Quelle anything but agréeable réunion! he was muttering to himself on the stairs.
And M. Racicot, that anaemic little squirt crumpled up in a golden fauteuil from Dufayels with a shawl over his shoulders, was the great man whom Max Bruff had been raving about for two years, the only musician in Europe, so Max averred, who had caught and expressed the spirit of the new age, a genius and a prophet, mothered by Debussy, sired by the later Scriabin, but with a dynamic new idiom of his own—something to do with a revolutionary use of intervals and a new conception of tone. One cold afternoon Grover had listened for hours to Max's renditions of Racicot's piano compositions,—preludes with occult titles and a still more occult purport. To get the purport of this music, Max had told him, a little-patronizingly, you must banish from consciousness all the music you had ever heard before and listen with a new ear. Despite a few electrifying flashes, a few moments of inner turmoil, the net result for Grover had 'been a headache, though, as in the case of Casimir's submarine painting, he could feel the projection of some compelling, undeniably authentic force. That would explain the fast spiritual bond between Casimir and Racicot, than whom two men had assuredly never been more unlike as to externals.
How many times, in the good old safe, hideous, red sitting-room in Cambridge had he argued that only a man with "a beautiful soul and beautiful tastes"
