“'Well, my daughter,’ said the old man, with a gentle, but somehow horrible voice, softly clapping his hands.
“Then she appeared on the stairs and came slowly down the room....”
Jan gulped. His fingers, which still held Freder’s wrist in their clutch, gripped tighter, as though they wished to crush the bones.
“Why am I telling you this?” he stammered. “Can one describe lightning? Or music? Or the fragrance of a flower? All the women in the hall suddenly blushed violently and feverishly and all the men turned pale. Nobody seemed capable of making the least movement or of saying a single word.... You know Rainer? You know his young wife? You know how they loved each other? He was standing behind her. She was sitting, and he had laid his hands on her shoulders with a gesture of passionate and protective affection. As the girl walked by them—she walked, led by the hand of the old man, with gentle ringing step, slowly through the hall—Rainer’s hands slipped from his wife’s shoulders. She looked up at him, he down at her; and in the faces of those two were burnt, like a torch, a sudden, deadly hatred....
“It was as though the air was burning. We breathed fire. At the same time there radiated from the girl a coldness—an unbearable, cutting coldness. The smile which hovered between her half-open lips seemed to be the unspoken closing verse of a shameless song.
“Is there some substance through the power of which emotions are destroyed, as colours are by acids? The presence of this girl was enough to annul everything which spells fidelity in the human heart, even to a point of absurdity. I had accepted the invitation of this house because Tora had told me she would go too. Now I no longer saw Tora, and I have not seen her since. And the strange thing was that, among all these motionless beings who were standing there as though benumbed, there was not one who could have hidden his feelings. Each knew how it was with the other. Each felt that he was naked and saw the nakedness of the others. Hatred, born of shame, smouldered among us. Tora was crying. I could have struck her.... Then the girl danced. No, it was no dance.... She stood, freed from the hand of the old man, on the lowest step, facing us, and she raised her arms about the width of her garment with a gentle, a seemingly never-ending movement. The slender hands touched above her hair-parting. Over her shoulders, her breasts, her hips, her knees, there ran an incessant, a barely perceptible trembling. It was no frightened trembling. It was like the trembling of the final spinal fins of a luminous, deep-sea fish. It was as though the girl were carried higher and higher by this trembling, though she did not move her feet. No dance, no scream, no cry of an animal in heat, could have so lashing an effect as the trembling of this shimmering body, which seemed, in its calm, in its solitude, to impart the waves of its incitement to every single soul in the room.
“Then she went up the steps, stepping backwards, with tentative feet, without lowering her hands, and she disappeared into a velvet-deep darkness. The servants opened the door to the street. They lined up with backs bent.
“The people still sat motionless.
“'Good night, ladies and gentlemen!’ said the old man....”
Jan was silent. He took his hat from his head. He wiped his forehead.