He had simply been very
naturally mistaken for a stranger from New York who had not arrived.
But since he had accomplished something, though he did not know
what, inasmuch as the slip of paper lay crushed in his hand unread,
he must, he decided, pay for it. Without ado he stepped to the
platform.
"I have explained to Mrs. Manners and to these ladies," he said
gravely, "that I am not the gentleman who was to sing for you.
However, since he is detained, I will do what I can."
This, mistaken for a merely perfunctory speech of self-depreciation,
was received in polite, contradicting silence by the Guild. St.
George, who had a rich, true barytone, quickly ran over his little
list of possible songs, none of which he had ever sung to an
audience that a canoe would not hold, or to other accompaniment than
that of a mandolin. Partly in memory of those old canoe-evenings St.
George broke into a low, crooning plantation melody. The song, like
much of the Southern music, had in it a semi-barbaric chord that the
college men had loved, something--or so one might have said who took
the canoe-music seriously--of the wildness and fierceness of old
tribal loves and plaints and unremembered wooings with a desert
background: a gallop of hoof-beats, a quiver of noon light above
saffron sand--these had been, more or less, in the music when St.
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