FullReads

Gardiner paused, as if considering very carefully what he should say.

“No!” he said presently, “I’m not overdoing it. My judgment of Jonathan Bull is no longer a sudden enthusiasm, as the natural effort of a man to make his own discoveries seem more important to his friends than they deserve. He is one of the giants. Think of it: he had made, on an impulse of out and out creation, the most expressive of all languages, so far as mere sound goes; and as if that were not enough, he had gone ahead and composed in that language incomparable lyrics. The meanings were in the sounds. You couldn’t mistake them. Have you ever heard a tiger roar–full steam ahead? There was one piece that began suddenly with a kind of terrible, obsessing, strong purring that shook the walls of the room and that went into a series of the most terrible tiger roars and ended with the nightmare screams of a child. I have never been so frightened in my life. And there was a snake song, a soft, wavy, piano, pianissimo effect, all malignant stealth and horror, and running through it were the guileless and insistently hungry twitterings of baby birds in the nest. But there were comical pieces, too, in which ludicrous adventures befell unsophisticated monkeys; and there was a whole series of spring-fever songs–some of them just rotten and nervous, and some of them sad and yearning–and some of them–I don’t know just how to put it–well, some of them you might say were not exactly fit to print. One thing he read me–it was very short–consisted of hoarse, inarticulate, broken groans–I couldn’t make out what it meant at all. And I was very curious to know, because it seemed to move Jonathan himself much more than anything else of his.

“‘You know,’ he explained to me, ‘my father and mother couldn’t make any sound at all–oh, yes–they could clap their hands together and make a sound that way–but I mean with their voices–they hadn’t any voices–sometimes their lips smacked and made a noise over eating, or kissing; but they couldn’t make sounds in their throats. Well, when my mother died–just think, she couldn’t make my father understand that she was sick; and I couldn’t. I tried every way. He didn’t know that she was leaving him–I’m glad you can’t see that poor blind face of her’s, turned to father’s blind face and trying to tell him good-by–I see it, almost all the time,’ he said. ‘You know they were always touching–I can’t remember a single second in all those years when they weren’t at least holding hands. She went in the night. My father was asleep with one arm over and about her. As she got colder and colder it waked him. And he understood. Then he began to make those dumb, helpless groans, like that piece I just read you–the nearest he got to speaking. He sat on the ground and held her in his arms all the rest of the night, and all the next day, and the next night–I couldn’t make him let go, and every little while he went into those dreadful, dumb groanings. You don’t get brought up in the jungle without knowing death when you see it, and what dead things do. The second night, about midnight, the news of my mother’s death began to get about; and horrible, hunchbacked beasts that I had never seen or dreamed of before began to slink about among the trees, and peer out, and snuffle, and complain–and suddenly laugh just like men. And I was so frightened of them, and of the night anyway, that every now and then I’d go into a regular screaming fit, and that would drive them away and keep them quiet for a time, but pretty soon I’d hear their cautious steps, way off, drawing closer and closer, and then the things would begin to snuffle, and complain, and laugh again–they had disgusting, black dogfaces, and one came very close, and I could see the water running out of its mouth. But when dawn began to break they drew farther and farther away, until you could only hear them–now and then.