Listening to Gerald playing that sixth Nocturne, listening to him playing all that followed it, you would have thought he was a youth of the deepest feelings, yet I could never find any trace of those feelings at any other time. Somewhere, I suppose, they must have been, somewhere below the surface, but I was never able to discover them. It was as if his soul only came into being when he sat down at a piano. When he played you could see him listening to his own music, you could see him drinking it up as if it were the perfume of my mignonette, as if there were some finer echo audible only to himself. And his playing would alter, would grow gayer, or a kind of weariness would creep into it. I offer these only as the impressions I received at the time; what I should receive now I cannot tell. Yet I find it hard to believe I was utterly mistaken. It was never my fortune to hear him in later years, when I had heard many famous pianists――and I suppose I have heard practically all those of my time――but I cannot help thinking he might have been among the greatest had he not chosen to be something else, something I last saw at a café in Berlin. The puffed, horrible face, the glazed, sodden eyes――no, there was no music there. Or if there was, it was hidden, buried, lost for ever in that desecrated, half-paralysed body, buried alive, like a lamp burning in a tomb. Now, I have nothing to go upon save those first impressions of a boyish, uncultivated taste, and the fact that in after years the playing of Vladimir de Pachmann brought back sharply to me the memory of that afternoon. He played on for nearly two hours. In the end he stopped abruptly and got up from the piano, while I thanked him. I knew that he knew he had given me a tremendous pleasure, and there was no need to say much. He told me the music I had been listening to was all, or nearly all, by one composer. “And that last thing?” I asked. “That was one of the Studies――the one in A flat. I can’t play anybody else. I don’t mean that other things are more difficult, but they don’t suit me.” He was silent, until he added, “I may as well tell you that I’m not as good as you think.” “I haven’t told you yet what I think,” I answered, smiling, for I was still under the glamour of his mood, and indeed at that moment I could have hugged him. I did not want to talk of ordinary things. The music had wakened in me a feeling of melancholy, like a memory of some delicious thing that had happened long ago, and would never happen again. I tried to explain my very tenuous ideas to Gerald, but they did not interest him. And already I felt our relation altering. When he was at the piano he had seemed to me a kind of angel; now that other element, that element of latent antagonism, was beginning to re-awaken in me.