He was a curious student of matters psychologic as well as musical.  A friendly laboratory had inducted him into many biologic mysteries.  Particularly fascinating to him was the tactile sense, that sense of touch wherewith man acquaints himself with this earth-clot swimming in space.  Davos contemplated the tips of his fingers as he sat in the grateful cool, his ten voices as he named them.  With them he sang, thundered, and thought upon the keyboard of his grand piano-forte.  A miracle, indeed, these slender cushions of fat, ramified by a network of nerves, sinews, and bones as exquisite in their mechanism as the motion of the planets.  If hearing is a miracle, so is touch; the ear is not a resonator, as has been so long maintained, but an apparatus which records variations of pressure.  This makes it subservient to the laws of sensation; touch and hearing are akin.  It aroused the pride of Davos after he had read the revolutionary theories of Pierre Bounier regarding the touch.  So subtle could the art of touch be cultivated, the pianist believed, that the blind could feel colour on the canvas of the painter.  He spent weeks experimenting with a sensitive manometer, gauging all the scale of dynamics.  No doubt these fumblings on the edge of a new science temporarily hurt his play.  With a dangerous joy he pressed the keys of his instrument, endeavouring to achieve more delicate shadings.  He quarrelled with the piano manufacturers for their obstinate adherence to the old-fashioned clumsy action; everything had been improved but the keyboard—­that alone was as coldly unresponsive and inelastic as a half-century ago.  He had fugitive dreams of wires that would vibrate like a violin.  The sounding-board of a pianoforte is too far from the pianist, while the violinist presses his strings as one kisses the beloved.  Little wonder it is the musical monarch.  A new pianoforte, with passionately coloured overtones, that could sob like a violoncello, sing like a violin, and resound with the brazen clangours of the orchestra—­Liszt had conceived this synthesis, had by the sheer force of his audacious genius compelled from his instrument ravishing tones that were never heard before or—­alas!—­since.

Even the antique harpsichord had its compensations; not so powerful in its tonal capacity, it nevertheless gave forth a pleading, human quality like the still small angelic voice.  Davos pondered these problems, pondered Chopin’s celestial touch and the weaving magic of his many-hued poems; Chopin—­Keats, Shelley, and Heine battling within the walls of a frail tender soul.

The sound of footsteps and voices aroused him.  He shivered with disgust.  More people!  Two men, well advanced in life, followed by two women, barely attracted his notice, until he saw that the little creature who waddled at the rear of the party was a Japanese in European clothes.  Notwithstanding her western garb, she resembled a print of Utamaro.  Beside her walked a tall, grave girl, with dark hair