"Dolce, ma non troppo dolce," said the Professor to the Mistress, who was sweetening his tea. She always sweetens his and mine for us. He has been attending a series of concerts, and borrowed the form of the directions to the orchestra. "Sweet, but not too sweet," he said, translating the Italian for the benefit of any of the company who might not be linguists or musical experts.
"Do you go to those musical hullabaloos?" called out Number Seven.
There was something very much like rudeness in this question and the tone in which it was asked. But we are used to the outbursts, and extravagances, and oddities of Number Seven, and do not take offence at his rough speeches as we should if any other of the company uttered them.
"If you mean the concerts that have been going on this season, yes, I do," said the Professor, in a bland, good-humored way.
"And do you take real pleasure in the din of all those screeching and banging and growling instruments?"
"Yes," he answered, modestly, "I enjoy she brouhaha, if you choose to consider it such, of all this quarrelsome menagerie of noise-making machines, brought into order and harmony by the presiding genius, the leader, who has made a happy family of these snarling stringed instruments and whining wind instruments, so that although Linguae centum sent, oraque centum, notwithstanding there are a hundred vibrating tongues and a hundred bellowing mouths, their one grand blended and harmonized uproar sets all my fibres tingling with a not unpleasing tremor."
"Do you understand it? Do you take any idea from it? Do you know what it all means?" said Number Seven.
The Professor was long-suffering under this series of somewhat peremptory questions. He replied very placidly, "I am afraid I have but a superficial outside acquaintance with the secrets, the unfathomable mysteries, of music. I can no more conceive of the working conditions of the great composer, 'Untwisting all the chains that tie The hidden soul of harmony,' than a child of three years can follow the reasonings of Newton's 'Principia.' I do not even pretend that I can appreciate the work of a great master as a born and trained musician does. Still, I do love a great crash of harmonies, and the oftener I listen to these musical tempests the higher my soul seems to ride upon them, as the wild fowl I see through my window soar more freely and fearlessly the fiercer the storm with which they battle."
"That's all very well," said Number Seven, "but I wish we could get the old-time music back again. You ought to have heard,--no, I won't mention her, dead, poor girl,--dead and singing with the saints in heaven,--but the S_____ girls. If you could have heard them as I did when I was a boy, you would have cried, as we all used to. Do you cry at those great musical smashes? How can you cry when you don't know what it is all about? We used to think the words meant something,--we fancied that Burns and Moore said some things very prettily. I suppose you've outgrown all that."
No one can handle Number Seven in one of his tantrums half so well as Number Five can do it. She can pick out what threads of sense may be wound off from the tangle of his ideas when they are crowded and confused, as they are apt to be at times. She can soften the occasional expression of half-concealed ridicule with which the poor old fellow's sallies are liable to be welcomed--or unwelcomed. She knows that the edge of a broken teacup may be sharper, very possibly, than that of a philosopher's jackknife. A mind a little off its balance, one which has a slightly squinting brain as its organ; will often prove fertile in suggestions. Vulgar, cynical, contemptuous listeners fly at all its weaknesses, and please themselves with making light of its often futile ingenuities, when a wiser audience would gladly accept a hint which perhaps could be developed in some profitable direction, or so interpret an erratic thought that it should prove good sense in disguise. That is the way Number Five was in the habit of dealing with the explosions of Number Seven. Do you think she did not see the ridiculous element in a silly speech, or the absurdity of an outrageously extravagant assertion? Then you never heard her laugh when she could give way to her sense of the ludicrous without wounding the feelings of any other person. But her kind heart never would forget itself, and so Number Seven had a champion who was always ready to see that his flashes of intelligence, fitful as they were, and liable to be streaked with half-crazy fancies, always found one willing recipient of what light there was in them.
Number Five, I have found, is a true lover of music, and has a right to claim a real knowledge of its higher and deeper mysteries. But she accepted very cordially what our light-headed companion said about the songs he used to listen to.
