These are _not_ placeholders for
actual illustrations in the book.]
My friend the artist once collaborated with me in an experiment of this
sort, but we did not pursue it, discovering how feeble an advance ours
would be after all; for there were points at which both of us felt we
ought to give way to the tone-poet. When the emotions became too
intangible for intellectual expression I asked my friend the musician to
insert paragraphs in a minor key. The love-scenes I was particularly
anxious to have written in musical phrases. But he shrank from so
unconventional a form, not being sure he was a genius. I was also
disheartened by the disappointing behaviour of the diverse scents with
which I had expressed myself on certain blank pages. They would not
remain in their places.
II
TUNING UP
They were "tuning up" in a wooden hall, stupidly built on the pier to
shut off the sea and the night (a penny to pay for the privation), and in
that strange cacophony of desolate violin strings, tuneless trombones,
and doleful double basses, in that homeless wail of forlorn brass and
lost catgut, I found a music sweeter than a Beethoven symphony; for
memory's tricksy finger touched of a sudden the source of tears, and
flashed before the inner eye a rainbow-lit panorama of the early joys of
the theatre--the joys that are no more.
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