But Dr. Carl Mann, in the early winter of 1930, not drunk for he never was, a blue ugliness of ink still visible in the long seam of scar tissue across his face, his financial affairs well in order--in fact very little hurt by the smash of 1929, for country people still got sick and still paid for it as well as they could--and the night cloudy, yes, but no rain or ice on the roads, happened somehow to drive his car into the concrete abutment of the railroad overpass at Pritchett. His only unkindness the matter of uncertainty. It could easily have been a syncope as the coroner decided, or a mechanical failure of the car concealed by the total smash. Or the Doctor might have been uncertain himself, up to the last blind instant of no return. Here anyway was the instruction book, pages gone brown at the rims, and with the script of Michael Brooks. _Eyes on the notes! Get rid of that shoulder-arm tension!!_ Judge Mann carried it to the armchair, with a go-to-bed glass of brandy. Not all those careful fingerings had been written in by Mr. Brooks. The last half of the manual (he had forgotten) had quite a few figures in an eight-or nine-year-old hand (correct too!) placed there after he had got by the first few hurdles with his enthusiasm still afire. The book would be more or less out of date, Judge Mann reflected: modern pedagogy had new notions, some good, some not. He wondered if he was examining this relic from a middle-aged need to get nearer somehow in time to the mind of Callista Blake. Partly, maybe. Certainly the dignified black notes before his eyes, the passages of the third Fugue remembered, The Express, the first discovery of _Huck Finn_, _Moby Dick_, Beethoven Opus 57, the embrace of a Filipino girl whose body was a little golden candle flame--certainly none of all that had the effect of shutting away Callista Blake. She was very present. ("_Which is the Clerk?_") But more than anything else, here at the frayed, tired, lonely end of the evening, he was wondering--practically too, and with the special fascination of such practical problems--how he would go about helping a child beginner to free the fourth finger, strengthen the fifth, accomplish the small-immense passage from the five-finger cage to the wide-open country of the octave. And he found that he meant just that: how _he_ would do it, he, Terence Mann, age forty-seven, not merely Judge of the Court of General Sessions in and for the County of Winchester, but also a pianist of more than decent competence.