“She was comforting,” he said. “She made one feel happy and—and normal.” Then he said, in a tone that sounded as if he expected me to contradict him: “She had a good ear for music, too. Not perfect, of course. . . . Did you ever know any one with an ear so perfect that only the eighth interval satisfied them?”
“One or two,” I said, wondering what he was driving at now. “They were cranks, though. One should love music in reason, in my opinion.”
“In reason, that’s it,” Cartwright repeated in a low tone. “My cousin loved it in reason. I couldn’t. Perfection—I was tortured with the idea.”
“I’ve never been able to care for things in reason. I wanted perfection. Music, love, I longed to lose myself in them, but couldn’t, because always something jarred, and then I grew cold. My cousin Charlotte used to laugh at me. She had a sweet voice. Not perfect, though, and sometimes it would irritate me to madness to hear the flaws that most people didn’t even notice. And yet even at sixteen Charlotte was dearer to me than any other creature on earth.
“Then I came out to Taku, and I met Lulukuila. She was beautiful beyond anything I had ever dreamed. She made other women look clumsy beside her. She stayed overnight at my uncle’s, and next day an escort came from the old chief, her father—six savages in pandanus kilts and necklaces. Those creatures came to take the very flower of womanhood back to uncivilized surroundings. I can’t tell you how horrible it seemed to me. And so I married her.”
Cartwright jumped up, and began walking up and down. After a while he switched off on another tack.
“Her voice was as perfect as her face,” he said, “and her sense of pitch was absolute. Those first days we used to go out to the point where the pavilion stands, and sit looking out over the reefs, and I thought I’d found happiness at last. I liked to hear her answer a certain note that the sea sounds in the reefs yonder when the tide is right. She would take up the note an octave higher, and it was thrilling, the perfection of her pitch. I sent home for the piano, imagining that it would be a bond between us. I thought I’d teach her the songs Charlotte and I used to sing together.
“But she hated the piano,” Cartwright brought out in a muffled voice. “I suppose I was rather a fool over it at first. I was so hungry for familiar music. Lulukuila couldn’t bear the music I’d grown up with. It brought out alien traits in her, gusts of passion, fits of moodiness. Octaves, those she’d listen to. Once when I filled in an octave she jumped up and caught my hands. I remember yet how she looked.