Alone By Norman Douglas













































































 -  Now don't cry, and don't apologize. A polonaise like yours is
worth a piano. I set these things down with - Page 144
Alone By Norman Douglas - Page 144 of 291 - First - Home

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"Now Don't Cry, And Don't Apologize.

A polonaise like yours is worth a piano." I set these things down with modest diffidence, solely in order to establish my locus standi as a person who might be expected to know the difference between sound and noise.

As such, I have no hesitation in saying that the first three bars of that nightingale performance are, to sleeping ears, not music. They break upon the stillness with the crash of Judgment Day.

And every night the same scare. It causes me to start up, bathed in sudden perspiration, out of my first, and best, and often only sleep, with the familiar feeling that something awful is happening. Windows seem to rattle, plaster drops from the ceiling - an earthquake? Lord, no. Nothing so trivial. Nothing so brief. It is that blasted bird clearing its throat for a five hours' entertainment. Let it not be supposed that the song of these southerners bears any resemblance to that of an English nightingale. I could stand a hatful of English nightingales in my bedroom; they would lull me to sleep with their anaemic whispers. You might as well compare the voice of an Italian costermonger, the crowing of a cock, the braying of a local donkey, with their representatives in the north - those thin trickles of sound, shadowy as the squeakings of ghosts. Something will have to be done about those nightingales unless I am to find my way into a sanatorium. For hardly is this bird started on its work before five or six others begin to shout in emulation - a little further off, I am glad to say, but still near enough to be inconvenient; still near enough to be reached by a brick from this window - - A brick. Methinks I begin to see daylight....

Meanwhile one can snatch a little rest out of doors, in the afternoon.

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