“A Soldier’s the lad for my notion”

“A Soldier’s the lad for my notion” is a comic, old-fashioned song that Lea Marquis sings at her mother’s prompting during a December evening. The performance turns its cheerful preference for a soldier into something strained and unsettling: Lea sits rigidly at the piano, struggles with the song’s high notes, and continues as her voice and playing lose control. In the surrounding story, the song’s conventional courtship language sits uneasily beside the suspicions, rivalries, and fragile intimacies that shape the characters’ lives.

The Song and Its Performance

Mrs. Marquis has found the song in the Lady’s Book. Its opening declares, “A Soldier's the lad for my notion,” and its refrain celebrates the soldier’s “row de dow dow” as a sound that “Sets the hearts of his hearers in motion.” The lyrics give the performance a buoyant, flirtatious premise: a soldier is presented as the sort of man who can stir a woman’s heart. But Lea’s delivery does not match that promised lightness.

The narrator imagines the song as something that might once have appeared on an Olympic Theatre bill with burnt-cork comedians and French ballerinas. In that imagined production, a performer named Magdalena or Delilah might wear blue-beaded ostrich feathers or a sailor’s suit, with exaggerated makeup and a knowing wink. This is the narrator’s speculation about the song’s theatrical associations, not a description of Lea’s appearance. The imagined stage version supplies a vivid measure of how much verve the song seems to demand—and how little Lea can bring to it.

Lea sits bolt upright on the bench, her arms “rigid as muskets.” Once her hands lift from the keyboard as if she might stop, but she resumes. Though she has a natural contralto, as Edgar Allan Poe has reported, she sings in a key too high for her voice. As she approaches the top of the clef, it clouds into a sound the narrator likens to steam forced through clenched lips: faint, yet stubbornly persistent. Her playing also changes. Her hands begin to pound the keys, sending notes out of rhythm and into other measures, while she keeps singing the refrain.

The performance lasts about four minutes and includes three choruses. At its close, the company rises to applaud with conspicuous intensity. Mrs. Marquis claps louder than anyone, beats her feet against the floor, and praises Lea while correcting her handling of the F’s and G’s. She tells her daughter to think “out, not up,” describing the passage toward resonance as a journey rather than a climb. The technical advice is precise; its delivery, amid Lea’s visibly strained performance, sharpens the gap between the mother’s enthusiasm and the daughter’s apparent distress.

Courtship, Soldiers, and Uneasy Company

The song’s uncomplicated praise of the soldier contrasts with the more uneasy talk of courtship elsewhere in the evidence. During a gathering where the company discusses Leroy Fry’s death, one cadet proposes that Fry hanged himself after being jilted by a woman who had promised to meet him. When someone asks who could have made such a promise, Randolph Ballinger turns the question toward Artemus Marquis, asking whether Artemus’s sister had dazzled Fry. The suggestion transforms a joke about a woman’s supposed appointment into a challenge to her honor and to the men around her.

The room falls silent. The narrator is about to demand an explanation, but Artemus stops him with a hand on his sleeve and, with an unexpectedly serene expression, invites Ballinger to speak: “You were closer to Fry than anybody in this room.” Ballinger answers that he does not believe he was as close to Fry as Artemus. Artemus does not reply. Instead, he and Ballinger eventually break into laughter that the narrator describes as hysterical rather than merry. The exchange does not establish that the song is connected to Fry’s alleged assignation; it does, however, place the song’s jaunty soldier-and-courtship premise beside a world in which talk of a woman’s attraction quickly becomes a test of male loyalty, proximity, and restraint.

Gendered Roles and Intimacy

The song makes its central preference public and conventional: the soldier is the desired suitor, and the woman’s response is figured as a heart set in motion. Lea’s performance complicates that formula. She gives the song its words and voice, yet the scene emphasizes her constrained posture, her interrupted impulse to stop, and the labor of continuing. Even the refrain’s repetitive buoyancy becomes difficult to separate from the effort of sustaining it. The audience applauds, but its intensity suggests relief at the performance’s ending as much as uncomplicated delight.

A later exchange between Artemus and Poe offers a contrasting moment of intimacy, though the text does not explicitly connect it to the song. Artemus suggests that Poe has not yet given himself to a woman, then describes his innocence as endearing and counts himself among those who hold him dear. He takes Poe’s hands, spreads his fingers, calls them as pretty as a lady’s, and names them “Priest's hands” before kissing them. Read alongside the song’s clear division between the soldier who attracts and the woman whose heart responds, this encounter unsettles the boundaries implied by conventional gendered language: the hands Artemus admires are Poe’s, and he describes them through both feminine beauty and priestly association. The contrast is an interpretive echo, not evidence that the characters invoke the song in this later scene.

Narrative Significance

The expression’s significance lies partly in the difference between what its lyrics promise and what its performance reveals. The song offers a neat, comic picture of attraction to military masculinity. Lea’s rigid playing and faltering voice resist that ease, while her mother’s exuberant coaching turns the performance into a display shaped by conflicting responses: strain, insistence, applause, and correction. Around the song, the novel likewise presents courtship less as uncomplicated preference than as a subject through which other people make claims, test loyalties, and expose tensions.

The refrain repeats, but repetition does not restore the lightness of its premise. Lea sings three choruses; her voice clouds, her hands pound the keys, and still the song proceeds to its close. Its cheerful words therefore acquire a dramatic irony that the performance itself supplies. The soldier may be the singer’s declared preference, but the scene leaves the reader attending instead to who controls the performance, who must continue it, and how much unease can gather beneath a familiar tune.