Christian Trevalga remembered all this as he sat waiting for the doctor in his rooms in Piccadilly; and it came to him like the first act of a play which he was still watching, without knowing how the curtain was to come down. That year in London, the loneliness, poverty, labour of it; the great day of the competition, when he played behind the curtain, and Rubinstein, sitting among the professors, silenced every hesitation with his strong approval; the three years of hard daily work, the painful perfecting of everything that he had sketched out for himself; life, as he had lived it, a queer, silent, sullen, not unattractive boy, among the students in whom he took so little interest; all this passed before him in a single flash of memory. He had gone abroad, at the expense of the college; had travelled in Germany and Austria; had extorted the admiration of Brahms, who had said, 'I hate what you play, and I hate how you play it, but you play the piano!' Tschaikowsky was in Vienna; he had taken a warm personal liking to the unresponsive young Englishman, who seemed to be always frowning, and looking at you distrustfully from under his dark, overhanging eyebrows. It was not to the musician that he was unresponsive, as he was to the musician in Brahms, the German doctor of music in spectacles, that peered out of those learned, intellectual scores. He felt Tschaikowsky with his nerves, all that suffering music without silences, never still and happy, like most other music, at all events sometimes. But the man, when he walked arm in arm with him, seemed excessive, a kind of uneasy responsibility.
Then he had come back to London, lived and worked there, given concerts, made his fame in the world, seen himself triumph, watching his own career with an absolute certainty of being able to do what he wanted. And all the time he had been, as he was that day at the college when he won the scholarship, playing behind a curtain. He knew that on the other side of the curtain was the world, with many things to do besides listening to him, though he could arrest it when he liked, and make it listen; then it went on its way again, and the other things continued to occupy it. Well, for him, where were those other things? They hardly existed. The great men who had given him their friendship, all the people who came to him because they admired him, those who came to him because his playing seemed to speak to them from somewhere inside their own hearts, in the little voices of their blood, the women who, as it seemed, loved him: why was it that he could not be as they were, respond to them in their own language, which was that of humanity itself, admire, like, love them back?