Old Fogy Part 10

The concerto was played in a dreary fashion, and only the strenuous efforts of the attendants on each side of the soloist kept him from going off into a sound nap during every tutti. The rest of the piano program was almost the same story. The Steibelt selection, the old-fashioned _L'Orage_, was no storm at all, but a feeble, maundering up and down the keyboard. The Czerny fugue was better and the performance of the same composer's _Velocity Studies_ was a marvel of lightness and one might almost say volubility. In these etudes his wonderful stiff arm octave playing, in the real old-fashioned manner, showed itself, for in every run in single notes he introduced octaves.

The applause after this was so great and the flappers at the pianist's side plied him so vigorously that the Gospadin actually began playing the _Hexameron_, that remarkably difficult and old set of variations on the march in _Puritani_, by Liszt, Chopin, Pixis, and Thalberg.

These he played, it must be confessed, in a masterly manner, but at the end he introduced a variation, prodigious as to difficulty, which I failed to recognize as ever having seen it in the printed copy of the composition. Again my right-hand neighbor, appearing to antic.i.p.ate my question on the subject, informed me that it was by Bundelcund himself, and that he had been angered beyond control by the refusal of the publishers to print it with the rest, and had written a lengthy letter to Liszt on the subject, in which he told him that he considered him a charlatan along with Henselt, Chopin, Hiller, and Thalberg, and that he was the _only_ pianist worth speaking of, which information threw an interesting side light on our Asiatic virtuoso's character, and showed that he was made of about the same metal, after all, as most of your European manipulators of ivory.

By this time the stage had been cleared of the piano and the litter, and a conductor's stand was brought forward, draped in black velvet trimmed with white, and appropriately wreathed with tuberoses, whose deathly-sweet odor diffused itself throughout the house and caused an unpleasant shudder to circulate through the audience, who were beginning to realize the mockery of this modern dance of death, but who remained to see the end of the sad comedy. The orchestra, which was reinforced by several uncanny looking instruments, strange even to Asiatic eyes, were seated, and then the dusky servants lifted with infinite care the aged Bundelcund into a standing posture, placed him at the stand, and while four held him there the two flappers were so unremitting in their attentions that one might suppose the old man's face would be sore, were it not for its almost total absence of flesh, and also his long, thick hair, which fell far below his waist.

Standing in an erect att.i.tude he was an appalling figure to behold, and the two lighted tapers in ma.s.sive candelabras on each side of the desk lighted up his face with an unholy and gruesome glare. The funereal aspect of the scene was heightened by the house being in total darkness, and though many women had fainted, oppressed by the charnel-house atmosphere that surrounded us, still the audience as a whole remained spellbound in their seats. The medical man now plied the conductor-pianist with the contents of the mysterious phial, and placing a long, white ostrich plume in his hand, he made a signal for the orchestra to begin. The conductor, despite his deafness, appeared to comprehend what was going on and feebly waved the plume in air, and the first gloomy chords of the _Marche Funebre a la Tartare_ were heard. Of all the funeral marches ever penned this composition certainly outdid them all in diabolical waitings and the gnashing of teeth of d.a.m.ned souls.

It was the funeral march of some mid-Asiatic pachyderm, and the whole herd were howling their grief in a manner which would put Wagner, Berlioz, and Meyerbeer to shame; for such a use of bra.s.s had never been even dreamed of, and the peculiar looking instruments I first spoke of now came to the fore and the din they raised was positively h.e.l.lish.

Those who could see the composer's face afterward declared it was wreathed in smiles, but this, of course, I could not see; but I did see, and we all saw, after the rather abrupt end of the march (which finished after a long-drawn-out suspension, _capo d'astro_, resolved by the use of the diseased chord of the minor thirteenth into a dissipated fifth), the venerable virtuoso suddenly collapse, and suddenly fall into the arms of the attendants, whose phlegm, while being thoroughly Oriental, still smacked of antic.i.p.ation of this very event. Instantly the lights went out and a panic ensued, everyone getting into the street somehow or other. I found myself there side by side with my neighbor, who informed me in an oracular manner that he had expected this all along.

Then an immense crowd, angered by the cruel exhibition which they had witnessed, searched high and low for the miscreant and mercenary great-grandchildren who had so ruthlessly sacrificed their talented progenitor for the sake of pelf, but they were nowhere to be found, and they doubtlessly had escaped with their booty to a safe place. The doctor had also disappeared and with him all traces of the Gospadin Bundelcund, and soon after sinister rumors were spread that the man we had heard performing was a _dead man_ (horrible idea!) that he had been dead for years, but by the aid of that new and yet undeveloped science, hypnotism, he had been revived and made to automatically perform, and that the whole ghastly mummery was planned to make money. Certain it was that we never heard of any of the partic.i.p.ants in the affair again, and I write to you knowing that American readers will be interested in this queer musical and psychical prodigy. His epitaph might be given in a slightly altered quotation, "Butchered to make a Laputian's holiday."