He did not embroider the statement.  He left it in its nakedness.  Nor did he permit anybody else to embroider it.  Before a word of any kind could be uttered he had begun to play again.  Probably in all the annals of artistic snobbery, no cultured cosmopolitan had ever been made to suffer a more exquisite moral torture of humiliation than Musa had contrived to inflict upon Mr. and Mrs. Spatt in return for their hospitality.  Their sneaped squirmings upon the sofa were terrible to witness.  But Mr. Ziegler’s sensibility was apparently quite unaffected.  He continued to smile, to drink, and to smoke.  He seemed to be saying to himself:  “What does it matter to me that this miserable Frenchman has caught me in a mistake?  I could eat him, and one day I shall eat him.”

After a little while Musa snatched out of his right-hand lower waistcoat pocket the tiny wooden “mute” which all violinists carry without fail upon all occasions in all their waistcoats; and, sticking it with marvellous rapidity upon the bridge of the violin, he entered upon a pianissimo, but still lively, episode of the Toccata.  And simultaneously another melody faint and clear could be heard in the room.  It was Mr. Ziegler humming “The Watch on the Rhine” against the Toccata of Debussy.  Thus did it occur to Mr. Ziegler to take revenge on Musa for having attempted to humiliate him.  Not unsurprisingly, Musa detected at once the competitive air.  He continued to play, gazing hard at his violin and apparently entranced, but edging little by little towards Mr. Ziegler.  Audrey desired either to give a cry or to run out of the room.  She did neither, being held to inaction by the spell of Mr. Ziegler’s perfect unconcern as, with the beer glass lifted towards his mouth, he proceeded steadily to work through “The Watch on the Rhine,” while Musa lilted out the delicate, gay phrases of Debussy.  The enchantment upon the whole room was sinister and painful.  Musa got closer to Mr. Ziegler, who did not blench nor cease from his humming.  Then suddenly Musa, lowering his fiddle and interrupting the scene, snatched the mute from the bridge of the violin.

“I have put it on the wrong instrument,” he said thickly, with a very French intonation, and simultaneously he shoved the mute with violence into the mouth of Mr. Ziegler.  In doing so, he jerked up Mr. Ziegler’s elbow, and the remains of the beer flew up and baptised Mr. Ziegler’s face and vesture.  Then he jammed the violin into its case, and ran out of the room.

“Barbare!  Imbecile!  Sauvage!” he muttered ferociously on the threshold.

The enchantment was broken.  Everybody rose, and not the least precipitately the streaming Mr. Ziegler, who, ejecting the mute with much spluttering, and pitching away his empty glass, sprang towards the door, with justifiable homicide in every movement.

“Mr. Ziegler!” Audrey appealed to him, snatching at his dress-coat and sticking to it.