第6章 The Guest Who Would Not Come Down

He arrived on the twenty-first day, in the middle of the first real blow, carried in from the pass gate by two drovers who wanted him out of their sleigh and no further. He was about thirty, thin, with a violin case taller than he was and hands that were red to the second knuckle. He took the smallest room in the house, which was at the top of the back stair under the roof, and he came down once a day, early, when the house was empty, and he went up again. "You'll want the common room for your playing," Pippa said, on his second morning. "I won't be playing." "Then you'll want the common room for company." "No." He said it without unkindness, and shut his door, and she stood on the landing a moment before she went down. Quintin Marlowes. The name in the register, in his own hand: *I have nothing left to say to anyone.* She had looked at that sentence eleven times and had not asked about it, because you did not ask, and because she was new, and because she had spent nine years in a city where people had a great deal to say to each other about nothing at all. The house rearranged itself around him, and she felt it happen the way you feel a barometer drop. The common room, which had held eleven people on the good evenings, held six. Old Sedgewick the coachman stopped coming. The two drovers, who had been drinking in the snug every night for a week, took their custom to Gammon's instead. A man is not obliged to come down. A man is only not to be asked. * * * On the fifth night she began sending up trays. She did it herself and she told Tibb not to come up with her, and she knocked twice and left the tray on the floor and went away without a word, and she did it every night for eleven nights whatever he did with them. The seventh night the tray came back downstairs, washed. "I am not going to starve in your house," said a voice through the door, when she knocked. "I want you to know that I understand the courtesy. I want you to know that I am not going to starve." "Good," said Pippa. "That's it?" "That's the whole of it. If you want the tray taken down, say so and I'll stop. If you don't want it taken down, leave it and I'll bring another at eight." A pause that went on so long she thought he had gone. "There's five in the house," he said. "Seven." "Seven. I can hear you counting from here." "It's a habit." "I've noticed." * * * On the eleventh night, at two in the morning, Pippa came down for water and stopped dead in the passage. Somebody was playing the violin in the common room, in the dark, with the fire out, at a volume that somehow carried through two floors of a house built out of a mountain. He was not playing it very well. He was playing it as though it were a person who had gone out of the room and might be listening from the hall. She went back up the stairs on bare feet and stood outside his door. The sound came through it, thin and wavering, and she had the odd feeling of listening to a conversation through a wall. Then she went down the passage to the lectern with the seventh lamp in her hand. The seventh lamp, which she had found burning on the seventh evening and which had not smoked once in three weeks, was throwing a flame four inches high and leaning hard towards the door. Behind her, all down the passage, the other ten lamps had stayed exactly as small and exactly as steady as they were. She set the seventh down, and trimmed it back, and stood there until it went to size. Upstairs, the playing stopped. She went to bed. In the morning there was a tray outside his door with the usual bread and the usual small quantity of broth, and beside it, set neatly on the sill, a page torn from a music paper, folded twice. On it were eleven numbers. Underneath, in the same thin handwriting as the register entry, four words: *I will come down at six.* He came down at six. He was not good, and he knew he was not good, and the room went entirely quiet in a way that must have been unbearable, and he played three pieces and went up without speaking and everybody let him. From that night he played at six every night, badly, in front of everybody, and the house learned to listen to it the way you learn to listen to a clock. * * * The changes came slowly and then all at once. Pippa found the common room filling again without anybody deciding it should. Trevose came back. The drovers came back. Amberley, who had said almost nothing to the musician for a month, left a bottle of something on the sill at six o'clock every evening for a fortnight, and nobody ever mentioned that either, and the bottles were never empty by morning. On the second night of the playing, Marlowes asked her, at the stair head, in the dark, to hold the fifth lamp. "Why?" "Because when you hold a lamp near a fiddle the flame tells you when you're flat. It leans. It leans towards the note that's honest." He turned the tuning peg a fraction. "Everybody says that's a story. It's not a story, it's brass." "That's brass on the other side of the wall from the north," said Pippa. "Then hold it and find out." She held it. She stood on the landing for an hour that night with a brass lamp in her hand and a fiddler playing six inches away, and she watched the flame lean and settle and lean again, and she learned the shape of true from the shape of false, and she kept the lamp until the candle behind her burned down to the brass. On the last night of that month Marlowes came and knocked on the keeper's door, which no guest had ever done, and stood in the corridor looking thoroughly ashamed of himself. "The seal," he said. "Amberley's seal. It was mine to sell. I sold it eight months ago, for money I did not have, to a man who had a house and no way to make a living." He turned the flat of his hands over. "I came up this pass because I could go no further north and I had nowhere else to be. I have been sleeping under your roof while a man in a house in Selborne wears the Thawkeeper's seal in his pocket." "Then you should have told me." "Yes." "Why didn't you?" His mouth worked. "Because on the sixth evening you lit the seventh lamp last of all," he said, "and I thought, well, that's somebody who has done this before." ---