"Oh, what does that matter," said she, while she let her hands slide from the keys. "It was splendid, only, do you see, I feel as if I am a dragging-shoe for you. I would like to have a wish, a great immoderate wish. I would like to hear you once alone, without accompaniment, from your heart. Give me one glance into your soul, make your musical confession to me!"
He felt a peculiar twitching and burning in his finger-tips. He would rather have killed himself than let her glance into his inmost soul, as the condition of that soul had been until then.
"Do not ask that of me," said he, hoarsely.
"It was very immodest in me, excuse me," said she hastily and confused.
"Oh, that is nothing," he assured her. "Do you think that I will spare the little bit of pleasure that I can perhaps give you, only--but if you really wish it--as far as I am concerned----"
He took up the violin.
It was a different affair now. Dragging-shoe or not in any case her accompaniment had had a calming and perhaps purifying effect on his musical instincts. With her he had played as a wonderfully deeply sensitive and technically cultivated virtuoso; in spite of all the heartfelt fulness of tone and vibrating passion, he had scarcely passed the boundary of musical conventionality. It had been the highest possibility of a quiet, artistic performance; but what Natalie now heard was no longer art, but something at once splendid and fearful. It was also no longer a violin on which he played, but a strange, enchanted instrument that she had never known formerly and that he himself had invented; an instrument from which everything that sounds the sweetest and saddest on earth vibrated, from the low voice of a woman to the soft, complaining sigh of the waves dying on the shore. A depth of genial musical eloquence burst forth under his bow. Inconsolable pain--dry, hard, cutting; tender teasing, winning grace, mad rejoicing, a wild confusion of passion and music, the height and depth of neck-breaking technical extravagance.
But what was most peculiar about his playing, and had the most magical effect, was neither the mad bravura nor the flattering grace, but something oppressive, mysterious, that crept maliciously into the heart and veins, ensnaring and paralyzing--a thing of itself, a strange horror. Again and again, like a mysterious call, appeared in his improvisation the same bewitching, exciting succession of tones, taken from the Arabian folk-songs, the devil's music.
Suddenly he seemed to be beside himself; he drew the bow across the violin as if beset by an untamable, passionate excitement. It was no longer one violin which one heard; it was twenty violins, or, rather, twenty demons, who howled and cried together.
