great Hall of
Ebony, and there, quite alone, he sat waiting for some cue to begin.
None came. He glanced curiously about him. For all the signs of humanity
he might as well have been on the heights of Kerb, out among its thorny
groves, or in its immemorial forests. He preluded as he gazed around. He
could see, by the dim light of two flambeaux set in gold sconces, column
after column of blackness receding into inky depths of darkness. A
fringe of light encircled his instrument, and beside him was a gallery,
so vast that it became a gulf of the infinite at a hundred paces. Now,
Pobloff was a brave man. He believed that once upon a time he had peered
into strange crevices of space; what novelty could existence hold for
him after that shuddering experience? Again he looked into the tenebrous
recesses of the hall. He saw nothing, heard nothing.

His fingers went their own way over the keyboard. Finally, following
some latent impulse, they began to shape the opening measures of
Chopin's Second Ballade, the one of the enigmatic tonalities, sometimes
called _The Lake of the Mermaids_. It began with the chanting, childish
refrain, a Lithuanian fairy-tale of old, and as its naive, drowsy,
lulling measures--the voices of wicked, wooing sirens--sang and sank in
recurrent rhythms, Pobloff heard--this time he was sure--the regular
reverberation of distant footsteps. It was as if the monotonous beat of
the music were duplicated in some sounding mirror, some mirror that
magnified hideously, hideously mimicked the melody. Yet these footfalls
murmured as a sea-shell. Every phrase stood out before the pianist,
exquisitely clear; his brain had only once before harboured such an
exalted mood. There was the expectation of great things coming to pass;
dim rumours of an apocalyptic future, when the glory that never was on
sea or land should rend the veil of the visible and make clear all that
obscures and darkens. The transfiguration which informs the soul of one
taken down in epileptic seizure possessed him. Every cranny of his being
was flooded with overmastering light--and the faint sound of footsteps
marking sinister time to his music, drew closer, closer.

Shaking off an insane desire to join his voice in the immortal choiring
of the Cherubim, Pobloff dashed into the passionate storm-scream of the
music, and like a pack of phantom bloodhounds the footsteps pressed him
in the race. He played as run men from starving wolves in Siberian
wa