nd stole up to his head and stroked
his curls.

Every morning he began to practise at eight o'clock, and continued till
eleven. The piano, a Steinway in a hundred Steinways, was in the further
of the two drawing-rooms. He would go into the room smoking a cigarette,
and when he had thrown away the cigarette I would leave him. And as soon
as I had closed the door the first notes would resound, slow and solemn,
of the five-finger exercises with which he invariably commenced his
studies. That morning, as often, I sat writing in the enclosed garden. I
always wrote in pencil on my knee. The windows of the drawing-room were
wide open, and Diaz' music filled the garden. The sheer beauty of his
tone was such that to hear him strike even an isolated note gave
pleasure. He created beauty all the time. His five-finger exercises were
lovely patterns of sound woven with exact and awful deliberation. It
seemed impossible that these should be the same bald and meaningless
inventions which I had been wont to repeat. They were transformed. They
were music. The material in which he built them was music itself,
enchanting the ear as much by the quality of the tone as by the
impeccable elegance of the form. To hear Diaz play a scale, to catch that
measured, tranquil succession of notes, each a different jewel of equal
splendour, each dying precisely when the next was born--this was to
perceive at last what music is made of, to have glimpses of the divine
magic that is the soul of the divinest art. I used to believe that
nothing could surpass the beauty of a scale, until Diaz, after writing
formal patterns in the still air innumerably, and hypnotizing me with
that sorcery, would pass suddenly to the repetition of fragments of Bach.
And then I knew that hitherto he had only been trying to be more purely
and severely mechanical than a machine, and that now the interpreter was
at work. I have heard him repeat a passage fifty times--and so
slowly!--and each rendering seemed more beautiful than the last; and it
was more beautiful than the last. He would extract the final drop of
beauty from the most beautiful things in the world. Washed, drenched in
this circumambient ether of beauty, I wrote my verse. Perhaps it may
appear almost a sacrilege that I should have used the practising of a
Diaz as a background for my own creative activity. I often thought so.
But when one has but gold, one must put it to lowly use. So I wrote, and
he passed from Bach