What do you make of that?”

“Still Autumn?”

“An Autumn that continues forever? Examine the symbols—lamp gone out, chain broken, jug empty, cord ready to break, and all the tomorrows being like today—what’s that suggest? What is the warning voice? Think!”

Monica thought. “Death, perhaps?”

“Quite correct. Death—perhaps: but not quite Death as it is ordinarily conceived. The answer is in the last verse—

There it is! Plain as the nose on your face! What is it all about? What are they saying Good-bye to? Come on! Think!”

His repeated insistence that she think made Monica confused and mulish. She sat and stared at him for perhaps two minutes, and then he spoke.

“It is Death, right enough, but not the Death of the body; it is the Death of Love. Listen to the passion in the last verse—passion which Tosti has quite effectively partnered in the music. Haste—the sense of constraint around the heart—the pleading for a climax and the disappointment of that climax—What is it? In human experience, what is it?”

Monica had no idea what it was.

“Well, Miss Lumpish Innocence, it is the Autumn of love; it is the failure of physical love; it is impotence. It is a physical inadequacy which brings in its train a terrible and crushing sense of spiritual inadequacy. It is the sadness of increasing age. It is the price which life exacts for maturity. It is the foreknowledge of Death itself. It is the inspiration of some of the world’s great art, and it is also at the root of an enormous amount of bad theatre, and Hollywood movies, and the boo-hoo-hoo of popular music. It is one of the principal springs of that delicious and somewhat bogus emotion—Renunciation. And Whyte-Melville and old Tosti have crammed it into twenty lines of verse and a hundred or so bars of music, and while the result may not be great, by God it’s true and real, and that is why that song still has a kick like a mule, for all its old-fashionedness. Follow me?”

Monica sat for a time, pondering. What Revelstoke had said struck forcibly on her mind, and she felt that it would have opened new doors to her if she had fully understood it. And she wanted to understand. So, after a pause, she looked him in the eye.

“What’s impotence?”

Revelstoke looked at her fixedly. Ribald comment rose at once to his tongue, but Monica’s seriousness asked for something better than that. He answered her seriously.

“It is when you want to perform the act of love, and can’t,” he said. “The difficulty is peculiar to men in that particular form, but it is equally distressing to both partners. The symbolism of the poem is very well chosen.”

There was silence for perhaps three minutes, while Monica pondered. “I don’t see the good of it,” she said at last. “You take an old song that hundreds of people must have sung and you drag it down so it just means a nasty trouble that men get. Is that supposed to make it easier for me to sing it? Or are you making fun of me?”

“I am not making fun of you, and I have not done what you said. I have related quite a good poem to a desperate human experience which, in my opinion, is the source from which it springs. If you think of a poem as a pretty trifle that silly men make up while smelling flowers, my interpretation is no good to you. But if you think of a poem as a flash of insight, a fragment of truth, a break in the cloud of human nonsense and pretence, my interpretation is valid. When you sing, you call from the depth of your own experience to the depth of experience in your hearer. And depth of experience has its physical counterpart, believe me; we aren’t disembodied spirits, you know, nor are we beautiful, clear souls cumbered with ugly indecent bodies. This song isn’t about ‘a nasty trouble that men get’—to use your own depressingly middle-class words; it is about the death of love, and the foreknowledge of death; it is an intimation of mortality. As you say, hundreds of people have sung it without necessarily looking very deeply into it, and thousands of listeners have been moved without knowing why. Poetry and music can speak directly to depths of experience in us which we possess without being conscious of them, in language which we understand only imperfectly. But there must be some of us who understand better than others, and who give the best of ourselves to that understanding. If you are to be one of them, you must be ready to make a painful exploration of yourself. When I came in here just now, you were playing a rather silly piece in a very silly way. You sang your folksongs like a cheap Marie Antoinette pretending to be a shepherdess. Domdaniel wants you to be better than that, and so he has sent you to me.”

“Do you think Sir Benedict thinks about songs and poetry the way you do?”

“Sir Benedict dearly loves to play the role of the exquisitely dressed, debonair, frivolous man of the world. But he’s no fool. And he thinks you are no fool, too. He told me so. Here’s your cup of tea that I promised you.”

It was very nasty tea. Monica drank it reflectively. After a time, during which Revelstoke had stared intently at her, he said—

“What are you thinking about?”

“I was thinking that you’re not really simpatico.”

“I’ve no time for charm. Many people think me extremely unpleasant, and I cultivate that, because it keeps fools at a distance.”

“Mr Molloy says you’re quite the genius.”

“Mr Molloy, in his limited way, is quite right.—Well, are you coming to me for lessons?”

“Yes.”

“All right. Give me thirty shillings now, for your subscription to Lantern. Here’s a copy of the latest number. And next time you come here, have the politeness to ring the bell. It’ll spare your blushes.”

If Monica had been in danger from loneliness and boredom before, she would now have found herself in danger of being exhausted, had it not been that, as Sir Benedict had said, she was as strong as a horse. She thoroughly enjoyed the excitement. Molloy continued to take her association with Revelstoke as an intentional affront offered to his own powers as a teacher by Domdaniel, and he worked her very hard on exercises designed to develop those two characteristics of the voice which he called, in his old-fashioned nomenclature, “the florid and the pathetic”, and which Sir Benedict preferred to call “agility and legato”. He imparted his infallible method to her in a sort of pedagogic fury, nagged ceaselessly about the importance of breath and posture in the control of nervousness, and inquired searchingly about what she ate, and how much. In a veiled manner, he inquired about the regularity of her bowels. The poise of her head and the relaxation of her jaw become obsessions with him, and sometimes she woke in the night, startled to hear his voice shouting “Head forward and up—not backward and down—lead with your head!”

Revelstoke said very little to her about the production of her voice, and it did not take her long to discover that he knew little about it. “Let the ineffable Murtagh teach you the mechanics,” said he, “and I’ll take care of your style.” But he led her on to tell him what Molloy did and said at lessons, and she, finding that imitations of the Irishman amused him, could not resist the temptation to oblige, now and then, though she felt rather cheap afterward. Molloy was so truly kind, so unstinting in his efforts on her behalf, and yet—it was not easy to resist a young and clever man who wanted her to make sport of the older, exuberant one. She salved her conscience by telling it that she meant no real unkindness, and that everybody, including Sir Benedict, laughed at him.