Page:Adams - A Child of the Age.djvu/176

164 And the rolling slaty-coloured volumes of his first unrecognisable words, which had filled the space between this softer lower place and that first mingled melody, had filled it into peacefulness, were growing disturbed: the volumed column of that first mingled melody was passing down over the slaty glassiness towards this lower place. The voices rose in an unspeakable harmony together, but some of it was losing itself in the slaty-coloured rolling volumes that came over the glassiness of the water of the now back-confused picture, and at last, half-dying, half-fading away, left the whole picture lost in the coloured rolling volumes: from which now came short, sharp notes, like the cracklings of connected and disconnected electric lines: crackle: crackle: crackle. And then the whole thing was whelmed in a full slaty silent flood.

I awoke.

'You remember,' Sir James's voice was saying, 'with what thought Keats closed his sweet, short nightingale's song? that wish to the bright star of steadfastness. There is just the difference between that death-song of Vivian's and this of Keats' that there was between Hylas and Narcissus.'

'Perhaps,' said Miss Cholmondeley, by him with the music in her hand, and looking at it, 'the difference was between their deaths rather than their songs. Do you think Vivian would have said: "Lift me up—I am dying—I shall die easy." I don't.'

'No,' said Sir James, 'he would not. He probably would have died in trying to lift himself up, as Emily Brontë did. But I was not prepared to have my words pressed home. I only meant to notice the two death-songs as being characteristic of the two singers: the likeness and the difference. Vivian's is a child's dream of a sensuous death, Keats' a man's. Of course, any further comparison than the superficial thoughts suggested by the two death-songs would be ludicrous.'

'Would it?' asked Miss Cholmondeley, looking up, 'personally, I prefer Vivian's.'

I suddenly thought she was teasing him. I thought