It was an unusual situation which had me on my guard from the first. Holmes owed me, and dinner and a concert had been the agreed upon price. However, the concert he chose mystified me.
A lesser known quartet of lesser known musicians was playing a small venue, offering the works of an entirely unknown composer. Or, at least, the fellow's name was entirely unknown to me, and I said as much.
"I know him," Holmes admitted with the queerest quirk of a smile, "quite well, actually. I think you'd be very interested to hear his work, Watson."
"If you are so enthusiastic about it I'd have to disagree," I muttered, "our tastes differ wildly, after all."
Holmes glanced at me sidelong from beneath arched brows. "Rather looking a gift horse in the mouth aren't you?"
"Not at all. In all fairness, we ought to have gone to a concert of my choosing."
Holmes chuckled.
"Really, Holmes, after -"
"Let's not go into it again," he said with a wince. "If this doesn't suit, then some other evening -"
I waved a hand, smiling at him in spite of myself, so contrite and uncomfortable did he appear. "I'm only playing, Holmes."
"Are you?"
"Mostly. You apologize so rarely it's entertaining when you can be induced to do so."
Holmes rolled his eyes. We disembarked from our cab and were soon taking our seats in the concert hall. I was mystified a bit further when we passed inside and without preamble or so much as presenting a ticket Holmes led us to what had to be one of the better boxes in the house.
He slouched into one of the seats as was his habit, and favored me with one of those elusive genuine smiles of his as I settled with some caution and mistrust into mine.
"I promise our being here is perfectly legitimate," he insisted, laughing. He'd read my mind, again, it seemed.
"Well, I know enough of detection to recognize your modus operandi, Holmes -"
"My modus operandi - !"
"You are a very audacious thief in the instances the appellation can be applied to you. If we were going to slip into any box and merely insist that it was ours -"
"Watson," Holmes laughed again, "I've told you that the composer is an acquaintance of mine. Do you think I'd pull a gammon like that when this is all in the interest of making amends?"
"Especially then," I replied. "But since you know the composer I suppose I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. These must be very expensive seats -"
Holmes cut me off with a derisive snort.
"Were they not?" I probed.
"Bloody hell, Watson," Holmes sighed, finally beginning to show some signs of irritation.
I took this as my cue to leave well enough alone, and asked him no further questions.
None the less, his reasons for insisting that we attend this concert in particular continued to be a mystery to me.
The mystery only deepened when the house lights finally dimmed and the curtain rose.
It really was a plain little venue, but the opening notes left little doubt as to the quality of the acoustics. It was one grand, swelling chord that spanned the whole range of the quartet. All the musicians seemed to be playing double stops so the effect was that the entire hall resonated with the low notes, like the rumbling of a landslide, and sang with the clear sweetness of the high notes. It was like a breeze during an earthquake. This cord rolled and swelled into another, and then another, so that the earthquake and the breeze seemed to become waves pounding the hall, like the surf tumbling and crashing against the sea cliffs of the coast. It was very impressionistic and illustrative, and yet the emotion it conjured up was straightforward. It was equally reminiscent of the violent waves as of silent weeping.
So dramatic and diverting was this that at first I failed to notice how aberrant Holmes' behavior had become. Ironically, while I found myself wholly enthralled by the music for once, he seemed not engaged by it at all. While I ought to have found him in his usual attitude, with his head tipped back and his eyes closed, lost to the world - oftentimes I'd observed that he would even, by some strange instinct, breath in time with a piece that struck him particularly - he was instead watching me intently over steepled fingers.
"What do you think?" he asked, leaning in close and speaking into my ear at the questioning look I'd shot him.
"I've never heard anything like it," I said truthfully. Meanwhile the chords rose and fell in tide like progression, until they quieted finally and the tempo picked up, the music sublimating into a series of technical, complicated scales handled mostly by the violin but accentuated to stunning effect by the lower instruments. The waves were now a rain storm. "In all honesty it sounds a bit like it was written by some manically depressed conglomerate of Grieg and Paganini," I added. "Who perhaps admired Debussy."
Holmes seemed strangely undecided as to whether or not to be amused or disappointed by this.
"Nothing about it strikes you as familiar?" he asked.
I did not know why it should. "How could it? This composer friend of yours is certainly original - if he has yet to gain any great popularity it is only because he's the first of his kind."
Odder still, I recognized here the quickly suppressed curl of a smile at the corner of my friend's mouth and the manner in which he casually glanced back to the performers as the sort of mannerisms he was liable to adopt when deeply flattered. I may as well have congratulated him sincerely on some hard won achievement in a case.
Soon, however, my suspicions were lost once again as my attention became arrested by the music.
The character of the piece seemed to me to suggest an enigma. It may have been an emotional confession - but it only dipped here and there towards the truth, as though the confessor could allude to, but would not say outright, whatever secret they were keeping. It was a forceful sort of denial, however - an insistence upon a boundary - and not a coy refusal that it brought to mind.
The piece was certainly beautiful, but in the sense that a bright light scattering off cut glass is beautiful - intense and severe, making no pretension of appeal to the softer senses, demanding to be accepted for what it was. Although I would not have expected to be, I found myself very attracted to this quality. The piece held my attention totally as I took in its various nuances, attempting to understand it. I was actually annoyed when Holmes leaned towards me again and broke in upon my thoughts.
"Are you sure you don't recognize any of this?"
"I've said that the complexity and technicality remind me a bit of Paganini," I replied tersely, "And the heavy chords are a bit like Grieg."
One of Holmes' brows arched sardonically. "I'll give you a hint, then," he said. "In two measures, think about what happened the other night when I was up playing my violin and you came downstairs and told me to be quiet."
I hardly knew what to make of this. My grasp of music theory was sufficiently weak as to render the idea of my accurately counting two measures of the intricate piece almost absurd. Fortunately, I suppose, the clue Holmes had given turned out to be very obvious.
I could not miss the change in the mood of the piece.
The chords came hard and fast upon one another, blending and diverging like light refracted through a prism until finally crashing into silence. Then, like smoke from the rubble of an explosion, a much softer, drifting tune arose. It was quiet and gentle, but elusive, the violin playing in the middle of its range and the rest of the instruments humming around it and bearing it up as opposed to pointedly accentuating what it played. And yet for all the differences this part of the piece bore to what preceded it, one could steal easily recognize the same thread running through the whole thing, the same basis underlying it - two different shades painted on one canvas, complementing one another.
And, quite suddenly, I felt like a complete fool.
All along I had been missing it - I knew exactly who's playing the piece reminded me of, and it wasn't Grieg.
I whirled towards Holmes, my jaw dropping. He smiled, looking down at his steepled fingers as opposed to returning my gaze.
"You see what inspired the second movement, then?"
"Good God!" I cried, under my breath so as not to disturb the whole hall, "someone has taken your scales and chords and made a song of them!"
"I, Watson," Holmes corrected a bit petulantly. "I have taken my scales and chords and made a song of them. I told you you did me an injustice when you said I produced nothing like music when playing for my own enjoyment."
"I wholeheartedly take it back!" I declared. "What part of this were you playing when I interrupted you that night?"
Holmes could not suppress a pleased smile here. "I was putting the finishing touches on the Bass's part. It's very monochromatic without the other instruments, and a violin has different strings so I agree that it sounded horrid then -"
"I can't believe that you wrote this," I interjected, shaking my head. "I never knew you wrote music at all, Holmes."
"Nothing as complete as this, before" he admitted. "Really it was something of an experiment on my part - to write down what I played. Such as it is," he added cheekily, "I've made enough on it to cover dinner."
We listened to the rest of the piece in silence - I with a whole new perspective on it, and Holmes approximating more closely his usual manner of listening to music, though with a critical air of examination as I suppose indicated an only natural concern for the handling of his piece.
"What did you call it?" I asked once the final notes had died down.
Holmes shrugged. "String quartet in G minor movements one through four."
"Really? Only that?"
Holmes screwed up his mouth and rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. "I may have titled the second movement something unflattering about cross flatmates."
I daresay he thought of a better name for at least one of the other movements when I pointed out jokingly that treating me to a concert from which he'd turned enough of a profit to render paying for dinner no expense hardly cancelled his debt.
