Poor little jerking tunes without line or joy or hope, they dropped softly off the twangling notes of the ukulele with their own beauty. In them the lover was a sweet man but could not get a job, nor hold one down if he did, and the lass knew it, and despaired, but loved the more. None of the people in these songs had any money; they had only dreams, and who wanted those? Sometimes they expressed surprise that anyone should love so poor a thing as they were; sometimes they expressed a weak indignation because no one did.

None of them actually said as much, but one felt that consolation in the form of cocaine was waiting for them just round the corner. Snow, it is called in America; a wonderful name from that nation which coins poetry in its casual speech, unhampered by ancient literary standards; snow. Like snow it is warming if there is enough of it, and on its flakes the singer floats quietly down into the darkness.

I gotta pass your house

To get to my house …

sang Francis softly, staring into the fire, and Harry and Celia, a little hypnotized, rocked to and fro, melted with delicious melancholy and staring too.

But Sophia, that priggish girl, moved uneasily once or twice in the dreamy dying firelight. Some bump of common sense and sturdiness in her nature disliked this musical creeping and whining and ululating, this snow-man singing. To herself, she called it ‘a dreary row.’ A sentimental streak in her nature could enjoy it for five minutes, and then she felt bored and ashamed and wanted something which was musically gay, firm and shapely.

A satisfied pause followed the last notes of another song of the same type; and then Sophia said diffidently, ‘Do you mind if we have the little Brahms waltz? It won’t take very long.’

‘Oh, lord, need we have on the light? It’s so nice like this.’

‘I can see without it, I think.’

She found the gramophone; and in a minute the first clear, delicate and precise notes of the little waltz (Op. 39, No. 15) played by Kreisler, struck on the dark air.

It was so different from the song which had just ended that it was hard to believe both sounds could impress the ear as music. The song had been written to a formula by three extremely vulgar and rather wicked men, and the theme of the little waltz had been written by a man of genius, but the difference did not lie in this.

The little waltz sounds extremely sad. It is like a farewell which must last for ever, yet it is not despairing, because it contains order, courage, resignation, in its themes; these qualities are probably not discerned by technicians, but an ordinary listener usually detects them. The contemporary song is sad also, but with the nervous shapeless despair of the drug addict; it heels clean over, out of sight and into the last dark pit. The post-war world has got the popular music it deserves; and the little waltz by Brahms has nothing to do with it.