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
wastes.
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