The Voyage Home

urn:iso:std:iso:639:ed-3:eng

188-89

text excerpt

I stopped outside the house next door to that where we had our flat.  It was the home of the London Music Club.  Someone was practising the piano, deft-fingered at the scales.  The delicious stream of sound, in its pulses of eight, made me catch my breath as though I had stooped and put my lips to a cold fountain.

The pianist stopped playing, and I returned to earth.  I was about to move on, when the music began to flow afresh; but now it was a gay movement from one of the Vivaldi concertos transcribed by Bach for the keyboard.  I recognized it at once, and I saw my brother Jack sitting at the instrument, in our rooms, on Denmark Hill twenty years earlier.  He turned his head as he was playing, and nodded to me, approving, assenting.

The perfume from the budding trees beyond the railings opposite the house, the music that shared its speed and insinuation, the reappearance of my brother from beyond the grave, all these tangibilities united to celebrate my home-coming, enlarging a minor, private event into an oratorio, universal and loud with praise.

excerpt from 'The Voyage Home' pp. 188-89 (189 words)

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1447600308792