Page:Solo (1924).pdf/193

 asked members of the class to name them, by ear. All which, while constituting a reality, of its kind most excellent, was not the pot of gold.

For weeks Paul went faithfully to classes and concerts at the Musikvereinsgebäude, in the hope that illumination would break through the fog of drudgery. Away from the studios, at a hired piano, his soul went on rare excursions, but these were in the nature of truancy. The rest was school all over again—school of the j' aij'ai [sic]-tu-as-il-a variety; and as he had once fled the droning chorus of verb-conjugators to vivify the verbs in books, so now he retired to make music that should tout simplement sound forth proclamations otherwise inexpressible. He was no longer the mutinous boy chafing at drill; he was the man realizing that his goal was not the goal of his neighbours. For him the prescribed exercises were a mockery. The faster his fingers flew, the more sardonic became the laughter of scales and arpeggios, the more maliciously they echoed the truth of his bitter discovery. Music had once been the channel for everything mystical in his nature. He could lose his soul in it and gloriously "find" it in the process. But in the long interval since he had "nearly been able to play the Liszt sonata" his soul had perforce sought other vehicles. It was too late to harness musical steeds for its journey. Musicians evinced an interest in his talent; he might, with application, become a virtuoso. Yet though he mastered every trick and played with a comprehension surpassing that of all his contemporaries, a deep importunate part of himself would still remain mute. Audiences might listen spellbound and applaud to the echo; yet at the end of his most exalted performance he would stand before them—as he had stood that night years ago in Fremantle—unhappy, almost ashamed, conscious that they had taken the shadow for the substance and mistaken the superficial message of a sonata