It was just at sunset, and there was a new moon in the sky, and the evening star trembled upon the bosom of the waters. There in the magic stillness lay the vessel--and suddenly came the sounds of a guitar, and of young voices singing. Wonderful to tell, they sang--not “ragtime” and “college songs,” but the chorus of the “Rheintoechter,” and Schubert’s “Auf dem Wasser zu singen”, and other music, unknown to Thyrsis, exquisite almost beyond enduring. It pierced him to the heart; he sat with his hands clenched, and every nerve of him a-quiver, and the hot tears raining down his cheeks. It was loveliness not of this earth, it was an apparition; that presence which had been haunting him ever since he had come to this spot--
“So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, And hear old Triton blow his wreathéd horn.”
The music died away, and rose again; and the deeps of his spirit were opened, and ecstasy and grief welled up together within him. Then he made out that the anchor was being lifted; and he was tempted to spring up and cry out to them to stay. But no--what did they know of him? What would they care about him? So he crouched by the bank, drinking greedily the precious notes; and as the yacht with its gleaming lights stole away into the twilight, all the poet’s soul went yearning with it. Still he could hear the faint strains swelling--
“Blow, blow, breathe and blow, Wind of the western sea!”
He sat with his face hidden in his hands, shuddering. Here he was, wrestling in the pit with sickness and despair--and there above him were the heights of art. If only he could live with such music, what prodigies could he not perform. And they who possessed it--did it mean to them what it meant to him? They who had everything that life could offer--music and art, freedom and beauty and health--all the treasures of life as their birthright--had they never a thought of those who had nothing, and were set to slave in the galleys of their pleasure-craft?
Thyrsis was always coming upon some aspect of this thing called Privilege. Corydon had suggested that there might be some work that she could do at home; and so one day he was looking over the advertisements in a newspaper, and came upon a composition by a man who was seeking a governess for his three children. It was written in a style all its own; it revealed a person accustomed to specify exactly what he wanted, and it occupied three or four inches, as if symbolic of the fact that he did not consider expense. He described the life of his children; they had servants and a tutor to attend to their physical and mental needs, and the father now sought a friend and, companion, to take charge of their spiritual and social development. The specifications evoked a picture of an establishment, in which all the community’s resources, all the sciences and arts of civilization, were set at work to create joy and power for three young people. What a contrast it made with the care that little Cedric was getting, as revealed in his mother’s letters!