’Do you realise that it is nearly fifteen years since we have seen each other?  The history of those fifteen years, so far as I am concerned, has been the history of a single uninterrupted deveine—­one continuous run of ill-luck, against every probability of the game, against every effort I could make to play my cards effectively.  When I started out, one might have thought, I had the best of chances.  I had studied hard; I worked hard.  I surely had as much general intelligence, as much special knowledge, as much apparent talent, as my competitors.  And the stuff I produced seemed good to you, to my friends, and not wholly bad to me.  It was musicianly, it was melodious, it was sincere; the critics all praised it; but—­it never took on!  The public wouldn’t have it.  What did it lack?  I don’t know.  At last I couldn’t even get it published—­invisible ink!  And I had a wife to support.’

He paused for a minute; then:  ‘You see,’ he said, ’we made the mistake, when we were young, of believing, against wise authority, that it was in mortals to command success, that he could command it who deserved it.  We believed that the race would be to the swift, the battle to the strong; that a man was responsible for his own destiny, that he’d get what he merited.  We believed that honest labour couldn’t go unrewarded.  An immense mistake.  Success is an affair of temperament, like faith, like love, like the colour of your hair.  Oh, the old story about industry, resolution, and no vices!  I was industrious, I was resolute, and I had no more than the common share of vices.  But I had the unsuccessful temperament; and here I am.  If my motives had been ignoble—­but I can’t see that they were.  I wanted to earn a decent living; I wanted to justify my existence by doing something worthy of the world’s acceptance.  But the stars in their courses fought against me.  I have tried hard to convince myself that the music I wrote was rubbish.  It had its faults, no doubt.  It wasn’t great, it wasn’t epoch-making.  But, as music goes nowadays, it was jolly good.  It was a jolly sight better than the average.’

‘Oh, that is certain, that is certain,’ I exclaimed, as he paused again.

’Well, anyhow, it didn’t sell, and at last I couldn’t even get it published.  So then I tried to find other work.  I tried everything.  I tried to teach—­harmony and the theory of composition.  I couldn’t get pupils.  So few people want to study that sort of thing, and there were good masters already in the place.  If I had known how to play, indeed!  But I was never better than a fifth-rate executant; I had never gone in for that; my “lay” was composition.  I couldn’t give piano lessons, I couldn’t play in public—­unless in a gargotte like the hole we have just left.  Oh, I tried everything.  I tried to get musical criticism to do for the newspapers.  Surely I was competent to do musical criticism.  But no—­they wouldn’t employ me.  I had ill luck, ill luck, ill luck—­nothing but ill luck, defeat, disappointment.  Was it the will of Heaven?  I wondered what unforgiveable sin I had committed to be punished so.  Do you know what it is like to work and pray and wait, day after day, and watch day after day come and go and bring you nothing?  Oh, I tasted the whole heart-sickness of hope deferred; Giant Despair was my constant bed-fellow.’