“What is the matter with you?” asked Freder. There was nothing remarkable about this house, except that it lay next to Rotwang’s house.
“Hush!” answered Jan, clasping his fingers around Freder’s wrist.
“Are you mad?” Freder stared at his friend. “Do you think that the house can hear us across this infernal street?”
“It hears us!” said Jan, with an obstinate expression. “It hears us! You think it is a house just like any other? You’re wrong … It began in this house …”
“What began?”
“The spirit …”
Freder felt that his throat was very dry. He cleared it vigorously. He wanted to draw his friend along with him. But he resisted him. He stood at the parapet of the street, which sheered down, steep as a gorge, and he was staring at the house opposite.
“One day,” he said, “this house sent out invitations to all its neighbours. It was the craziest invitation on earth. There was nothing on the card but: ‘Come this evening at ten o’clock! House 12, 113th Street!’ One took the whole thing to be a joke. But one went. One did not wish to miss the fun. Strangely enough no one knew the house. Nobody could remember ever having entered it, or having known anything of its occupants. One turned up at ten. One was well dressed. One entered the house and found a big party. One was received by an old man, who was exceedingly polite, but who shook hands with nobody. It was an odd thing that all the people collected here seemed to be waiting for something, of which they did not know. One was well waited upon by servants, who seemed to be born mutes, and who never raised their eyes. Although the room in which we were all gathered was as large as the nave of a church, an unbearable heat prevailed, as though the floor were glowing hot, as though the walls were glowing hot, and all this in spite of the fact that, as one could see, the wide door leading to the street stood open.
“Suddenly one of the servants came up from the door to our host, with soundless step, and seemed wordlessly, with his silent presence, to give him some information. Our host inquired: ‘Are we all met?’ The servant inclined his head. ‘Then close the door.’ It was done. The servants swept aside and lined themselves up. Our host stepped into the middle of the great room. At the same moment so perfect a silence prevailed that one heard the noise of the street roaring like breakers against the walls of the house.
“ ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said the old man courteously, ‘may I have the honour of presenting my daughter to you!’
“He bowed to all sides, and then he turned his back. Everyone waited. No one moved.
“ ‘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
