For a second he stood just as he was, like one suddenly frozen, then he settled into his coat, walked over to his work chair and dropped into it, leaning forward and propping up his head with his hands. "Yes," he said. "In a way, perhaps, there is some one. That's what I was going to tell you about. She came in as quiet as a little ghost, just as Mrs. Wollaston was beginning to sing and she sat down beside me without a word. And somehow while we listened, we—we were the same person. I can't make you understand that. It never happened to me before, nothing in the least like it, nothing so—intimate. I felt that song go vibrating right through her. She didn't speak at all, even after it was over, except to say that we mustn't talk—while we were waiting for the people in the other room to go away. And then Mrs. Wollaston came and got me. She didn't see her at all. She had disappeared somehow by that time."
He stopped but Jennie, it seemed, had nothing to say just then. She turned away to her outdoor wrap but she laid it down again and stood still when he went on.
"You don't want to run away with the idea that I'm in love with her," he said. "That isn't it. That's particularly—not it. I haven't an idea who she is nor any intention of trying to find out. Even if I knew the way to begin getting acquainted with her, I'm inclined to think I'd avoid it. But as an abstraction—no, that's not what I mean—as a symbol of what I'll find waiting for me whenever I get down to the core of things … I've got a sort of—superstition if I don't do anything to—to break the spell, you know, that sometime she'll come back just the way she came that night."
With a little exaggeration of the significance of the act, she put on the coat she had crossed the room to get. He got up and came over to help her but he stopped with a sudden clenching of the hands, and a wave of color in his face as he saw the look in hers. At that she came swiftly to meet him, pulled him up in a tight embrace and kissed him.
"Good luck, my dear," she said. "I must be running and so must you. I'd take you with me only we go different ways. Carry your score along to the Wollastons. That's the first step to the princess, I guess."
CHAPTER IX
IN HARNESS
The episode upon which March had built the opera he called The Outcry, was one that was current during the autumn of 1914. A certain Belgian town had been burnt and it had been officially explained that this was done because the German officer who was billeted upon the burgomaster had been shot. The story was that the burgomaster's son shot him because he had raped his sister. The thing got complete possession of March's mind. At first just the horror of it and later its dramatic and musical possibilities. He saw, in orchestral terms, the sodden revelry in that staid house—with its endless cellars of Burgundy. He saw the tight-drawn terror in the girl's room where she lay in bed. He saw the room lighted fitfully by the play of searchlights over the city; the sinister entrance from a little balcony through the French widow, of the officer in uniform, his shadow flung ahead of him by the beam of the searchlight. He saw the man, blood—as well as wine—drunk, garrulous and fanatic with the megalomania of the conquering invader. He saw the man's intention made clear from the first, but the execution of it luxuriously postponed. Safely postponed because of the terrified girl's acceptance of his assurance that if anything happened to him, if a hand were raised against him, her father and a dozen more hostages would be shot and the town burned to the ground. Then came the girl's irrepressible outcry when he first touched her; the brother's knock at the door; her frantic effort to reassure him frustrated by the officer's drunken laugh; the forcing of the door and the fight half in the dark; the killing of the girl and then of her ravisher.
The thing that wouldn't let March alone, that forced him into the undertaking, was the declaration of the brutal philosophy of the conqueror made by the officer while he gloated over the girl who was to be his prey; the chance to put into musical terms that paranoiac delusion of world conquest. One recognized in it, vaguely, some of 'Wagner's themes and some of Straus', distorted and grown monstrous.
The thing had haunted March, as I have said, and he had tried to find somebody who would write him the book, the indispensable preliminary to his getting to work. Failing here, he had audaciously made up his mind to write it himself. It was not his first attempt to do, in the mere light of nature, a thing commonly supposed to be impossible except at the end of painful instruction. He had once experimented at painting in oils, he had tried his hand at the stylus, he had made a few figurines in modeling-wax. He wrote his play, then, by the simple process of building first with painstaking accuracy, a model of his stage, the girl's room in that burgomaster's house with the French windows giving upon the little balcony. He modeled the furniture in plastiscene. He bought three little dolls to represent his characters. And then he reported what he saw happening in that room; what his characters did and what they said. By the time he had finished this work, the music was all in his head. He couldn't write it down fast enough.