The organ--there stood the organ but, musician as he
was, he could not play his score in reverse fashion. The thing was a
manifest impossibility. Then a light beat in upon his tortured brain.
The carpenter trembled for the conductor's reason.

"Look here, my boy," Pobloff blurted, "will you do me a favor? Just take
this music--these two pages to the organ factory. You know the address.
Tell the superintendent it is a matter of life or death to me. Promise
him money, opera tickets for the season, for two seasons, if he will
have this music reproduced, cut out, perforated, whatever it is--on a
roll that I can use in this organ. I must have it within an hour--or
soon as he can. Hurry him, stand over him, threaten him, curse him, beat
him, give him anything he asks--anything, do you hear?" Thrusting the
astonished fellow out of the room into the entry, into the street,
Pobloff barred the door and standing on one leg he hopped along the hall
like a gay frog, lustily trolling all the while a melancholy Russian
folk-song. Then throwing himself prostrate on the floor he spread out
his arms cruciform fashion and with a Slavic apathy that was fatalistic
awaited the return of the messenger.

* * * * *

The deadly solemnity of the affair had robbed it for him of its
strangeness, its abnormality; even his sense of its ludicrousness had
fled. He was consumed by a desire to see Luga once more. She had been a
burden: she was waspish of tongue and given to seeking the admiration of
others, notably that of the damnable horn-player--Pobloff clenched his
fists--but she was his wife, Luga, and could tell him what he wished
most to know....

He seemed to have spent a week, his face pressed to the boards, his eyes
concentrated on the uneven progress of a file of ants in a crack. The
cautious tap at the stage door had not ceased before he was there
seizing in a clutch of iron the carpenter. "The rolls! Have you got them
with you?" he gasped. A cylinder was shoved into his eager hand and with
it he fled to the auditorium, not even shutting the doors behind him.
What did he care now? He was sure of victory. Placing the roll in
reverse order in the cylinder he started the mechanism of the organ.
Slowly, as if the grave were unwilling to give up its prey the music
began to whimper, wheeze and squeak. It was sounding backward and it
sounded three times before the unhappy man saw failure once more
blinking at him m