Two or three times during my wanderings through the streets I had heard the strains of an organ coming from a little church in the suburbs, without, however, stopping to listen. The next time I passed by the church I heard it again, and recognized that Bach was being played. I went to the door, which I found to be locked. As the street was practically empty I sat down on a curb-stone close to the church, turned up the collar of my coat and listened. It was not a large organ, but a good one nevertheless. Whoever was playing played wonderfully well, almost like a virtuoso, but with a peculiar, highly personal expression of will and perseverance, which seemed to make the music ring out like a prayer. I had the feeling that the man who was playing knew a treasure was shut up in the music and he struggled and tapped and knocked to get at the treasure, as if his life depended on his finding it. In the technical sense I do not understand very much about music, but this form of the soul’s expression I have from my childhood intuitively understood; I feel music is something which I can comprehend without initiation. The organist next played something modern, it might have been Reger. The church was almost completely dark, only a very narrow beam of light shone through the window nearest to me. I waited until the end, and then walked up and down till the organist came out. He was still a young man, though older than myself, robust and thick-set. He walked quickly, taking powerful strides, but as if forcing the pace against his will. Many an evening thereafter I sat before the church, or walked up and down. Once I found the door open, and for half an hour I sat shivering and happy inside, while the organist played in the organ loft by the dim gas light. Of the music he played I heard not only what he himself put into it. There seemed also to be a secret coherence in his repertory, each piece seemed to be the continuation of the one preceding. Everything he played was pious, expressing faith and devotion. But not pious like church-goers and clergymen, but like pilgrims and beggars of the Middle Ages, pious with a reckless surrender to a world-feeling, which was superior to all confessions of faith. He frequently played music by the pre-Bach composers, and old Italian music. And all the pieces said the same thing, all expressed what the musician had in his soul: longing, a longing to identify oneself with the world and to tear oneself free again, listening to the workings of one’s own dark soul, an orgy of devotion and lively curiosity of the wonderful.