So that when, at last, I
pushed my way out of the crowded house and joined M. Cristich at the
stage door, where he waited with eyes full of expectancy, the music still
lingered about me, like the faint, past fragrance of incense, and I had no
need to speak my thanks. He rested a light hand on my arm, and we walked
towards his lodging silently; the musician carrying his instrument in its
sombre case, and shivering from time to time, a tribute to the keen spring
night. He stooped as he walked, his eyes trailing the ground; and a certain
listlessness in his manner struck me a little strangely, as though he came
fresh from some solemn or hieratic experience, of which the reaction had
already begun to set in tediously, leaving him at the last unstrung and
jaded, a little weary, of himself and the too strenuous occasion. It was
not until we had crossed the threshold of a dingy, high house in a byway of
Bloomsbury, and he had ushered me, with apologies, into his shabby room,
near the sky, that the sense of his hospitable duties seemed to renovate
him. He produced tumblers from an obscure recess behind his bed; set a
kettle on the fire, a lodging-house fire, which scarcely smouldered with
flickers of depressing, sulphurous flame, talking of indifferent subjects,
as he watched for it to boil.
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