y stunned
senses would allow me to perceive, the people were not wrathful or even
curious; they were just silent and collected as people generally are at
some solemn ceremonial. Nobody but me seemed to realize the
outrageousness and monstrosity of the vulgar-looking, insignificant
Barber there on the platform, holding up the show, stopping the
excellent music we had all paid to hear.

And in truth I myself was rapidly falling into the strangest confusion.
For a certain time--I cannot quite say how long--I lost my hold on
realities. The London concert hall, with its staid, rather sad-looking
audience, vanished, and I was in a great white place inundated with
sun--some vast luminous scene. Under a wide caressing blue sky, in the
dry and limpid atmosphere, the white marble of the buildings and the
white-clad people appeared as against a background of an immense blue
veil shot with silver. It was the hour just before twilight, that rapid
hour when the colors of the air have a supreme brilliance and serenity,
and a whole people, impelled by some indisputable social obligation,
seemed to be reverently witnessing the performance of one magnificent
man of uncontrollable power, of high and solitary grandeur.--

Barber began to sing.

Of what he sang I can give no account. The words seemed to me here and
there to be Greek, but I do not know Greek well, and in such words as I
thought I recognized, his pronunciation was so different from what I had
been taught that I may well have been mistaken.

I was so muddled, and, as it were, transported, that I cannot say even
if he sang well. Criticism did not occur to me; he was there singing and
we were bound to listen. As I try to hear it, now, it was a carefully
trained voice. A sound of harps seemed to accompany the singing; perhaps
the harpists in the orchestra touched their instruments.--

How long did it last? I have no idea. But it did not appear long before
all began to waver. The spell began to break; the power by which he was
compelling us to listen to him was giving out. It was exactly as if
something, a mantle or the like, was falling from Barber.

The absurdity of the whole thing began to dawn on me. There was Barber,
an obscure little Londoner, daring to interrupt a great musical
performance so that the audience might listen to him instead! Probably
because I was the only one on the spot personally acquainted with
Barber, I was perceiving the trick put upon us sooner th