“Come, then.”
We drained our coffee cups reluctantly, rose from the table, and stirred out into the hot passageway, Yvette and McTeague ahead, old Guilbert following with me, the poet trailing behind. Through little winding streets, dusky, sleepy, and sweltering we passed, and at length out beside the Maison du Roi and the golden Flemish splendours of the corporation halls and the Hôtel de Ville on the Grand’ Place. We wound through the lines of German sentries and up the steps of a new restaurant—the Café du Cid—up dirty, twisting stairs behind the bar rail, to the dancing-hall where Guilbert taught.
“Now,” he exclaimed in rapture, turning on his toes with a movement of astonishing grace for one so old and fat. “Monsieur le poète to the piano! Madame Yvette to the dressing-room, quick! Messieurs les Américains, seat yourselves, if you please! Quick! Quick! Quick! Everybody!
“Messieurs!” He flung up his fingers and addressed us as we sank languidly into chairs before the open windows. “It is a dance which I have myself composed—the dance of the ourang-outang. I am he—the great man-ape. I dance so.... Music!” he called to the poet at the piano. “Music! Moussorgsky—slow—terrible—so!”
The poet smote the ivory keys, keys yellow as the teeth of an old horse, and the dance began solo. Old Guilbert swayed and leaped over the dusty floor under the hanging lamps—swayed and leaped heavily, horribly, bestially, while the wild music of the piano panted and coughed through the room. The hot night air doubtless added to the grim effect on McTeague and me. I seemed to breathe the very exhalations of a jungle, and watched as if fascinated the contortions of the dancing-master.
As he danced he roared explanations and orders. “It is a forest, messieurs, and I, the ourang-outang, I dance in the moonlight under the trees, so, and so, and so; and as I dance I long for something to love, something to destroy. I am seeking here, there, as I dance.... Ah! I have found her—there, there!”
He made an extraordinary succession of leaps toward Madame Yvette’s dressing-room, and suddenly she floated out before us, her heavy body spinning on her toes, light as a cloud and almost as swift; her eyes half closed, her hands at her breast, a Liberty cap on her head; and at the end of her turn she sank quietly into a heap in the middle of the floor.
Guilbert’s horrid dance began again, and the rapid flow of his explanation: “She is asleep, messieurs, this fay in the forest.” He paused ecstatically before her. “I have found her, I love her, I will have her, I shall win her by my dancing.” He touched her on the breast. She leaped to her feet and spun across the floor like a whirlwind, terror and amazement and grace and voluptuousness all portrayed in her movements. The ape leaped after her, dancing round and round her, enmeshing her like a firefly in a cage of grass. Her eyes grew wider with terror, she danced this way and that, trying to escape him; he seized her, and she flew to right and left, still fast in his clutches; she leaped straight up, and he caught her firmly in his arms and yelled, actually yelled, with delight.
And then—it seems utterly impossible even as I tell it—into the music came a wild, unholy burst of “The Watch on the Rhine.” The two figures on the floor leaped and curveted. A hoarse cheer rose to us from outside, and below the windows I saw three ecstatic German soldiers swaying and bellowing applause.... The ape held the forest-fay securely as they danced.... It must have been the music which first warned me of change, for into the German hymn stole a wilder motif—the great chords of an alien theme intruded, fought, conquered, and swept over the fragments of the old, and like a wild mob of music bursting from prisons of silence poured forth the “Marseillaise.” The dance was symbolic, then: Germany and Europe! The conquest of the world!... The knit figures still swayed and leaped, but the ape was weakening. The taller figure of the woman slowly dominated and then submerged the male. With a sudden thrust she flung him prone, but the music went on. There came a howl at our backs, and I saw the soldiers in the square below waving their rifles and dancing with anger.