Winton had his first really bad attack of gout when Gyp was twenty-two, and, terrified lest he might not be able to sit a horse in time for the opening meets, he went off with her and Markey to Wiesbaden. They had rooms in the Wilhelmstrasse, overlooking the gardens, where leaves were already turning, that gorgeous September. The cure was long and obstinate, and Winton badly bored. Gyp fared much better. Attended by the silent Markey, she rode daily on the Neroberg, chafing at regulations which reduced her to specified tracks in that majestic wood where the beeches glowed. Once or even twice a day she went to the concerts in the Kurhaus, either with her father or alone.
The first time she heard Fiorsen play she was alone. Unlike most violinists, he was tall and thin, with great pliancy of body and swift sway of movement. His face was pale, and went strangely with hair and moustache of a sort of dirt-gold colour, and his thin cheeks with very broad high cheek-bones had little narrow scraps of whisker. Those little whiskers seemed to Gyp awful—indeed, he seemed rather awful altogether—but his playing stirred and swept her in the most uncanny way. He had evidently remarkable technique; and the emotion, the intense wayward feeling of his playing was chiselled by that technique, as if a flame were being frozen in its swaying. When he stopped, she did not join in the tornado of applause, but sat motionless, looking up at him. Quite unconstrained by all those people, he passed the back of his hand across his hot brow, shoving up a wave or two of that queer-coloured hair; then, with a rather disagreeable smile, he made a short supple bow or two. And she thought, “What strange eyes he has—like a great cat's!” Surely they were green; fierce, yet shy, almost furtive—mesmeric! Certainly the strangest man she had ever seen, and the most frightening. He seemed looking straight at her; and, dropping her gaze, she clapped. When she looked again, his face had lost that smile for a kind of wistfulness. He made another of those little supple bows straight at her—it seemed to Gyp—and jerked his violin up to his shoulder. “He's going to play to me,” she thought absurdly. He played without accompaniment a little tune that seemed to twitch the heart. When he finished, this time she did not look up, but was conscious that he gave one impatient bow and walked off.
That evening at dinner she said to Winton:
“I heard a violinist to-day, Dad, the most wonderful playing—Gustav Fiorsen. Is that Swedish, do you think—or what?”
Winton answered:
“Very likely. What sort of a bounder was he to look at? I used to know a Swede in the Turkish army—nice fellow, too.”
“Tall and thin and white-faced, with bumpy cheek-bones, and hollows under them, and queer green eyes. Oh, and little goldy side-whiskers.”
“By Jove! It sounds the limit.”
Gyp murmured, with a smile:
“Yes; I think perhaps he is.”