--MACBETH.
Pobloff began to whistle the second theme of his symphony. He was a
short, round-bellied man with a high head upon which stood quill-like
hair; when he smiled, his little lunar eyes closed completely, and his
vast mouth opened--a trap filled with white blocks of polished bone;
when he laughed, it sounded like a snorting tuba.... Nature had
hesitated whether to endow him with the profile of Punch or Napoleon. He
was dark, not in the least dangerous, and a native of Russia, though
long a resident of Balak. Pobloff's wife dusted the music on the top of
his old piano. "In God's name, Luga, let my manuscript in peace," he
adjured her. She snapped at him, but he continued whistling. "More
original music?" She was ironically inquisitive as she danced about the
white porcelain stove, tumbled over scores that littered the apartment
as grass grown wild in a deserted alley; pushed violin cases that
rattled; upset an empty bird-cage and finally threw wide back the
metal-slatted shutters, admitting an inundation of sunshine.... It was
early May, but in Balak, with its southeastern Europe climate, the
weather was warm as a July day in Paris. "Hurrah!" Pobloff suddenly
bellowed, "I have it, I have it!" Luga glanced at him sourly. "I suppose
you'll set the world on fire this time for sure, my man; and then little
Richard Strauss will be asking for advice! What are you going to call
the new symphonic poem, Pobloff? Oh, name it after me!" She shrieked
down the passage way at a slouching maid, and ran out, leaving Pobloff
jolly and unruffled.
"Ouf!" he ejaculated, as her sarcasm finally penetrated his
consciousness, "I'll call it 'The Fourth Dimension'--that's what I will.
Luga! Where's that idle cat? Luga, some tea, tea, I'm thirsty." And he
again whistled the second theme of his new symphony.
I
Pobloff loved mathematics more than music--and he adored music. He was
fond of comparing the two, and often quoted Leibnitz: "Music is an
occult exercise of the mind unconsciously performing arithmetical
calculations." For him, so he assured his friends, music was a species
of sensual mathematics. Before he left St. Petersburg to settle in Balak
as its Kapellmeister he had studied at the University under the famous
Lobatchewsky, and absorbed from him not a few of the radical theories
containing the problematic fourth dimension. He read with avid interest
of J. K. F. Zöllner's experiments which drove that unfortunate Leipzig
physicist into incurable melancholia. Ah, what madmen these! Perpetual
motion, squaring the circle, the fourth spatial dimension--all new
variants of the old alchemical mystery, the vain pursuit of the
philosophers' stone, the transmutation of the baser metals, the
cabalistic Abracadabra, the quest of the absolute! Yet sincere and
certainly quite sane men of scientific training had considered seriously
this mathematic hypothesis. Cayley, Pobloff had read, and Abbot's
"Flatland"; while the ingenious speculations of W. K. Clifford and the
American, Simon Newcomb, fascinated him immeasurably. He cared
little--being idealist and musician--for the grosser demonstrations of
hyper-normal phenomena, though for a time he had wavered before the
mysterious cross-roads of demoniac possession, subliminal divinations,
and the strange rappings that emanate from souls smothered in hypnotic
slumber. The testimony of such a man as Professor Crookes who had
witnessed feats of human levitation greatly stirred him; but in the end
he drifted back to his early passions--music and mathematics.
Zöllner had proved to his own satisfaction the existence of a fourth
dimension, when he turned an India-rubber ball inside out without
tearing it; but Pobloff, a man of tone, was more absorbed in the
demonstration that Time could be shown in two dimensions. He often
quoted Hugh Craig, who compared Time to a river always flowing, yet a
permanent river: If one emerged from this stream at a certain moment and
entered it an hour later, would it not signify that Time had two
dimensions? And music--where did music stand in the eternal scheme of
things? Was not harmony with its vertical structure and melody's
horizontal flow, proof that music itself was but another dimension in
Time? In the vast and complicated scores of Richard Strauss, the
listener has set in motion two orders of auditions: he hears the music
both horizontally and vertically. This combination of the upright and
the transverse amused Pobloff immensely. He declared, with his
inscrutable giggle, that all other arts were childish in their demands
upon the intellect when compared to music. "You can see pictures, poems,
sculpture, and architecture--but music you must hear, see, feel, smell,
taste, to apprehend it rightfully: and all at the same time!" Pobloff
shook his heavy head and tried to look solemn. "Think of it! With every
sense and several more besides, going in different directions,
brilliantly sputtering like wet fireworks, roaring like mighty
cataracts!" Ah, it was a noble, crazy art, and the only art, except
poetry, that moved. All the rest are beautiful gestures arrested....
Pobloff ate five meals a day, and sometimes expanding his chest to its
utmost and extending his arms to the zenith, yawned prodigiously. Born a
true pessimist, often was bored to the extreme by existence. In addition
to the fortnightly symphony concerts and their necessary rehearsals, he
did nothing but compose and dream of new spaces to conquer. He was a
Czar over his orchestra, and though a fat, good-humored man, had a
singularly nasty temper.
Convinced that in music lay the solution of this particular mathematical
problem, he had been working for over a year on a symphonic poem which
he jocularly christened "The Abysm." Untouched by his wife's daily
tauntings--she was an excellent musician and harpist in his band--he
could not help admitting to his interior self, that she was right in her
aspersions on his originality: Richard Strauss had shown him the way.
Pobloff decided to leave map and compass behind, and march out with his
music into some new country or other--he did not much care where. Could
but the fourth dimension be traced to tone, to his tones, then would his
name resound throughout the ages; for what was the feat of Columbus
compared with this exploration of a vaster spiritual America! Pobloff
trembled. He was so transported by the idea, that his capacious frame
and large head became enveloped in a sort of magnetic halo. He diffused
enthusiasm as a swan sheds water; and his men did not grumble at the
numerous extra rehearsals, for they realized that their chief might
make an important discovery.
The composer was a stern believer in absolute music. For him the charms
of scenery, lights, odor, costume, singers, and the subtle voice of the
prompter seemed factitious, mere excrescences on the fair surface of
art. But he was a born colorist, and sought to arouse the imagination by
stupendous orchestral effects, frescoes of tone wherein might be
discerned terrifying perspectives, sinister avenues of drooping trees
melting into iron dusks. If Pobloff was a mathematician, he was also a
painter-poet. He did not credit the theory of the alienists, that the
confusion of tone and color--_audition colorée_--betrayed the existence
of a slight mental lesion; and he laughed consumedly at the notion of
confounding musicians with madmen.
"Then my butcher and baker are just as mad," he asserted; and swore that
a man could both pray and think of eating at the same time. Why should
the highly organized brain of a musician be considered abnormal because
it could see tone, hear color, and out of a mixture of sound and
silence, fashion images of awe and sweetness for a wondering,
unbelieving world? If Man is a being afloat in an ocean of vibrations,
as Maurice de Fleury wrote, then any or all vibrations are possible. Why
not a synthesis? Why not a transposition of the _neurons_--according to
Ramon y Cajal being little erectile bodies in the cells of the cortex,
stirred to reflex motor impulse when a message is sent them from the
sensory nerves? The crossing of filaments occurs oftener than imagined,
and Pobloff, knowing these things, had boundless faith in his
enterprise. So when he cried aloud, "I have it!" he really believed that
at last he saw the way clear; and his symphonic poem was to be the key
which would unlock the great mystery of existence.