"What I mean is—anything—is so—infernally serious to me When one is just hanging on, and out of breath. Like bad weather.—You are afraid to expect—any sunlight."
The expression of Tom Roland's eyes altered.
"I might depend on what would seem to you to be sunlight. Relatively. Suppose you had to do the same sort of job, but in different surroundings? Would that be sunlight?"
"Absolutely."
"All right. We meet about half-past eight. This place is impossible."
The astonishing thing was that Mr. Roland kept an hotel—or rather that he was about to keep an hotel. He sat under the great elm and explained.
"What did you think I did, man?"
"I hadn't the faintest idea," said Sorrell.
"Nothing—perhaps! I am rather music-mad, and after the war I could not settle,—just drifted about. But I have a practical part to my soul, and it began to cry out."
He rested his head against the trunk of the tree. He looked amused; he was smiling at himself, and to Sorrell, who had been living in a world that could not smile happily at itself, this smile was like Tom Roland's music. It took you into the big, wise heart of the man.
"Knocking about, a dilettante, scribbling songs, with some sort of idea that I could write an opera. And so I can. But, my dear chap, the queer way things happen. The way we react. One day I met a man I most cordially detest, a fellow who is a financial light—or something. 'Hallo, Roland, still scribbling music?' Well, it set me off. 'Damn these commercial people,' I thought, 'I'd like to prove their game is easier than mine.' But—you know—there was a rightness in what that fellow said. He had knocked a chip off me. You can get many a good hint from a man who dislikes you if you are not too pot-bound to soak it up. I had been getting a little—Londonish—shall we call it. I took my car out—and went touring, and then the idea was thrown at me. I had it in my soup; I found
