The Gorgio was a money-master,
they said, but he would find that a Romany was a master, too, in his own
way. He thought of one of the first pieces he had ever heard, a rhapsody
which had grown and grown, since it was first improvised by a Tzigany in
Hungary. He had once played it to an English lady at the Amphitryon Club
in London, and she had swooned in the arms of her husband's best friend.
He had seen men and women avert their heads when he had played it, daring
not to look into each other's eyes. He would play it now--a little of
it. He would play it to her--to the girl who had set him free in the
Sagalac woods, to the ravishing deserter from her people, to the only
woman who had told him the truth in all his life, and who insulated his
magnetism as a ground-wire insulates lightning. He would summon her here
by his imagination, and tell her to note how his soul had caught the
music of the spheres. He would surround himself with an atmosphere of
his own. His rage, his love, and his malignant hate, his tenderness and
his lust should fill the barber's shop with a flood which would drown the
Gorgio raider. He laughed to himself, almost unconsciously.
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