The Pipes of Commerce

THIS morning Daphnis was on the ferry-boat. He strode up to me sitting in the cabin. With his folded newspaper he clapped me on the shoulder. I looked up at him.

‘You have a new hat,’ I remarked. ‘It is not becoming.'

Daphnis lifted the new black derby from his curly head. He jammed it firmly on again. ‘Come on outside,’he urged. He slipped his young arm through my old one, pushed the door open, and we stood on the forward deck.

The breeze from the harbor laid a hand like a child’s on our faces. We stood gazing at the sweep and wash of color and line. The freshness of the city morning held for me, as it so often does, amazement. I saw golden fire burning on turret, tower, and bridge, light budding on walls of brick and steel. Daphnis stood by me, but his gaze wandered, his head was thrown a little to one side. It struck me that he not so much looked as listened.

I used not to know Daphnis. I am an odd, cobwebby old man, walking now not so much with my stick as after it, still going to and from the city, because it takes more strength than I have to break the habit. I used to see Daphnis, with the other young bank clerks and brokers, hurrying by to take tube and ferry. I used to note the wonderful ‘Must get there’ expression of youth on his dark young face. Somehow, because I had plenty of time, and could follow at my own snail’s leisure, I used to fall to wondering about this young fellow. He seemed to me different from the other youths, keener, more alive, more like a wild thing. Often, under his trim sack coat I thought I caught lines of woodland litheness, something like a young shepherd’s grace.

I asked other people about Daphnis. Whence his birth? What his station? Why he, hurrying with the other men and women into the Trap of the city, was seeking the old, coarse, common bait? For it seemed to me that others must see what I saw, must recognize the young shepherd hidden in the bank clerk’s disguise. Others must have known what I know: how, of his own choice Daphnis would only have asked for a loin-cloth of fur, bedding of fern, wild nuts and wild fruits, and a resting-place by a woodland pool.

For that was what I came to know about this young fellow. I came to know that all he wanted in the world was leisure; leisure for fantastic reveries, sitting by streams winnowed with shadows of leaves, having dryads for friends, young merry fauns for playmates. And, if he ever tired of these, such smiling, luring secrecy of sky and trees as would keep him mystically unsated, forever questing.

Now, then, I am accustomed to being ‘pooh-poohed’; all old people are; therefore was I the more astonished when those to whom I stated my beliefs did not coldly stare me down.

I was, said those in whom I had confided, to a certain extent right about Daphnis. He would have liked leisure, and reverie, and the brooks winnowed with green leaf-shadows. Yes, Daphnis would have liked those things. But the leisure for them had never come. When, in his earliest manhood, Daphnis might have gone to find them, Something Else came. Something Else had put its hand ever so gently on his shoulder, turned his young face in one terrible direction, and asked quietly, ‘Do you dare?’ Daphnis, so these people who knew told me, had dared. I could picture the rest. I could understand what had caused Daphnis to put off the dear shepherd guise, lay down the woodland pipe, and make ready to spring into the Trap.

How I first came to know Daphnis I very clearly recall. I remember having thought, with the curious helplessness of old age, ‘He will, like all the rest, think that I am too long-winded, he will interrupt what I have to say with a careless, “That’s right,” and pass me by.’ Therefore was I the more pleased when these things did not happen. When at last, we did meet, the young shepherd looked long and intently into my eyes. He said quite simply, ‘I have seen you before.’ He meant, of course, on the ferry-boats and cars, but it did not please me to take it in just that way.

At the time I was speaking quite learnedly, I remember, of a certain swamp-flower, which in my younger days I had had good times searching for. I saw that, while the other young men to whom I described it looked bored or amused, Daphnis cared to know. I must have described the violet sac of that marvelous swamp-flower very well indeed, I must have made visible its silvery-fleshed petals, I must, somehow, have given body to its surroundings: smell of black muck, tangle of roots, stillness and breathing and mystery of the swampy woods; for suddenly Daphnis bent upon me the shepherd’s eyes. He looked as if he, long thirsting, had found a spring. After that he invariably left his companions on the ferry-boat and joined me. Every morning we two hung over the rails and talked or were silent.

That was months ago. It was not until this morning that I learned Daphnis’s secret and heard about the ‘ Pipes of Commerce.’

It all began at some mention of Neptune, called forth by the water. We had fallen to talking of the difference between men and gods. ‘After all,’ — Daphnis flung out his arms, he stretched his young body, clicking his bootheels together, —‘after all, a man is a god until he forgets it himself. It is the feeling of one’s godhead that counts, only we don’t feel it. Now I look like a plain, everyday sort of a chap, don’t I? Anyway, a practical man?’

My eye ran over him. I saw every inch of him, in spite of that wilding shepherd grace, set with peculiar masculinity to meet his world.

’It’s odd,’went on Daphnis slowly. ‘I hope I act like one, but I feel in these clothes, this collar, these shoes, like an old granny, a cow, a duffer, a saphead.’ The boy went slowly over the list of incapables. He bent over the rail, staring down into the harborwater, saying as if speaking to himself, ‘If we only acted more like men!’

I smiled to myself; I felt that I was going to get at Daphnis’s secret now. ‘Well —?’ I said encouragingly.

‘If we could only be what, out of our conventionality, we have grown to call “savage.” Think,’urged Daphnis eagerly, ‘think of watching the first spring sprouting of the maize, to know whether you’re going to have bread or not! Think of plunging your body into cold forest lakes, feeling your blood rising with the morning sun; think of tearing boughs from goodsmelling trees, because you needed fire and a bed; think of following bees over the mountain for the sake of the taste of wild honey; think of tying your own little dream-string to every star, inventing your own whistle to answer the silver pipe of morning.’

‘Think of forever hanging up the stiff derby hat, and the stiff shirt-collar on the sour-apple tree!’ I concluded with my old man’s flippancy. Then I dropped my voice quickly. ’I understand, oh Lord, how I understand! It all convinces me of what I have always believed: you, Daphnis, my young bank clerk, have known some other life, some other clime; you have been taught by Pan.’

At my teasing mention of the name, my young shepherd’s head went up with a surprised lift. Very curious indeed were the eyes under the stiff derby hat. For an instant Daphnis might have been a mountain brook instead of a city youth. He looked full of the ripple of forked courses of clear spirit, a very whimsical vagrom human.

‘Pan!’ the youth whistled softly. ‘Pan? ssssh! don’t mention that name aloud! Pan’s the one thing the Elect should keep to themselves. Pan, — well ’ — Daphnis looked at me and deliberately grinned. ‘Pan, you might say, is my uncle.'

‘Not your father?’ I asked. I wondered what Daphnis’s real father had been like.

The boy considered; for the moment his cheek hardened, but he smiled and went on with the game.

‘No,’ looking bravely into my face. ‘A father is, I suppose, a sacred thing; the ideal, even if — if, humanly, it fails. But your uncle is the old fellow that gave you your first skates, and your gold pieces, and the cabinet for your birds’-egg collection,’ Daphnis paused; then, “Pan,’ he repeated, ‘is my uncle.’

‘Indeed?’ I murmured respectfully. ‘ Uncle Pan, — that is a very interesting family connection. I may, since it is you, admit that Caliban has for a long time been my cousin.’

We leaned on the ferry-boat rail. Daphnis pressed a sharp young banker’s grin close to my white-bearded face.

‘Does your cousin Caliban wear a derby hat?’ he inquired softly; then hesitated: it was clear that my young shepherd wanted to confess something. He looked to see how I would take it.

‘ You did n’t know about Uncle Pan ? ’ doubtfully: ‘that he has come to live in the city?’

‘Come to live in the city? your Uncle Pan?’ I was astounded! ‘How very injudicious; at his age, too! Why, may I ask ?'

’Because every one else lives there; because the people to whom he is uncle have to be there; because some day there’s going to be nothing but city to live in.’

The harbor tide was unusually tricky that morning. Our progress was slow. Our ferry-boat gave the curious slabsided lurch peculiar to ferry-boats, then halted. Something as lofty and long as a Gothic cathedral darkened our light, swept across our path. Our ferry-boat seemed for the moment like a floating chapel; we working people thronged on her decks, in the early morning light, might have been a body of the Priests of work, waiting, as the proud steamship swept by us, to break out into some strange matin song.

The powerful mass rested on the water berg-like, the strange pure pathos of the morning sun investing it. A few faces were strung irregularly like questioning masks along the rail as the steamer, gripped by clinging tugs, sank away on the tide.

I took off my hat, gravely saluting her.

‘ “ To the Dream!"'

‘What Dream?’ asked Daphnis.

But I make it my habit not always to play into the hands of this impatient young shepherd. He knew, as well as I, what dreams go on out-bound steamers; besides, just then something happened that made Daphnis’s eyes shine. There came from the haughty throat of the steamer one long note, purple black, ragged with cindery overtones; insolently, under a proud guidon of smoke, it floated over the harbor.

Though it was proud and pompous, this long grave note, it was blown with something of an experimental deliberation. I saw my young shepherd put his head on one side and listen to it. He looked at me, drawing a deep breath.

‘That,’ said Daphnis mysteriously, ‘was Uncle Pan. You heard him? He’s practicing polyphonic composition. That, you know, is the study of how to juggle notes.’

And then and there, because he could no longer withhold it, the shepherd boy told me his whole secret. It was a secret, he said, that had made things easier for him. ‘You see,’ said Daphnis simply, ‘I always cared about music. I care for it in the way that a bird cares for the air it flies in, or a flower cares for the soil it grows from. I studied it up to the time I was fourteen. I was going to college and then I was going abroad to study more. Then, you know, everything went to smash. I —well — I went into Business instead.’

To go into Business instead of Music was to me a whimsical sort of idea. I listened attentively to Daphnis.

It was the very old story of the buried talent. Daphnis, as a young shepherd would be likely to do, hurried over the painful details of it. But he told me how that his one dream was, when the overwhelming debts should be paid, his father’s name saved, and the responsibilities not of his making adjusted, to buy a piano and study evenings, after work-hours. Already, he confessed, he knew a little harmony and counterpoint. The composers, both ancient and modern, were to him more real than I.

Bach, Daphnis confided to me, was his favorite. ‘Bach did away with “ Willyism” in music. Unlike the Puccinis and Debussys, Bach fitted one to take up any sort of life. The garbageman, for instance; that was a sad, painful sort of existence, once you considered it. Much Chopin, like much Shelley, would unfit all garbage-men for their uncongenial tasks; but give a garbage-man plenty of lusty, husky Bach, and all he would care about would be to handle the garbage-cans cleanly, deftly, with a technical sincerity of whirl that only Bach could teach.’

There was, I firmly believe, a tear in one of my old eyes, a twinkle in the other. Else, why should Daphnis, just here, stop and look at me so steadily? I saw the pained doubt of me in his young face. Did he, then, think I would fail him? ‘Lord,’ prayed I, ‘Lord, I positively must not fail him.’

When I realized how thoroughly I was getting at the real shepherd in this young city bank clerk, I was as shy and blushing as a girl about to receive a proposal. To give myself pause, I hailed a passing bootblack. Having got him to begin at my grim, square-toed boots, I hemmed and hawed, and after the manner of an old man, asked a few apparently trivial questions. At last, I could see, I made the young shepherd trust me. He drew a long breath, he confided to me, how with his enforced giving up of the dreamy country life, of all beauty, contemplation, and leisure, he had decided that Uncle Pan might help him find them elsewhere. He looked at me eagerly, avid of sympathy in this idea.

At first, I may as well confess, I was not sympathetic. In my dry old throat, I scoffed a little. I could see, I said, how it would comfort a young musician to toy with an idea like that, but I thought it was a little too fantastic. Pan? in the city?' I drew myself up a little pompously, ‘Why, to my personal knowledge, Pan never plays unless he is sitting under a tree, or on a hill, or in a glade beside a woodland river. And, heaven knows, there are no trees here in the city! ’ I summed up crossly. ‘ Anyway, nothing that Pan would call a tree! And where do you get the least suggestion of music?’

Our ferry-boat made a slight turn, the wind came from another quarter, a whirl of harbor gulls flickered near us. These gulls swung in poised circles, round and round one another, darting as between two clefs of vibration, to the blue of the sky and the amber of the water. Round and round the air they wrapped themselves in repeated flights, in airy spirals. Sometimes in strings like cadenzas or arpeggios they dipped, sometimes the white bodies soared in chromatic lapping of wings. At times, they swept by like notes in a written scale, but for the most part they kept in a whirl, three by three, or two against three, with the regularity of irregular beat, that gave to the eye curious suggestion of syncopated script.

I was not surprised at the way Daphnis looked at this gull flight. I was not much surprised that he even whistled a fragment of music that seemed curiously to fit the beating of the gulls’ wings. With a strange little air of triumph he turned to me. ‘They are the Harbor Fugue,’ he said quite simply. Then he took up my complaint that there were not enough trees in the city to help carry out the idea of the presence of Uncle Pan.

I remained quite sullen about the thing. I looked down at the bootblack and requested him to please to bear a little less heavily upon my gouty foot. ‘There are practically no trees!’ I repeated obstinately.

The derby-hatted shepherd looked patient. His strong eyebrows thatched the brook-color of his eyes as he asked,

‘Do you never come this way at night? Over the ferry, I mean?’

‘Yes,’ sulkily, ‘instead of taking the Tube with the other rats.’

I wondered what he was beating about the bush for.

My young friend stopped to reprimand me.

‘Not so fast, man. Not rats. It’s the pick of the army that uses the Tube. That’s the strange thing; the sad thing. The Best are the people who get there, are n’t they? Well — the fittest of to-day’s humanity goes underground. You and I, the old grannies, the duffers, the sapheads and the dreamers, take the ferry-boats.’

I hung my head. I bent over to the bootblack and told him to be very careful to get plenty of polish on my boot heels.

‘Well, what about your old trees?’ I went back to the subject obstinately.

It was at night, my young shepherd explained, that one got the illusion best. At night one saw the city harbor shores loom up like the shores of a forest stream, thronged with trees hung with lights like the golden apples of the Hesperides. ‘What,’ he demanded of my quizzical face, ‘what were trees anyway but pyramids, obelisks, towers of shimmering light? Were n’t trees huge dense shapes of shadow, bulks of myriad dartles, things that gleamed and glanced and twinkled? Well then,’ he demanded, ‘can’t you see how these great buildings, hung with girandoles, with fretted branchlets of sparkle, were like trees, myriads of golden windows sparkling, shaking their illumination, as a tree in autumn shakes its countless little patches of color?

‘They fringe the water, don’t they, this new kind of trees? They stand in clumps and groves, one group taller than the other, they make shadow, they strike the stars, they blot the night. In the daytime, like all good green trees, they are nothing but fairy castles astir with life, with song, with nesting. In the night, their countless little golden foliations seem to flutter. Why!' Daphnis’s brook-eyes rippled at me, ‘Why, the whole city is not only full of groves of golden trees, but of pergolas, trellises, vines!’

The wind freshened while my young shepherd was speaking. A string of tows went by. The cumbrous square masses of barge took the cross chop from passing craft. On the opaque wizardry of the water, the coarse black segments of the line were tossed like a floating Egyptian necklace, with huge mummy-like heads. The two tugs at the head of it sounded each a staccato whistle.

‘Stretto!’ Daphnis soliloquized. ‘Stretto ! Uncle Pan, I have observed, often uses that closed form of fugue. Uncle Pan is a great old experimenter.’

Suddenly I found myself being immensely tickled with my young shepherd’s attitude toward his Uncle Pan. My two shoes being polished, and all being well with me, I turned to help him play his game. Need I say that I began to feel a sort of challenge in this game, for I, also, had need of Uncle Pan in the city. Ah, I had long had need of him.

Now the ferry-boat turned. From where we stood, close to the gates, the straight slab of flooring moved, curiously uncouth, as Argo might have moved, over the slapping water. Our advance became to me suddenly a thing mysterious, adventurous. It was as if we did, indeed, sail down some new and strange woodland river. Objects fell behind us, or to either side. They drifted away wrapped in mists, muffled in smoky mirage, that made them wellnigh impalpable, unreal; until I, like Daphnis, saw craft as vague, as shapeless as twilight highway bushes, countless masts like reeds or cat-tails, elevator and derrick and tower as ethereal and feathery as pampas or milkweed.

Slowly, surely, I too began to get the illusion, this strange dream, with which Daphnis, all his poor young years, had been playing. Surely the harbor was no longer that hard-sounding name by which I had known it. It was instead a broad woodland river, along the banks of which were concealed the gods, fauns, nymphs, and satyrs of commerce. Invisible it is true, as those of the forest, but no whit less merry, magic, and potent. All at once I knew that strange ship-birds laid golden eggs in the floating wharf-nests. I saw lofty growing shapes, not trees indeed, yet filled with spirits as mystical as dryads, fringing the broad waterway. — Truly, Uncle Pan had had a wondrous vision! No wonder he sat in his secret nook, still trying fugitive bits of melody; no wonder he could not as yet fully interpret the Harbor Song, or perfectly play the ‘Pipes of Commerce.’

For that was the noticeable thing about the piping of the harbor, it was catchy, snatchy, vague. At last I found courage to mention this.

‘Your Uncle Pan,’ I critically remarked, ‘needs the Telharmonium to play on. Evidently his Syrinx is too delicate an instrument for these harbor melodies. I’d as soon expect to play Wagnerian strains on the “sevenstringed mountain-shell.” Also,’ I teased on, ‘he’s too spasmodic. I’ve been told that rhythm was the deciding element in music. Well, you get no rhythm in this Harbor Music!’

Daphnis turned his head away from the wind. He took off his hat, that unconsciously lying and mocking derby hat of which I have spoken; he stood there letting the breeze blow through his hair, just as it would have blown had he lain among the soft green hills, watching the slowly moving flocks and piping up the morning.

‘I have n’t yet decided just what kind of music Uncle Pan is trying to make out of this harbor,’ the youth slowly admitted. ‘It’s got to be different from all music that has hitherto been made. So far, of course, you realize that it has been called just “Noise”?’

I nodded.

Daphnis had his explanation ready.

‘It has been called “Noise” because it has never been absorbed into the perceptions with some mental picture, some heroic or lyric vision. Just as would Wagner’s music, without the libretto, have been considered by many people mere “noise.” Music has to have its controlling idea. You wouldn’t care for a bird’s song if it did n’t mean blue sky, green leaves, wings, flowers, and dew. Even songs without words convey their idea in their titles.’ My young shepherd turned; he looked dreamily out over the moving harbor. ‘Now, so far,’ he slowly said, ‘so far this city music has no rhythmic power. It is Eastern in its development. Like some of the Modern French School it has two supreme qualities, Suspense and Mysticism. You get those?’

‘After all,’ I jeered, ‘after all, your Uncle Pan will simply line up with Debussy and Vincent d’Indy — a sort of pagan Modern.’

But, as if in answer to his nephew’s belief in him, from far down the broad waterway, out of that blue murkiness where rose the black, swamplike hummocks of city roofs, came a full chord. It was the dominant chord of the seventh. This chord was as clear, as defined, with its four voices, as if it had been firmly struck by a giant hand on a giant organ; but it was a blown chord — one could almost imagine the purse of the great lips that produced it. It was followed by a succession of smaller, more reedy pipings, which, one voice after another, gave what seemed to be the fragment of some plaintive melody. For a moment my dried old heart bounded like a cement ball.

‘Why, it was like, yes, it was very like some one playing a set of pipes!’

I looked at young Daphnis; he, head still turned a little to one side, was smiling.

‘Anticipation,’ he murmured. ‘Anticipation rises when one or more voices sing in a tone foreign to the present chord.’ Daphnis hummed the snatch meditatively. ‘That is a very familiar little bit,’ he said, ‘it is one of the principal motifs of the Harbor Song.’

The Harbor Song. I drew a long breath. His putting it that way struck me very strangely. For after all, this idea of Daphnis’s was not new, not unusual. I realized that I had always been hearing, always been listening for, the Harbor Song. I remembered that I had heard it many nights and many mornings, in many times of loneliness and defeat, of doubt and despair. The Harbor Song! How many thousands listened to it every day, all uncomprehending that the world’s ‘Uncle Pan,’ hiding along the banks of the harbor, was trying to unify it, to make of it some clear harmony that all the world could catch.

I started to speak again to Daphnis, but he put up his hand, murmuring something about ‘drone bass,’ which was a thing, he said, used in pastoral music and in the music of the Middle Ages. ‘One got,’ he said, ‘perfect examples of drone bass in the harbor’; he had just now half heard one.

For a long time we were silent, he listening, I staring down at the harborwater flinging its tawdry foam-fringes.

At last, ’Daphnis,’ I cried out, ’Daphnis, I believe it’s the harbor-water that holds the introductory motif, the meaning of the Harbor Music.’

My shepherd lad did not at first appear to hear me, seeming to try to catch again that little far-off misty thematic bit. But at last he gave it up, and turned to give my remark his young shepherd’s consideration.

‘I suppose you mean in its movement,’ he agreed, ‘in the signs and hints of flotsam and jetsam? Or along the wharf, the floating casks and bales, the gums and oils and cottons and fruits; or on the docks the dark, wild, fierce foreign faces?’

‘Yes,’ said I dubiously. ‘Yes, except that all those things, done into music, would make a spicy piece, a rigadoon, a gaillard, a bold rondo. I hear nothing in this harbor but minor melodies, groping futile chords, intoning of portent, sad questioning notes that seem to haunt the misty waters. I say, Daphnis, people speak of the “ Tonic Chord.” That means the original basis, the beginning of the musical sentence, does n’t it? Well, then, what is the Tonic Chord of this harbor?’

Ah! — that was where I made my mistake. That was where I proved myself to be an old man. In Daphnis’s startled eyes I read what, in a general way, I had always known, that these young shepherd lads hate to be held down to facts. They see life as one follows a brook; as they, lying on their backs, see clouds, watching them pass, wind-blown, white and soft, expanded, dwarfed, to a hundred fantastic shapes. Daphnis looked unwilling, almost uncomfortable; for the moment I was nonplussed as to how to get the truth out of him. But in my old man’s way I was determined to have it.

‘ If you are any true nephew of Uncle Pan,’ I challenged, ‘you will tell me; think it over a little. Now — What is the Tonic of this harbor?’

A smoky, one-masted lugger, laden with lumber, got in our ferry-boat’s way. She slid to starboard, passing so close that her sooty patched sail, all its little reef-points trembling, shook in our very faces. As she flopped into stays and fell impotently in the trough of our wake, Daphnis muttered, under his breath, —

‘I suppose the blamed old Tonic Chord might be called the chord of Pity.’

‘Pity?’ I glanced around at the proud progress of the harbor shores, at the superb castle-like business houses, the brilliant bird-like shipping. ‘Pity?’ — My eyes tried to laugh into those of Daphnis.

But now that he had spoken this thing my young shepherd had become suddenly very grave. He had taken out his watch. His face had fallen into stern lines. He stood, clear eyes on the approaching wharf-clock, ready to jump into the steely Trap lying there with its bait ready for him and for millions of others.

‘Yes,’ he repeated sombrely, ‘pity.’

‘Pity?’ — Stupidly I repeated the word. Then, as I heard far behind us a long melancholy chord broodingly blown on the strange unseen harbor pipes, I tried to look as if I understood. ‘Oh, yes,’ I airily said. ‘Oh, yes,’ in my jaunty old man’s way. ‘Pity. Quite so. As you say — er — Pity?’

‘Why not?' asked Daphnis gravely. He was very much a modern young man now. He stood very straight, his keen eyes set square ahead, his firm lips shooting out curt words. ‘ Why not pity for the wild dreams of power that come to us and enslave us? Why not pity for temples where only foul gods reign? Why not pity for the dream of ideal love that makes men hurry and scurry to win the mere right of existence? Pity for treachery, weakness, disease, incapacity. Pity—’

He stopped short, looking at me. One more low musing chord came from far down the harbor. The Pipes of Commerce played one more strange detached little melody, and I saw a whole nature, like one note in some unalterable law of harmony, vibrate to it.

Daphnis, the brook-boy, the shepherd lad, suddenly shivered and grew pale.

Like a flash it came to me that I had a duty to ‘Uncle Pan,’ hiding there among the strange stone boscage that fringed the shores of the harbor. Uncle Pan, who had taken up his residence in the city in order to do what he could for young shepherds, would very likely depend upon me in this matter. Clearly the time had come for me to be a sort of Uncle Pan myself, in my strange, old man’s way; yet I feared there was little I could say.

‘Pity?’ I asked once more; and then, very stoutly, very firmly, considering my age, ‘No, not pity. It is something better than that, Daphnis. Those few bits of melody we hear, those strange snatches of harbor song, are rather the Tonics of dream and desire. They mean Progress, Quest, Eternity. Yes, my impatient young man, don’t you lift one eyebrow at me! You see, I know. Give your Uncle Pan time, can’t you? a few million years or so! Boy, your Uncle Pan has got the right idea. He is sitting on the shores of this harbor, trying over all sorts of little phrases, little phrases of music that are some day going to form a wonderful symphony, some great shimmering fabric of balanced harmonies. He plays the thing that makes men brave for life, that holds their bodies alert to discipline, their hearts fixed in narrow sentry boxes of duty. True, he plays other strains: sorrow, of blank yellow-fogged morning, sin, of black reeking rainy nights. But, more than all, he plays the Tonic Chord of the old Human Dream, To See the Thing Through.’ I stopped right there. ‘Uncle Pan,’ I added very quietly, ‘plays for me only one meaning.’

‘ And what is that? ’ inquired Daphnis lightly.

He had got that derby hat jammed down very securely by now. As our ferry-boat blundered into the pier, he carelessly nodded to one or two acquaintances amongst the throng. As the huge unwieldy craft bumped first into one side of the yielding piles, then into the other, I staggered a little. In a familiar way, as if he had been my son, Daphnis caught at my old arm. For a moment he steadied me.

‘What is that one meaning?’ he whispered.

‘Go along, young man,’ said I crossly. ‘I take an up-town car. Go along, you’ll be late.’

For I could not tell Daphnis. I knew that some day he would find out for himself, and that then nothing would matter. Meanwhile, there was his Uncle Pan. So I, old and rheumatic, crawled contentedly along, not so much with my stick as after it, while my shepherd lad, dashing off the ferryboat, sprang, far ahead of the other working men and women, into the Trap.