A thin rift of sunshine fell across Pobloff's nose and awoke him. He sat
up. It took fully five minutes for self-orientation, and the fixed idea
bored vainly at his forehead. He groaned as he realized the hopelessness
of the situation. Sometime the truth would have to be told. The
king--what would His Majesty not say! Pobloff's life was in danger; he
had no doubt on that head. At the best, if he escaped the infuriated
women he would be cast into prison, or else wander an exile, all his
hopes of glory gone. The prospect was chilling. If he had only kept the
score--the score, where was it? In a moment he was on his feet,
rummaging the stage for the missing music. It had vanished. Pobloff
jumped from the platform to the spot where he had fallen; his sharp eye
saw something white beneath the overturned music-stand. It did not take
long to reveal the missing _partitur_. All was there, not a leaf
missing, though some rumpled and soiled. When Pobloff had tumbled into
the aisle, miraculously escaping a dislocated neck, the music and the
rack had kept him company. Curiously he fingered the manuscript. Yes,
there was the fatal spot! He gazed at the strange combination of
instruments on the page in his own nervous handwriting. How came the
cataclysm? Vainly the composer scanned the various clefs, vainly he
strove to endow with significance the sparse bunches of notes scattered
over the white ruled paper. He saw the violins in the highest, most
screeching position; saw them disappear like a battalion of tiny
balloons in a cloud. No, it was not by the violins the dread enigma was
solved. But there were few other instruments on the leaf except the
harp. Pooh! The harp was innocent enough with its fantastic spray of
arpeggios; it was used only as gilding to warm the bitter, wiry tone of
the fiddles. No, it was not the harp, Pobloff decided. The tam-tam, a
pulsatile instrument! Perhaps its mordant sound coupled to the hissing
of the fiddles, the cheeping of the wood-wind, and the roll of the harp;
perhaps--and then he was gripped by a thrilling thought.
He paced the length of the empty hall talking aloud. What an idea! Why
not put it into execution at once? But how? Pobloff moaned as he
realized its futility. He could secure no other musicians because every
one that once resided in Balak had disappeared; there was no hope for
their recrudescence. He tramped the parquet like a savage hyena. To
play the symphonic poem again, to rescue from eternity his lost Luga,
his lost comrades, to hear their extraordinary stories!... Trembling
seized him. If the work could by any possibility be played again would
not the same awful fate overtake the new men and perhaps himself?
Decidedly that way would be courting disaster.
As he strode desperately toward the stage, staring at its polished
boards as if to extort their secret, he discerned the shining pipes of
the monster mechanical organ that Balakian municipal pride had imported
and installed there. Pobloff was a man of fertile invention: the organ
might serve his purpose. But then came the discouraging knowledge that
he could not play it well enough. No matter; he would make the attempt.
He clambered over the stage, reached the instrument, threw open the case
and inspected the manuals. By pulling out various stops he soon had a
fair reproduction of the instrumental effects of his score. Trembling,
he placed the music upon the rack, tremblingly he touched the button
that set in movement the automatic motor. Forgetting the danger of
detection, he set pealing in all its diapasonic majesty this Synthesis
of Instruments. He reached the enchanted passage, he played it, his
knees knocking like an undertaker's hammer, his fingers glued to the
keys by moisty fear. The abysm was easily traversed; nothing occurred.
Despair crowned the head of Pobloff, pressing spikes of remorse into
his sweating brow. What could be the reason? Ah, there was no tam-tam!
He rushed into the music-room and soon returned with an old, rusty
Chinese gong. Again the page was played, the tam-tam's thin edge set
shivering with mournful resonance. And again there was no result.
Pobloff cursed the organ, cursed the gong, cursed his life, cursed the
universe.
The door opened and the stage carpenter peeped in. "Say, Mr. Pobloff, do
come and have your coffee! The coast's clear. All the women have gone
away to the country on a wild goose chase." His voice was kind though
his expression was one of suspicion. Pobloff did seem a trifle mad. He
went into the property room. As he drank his coffee the other watched
him. Suddenly Pobloff let out a huge cry of satisfaction. "Fool! Dolt!
Idiot that I am! Of course the passage will have to be played backward
to get them to return, to disenchant the symphony!" He leaped with joy.
"Yes, governor, but you've upset your coffee," said the carpenter
warningly. Pobloff heard nothing. The problem now was to play that vile
passage backward. The organ--there stood the organ but, musician as he
was, he could not play his score in reverse fashion. The thing was a
manifest impossibility. Then a light beat in upon his tortured brain.
The carpenter trembled for the conductor's reason.
"Look here, my boy," Pobloff blurted, "will you do me a favor? Just take
this music--these two pages to the organ factory. You know the address.
Tell the superintendent it is a matter of life or death to me. Promise
him money, opera tickets for the season, for two seasons, if he will
have this music reproduced, cut out, perforated, whatever it is--on a
roll that I can use in this organ. I must have it within an hour--or
soon as he can. Hurry him, stand over him, threaten him, curse him, beat
him, give him anything he asks--anything, do you hear?" Thrusting the
astonished fellow out of the room into the entry, into the street,
Pobloff barred the door and standing on one leg he hopped along the hall
like a gay frog, lustily trolling all the while a melancholy Russian
folk-song. Then throwing himself prostrate on the floor he spread out
his arms cruciform fashion and with a Slavic apathy that was fatalistic
awaited the return of the messenger.
* * * * *
The deadly solemnity of the affair had robbed it for him of its
strangeness, its abnormality; even his sense of its ludicrousness had
fled. He was consumed by a desire to see Luga once more. She had been a
burden: she was waspish of tongue and given to seeking the admiration of
others, notably that of the damnable horn-player--Pobloff clenched his
fists--but she was his wife, Luga, and could tell him what he wished
most to know....
He seemed to have spent a week, his face pressed to the boards, his eyes
concentrated on the uneven progress of a file of ants in a crack. The
cautious tap at the stage door had not ceased before he was there
seizing in a clutch of iron the carpenter. "The rolls! Have you got them
with you?" he gasped. A cylinder was shoved into his eager hand and with
it he fled to the auditorium, not even shutting the doors behind him.
What did he care now? He was sure of victory. Placing the roll in
reverse order in the cylinder he started the mechanism of the organ.
Slowly, as if the grave were unwilling to give up its prey the music
began to whimper, wheeze and squeak. It was sounding backward and it
sounded three times before the unhappy man saw failure once more
blinking at him mockingly. But he was not to be denied. He re-read the
score, set it going on the organ, then picked up the tam-tam. "These old
Chinese ghosts caused the trouble once and they can cause it again," he
muttered; and striking the instrument softly, the music for the fourth
time went on its way quivering, its rear entering the world first....
* * * * *
The terrified carpenter, in relating the affair later swore that the
darkness was black as the wings of Satan. A lightning flash had ended
the music; then he heard feet pausing in the gloom, and from his
position in the doorway he saw the stage crowded with men, the musicians
of the Balakian orchestra, all scraping, blaring and pounding away at
the symphony, Pobloff, stick in hand, beating time, his eyes closed in
bliss, his back arched like a cat's.
When they had finished playing, Pobloff wiped his forehead and said,
"Thank you, gentlemen. That will do for to-day." They immediately began
to gabble, hastily putting away their instruments; while from without
entered a crazy stream of women weeping, laughing, and scolding. In five
minutes the hall was emptied of them all. Pobloff turned to Luga. She
eyed him demurely, as she covered with historic green baize her brave
harp.
"Well," she said, joining him, "well! Give an account of yourself, sir!"
Pobloff watched her, completely stupefied. Only his discipline, his
routine had carried him through this tremendous resurrection: he had
beaten time from a sense of duty--why he found himself at the head of
his band he understood not. He only knew that the experiment of playing
the enchanted symphony backward was a success: that it had become
disenchanted; that Luga, his violet, his harpist, his wife was restored
to him to bring him the wonderful tidings. He put his arms around her.
She drew back in her primmest attitude.
"No, not yet, Pobloff. Not until you tell me where you have been all
day." He sat down and wept, wept as if his heart would strain and crack;
and then the situation poking him in the risible rib he laughed until
Luga herself relaxed.
"It may be very funny to you, husband, and no doubt you've had a jolly
time, but you've not told where or with whom." Pobloff seized her by the
wrists.
"Where were _you_? What have you been doing, woman? What was it like,
that strange country which you visited, and from which you are so
marvellously returned to me like a stone upcast by a crater?" She lifted
her eyebrows in astonishment.
"You know, Pobloff, I have warned you about your tendency to apoplexy.
You bother your brain, such as it is, too much with figures. Stick to
your last, Mr. Shoemaker, and don't eat so much. When you fell off the
stage this morning I was sure you were killed, and we were all very much
alarmed. But after the hornist told us you would be all right in a few
hours, we--" "Whom do you mean by _we_, Luga?" "The men, of course."
"And you saw me faint?" "Certainly, Pobloff."
"Where did you go, wife?" "Go? Nowhere. We remained here. Besides, the
doors were locked, and the men couldn't get away." "And you saw nothing
strange, did not notice that you were out of my sight, out of the
town's sight, for over thirty hours?" "Pobloff," she vixenishly
declared, "you've been at the vodka."
"And so there is no true perception of time in the fourth dimension of
space," he sadly reflected. His brows became dark with jealousy: "What
did you do all the time?" That accursed horn-player in her company for
over a day!
"Do?" "Yes," he repeated, "do? Were there no wonderful sights? Didn't
you catch a glimpse, as through an open door, of rare planetary vistas,
of a remoter plane of existence? Were there no grandiose and untrodden
stars? O Luga, tell me!--you are a woman of imagination--what did you
see, hear, feel in that many-colored land, out of time, out of space?"
"See?" she echoed irritably, for she was annoyed by her husband's poetic
foolery, "what could I see in this hall? When the men weren't grumbling
at having nothing to drink, they were playing _pinochle_."
"They played cards in the fourth dimension of space!" Pobloff boomed out
reproachfully, sorrowfully. Then he went meekly to his home with Luga,
the harpist.