the young fellow at the piano rolling his eyes round in a ridiculous fashion, and mouthing out the word “blues” extravagantly as he sang it, the little dark fellow bending forward in an unctuous sweep as the note came gloating fatly from the horn, and Captain Nicholl swaying sideways in his chair as he strummed upon the banjo strings, and improvising a mournful accompaniment of his own, somewhat as follows: “I got dose blu-u-ues! Yes, suh! Oh! I got dose blues! Yes, suh! I sure have got’em—dose blu-u-ues—blu-u-ues—blu-u-ues!—” his mouth never relaxing from its strange fixed grin, nor his eyes from their bright set stare of madness as he swayed and strummed and sang the words that came so strangely from his lips.
It was a weird scene, an incredible performance, and somehow it pierced the heart with a wild nameless pity, an infinite sorrow and regret.
Something precious, irrecoverable, had gone out of them, and they knew it. They fought the emptiness in them with this deliberate, formidable, and mad intensity of a calculated gaiety, a terrifying mimicry of mirth, and the storm-wind howled around them in dark trees, and Eugene felt that he had known them for ever, and had no words to say to them—and no door.
LXXI
Once or twice a week Eugene went into town and had tea in the rooms of a boyhood friend whom he had known at school and who was now a Rhodes scholar at Merton College. The name of this youth was Johnny Park: he was a good-natured, industrious, and rather plodding boy, and thus far that patient, diligent and well-ordered plan of life which he had followed since his childhood had brilliantly succeeded. Formed in a native air, and followed out beneath familiar skies, that plan had never been interrupted by any doubt or strangeness, by any serious difficulty or dark confusion of the soul, or by any of the unforeseen surprises, shocks, or bewilderments of chance which break upon our lives with storm-like fury and twist our precious plans awry.
Therefore, when he had been awarded the Rhodes scholarship a few months before, during his last year at the university, it seemed that Johnny’s plan of life was marching onto its inevitable fulfilment. Everyone had known he would be appointed; it came to pass with an ordained precision, and Johnny had announced, just as he should, that he would study “International Law,” and everything was right and proper as it ought
