“Oh, no!” he protested. “This rotten feeling—I must walk it off. Drink would only make me worse.”
But, instead of going a long tramp as he had intended, he returned to his lodgings, and sat brooding at his open window. His thoughts turned to his dead father: he also had been a composer of music, and he had been one of life’s failures. He had worked hard and very patiently, but no one had ever played anything he had written.
Xavier rose from his chair and walked across the room to a big chest full of MSS., all in his father’s neat writing. He turned over page after page—symphonies, overtures, songs, string quartets. How like his father this music was!—mystical, tender, exquisite. “Like the poems of Rossetti,” Xavier murmured to himself. Soon he became so absorbed in his father’s work, that he nearly lost consciousness of himself. The music he was reading murmured and sang in his ears. His father’s very spirit seemed to suspire from the pages. Almost could his voice be heard. It was as though the soul of the dead man was brooding over his living son....
Some of the music had been written only ten years ago: it was very much in advance of its period, and perhaps it was for this reason that both publishers and conductors had disdained it. Xavier’s father had lived in London where, it is true, good music cannot for long go unrecognized; but he had been proud and almost vainly sensitive, and the rejection of a composition used to throw him into a condition of despair so great, that months would pass before he could persuade himself to give the work another chance. His sensitive pride had been his ruin....
Xavier, wrapped up in his own work, had not for some years examined his father’s music, and had never divined its true quality; but now he recognized its extraordinary distinction, its peculiar originality, its brooding power and barbed eloquence. Oblivious of time, he read on until his landlady entered with his lunch.
“We are going to have a thunderstorm,” she said, looking at the copper sky.
“Very likely,” he said, his eyes still on the music.
And while he ate his frugal meal, he continued reading his father’s music; he absorbed it until it was time to go to the Orient Café. As he walked slowly thither, he felt that during the last few hours his personality had undergone a strange metamorphosis. He was not himself: something had been added to him: some luxury, a kind of mental wantonness—had entered his spirit unawares. His mind was larger, his imagination more rapid and higher in its flights.
There was something ghostly in this, something, perhaps, even threatening. But no doubt the minatory feeling came from the sulphur sky that hung so low, a sky heavy with electricity and sulky with spleen....
The dances he and his comrades played that afternoon and evening meant less than nothing to him, for he did not even hear them. One performs mechanically the acts one performs frequently. The music that was in the air about him was the music he had read that morning.