“And all your music—you have given it up?”
“The music I have to do with,” he said, “has long ceased to be music that anyone could play.”
“But, Daniel!” I protested.
“Listen to me,” he said. “Have you never read that Beethoven never heard some of his greatest symphonies? Do you not understand how a musician can comprehend music from a score? And from that, how he can create it in his own mind and enjoy it, without ever writing it down or hearing it?”
“Then,” I said, almost speechless with wonder; “then you compose music in your mind?”
“No,” he said. “I live music in my soul.”
These things were on the day of my rescue, after I had recovered from my exhaustion. The words which he spoke I no more comprehended than if I had been a child; but the strangeness of the thing haunted my soul, and my questioning and arguing never ceased. All of this he bore with a gentle patience.
I had my youthful recollections of Robinson Crusoe; and as a man of science, I could naturally not spend two minutes conversing with Daniel and examining his affairs without thinking some new device by which he could have made his lot more tolerable. I could as yet hardly realise that it was to be my own fate to live upon the deserted island for ever; all my thoughts were of what I should have done had I been in his place. He had no weapons, no traps, no gardens, no house—and so on. “But, Edward,” he would say again and again, “do you not understand? Once more—I have no time for such things.”
“Time! Time!” I would cry. “But what else have you? What have you to do?”
“I have my life to live,” was the invariable response; “I have no time for anything else.”