"
My friend was an enthusiastic musician, being himself not only a very
capable performer, but a composer of no ordinary merit. All the afternoon
he sat in the stalls wrapped in the most perfect happiness, gently waving
his long thin fingers in time to the music, while his gently smiling face
and his languid, dreamy eyes were as unlike those of Holmes the
sleuth-hound, Holmes the relentless, keen-witted, ready-handed criminal
agent, as it was possible to conceive. In his singular character the dual
nature alternately asserted itself, and his extreme exactness and
astuteness represented, as I have often thought, the reaction against the
poetic and contemplative mood which occasionally predominated in him. The
swing of his nature took him from extreme languor to devouring energy;
and, as I knew well, he was never so truly formidable as when, for days on
end, he had been lounging in his armchair amid his improvisations and his
black-letter editions. Then it was that the lust of the chase would
suddenly come upon him, and that his brilliant reasoning power would rise
to the level of intuition, until those who were unacquainted with his
methods would look askance at him as on a man whose knowledge was not that
of other mortals. When I saw him that afternoon so enwrapped in the music
at St. James's Hall, I felt that an evil time might be coming upon those
whom he had set himself to hunt down.
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