to escape from Self." He chuckled. "The mirror is my Religion."
During this odd little scene I felt closer to his secret than ever before. There was something fine and lovely in him, something big, but it lay in ruins. Had my attitude been a little different, had I not laughed for instance, I think he would have taken me into his confidence there and then. But the opportunity was lost this time. He asked, instead, for music, old, simple German songs being what he liked most. He would lean back in his big chair, puff his great pipe, close his eyes, and hum the melodies softly to himself while I played. It was easy to vamp a sort of accompaniment with double stopping. He dreamed of old days, I suppose; it was a variant of the mirror game. Tschaikowsky, Meyer-Helmund, Massenet he also liked, but it was Schubert, Schumann, even Mendelssohn he always hummed to. Of "Ich grolle-nicht, auch wenn das Herz mir bricht," he never tired. The little child would dart up from the basement at the first sound of the fiddle, show her old, white face at the door, then creep in, sit in a corner, and never take her eyes from "the orchestra." When it stopped playing, she was off again in a second.
One item, while speaking of the music, stands out--chanting to the fiddle a certain passage from De Quincey. The "Confessions" fascinated him; the description of the privations in London, the scenes with Anne when she first brought him out of her scanty money the reviving glass of port, her abrupt disappearance finally and his pathetic faithful search, the lonely hours in the empty house in Greek Street, but particularly his prolonged fight against the drug. It was the Invocation to Opium, a passage of haunting beauty, however, he loved so much that he chanted it over and over to himself. The first time he did this I invented a soft running accompaniment on the lower strings, using double stopping. The mute was on. My voice added the bass. It was a curious composition of which he never tired; it moved him very
deeply; I have even seen tears trickling down his cheeks
