The Hotel by Elizabeth Bowen

Author:Elizabeth Bowen [Bowen, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

14

Music

Suddenly the group round the doors had dispersed and everybody was leaning over the drawing-room balcony. Above, all the way up the front of the Hotel, faces blossomed out unexpectedly, flinging away like veils the first oblivion of siesta. One would have thought a note of music had never been heard before or that the man into whose deep mouth they were all gazing down were himself Orpheus.

He plucked from his mandolin shaking notes which the tensity and blaze of noon and the gathered silence of his audience did invest with a strangeness, and sang while the whole of him quivered. He did not cease to parade beneath the balcony while maintaining fountainwise the spout of song. The child with red skirts clutching his coat-tails echoed, with the addition here and there of skip or quaver, his strut and his song. Her face, with a smile’s general glitter across it, was upturned to the balcony, eyes closed as though she could feel the benevolence of visitors descend upon the lids like rain.

The airs were not classical. He sang “Funiculi-Funicula” and “O Sole Mio,” and presently (encouraging his little girl to dance for their English friends and quickening the measure till her brief skirts spun out into a disc) a song about the beauties of a doll.

Ladies on either side of him began pressing Ronald closer, and more and more people came out through the window behind and leaned across his shoulders. He could hear, when he kept his head low, quite an orchestra of excited breathing.

Ah ch’è bella la bambola mia

Quasi, quasi più bella di me

Un vestito di ràso celeste

Un cappello di—

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