rom
head to foot, and left the house as if lashed by Furies, though it was
in the dead of night. The recurring bass figure of the _presto_ sounded
to him as though it were a gruesome, awed voice stammering out the fatal
words: "Man, hold your breath, Man, hold your breath!" And he did hold
his breath, full of unresting discomfort, while his inspiration hacked
its way through the ice-locked region into which a passionate spell that
was becoming more and more a part of his nature had driven it.

He saw humanity forsaking him; he watched the waves of isolation
widening and deepening around him. Since he felt that time did not
challenge him to effort of any kind, he took to despising time. It came
to the point where he regarded his creations as something that never
were intended for the world; he never spoke about them or cherished the
remotest desire that men hear of them. The more completely he kept them
in secret hiding, the more real they appeared to him. The thought that a
man could write a piece of music and sell it for money appealed to him
as on a par with the thought of disposing for so much cash of his mother
or his sweetheart, of his child or one of his own limbs.

He came on this account to cherish a feeling of superb disgust for
shrewd dealers who were carried along on the wings of fashion. He took a
dislike to anything that was famous; for fame smelled of and tasted to
him like money. He shuddered at the mere thought of the chaos that
arises from opinions and judgments; the disputes as to the merits of
different schools and tendencies made him ill; he could not stand the
perambulating virtuosos of all zones and nations, the feathers they
manage to make fly, the noise they evoke, the truths they proclaim, the
lies they wade about in and make a splash. He stood aghast at the
mention of a concert hall or a theatre; he flew into a reasoned rage
when he heard a neighbour playing a piano; he despised the false
devotion of the masses, and scorned their impotent, imbecile transports.

All their music smelled of and tasted to him like money.

He had bought the biographies of the great masters. From them he
familiarised himself with their distress and poverty; he read of the
petty attitudes and fatuous mediocrity that stood deaf and dumb in the
presence of immortal genius. But one day he chanced to read that
Mozart's body had been buried in a pauper's grave. He hurled the book
from him with an oath that he would neve