W.N.P. Barbellion
The Journal of a Disappointed Man
The "Fallen Angel" I loved most. The legs of the woman droop lifelessly backwards in an intoxicating curve. The eye caresses it – down the thighs and over the calves to the tips of the toes – like the hind limbs of some beautiful dead gazelle. He has brought off exactly the same effect in the woman in the group called "Eternal Spring," which I have only seen in a photograph.
This morning at 9 a.m. lay in bed on my back, warm and comfortable, and, for the first time for many weeks, with no pain or discomfort of any kind. The mattress curved up around my body and legs and held me in a soft warm embrace… I shut my eyes and whistled the saccharine melody for solo violin in Chopin's Funeral March. I wanted the moment prolonged for hours. Ill-health chases the soul out of a man. He becomes a body, purely physical.
November 29.
This evening she promised to be my wife after a long silent ramble together thro' dark London squares and streets! I am beside myself!
December 6.
I know now – I love her with passion. Health and ambition and sanity are returning. Projects in view: —
(1) To make her happy and myself worthy.
(2) To get married.
(3) To prepare and publish a volume of this Journal.
(4) To write two essays for Corn hill which shall surely induce the Editor to publish and not write me merely long complimentary and encouraging letters as heretofore.
Wired to A – , "The brave little pennon has been hauled down."
December 7.
Have so many projects in view and so little time in which to get them done! Moreover I am always haunted by the fear that I may never finish them thro' physical or temperamental disabilities – a breakdown in health or in purpose. I am one of those who are apt to die unexpectedly and no one would be surprised. An inquest would probably be unnecessary. I badly want to live say another twelve months. Hey! nonny-no! a man's a fool that wants to die.
December 9.
… I shook her angrily by the shoulders to-night and said, "Why do I love you? – Tell me," but she only smiled gently and said, "I cannot tell…" I ought not to love her, I know – every omen is against it… Then I am full of self-love: an intellectual Malvolio proud of his brains and air of distinction…
Then I am fickle, passionate, polygamous … I am haunted by the memory of how I have sloughed off one enthusiasm after another. I used to dissect snails in a pie-dish in the kitchen while Mother baked the cakes – the unravelling of the internal economy of a Helix caused as great an emotional storm as to-day the Unfinished Symphony does! I look for the first parasol in Kensington Gardens with the same interest as once I sought out the first snowdrop or listened for the first Cuckoo. I am as anxious to identify an instrument in Sir Henry's Orchestra as once to identify the song of a new bird in the woods. Nothing is further from my intention or desire to continue my old habit of nature study. I never read nature books – my old favourites – Waterton's Wanderings, Gilbert White, The Zoologist, etc. – have no interest for me – in fact they give me slight mental nausea even to glance at. Wiedersheim (good old Wiedersheim) is now deposed by a text book on Harmony. My main desire just now is to hear the best music. In the country I wore blinkers and saw only zoology. Now in London, I've taken the bit in my mouth – and it's a mouth of iron – wanting a run for all my troubles before Death strikes me down.
All this evidence of my temperamental instability alarms and distresses me on reflection and makes the soul weary. I wish I loved more steadily. I am always sidetracking myself. The title of "husband" scares me.
December 12.
Sir Henry Wood conducting
Went to the Queen's Hall, sat in the Orchestra and watched Sir Henry's statuesque figure conducting thro' a forest of bows, "which pleased me mightily." He would be worth watching if you were stone deaf. If you could not hear a sound, the animation and excitement of an orchestra in full swing, with the conductor cutting and slashing at invisible foes, make a magnificent spectacle.
The face of Sir Henry Wood strikes me as very much like the traditional pictures of Jesus Christ, tho' Sir Henry is dark – the melanic Messiah I call him (very much to my own delight). Rodin ought to do him in stone – Chesterfield's ideal of a man – a Corinthian edifice on Tuscan foundations. In Sir Henry's case there can be no disputing the Tuscan foundations. However swift and elegant the movements of his arms, his splendid lower extremities remain as firm as stone columns. While the music is calm and serene his right hand and baton execute in concert with the left, perfect geometric curves around his head. Then as it gathers in force and volume, when the bows begin to dart swiftly across the fiddles and the trumpets and trombones blaze away in a conflagration, we are all expectant – and even a little fearful, to observe his sabre-like cuts. The tension grows … I hold my breath… Sir Henry snatches a second to throw back a lock of his hair that has fallen limply across his forehead, then goes on in unrelenting pursuit, cutting and slashing at hordes of invisible fiends that leap howling out towards him. There is a great turmoil of combat, but the Conductor struggles on till the great explosion happens. But in spite of that, you see him still standing thro' a cloud of great chords, quite undaunted. His sword zigzags up and down the scale – suddenly the closed fist of his left hand shoots up straight and points to the zenith – like the arm of a heathen priest appealing to Baal to bring down fire from Heaven… But the appeal avails nought and it looks as tho' it were all up for poor Sir Henry. The music is just as infuriated – his body writhes with it – the melanic Messiah crucified by the inappeasable desire to express by visible gestures all that he feels in his heart. He surrenders – so you think – he opens out both arms wide and baring his breast, dares them all to do their worst – like the picture of Moffat the missionary among the savages of the Dark Continent!
And yet he wins after all. At the very last moment he seems to summon all his remaining strength and in one final and devastating sweep mows down the orchestra rank by rank… You awake from the nightmare to discover the victor acknowledging the applause in a series of his inimitable bows.
One ought to pack one's ears up with cotton wool at a concert where Sir Henry conducts. Otherwise, the music is apt to distract one's attention. R.L.S. wanted to be at the head of a cavalry charge – sword over head – but I'd rather fight an orchestra with a baton.
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony
This symphony always works me up into an ecstasy; in ecstatic sympathy with its dread fulness I could stand up in the balcony and fling myself down passionately into the arena below. Yet there were women sitting alongside me to-day – knitting! It so annoyed and irritated me that at the end of the first movement I got up and sat elsewhere. They would have sat knitting at the foot of the Cross, I suppose.
At the end of the second movement, two or three other women got up and went home to tea! It would have surprised me no more to have seen a cork extract itself from its bottle and promenade.
Tschaikovsky
Just lately I've heard a lot of music including Tschaikovsky's Pathétique and Fifth Symphonies, some Debussy, and odd pieces by Dukas, Glinka, Smetana, Mozart. I am chock-full of impressions of all this precious stuff and scarcely know what to write. As usual, the third movement of the Pathétique produced a frenzy of exhilaration; I seemed to put on several inches around my chest and wished to shout in a voice of thunder. The conventions of a public concert hall are dreadfully oppressive at such times. I could have eaten "all the elephants of Hindustan and picked my teeth with the spire of Strassburg Cathedral."
In the last movement of the Fifth Symphony of that splendid fellow Tschaikovsky, the orchestra seemed to gallop away leaving poor Landon Ronald to wave his whip in a ridiculously ineffective way. They went on crashing down chords, and just before the end I had the awful presentiment that the orchestra simply could not stop. I sat still straining every nerve in the expectancy that this chord or the next or the next was the end. But it went on pounding down – each one seemed the last but every time another followed as passionate and emphatic as the one before, until finally, whatever this inhuman orchestra was attempting to crush and destroy must have been reduced to shapeless pulp. I wanted to board the platform and plead with them, elderly gentlemen turned their heads nervously, everyone was breathless, we all wanted to call "For God's sake, stop" – to do anything to still this awful lust for annihilation… The end came quickly in four drum beats in quick succession. I have never seen such hate, such passionate intensity of the will to destroy… And Tschaikovsky was a Russian!
Debussy was a welcome change. "L'Après-midi d'un Faun" is a musical setting to an oscitatory exercise. It is an orchestral yawn. Oh! so tired!
Came away thoroughly delighted. Wanted to say to every one "Bally good, ain't it?" and then we would all shake hands and go home whistling.
December 14.
My rooms are littered with old concert programmes and the Doctor's prescriptions (in the yellow envelopes of the dispenser) for my various ailments and diseases, and books, books, books.
Among the latter those lying on my table at this moment are —
Plays of M. Brieux.
Joseph Vance.
The Sequel to Pragmatism: The Meaning of Truth, by Willam James.
Beyond Good and Evil.
Dostoievsky's The Possessed.
Marie Bashkirtseff's Journal.
I have found time to read only the first chapter of this last and am almost afraid to go on. It would be so humiliating to find I was only her duplicate.
On my mantelpiece stands a photograph of Huxley – the hero of my youth – which old B – has always taken to be that of my grandpapa! A plaster-cast mask of Voltaire when first hung up made him chuckle with indecent laughter. "A regular all-nighter. Who is it?" he said.
December 15.
Petticoat Lane
This morning, being Sunday, went to Petticoat Lane and enjoyed myself.
On turning the corner to go into Middlesex Street, as it it now called, the first thing I saw was a little girl – a Jewess – being tackled for selling Belgian button-hole flags by two policemen who ultimately marched her off to the police station.
In the Lane, first of all, was a "Royal Ascot Jockey Scales" made of brass and upholstered in gaudy red velvet – a penny a time. A very fat man was being weighed and looked a little distressed on being given his ticket.
"Another stone," he told the crowd mournfully.
"You'll have to eat less pork," some one volunteered and we all laughed.
Next door to the Scales was a man selling gyroscopes. "Something scientific, amusing as well as instructive, illustrating the principles of gravity and stability. What I show you is what I sell – price one shilling. Who?"
I stopped next at a stall containing nothing but caps, – "any size, any colour, any pattern, a shilling apiece – now then!" This show was being run by two men – a Jew in a fur cap on one side of the stall and a very powerful-looking sort of Captain Cuttle on the other – a seafaring man, almost as broad as he was long, with a game leg and the voice of a skipper in a hurricane. Both these men were selling caps at a prodigious pace, and with the insouciance of tradesmen sure of their custom. The skipper would seize a cap, chuck it across to a timid prospective purchaser, and, if he dropped it, chuck him over another, crying, with a "yo-heave-ho" boisterousness, "Oh! what a game, what a bees' nest."
Upon the small head of another customer, he would squash down his largest sized cap saying at once, —
"There, you look the finest gentleman – oh! ah! a little too large."
At which we all laughed, the customer looked silly, but took no offence.
"Try this," yells the skipper above the storm, and takes off his own cap. "Oh! ye needn't be afraid – I washed my hair last – year." (Laughter.)
Then to his partner, the Jew on the other side of the stall, "Oh! what a face you've got. Here! 6d. for any one who can tell me what it is. Why not take it to the trenches and get it smashed in?"
The Jew wore spectacles and had a soft ingratiating voice and brown doe-like eyes – a Jew in every respect. "Oh!" says he, in the oleaginous Semitic way, and accurately taking up his cue (for all this was rehearsed patter), "my wife says 'my face is my fortune.'"
"No wonder you're so hard up and 'ave got to take in lodgers. What's yer name?"
"John Jones," in a demure wheedling voice.
"Hoo – that's not your name in your own bloody country – I expect it's Hullabullinsky."
"Do you know what my name really is?"
"No."
"It's Assenheimopoplocatdwizlinsky Kovorod." (Loud laughter.)
"I shall call you 'ass' for short."
I was laughing loudly at these two clowns and the skipper observing as much, shouted out to me, —
"Parlez-vous Francois, M'sieur?"
"Oui, oui," said I.
"Ah! lah, you're one of us – oh! what a game! what a bees' nest," and all the time he went on selling caps and chucking them at the purchasers.
Perhaps one of the most extraordinary things I saw was a stream of young men who, one after another, came up to a stall, paid a penny and swallowed a glass of "nerve tonic" – a green liquid syphoned out of a large jar – warranted a safe cure for
"Inward weakness, slightest flurry or body oppressed."
Another man was pulling teeth and selling tooth powder. Some of the little urchins' teeth, after he had cleaned them as a demonstration, were much whiter than their faces or his. This was "the original Chas. Assenheim."
Mrs. Meyers, "not connected with any one else of the same name in the Lane" was selling eels at 2d., 3d. and 6d. and doing a brisk trade too.
But I should go on for hours if I were to tell everything seen in this remarkable lane during an hour an a half on a Sunday morning. Each stall-holder sells only one kind of article – caps or clocks or songs, braces, shawls, indecent literature, concertinas, gramophones, coats, pants, reach-me-downs, epergnes. The thoroughfare was crowded with people (I saw two Lascars in red fez caps) inspecting the goods displayed and attentively observed by numerous policemen. The alarm clocks were all going off, each gramophone was working a record (a different one!) and every tradesman shouting his wares – a perfect pandemonium.
December 31.
A Conversation
"There is that easily calculable element in your nature, dear boy," I said, "by which you forego the dignity of a free-willed human being and come under an inflexible natural law. I can anticipate your movements, intentions, and opinions long beforehand. For example, I know quite well that every Saturday morning will see you with The New Statesman under your arm; I know that the words 'Wagner' or 'Shaw' uttered slowly and deliberately in your ear will produce a perfectly definite reaction."
"I bet you can't predict what I am going to buy now,"
R – replied gaily, advancing to the newspaper stall.
He bought the Pink 'Un and I laughed…
"And so you read Pragmatism," he mused, "while the fate of the Empire stands in the balance."
"Yes," said I, "and the Paris Academy of Sciences were discussing the functions of θ [Greek: Thèta] and the Polymorphism of Antarctic diatoms last September when the Germans stood almost at the gates of Paris."
This was a lucky stroke for me, for he knew he was rubbing me on the raw. We are, of course, great friends, but sometimes we get on one another's nerves.
"I am polychromatic," I declaimed, "rhetorical, bass. You – besides being a bally fool – are of a pretty gray colour, a baritone and you paint in water-colours."
"Whereas you, of course, would paint in blood?" he answered facetiously.
His Oxford education has a firm hold on him. He says for example, "e converso" instead of "on the other hand" and "entre nous" for "between ourselves." He labels his paragraphs α, β, γ, instead of a, b, c, and quotes Juvenal, knows Paris and Naples, visits the Alps for the winter sports, all in the approved manner of dons.
Not infrequently he visits the East End to Study "how the poor live," he lectures at Toynbee Hall, and calls the proletariat "the prolly." In fact, he does everything according to the regulations, being a socialist and an agnostic, a follower of Shaw and a devotee of Bunyan. "Erotic" he is careful to pronounce eròtic to show he knows Greek, and the "Duma," the Dumà, tho' he doesn't know Russian. Like any don, he is always ready to discuss and give an opinion on any sub- supra- or circum-lunary subject from bimetallism to the Symphony as an art-form.
"That's a dominant fifth," I said to him the other day; no answer.
"You ignorant devil," I said, "you don't know what a dominant fifth is!"
We made grimaces at one another.
"Who's the Master of the Mint?" I asked him. "That is an easy one."
"The Chancellor of the Exchequer," was the prompt reply.
"Oh! that's right," I said sarcastic and crestfallen. "Now tell me the shortest verse in the Bible and the date of Rameses II."
We laughed. R – is a very clever man and the most extroardinarily versatile man I know. He is bound to make his mark. His danger is – too many irons in the fire. Here are some of his occupations and acquirements: Art (etching, drypoint, water-colours), music (a charming voice), classics, French, German, Italian (both speaking and reading knowledge), biology, etc., etc. He is for ever titillating his mind with some new thing. "For God's sake, do leave it alone – you simply rag your mind to death. Put it out to grass – go thro' an annual season of complete abstinence from knowledge – an intellectual Lent."
No one more than he enjoys my ragging him like this – and I do it rather well.
1915
January 1.
I have grown so ridiculously hypercritical and fastidious that I will refuse a man's invitation to dinner because he has watery blue eyes, or hate him for a mannerism or an impediment or affectation in his speech. Some poor devil who has not heard of Turner or Debussy or Dostoieffsky I gird at with the arrogance of a knowledgeable youth of 17. Some oddity who should afford a sane mind endless amusement, I write off as a Insus naturæ and dismiss with a flourish of contempt. My intellectual arrogance – excepting at such times as I become conscious of it and pull myself up – is incredible. It is incredible because I have no personal courage and all this pride boils up behind a timid exterior. I quail often before stupid but over-bearing persons who consequently never realise my contempt of them. Then afterwards, I writhe to think I never stood up to this fool; never uttered an appropriate word to interfere with another's nauseating self-love. It exasperates me to be unable to give a Roland for an Oliver – even servants and underlings "tick me off" – to fail always in sufficient presence of mind to make the satisfying rejoinder or riposte. I suffer from such a savage amour propre that I fear to enter the lists with a man I dislike on account of the mental anguish I should suffer if he worsted me. I am therefore bottled up tight – both my hates and loves. For a coward is not only afraid to tell a man he hates him, but is nervous too of letting go of his feeling of affection or regard lest it be rejected or not returned. I shudder to think of such remarks as (referring to me), "He's one of my admirers, you know" (sardonically), or, "I simply can't get rid of him."
If however my cork does come out, there is an explosion, and placid people occasionally marvel to hear violent language streaming from my lips and nasty acid and facetious remarks.
Of course, to intimate friends (only about three persons in the wide, wide world), I can always give free vent to my feelings, and I do so in privacy with that violence in which a weak character usually finds some compensation for his intolerable self-imposed reserve and restraint in public. I can never marvel enough at the ineradicable turpitude of my existence, at my double-facedness, and the remarkable contrast between the face I turn to the outside world and the face my friends know. It's like leading a double existence or artificially constructing a puppet to dangle before the crowd while I fulminate behind the scenes. If only I had the moral courage to play my part in life – to take the stage and be myself, to enjoy the delightful sensation of making my presence felt, instead of this vapourish mumming – then this Journal would be quite unnecessary. For to me self-expression is a necessity of life, and what cannot be expressed one way must be expressed in another. When colossal egotism is driven underground, whether by a steely surface environment or an unworkable temperament or as in my case by both, you get a truly remarkable result, and the victim a truly remarkable pain – the pain one might say of continuously unsuccessful attempts at parturition.
It is perhaps not the whole explanation to say that my milky affability before, say bores or clods is sheer personal cowardice… It is partly real affability. I am so glad to have opposite me some one who is making himself pleasant and affable and sympathetic that I forget for the moment that he is an unconscionable time-server, a sycophant, lick-spittle, toady, etc. My first impulse is always to credit folk with being nicer, cleverer, more honest and amiable than they are. Then, on reflection, I discover unpleasing characteristics, I detect their little motives, and hate myself for not speaking. The fellow is intolerable, why did I not tell him so? Bitter recriminations from my critical self upon my flabby amiable half.
On the whole, then, I lead a pretty disgraceful inner life – excepting when I pull myself together and smile benignly on all things with a philosophical smugness, such as is by no means my mood at this present moment. I am so envious that a reprint of one of Romney's Ramus girls sends me into a dry tearless anger – for the moment till I turn over the next page… Inwardly I was exacerbated this morning when R – recited, "Come and have a tiddle at the old Brown Bear," and explained how a charming "young person" sang this at breakfast the other morning. It was simply too charming for him to hear.
To-night as I brushed my hair, I decided I was quite good-looking, and I believe I mused that E – was really a lucky girl… All that is the matter with me is a colossal conceit and a colossal discontent, qualities exaggerated where a man finds himself in an environment which …
You observant people will notice that this explanation is something of a self-defence whereby the virtue goes out of my confession. I plead guilty, but great and unprecedented provocation as well. Intense pride of individuality forbids that I should ever be other than, shall I say, amiably disposed towards myself au fond, however displeased I may be with my environment. It is indeed impossible without sending him to a lunatic asylum ever to knock a man off the balance of his self-esteem… A man's loyalty to himself is the most pig-headed thing imaginable.
January 2.
The Fire Bogey
"This Box contains Manuscripts. One guinea will be paid to any one who in case of danger from fire saves it from damage or loss."
Signed: W.N.P. BARBELLION.
I have had this printed in large black characters on a card, framed and nailed to my "coffin" of Journals. I told the printer first to say Two Guineas, but he suggested that One Guinea was quite enough. I agreed but wondered how the devil he knew what the Journals were worth – nobody knows.
Next month, I expect I shall have a "hand" painted on the wall and pointing towards the box. And the month after that I shall hire a fireman to be on duty night and day standing outside No. 101 in a brass helmet and his hatchet up at the salute.
These precious Journals! Supposing I lost them! I cannot imagine the anguish it would cause me. It would be the death of my real self and as I should take no pleasure in the perpetuation of my flabby, flaccid, anæmic, amiable puppet-self, I should probably commit suicide.
August 7.
Harvey who discovered the circulation of the blood also conducted a great many investigations into the Anatomy and development of insects. But all his MSS. and drawings disappeared in the fortunes of war, and one half of his life work thus disappeared. This makes me feverish, living as I do in Armageddon!
Again, all Malpighi's pictures, furniture, books and MSS. were destroyed in a lamentable fire at his house in Bononia, occasioned it is said by the negligence of his old wife.
About 1618, Ben Jonson suffered a similar calamity thro' a fire breaking out in his study. Many unpublished MSS. perished.
A more modern and more tragic example I found recently in the person of an Australian naturalist, Dr. Walter Stimpson, who lost all his MSS., drawings, and collections in the great fire of Chicago, and was so excoriated by this irreparable misfortune that he never recovered from the shock, and died the following year a broken man and unknown.
Of course the housemaid who lit the fire with the French Revolution is known to all, as well as Newton's "Fido, Fido, you little know what you have done."
There are many dangers in preserving the labours of years in MS. form. Samuel Butler (of Erewhon) advised writing in copying ink and then pressing off a second copy to be kept in another and separate locality. My own precautions for these Journals are more elaborate. Those who know about it think I am mad. I wonder… But I dare say I am a pathetic fool – an incredible self-deceiver!
Anyhow – the "coffin" of raw material I sent down to T – while I retain the two current volumes. This is to avoid Zeppelins. E – took the "coffin" down for me on her way home from school, and at Taunton, inquisitive porters mistaking it, I suppose, for an infant's coffin carried it reverently outside the station and laid it down. She caught them looking at it just in time before her train left. Under her instructions they seized it by the brass handles and carried it back again. I sit now and with a good deal of curiosity fondle the idea of porters carrying about my Journals of confession. It's like being tickled in the palm of the hand… Two volumes of abstracted entries I keep here, and, as soon as I am married, I intend to make a second copy of these… Then all in God's good time I intend getting a volume ready for publication.
January 30.
Hearing Beethoven
To the Queen's Hall and heard Beethoven's Fifth and Seventh Symphonies.
Before the concert began I was in a fever. I kept on saying to myself, "I am going to hear the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies." I regarded myself with the most ridiculous self-adulation – I smoothed and purred over myself – a great contented Tabby cat – and all because I was so splendidly fortunate as to be about to hear Beethoven's Fifth and Seventh Symphonies.
It certainly upset me a little to find there were so many other people who were singularly fortunate as well, and it upset me still more to find some of them knitting and some reading newspapers as if they waited for sausage and mashed.
How I gloried in the Seventh! I can't believe there was any one present who gloried in it as I did! To be processing majestically up the steps of a great, an unimaginable palace (in the "Staircase" introduction), led by Sir Henry, is to have had at least a crowded ten minutes of glorious life – a suspicion crossed the mind at one time "Good Heavens, they're going to knight me." I cannot say if that were their intentions. But I escaped however…
I love the way in which a beautiful melody flits around the Orchestra and its various components like a beautiful bird.
January 19.
An Average Day
After a morning of very mixed emotions and more than one annoyance … at last sat down to lunch and a little peace and quiet with R – . We began by quoting verse at one another in open competition. Of course neither of us listened to the other's verses. We merely enjoyed the pleasure of recollecting and repeating our own. I began with Tom Moore's "Row gently here, my Gondolier." R – guessed the author rightly at once and fidgeted until he burst out with, "The Breaths of kissing night and day" – to me an easy one. I gave, "The Moon more indolently sleeps to-night" (Baudelaire), and in reply he did a great stroke by reciting some of the old French of Frangois Villon which entirely flummuxed me.
I don't believe we really love each other, but we cling to each other out of ennui and discover in each other a certain cold intellectual sympathy.
At the pay desk (Lyons' is our rendezvous) we joked with the cashier – a cheerful, fat little girl, who said to R – (indicating me), —
"He's a funny boy, isn't he?"
"Dangerous," chirped R – , and we laughed. In the street we met an aged, decrepit newsvendor – very dirty and ragged – but his voice was unexpectedly fruity.
"British Success," he called, and we stopped for the sake of the voice.
"I'm not interested," I said – as an appetiser.
"What! Not… Just one sir: I haven't sold a single copy yet, and I've a wife and four children."
"That's nothing to me – I've three wives and forty children," I remarked.
"What!" in affected surprise, turning to R – , "he's Brigham Young from Salt Lake City. Yes I know it – I've been there myself and been dry ever since. Give us a drink, sir – just one."
In consideration of his voice we gave him 2d. and passed on…
After giving a light to a Belgian soldier whose cigarette had gone out, farther along we entered a queer old music shop where they sell flageolets, serpents, clavichords, and harps. We had previously made an appointment with the man to have Schubert's Unfinished Symphony played to us, so as to recall one or two of the melodies which we can't recall and it drives us crazy. "What is that one in the second movement which goes like this?" and R – whistled a fragment. "I don't know," I said, "but let's go in here and ask." In the shop, a youth was kind enough to say that if we cared to call next day, Madame A – , the harp player would be home and would be ready to play us the symphony.