He paused and commenced to walk about the room with his hands in his pockets.
“Look here,” he began irritably, “when I heard that piece this afternoon I liked it very much. Then I asked myself why I liked it, and found it difficult to say. A sensible man should, of course, be prepared to give reasons for his likes and dislikes. ‘Is it possible,’ I asked myself, ‘that you like the thing because it is sentimental?’ I shuffled basely by telling myself: ‘I don’t know: I don’t even remember if the thing was sentimental.’ ... Well, now I’ve heard it a second time and I know for certain. It is sentimental—damned oozy, slimy, slithery sentiment from beginning to end. And the question is: What the devil’s the matter with me that I should have liked it this afternoon?”
She turned round to face him and laughed.
“How should I know?” she replied. “Perhaps you’re getting sentimental.”
“Heaven preserve me from such a fate,” he muttered gruffly. “Play me a Bach’s fugue to take that beastly sugary taste away.”
She did so, but if ever an attempt was made to infuse sentiment into a Bach’s fugue, it was on that occasion. All the while her soul was revelling in a strange airiness.
“Bach would turn in his grave if he could hear,” was his sole comment when she had finished. “Get up and I’ll show you how to do it.”
Once again the relationship of master and pupil had ousted every other.
He played the same fugue over again, and she was lost in admiration of his supreme technical facility. Obviously this was Bach as he should be played, Bach as he was meant to be played, every note mathematically in place and in time; every arpeggio like a row of stones in one triumphant mosaic. She was not fond of Bach, and in her deepest self she knew that she disliked him for precisely the reason that Verreker liked him: he was so totally devoid of sentimentality. Yet she could not but admire the stern purposefulness of his style: the lofty grace of his structures, that serene beauty of which, because it is purely æsthetic, one never tires.
When he had finished she said: “I want you to play some Debussy.”