Falloden reproduced the scene, as described to him by the chief actor in it, when the inventor announced to his family that the thing was accomplished, the mechanism perfect, and how that very night they should hear Chopin’s great Fantasia, Op. 49, played by its invisible hands.
The moment came. Wife and children gathered breathless. Chaumart turned on the current, released the machinery.
‘Ecoutez, mes enfants! Ecoutez, Henriette!’
They listened—with ears, with eyes, with every faculty strained to its utmost. And nothing happened!—positively nothing—beyond a few wheezing or creaking sounds. The haggard inventor, in despair, chased everybody out of the room, and sat looking at the thing, wondering whether to smash it or kill himself. Then an idea struck him. In feverish haste he took the whole mechanism to pieces again, sitting up all night. And as the morning sun rose he discovered in the very heart of the creature, to which by now he attributed an uncanny and independent life, the most elementary blunder,—a vital connection missed between the power-supplying mechanism and the cylinders containing the records. He set it right; and nearly dead with fatigue and excitement, unlocked his door, and called his family back. Then what triumph! What falling on each other’s necks—and what a déjeuner in the Palais Royal—children and all—paid for by the inventor’s last napoleon!
All this Falloden told, and told well.
Connie could not restrain her pleasure as he came to the end of his tale. She clapped her hands in delight.
‘And when—when will it come?’
‘I must go over again—but I think the first days of January will see it here. I’ve only told you half—and the lesser half. It’s you that have done most—far most.’
And he took out a little note-book, running through the list of visits he had paid to her friends and correspondents in Paris, among whom the rolls were being collected, under Chaumart’s direction. The ‘Orpheus’ already had a large musical library of its own—renderings by some of the finest artists of some of the noblest music. Beethoven, Bach, Liszt, Chopin, Brahms, Schumann—all Otto’s favourite things, as far as Connie had been able to discover them, were in the catalogue.
Suddenly, her eyes filled with tears. She put down the note-book, and spoke in a low voice, as though her girlish joy in their common secret had suddenly dropped.