A SON OF LISZT
It originated in the wicked vanity of Sir William Davenant himself, who, disdaining his honest but mean descent from the vintner, had the shameless impiety to deny his father and reproach the memory of his mother by claiming consanguinity with Shakespeare.
—Reed's Shakespeare.
Little Holland was very dry.
Little Holland is a shapeless stretch of meadowland pierced by irregular canals through which sluggishly flows the water at high tide. Odd shaped houses are scattered about, one so near the river that its garden overflows in the full of the moon. Dotted around stand conical heaps of hay gleaned from this union of land and water. It is called Little Holland, for small schooners sail by under the very nose of your house, and the hired girl often forgets to serve the salad while flirting with the skipper of some sloop. But this August night Little Holland was very dry.
As we stood facing the river I curiously examined my host. His face was deeply lined by life which had carved a quarter hundred little wrinkles about his eyes and the corners of his mouth. His eyes were not true. They shifted too much. His thick, brown hair was thrown off his forehead in a most exuberantly artistic fashion. His nose jutted well into the outer world, and I had to confess that his profile was of a certainty striking. But his full face was disappointing. It was too narrow; its expression was that of a meagre soul, and his eyes were very close together. Yet I liked Piloti; he played the piano well, sang with no little feeling, painted neat water sketches and was a capital host.
A sliced cantaloupe moon, full of yellow radiance, arose as we listened to the melancholy fall of the water on the muddy flats, and I said to Piloti, "Come, let us go within; there you will play for me some tiny questioning Chopin prelude, and forget this dolorous night." ... He had been staring hard at the moon when I aroused him. "As you will; let us go indoors by all means, for this moon gives me the spleen." Then we moved slowly toward the house.
Piloti was a bachelor; an old woman kept house and he always addressed her in the Hungarian tongue. His wants were simple, but his pride was Lucifer's. By no means a virtuoso, he had the grand air, the grand style, and when he sat down to play one involuntarily stopped breathing. He had a habit of smiting the keyboard, and massive chords, clangorous harmonies inevitably preluded his performances. I knew some conservatory girls who easily could outstrip Piloti technically, but there was something which differentiated his playing from that of other pianists. Liszt he did very well.
When we came into the shabby drawing-room I noticed a picture of the Abbé Liszt over the grand piano, and as Piloti took a seat he threw back his head; and my eyes which had rested a moment on the portrait involuntarily returned to it, so before I was aware of it I cried out, "I say, Piloti, do you know that you look like Liszt?" He blushed deeply, and gave me a most curious glance.
"I have heard it said often," he replied, and he crashed into the master's B minor Sonata, "The Invitation to Hissing and Stamping," as Gumprecht has christened it.