“And the music and the magic!” broke in the young man, weary of this interval. Slowly Van Zorn arose and stared at him steadily with his bird-of-prey eyes.
“Have you ever realized,” he finally began in sing-song tones, “what an instrument for good or evil is the art you profess to practise? Hear me out,” he continued, as the composer made a motion of dissent; “I don’t refer to the facile criticism which classifies some music profane, some music sacred. The weaklings who are hurt by sensual operatic music would be equally hurt by a book or a picture; I refer to the music that is a bridge between here and—over there, over there!” His voice sank as he waved his lean brown fingers toward the alcove. “In the days of old, when man was nearer to nature, nearer to the gods, music was the key to all the mysteries. Pan and Syrinx answered its magic summons. A lost art, lost with the vulgarization of the other beautiful arts, you say? I deny it!” He drew up his rickety figure as if he held the keys of a conquered city.
“No! I repeat, music is still the precious art of arts and across its poisonous gulf of sound, on the other side, over there,”—again he pointed to the alcove, with its sable velvet funeral pall—“the gods await our homage. Wagner—a worshipper at the diabolic shrine—pictured his faith in Parsifal. He is his own Klingsor, and the music he made for the evocation of Kundry came straight from the mouth of hell. Ah! how it burns the senses! How it bites the nerves’—‘Gundryggia there, Kundry here!’ Yes, the gods and the greatest of all the gods, my master. Music is the unique spell that brings him to his worshippers on earth. We near the end of things. This planet has lived its appointed years. All the sins—save the supreme one—have been committed, all the virtues have bleached in vain our cowardly souls. Tell me, young man, tell me,” he grasped Oswald by his wrist, “do you long for a sight of the true master? Through the gates of music will you go with me to my heaven where dwells the Only One?”
Invern nodded. He was more curious than afraid. With apish agility Van Zorn darted to the pianoforte and literally threw his hands upon its keyboard. A shrill dissonance in B minor sounded; like the lash of hail in his face the solitary auditor felt the stormy magnetism of the playing. He had sufficient control of his critical faculties—though it seemed as if he were launched into space on the tail of some comet—to realize the desperate quality of the performance. It was not that of a virtuoso; rather the travail of a spirit harshly expressing itself in a language foreign to its nature. The symmetry of the Wagner structure was almost destroyed; yet between the bits of broken bars and splintered tones there emerged the music of some one else, a stranger, newer Wagner. Was the Horla of Wagner buried in this demoniacal prelude to the second act of Parsifal struggling into palpable being! Carried before the banners of this surging army of tones, Oswald clutched his couch and eagerly listened to the evil music of Kundry and Klingsor.
He saw the stony laboratory with its gloomy battlements, from which the necromancer Klingsor witnessed Parsifal defeat the emasculate squires. He saw the mystic abyss hidden in the haze of violet vapor whence, obeying the hoarse summons of her master, Kundry slowly emerged. Her scream, the symphonic scream of woman, beast, or devil, fell upon his ears as though an eternity of damned souls had gnashed their teeth. And the echoes of her laughter reverberated through the porches of hell.
Gundryggia dort! Kundry hier! The succubus, or she-devil, demon, Rose of Hell, after vainly refusing to obey the demands of the harsh magician, sank with a baffled cry: “Oh! Woe is me!” The vast fabric of Klingsor’s abode shivered, dissipated into nothingness. But there followed no shining garden filled with strange and gorgeous flowers, shapes of delights, wooing maidens with promises of unearthly love on their lips. Vainly Oswald awaited that scene of tropical splendor with its dream-terraces, living arabesques, and harmonious comminglement of sky and mountain, earth and fountain, the fair mirage painted by Klingsor’s dark art. It did not appear. Instead the music became no longer Wagner’s, became no longer music. Van Zorn amid brazen thunders wrenched himself from the keyboard, and prostrate upon the floor fairly kissed its surface, mumbling an awful litany. The room was murky, though violet hues suffused the velvet at the end. Invern became conscious of a third person, where he could not say. An icy vibration like the remote buzzing of monstrous dynamos apprised him that a door or window had been opened in the apartment which permitted the entrance of—what! His heart beat in the same rhythm with the mighty dynamos and the hoarse chanting of the Count.
“O Exiled Prince on whom was wrought such wrong!
Who, conquered, still art impious and strong!”
“O Satan have mercy on us!”
“O Satan, patron saint of evil!”
“O Satan take pity on our misery!”
“O Prince of Suicide, Maker of music!”
“O Satan have pity on us!”
“O Father of Pain, King of Desolation, true Master of the House of Planets!”
“O Satan have mercy on us!”
“O Creator of black despair!”
“O Satan take pity on us!”
Indifferent Christian as was Invern, his knees knocked at this sacrilegious Baudelairian invocation. The violet grew in intensity as the prayers of the blasphemer increased. Slowly across the sombre velvet stretched in patibulary attitude a human skeleton. No thorns crowned its grinning skull; instead a live viper wreathed about its bony nest and turned glittering eyes upon the two men. Van Zorn’s voice became a wail, calling down imprecations on earth to men of good-will. He cursed life and praised death, and his refrain was ever:
“O Satan, take pity on our misery!”
Oswald no longer heard him. With hysterical agitation he remarked the transformation of the adumbrated phantom. The skeleton had begun to carnify—its frame was first covered with ivory-white flesh, and then, with amazing velocity, a woman bourgeoned before his eyes. Gone the skull, gone the viper. In their stead emerged the delicate head of a goddess—filleted by Easter lilies—with smiling lips, enticing pose, the figure of a delicious nubility. Hazel were the wide, gold-flecked eyes that shot forthright shafts into the bosom of Oswald, and charged him with ineffable longing. The arms, exquisite in proportion, the graciously modelled torso, pierced him with an epileptic ecstasy. And the crazy tones of Van Zorn assailed his ears as if from a great distance: