When Frederick and Willy returned to the dining-room, the chef was gone, and Lobkowitz and Franck were engaged in the time-worn dispute, whether Raphael or Michael Angelo is the greater.  Willy gave a humorous, though indignant account of the battle of the Amazons that had just taken place and how Webster and Forster wanted to insist on Miss Hahlstroem’s appearing that very night.  The artists’ chivalry was aroused.  They declared unanimously that they would refuse to give up their lovely ward, even if all New York were to come and besiege them.

Frederick looked at his watch.  It was a few minutes past ten.  The last thing Arthur Stoss had said on parting occurred to him, “At half past ten to the dot, I shall be on the boards behind the footlights.”  Frederick told the artists about Arthur Stoss; and Willy Snyders, the man of initiative, proposed that they go together to Webster and Forster to see the armless actor’s performance.

IV

Ritter lent Frederick one of his evening suits, which fitted him to perfection, and within less than half an hour the company was sitting in a box at Webster and Forster’s.  The enormous hall, in which smoking and drinking were allowed, was full.  Willy estimated that there were about four or five thousand people present.  A number of immense arc-lights shone in the tobacco smoke like frosty, white moons.

When Frederick and his friends entered, a woman and a slim toreador were dancing.  The music was of an exciting nature, and the character of the performance and the performer immediately took the artists captive.  The dance was an eccentric mixture of drollness, innocence, and wildness.  When watching the toreador, Frederick felt as if he were in an arena at Seville; when watching the girl, as if he were near the Gulf of Corinth, or on one of the islands of the Cyclades.  He promptly decided to leave Spain and follow the lovely dancer to her home in Greece, where she was his Chloe and he, her Daphnis.  Old shepherds sat tippling in a pine grove dedicated to Pan.  From the highland meadows he looked down upon the far off AEgean Sea beating noiselessly against the rocky coast-line.

The music of the orchestra turned into the piping of Pan, while Webster and Forster, the heavy fumes, the air vitiated by the exhalations of five thousand people no longer existed.  The pure breath of spring was rustling in the pines.  The shepherdess was dancing as she had learned to dance from the droll caperings of the goats or, by natural inheritance, from great Pan himself.  It was a dance of young, wild, bubbling joy in life.

“The origin of all music,” thought Frederick, “is dance and song in one and the same person.  The feet compel the rhythm that the throat voices; and if the dancer herself does not sing, she hears music different from the music to which she is dancing, and if she dances without an accompaniment, we who behold her hear her music nevertheless.  The melodies I hear in this girl’s dancing are comparable in their bucolic innocence to the things of the same sort that Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert wrote.  They have exorcised the vulgar muse from this vulgar place, banishing her to a remote distance.”