Standing in an erect attitude he was an appalling figure to behold, and the two lighted tapers in massive 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 Funèbre à 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 damned 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 brass 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 hellish. 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 anticipation 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 participants 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."