nlighten you in a measure. He was a
Eurasian. His father was an aristocratic Chinaman, and his mother a
Polish ballet-dancer--that was his parentage; but I would scarcely
hesitate to affirm that he came from Hell; and I shall presently show
you that he has certainly returned there.

You remember the strange stories current about him. The cunning ones
said that he had a clever press agent. This was true enough. One of
the most prominent agents in London discovered him playing in a Paris
cabaret. Two months later he was playing at the Queen's Hall, and
musical London lay at his feet.

He had something of the personality of Paganini, as you remember, except
that he was a smaller man; long, gaunt, yellowish hands and the face of
a haggard Mephistopheles. The critics quarrelled about him, as critics
only quarrel about real genius, and while one school proclaimed that
Tcheriapin had discovered an entirely new technique, a revolutionary
system of violin playing, another school was equally positive in
declaring that he could not play at all, that he was a mountebank, a
trickster, whose proper place was in a variety theatre.

There were stories, too, that were never published--not only about
Tcheriapin, but concerning the Strad, upon which he played. If all this
atmosphere of mystery which surrounded the man had truly been the work
of a press agent, then the agent must have been as great a genius as
his client. But I can assure you that the stories concerning Tcheriapin,
true and absurd alike, were not inspired for business purposes; they
grew up around him like fungi.

I can see him now, a lean, almost emaciated figure with slow,
sinuous movements and a trick of glancing sideways with those dark,
unfathomable, slightly oblique eyes. He could take up his bow in such a
way as to create an atmosphere of electrical suspense.

He was loathsome, yet fascinating. One's mental attitude toward him was
one of defence, of being tensely on guard. Then he would play.

You have heard him play, and it is therefore unnecessary for me to
attempt to describe the effect of that music. The only composition which
ever bore his name--I refer to "The Black Mass"--affected me on every
occasion when I heard it, as no other composition has ever done.

Perhaps it was Tcheriapin's playing rather than the music itself which
reached down into hitherto un-plumbed depths within me and awakened dark
things which, unsuspected, lay there sleeping. I never