Books › The Red Book 1911-06: Vol 17 Iss 2, 1911 › scan 124
Scan 124
The Red Book 1911-06: Vol 17 Iss 2, 1911
39 lines. Read by computer on 14 September 2026, twice; the two readings disagreed in places. Printed page 315. See the scan on archive.org.
1THE BROKEN CADENCE
3quick eagerness, the childlike frankness, of the musician. Has anyone ever really loved music—and lied? It is as abnormal to find the musician who is secretive and deceptive as the little child who is a born liar.
5Sometimes they drove through the peaceful country beyond the hills, and one morning when he came to take her for a drive, he found her waiting impatiently. Cheeks and lips were red, and she clasped something in her arms.
7"Take me somewhere away from people. I must hear my violin, I can't stand the silence any longer. Yes, I know the doctor said I must wait, but I'm so much stronger that just once cannot hurt."
9The way was very beautiful and Marjory talked and laughed light-heartedly. She seemed keenly alive to every impression, the friendly warmth of the sunshine, the wine color of a cluster of berries, the fragrance of the balsams. Presently a path, at right angles from the main road, caught her fancy.
11"I love that hint of mystery about a path which winds out of sight. When I was a child, I used to feel that just such a half-hidden trail might lead to fairy-land. Shall we see if this does?" one of two readings
12"I love that hint of mystery about a path which winds out of sight. When I was a child, I used to feel that just such a half-hidden trail might lead to fairyland. Shall we see if this does?" one of two readings
14Garrard tied his horse in front of the solitary cottage on the road, and together they took the winding way, green underfoot and redolent with the breath of pines. They came to a cleared, grassy place where the ground rose into a tiny hillock, and the path ended abruptly against a thick line of evergreens.
16Garrard threw himself upon the ground to watch her. A lump came into his throat as she took her violin from its case, and laid her cheek against it for a moment. So might a mother hold her child in loving absorption. All that was strongest in him responded to her love of her work for its own sake, to the individuality that could grow and develop without adventitious aids.
18There is a sound of beginning rain, so low, so soft, that one wonders whether or not the summer shower is falling; it is well-nigh as voiceless as tears which are too brave to fall. So the violin's notes brought to Garrard a sense of suppressed inarticulate sorrow—of a proud grief which stifles its sighings. Yet, as the music swept on, it seemed to the man as if he watched the marshaled procession of every unfulfilled hope. He could see the brown leaves of autumn falling on a baby's grave, see the very smile with heart-break in it, with which the wife turned to her husband to take up again her broken life. The futility of his father's sacrifice swept over him.
20"Don't!" he cried hoarsely. "I cannot bear it!"
22The notes trembled into silence, as she looked at him with an absent smile.
24"I—I had forgotten you were—there. Why, what a boy you are—and I had thought of you as so strong."
26He found her chiding sweeter than anything she had ever said to him, because, for the first time, it touched a personal note.
28"Is this the Romany air you liked?" she asked, and again the passionate cry of the open road stirred his blood.
30"What is that sound?" she questioned when she had finished. "It seems to me that I hear the sea, and I thought we had driven directly away from it."
32Together they explored beyond the wind-break of evergreens to find a curving ledge of basaltic rocks, every soft shade of brown, mauve and gray, with the sea lapping at the base.
34"Oh, my poor fiddle!" cried Marjory in dismay. "We must have been driving in a semi-circle, and I thought we had come as far away from the sea as possible and that the soft air under the pines could not injure my strings." Then with a sudden caprice, she said: "There's a song which has been haunting me all summer. It is but a step to that rock where I can get that mighty diapason for an undertone. I shall give you a song of the sea; not its hidden, cold caves nor its white, forgotten dead—Listen!"
36She chose a huge boulder which jutted over the water, and Garrard spread his coat for her to sit upon. He listened, enchanted, as she improvised.
38"It might be the flight of a gull!" he recognized in triumph. But even as it seemed to Garrard that he could actually see the white breast against the blue of a
The computer misreads some letters and numbers. Where a name matters to you, read the scan.