hat I should never be likely to hear at any of the
West End concert-halls.

These West End halls are unhappily situated. The dismal Bond Street
holds one, another stands cheek by jowl with Marlborough Police Court,
and the other two are stuck deep in the melancholic greyness of Wigmore
Street. All are absurdly inaccessible. However, when it is a case of
Paderewski or Hambourg or Backhaus or Ysayt, people will make
pilgrimages to the end of the earth ... or to Wigmore Street. It was at
the Bechstein, on a stifling June evening, that I first heard that
mischievous angel, Vladimir de Pachmann.

We had dined solidly, with old English ale, at "The Cock," in Fleet
Street. Perhaps tomato soup, mutton cutlets, quarts of bitter, apple
and blackberry tart and cream, macaroni cheese, coffee, and kuemmel are
hardly in the right key for an evening with Chopin. But I am not one of
those who take their pleasures sadly. If I am to appreciate delicate
art, I must be physically well prepared. It may be picturesque to sit
through a Bayreuth Festival on three dates and a nut, but monkey-tricks
of that kind are really a slight on one's host. However, I felt very
fat, physically, and very Maeterlinckian, spiritually, as we clambered
into a cab and swung up the great bleak space of Kingsway.

At the entrance to the Steinway we ran against a bunch of critics, and
adjourned to the little place at the opposite corner, so that one of the
critics might learn from us what he ought to say about the concert. We
had just time to slip into our seats, and then Pachmann, sleek and
bullet-headed, minced on to the platform. I said that I felt fat,
physically, and Maeterlinckian or Burne-Jonesy, or anything else that
suggests the twilight mood, spiritually. But the moment Pachmann came on
he drove the mood clean out of us. Obviously, _he_ wasn't feeling
Maeterlinckian or Chopinesque. He was feeling very full of Pachmann, one
could see. Nothing die-away or poetic about him. He was fat physically,
and he looked fat spiritually. One conceived him much more readily
nodding over the fire with the old port, than playing Chopin in a bleak
concert-hall, laden with solemn purples and drabs, stark and ungarnished
save for a few cold flowers and ferns.

However, there he was; and after he had played games and cracked jokes,
of which nobody knew the secrets but himself, with the piano-stool, his
hair, and his handkerchief, he set to work. He flourished a few scales;