Several teachers experimented with him. They found he had absolute pitch,
and a remarkable memory. As a very young child he could repeat, after a
fashion, any composition that was played for him. No matter how many wrong
notes he struck, he never lost the intention of a passage, he brought the
substance of it across by irregular and astonishing means. He wore his
teachers out. He could never learn like other people, never acquired any
finish. He was always a Negro prodigy who played barbarously and
wonderfully. As piano-playing, it was perhaps abominable, but as music it
was something real, vitalized by a sense of rhythm that was stronger than
his other physical senses--that not only filled his dark mind, but worried
his body incessantly. To hear him, to watch him, was to see a Negro
enjoying himself as only a Negro can. It was as if all the agreeable
sensations possible to creatures of flesh and blood were heaped up on those
black-and-white keys, and he were gloating over them and trickling them
through his yellow fingers.
In the middle of a crashing waltz, d'Arnault suddenly began to play softly,
and, turning to one of the men who stood behind him, whispered, `Somebody
dancing in there.' He jerked his bullet-head toward the dining-room. `I
hear little feet--girls, I spect.
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