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!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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