has only a code where he should have been taught a philosophy – and murder.

This world is hard on women. Perhaps because we men run it.

I slowly drew my foot back across the sill, moving into my own room. I hesitated again, and rested a trembling hand against the door frame.

It broke my heart to look at her, yet I could not keep from it. I wanted to help her. I wanted to do something. I even thought wildly of marching straight over to that crooked-legged iron table and taking her two hands solidly in mine and saying – “I know who you are, my dear, and I can imagine something of what you are suffering. I know from a glimpse of you that not one of the men who will be so quick to cast stones at you is fit to touch the hem of your skirt. I know, too, that no man can so much as befriend you, without plunging you into a deeper hell of suspicion and torment than the hell you are in now. But I am your friend, and all I ask of you is the opportunity to prove it!”

I was foolish in this, of course.

Suddenly she lifted her head and looked at me

I grew red all at once, and tried to swallow.

We were quite silent. She relieved the tension by stepping casually away from the table and glancing past me into my room.

“Is that your phonograph – in there?” she asked, her voice still low, and now a thought husky.

“Yes,” said I. “You must have heard it.”

She nodded slowly. “Sometimes it sounded like that,” she mused. “And other times it was like music a long way off. You played some melodies on a Chinese stringed instrument. They were quaint.”

“It is a Japanese instrument,” I corrected eagerly. Then I became confused, and knew that I was turning red again. The story of those Yoshiwara melodies and of the outcast girl who had played them for me seemed painfully out of place here. Not for anything in the world would I have told that commonplace story – not to this slim woman with the sad, honest blue eyes. For we do not tell such stories to women.

“You spoke of the piano scale,” she went on, in that musing tone. “I never knew before that other people noticed that. Sometimes, when I’m sitting at the piano, and strike one of the black keys after playing on the white, I can hear all around if – overtones, and fractions of tones.”

“Tell me,” I said – “What is the closest interval you have ever sung?”

She slowly shook her head. “I don’t know. There never was any reason for trying. And then there was no way to measure fractional tones.”

“There is now,” said I, emphatically. “My ear. Try it. We shall find out. First give me upper c.”

I got out my tuning fork, and struck the note after her

“Perfect pitch again!” I cried.

“Oh, yes,” she replied listlessly, “I can always do that.”

“Now take the closest interval you can, below the c.”

She did so. Then the next – and the next. I would not permit an apportamcnto, but made her separate the notes. She sang three distinct notes between the c and the b-natural that, on the piano, is the next step down.

I clapped my hands.

A little color came into her cheeks. She took a deep breath and kept at it. Her performance was not quite perfect – she got in only two clean notes between a and a-flat. But at that it was easily the most delicately precise bit of singing I have ever heard. She played with those close intervals with a facility that was amazing. And baring perhaps Sembrich and the earlier Melba, I have never heard such perfection of breath control (Patti doubtless had it, but I never heard her).

She stepped forward, threw her shoulders back (without raising them), swung up on the balls of her feet, and with a fine un-self-consciousness spun out those light, clear threads of tone. When she breathed it was with a quick inhalation that expanded the whole upper part of her body and made you forget how slim she had seemed. She became for the moment a strong, vibrant creature with a light in her eyes. But when she stopped singing that light died out.

“Come!” I cried. “We shall get this down now. We shall prove it on the phonograph. We shall settle that von Westfall beast forever!”

And I rushed back into my own room and prepared the instrument, without so much as ushering her in first. This was rude of me. But I have admitted I was not quite myself.

Before I had the cylinder on and the horn in position she followed. She stood at my side, watching my hands at work. I felt her there, so close, and was elated. I can not describe this sensation. That it is dangerous, I know only too well It is distinctly a tendency to be resisted.

On second thought, I decided not to waste any of my precious cylinders until she should acquire a reasonable degree of certainty with the delicate scale that was our goal. I explained this to her, and she understood. So I made her work upward from middle c, note by note, employing the utmost care to keep the intervals at precisely one-eighth of a tone. Over and over we did this. It called for the closest concentration, on her part as well as mine. I found a sort of wild happiness springing up within me at the thought that this woman has the rarest of all qualities, great capacity for work and for the enthusiasm and utter self-absorption that enter into all real achievement. I can not call her a trained worker. I would not go so far as to say that she has a trained mind. She needs guidance. And I rather imagine that further acquaintance will show that she lacks enterprise. Women of fine quality and great capacity often do, I think. They need stimulus and leadership. Imagine a man with both her extraordinary gift and her striking personality yet stirred by no curiosity to explore and create! “There never was any reason for trying,” was all she had said to that, and it was plainly all that was in her mind on the subject.