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Show 122 Lorin's great-uncle curled into a tight ball and cried, "I won't make any trouble! You can have everything!" The man kicked aside a bottle that struck the wall and rolled into a low spot in the floor where i t rocked back and forth. After looking at the foot of the bed and a large over-stuffed chair, he sat down in the chair, sinking into i t with his elbows on the arms. He glanced with his pale eyes at Lorin's great-uncle and then put his horn to his lips. He puffed his cheeks once or twice, took a deep breath, and began to play. The horn was curled into an oblong spiral with a wide bell, which the man held between his knees, and four valves. To judge from the redness of his face, except around the mouth, where it was white, it required considerable effort to play. Lorin's great-uncle, terrified to be in the same room with a lunatic, at first heard nothing, but then, by degrees, realized that this melody bought him time, and began to listen very closely. It was in a minor key, whose second scale degree was flatted-that much he recognized at once. It was melancholy, but with a l i l t that carried you over rises and around sharp corners where the signature shifted, across grassy meadows where the heart broke. It was stepwise and singable, except for an ugly passage of consecutive fourths which it escaped by chromatically altering the last note and recovering the dominant by surprise. Quivering under his blanket, Lorin's great-uncle followed every dip, pursued every inversion, hummed in his mind the top note of a steep climb that the player, his face dark with the strain, could not reach, followed as it tumbled down metallic stairs to a vestibule where the color changed briefly, turned dark, and at last tiptoed three steps up and was vertically home. Now he would be killed. The young man lowered the horn, sank back into his chair and contemplated the far wall. "Please don't kill me," said Lorin's great-uncle. |
