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.