rdiality.

If a fire broke out in the city, he was present. As his eyes peered into
the flames, they seemed intoxicated, obsessed, seized with uncanniness.
He would hum a tune of some sort, look into the anxious faces of those
immediately concerned, busy himself with whatever had been salvaged, and
attempt to force his gratuitous advice on the fire chief.

If a prominent citizen died, he never failed to attend the funeral, and,
where possible, to join the procession on the way to the cemetery. He
would stand by the grave with bowed head, and take in every word of the
funeral discourse. But his lips twitched in a peculiar fashion, as if he
felt that he were understood, and flattered.

And in truth all this did flatter him. The defeat, distress, and death
of other people, the betrayals that take place in any community, the
highhanded injustice of those in power, the oppression of the poor, the
violence that was done to right and righteousness, and the sufferings
which had to be borne by thousands day after day, all this flattered
him; it interested him; it lulled him into a comfortable feeling of
personal security.

But then he sat down at his piano at home, and played an adagio of
Beethoven or an impromptu by Schubert, his eyes with fine frenzy rolling
in the meantime. And when the mighty chorus in a Bach oratorio
resounded, he became pale with ecstasy. At the hearing of a good song
well sung he could shed copious tears.

He idolised music.

He was a provincial with unfettered instincts. He was an agitator with a
tendency to conservatism. He was a Nero without servants, without power,
and without land. He was a musician from despair and out of vanity. He
was a Nero in our own day.

He was the Nero of our day living in three rooms. He was a lonely
bachelor and a bookworm. He exchanged his views with the corner grocer;
he discussed city ordinances with the night watchman; he was a tyrant
through and through and a hangman at heart; he indulged in
eavesdropping at the shrine of fate, and in this way concocted the most
improbable of combinations and wanton deeds of violence; he was
constantly on the lookout for misfortune, litigation, and shame; he
rejoiced at every failure, and was delighted with oppression, whether
at home or abroad. He hung with unqualified joy on the imagined ruins of
imaginary disaster, and took equal pleasure in the actual debacles of
life as it was lived about him. And alongside of this innate