The poet finished his recitation and resumed his cigarette, waiting for our applause.

“It is a man absolutely extraordinary,” murmured the dancing-master across the table at my left, under cover of the hand-clapping. “He is the greatest poet of Belgium, monsieur. Verhaeren, Cammaerts, Maeterlinck—they are nothing. If you bring him an album—presto! he writes you an ode in it.”

In the tight little supper-room over the CafÉ de la Toison d’Or we were sweltering and dining at the expense of McTeague. It was a night in August, and the heat of noon had not yet died out of the boulevards and streets of Brussels, ville basse. The cheap cotton curtains at the two windows fronting on the avenue waved languidly to and fro, and the air of the room reeked with cigarette smoke and the odours of Belgian cooking.

McTeague sat at the table’s head—a huge, lonely, unsophisticated American, with a mop of gray hair topping a face like a child’s, tired eyes, slightly Roman nose, and what once was a rose-bud mouth. At his right was Yvette, the dancer of the Scala; pretty, of course, the big, muscular, operatic-soprano type of beauty rather than the petite beings we usually think of in the dance; sleek, serpentine, appraising the world about her. Next her was I; then Yvette’s husband, the poet; then Guilbert, her dancing-master.

“Thanks! thanks! I thank you infinitely, monsieur. Bravo! Bis, bis!” said McTeague, in his heavy Scotian French.

“No, no, monsieur,” the poet answered gloomily, shaking his head. “I demand pardon, but no.”

“Ah, it is the war, then! You feel such a sadness that you cannot be gay, monsieur?”

“No, it is not the war. What is the war? It is of nations. For me nations are nothing: men, men—Pushkin, Byron, Whitman, Schiller, Napoleon, Goethe, Victor Hugo—those for me are worth while. The rest? Pah!”

“Oh, la, la, la, la!”

“Do not mind, monsieur,” the dancing-master whispered ecstatically, as if he feared such sentiments might offend me, “it is a poet, n’est-ce pas? Art—art—that is a world of itself.” He mopped his forehead, beaded with drops of perspiration, his little black eyes rolled in his head, and he drummed on the tablecloth as if his fingertips would do the office of his toes. The man was a genuine enthusiast. To dance and to teach others to dance—that was life!

“Yvette, you have brought your ballet costume so you can dance for messieurs the Americans?” he asked.

“Yes, my old Guilbert,” she answered languidly.

“Come, then.”

We drained our coffee cups reluctantly, rose from the table, and stirred out into the hot passageway, Yvette and McTeague ahead, old Guilbert following with me, the poet trailing behind. Through little winding streets, dusky, sleepy, and sweltering we passed, and at length out beside the Maison du Roi and the golden Flemish splendours of the corporation halls and the HÔtel de Ville on the Grand’ Place. We wound through the lines of German sentries and up the steps of a new restaurant—the CafÉ du Cid—up dirty, twisting stairs behind the bar rail, to the dancing-hall where Guilbert taught.

“Now,” he exclaimed in rapture, turning on his toes with a movement of astonishing grace for one so old and fat. “Monsieur le poÈte to the piano! Madame Yvette to the dressing-room, quick! Messieurs les AmÉricains, seat yourselves, if you please! Quick! Quick! Quick! Everybody!

“Messieurs!” He flung up his fingers and addressed us as we sank languidly into chairs before the open windows. “It is a dance which I have myself composed—the dance of the ourang-outang. I am he—the great man-ape. I dance so.... Music!” he called to the poet at the piano. “Music! Moussorgsky—slow—terrible—so!”

The poet smote the ivory keys, keys yellow as the teeth of an old horse, and the dance began solo. Old Guilbert swayed and leaped over the dusty floor under the hanging lamps—swayed and leaped heavily, horribly, bestially, while the wild music of the piano panted and coughed through the room. The hot night air doubtless added to the grim effect on McTeague and me. I seemed to breathe the very exhalations of a jungle, and watched as if fascinated the contortions of the dancing-master.

As he danced he roared explanations and orders. “It is a forest, messieurs, and I, the ourang-outang, I dance in the moonlight under the trees, so, and so, and so; and as I dance I long for something to love, something to destroy. I am seeking here, there, as I dance.... Ah! I have found her—there, there!”

He made an extraordinary succession of leaps toward Madame Yvette’s dressing-room, and suddenly she floated out before us, her heavy body spinning on her toes, light as a cloud and almost as swift; her eyes half closed, her hands at her breast, a Liberty cap on her head; and at the end of her turn she sank quietly into a heap in the middle of the floor.

Guilbert’s horrid dance began again, and the rapid flow of his explanation: “She is asleep, messieurs, this fay in the forest.” He paused ecstatically before her. “I have found her, I love her, I will have her, I shall win her by my dancing.” He touched her on the breast. She leaped to her feet and spun across the floor like a whirlwind, terror and amazement and grace and voluptuousness all portrayed in her movements. The ape leaped after her, dancing round and round her, enmeshing her like a firefly in a cage of grass. Her eyes grew wider with terror, she danced this way and that, trying to escape him; he seized her, and she flew to right and left, still fast in his clutches; she leaped straight up, and he caught her firmly in his arms and yelled, actually yelled, with delight.

And then—it seems utterly impossible even as I tell it—into the music came a wild, unholy burst of “The Watch on the Rhine.” The two figures on the floor leaped and curveted. A hoarse cheer rose to us from outside, and below the windows I saw three ecstatic German soldiers swaying and bellowing applause.... The ape held the forest-fay securely as they danced.... It must have been the music which first warned me of change, for into the German hymn stole a wilder motif—the great chords of an alien theme intruded, fought, conquered, and swept over the fragments of the old, and like a wild mob of music bursting from prisons of silence poured forth the “Marseillaise.” The dance was symbolic, then: Germany and Europe! The conquest of the world!... The knit figures still swayed and leaped, but the ape was weakening. The taller figure of the woman slowly dominated and then submerged the male. With a sudden thrust she flung him prone, but the music went on. There came a howl at our backs, and I saw the soldiers in the square below waving their rifles and dancing with anger.

McTeague stared as if he were just recovering from a trance, shook himself clumsily, and muttered through the “Marseillaise”: “Strange, isn’t it, how artistic these Belgians are? Now if you and I were arranging a dance——”

The loud howls of the Germans beneath us interrupted McTeague’s moralizings. Swift feet were upon the stair, the proprietor of the cafÉ and his wife burst in upon us, weeping, gesticulating, talking all at once. Guilbert lay quietly in the middle of the floor, still acting his part; the poet at the piano pounded lustily. Yvette, more practical than they, ran to a window at the back of the hall and looked out, then ran back to us and grasped us. “Come quickly,” she exclaimed. “We can escape before the Germans come.”

“But your husband, and Guilbert?” I asked.

“Drag them behind us, then,” she replied, shrugging her naked shoulders. “Come at once. The Germans are on the stair!”

Directly beneath our feet we heard a tumult of rough voices, a clatter of dishes and pans, and then tramping boots coming up the winding stair. Panic seized on McTeague and me simultaneously. We leaped at the performers and hustled them across the floor behind the twinkling feet of the dancing-girl. Before we reached the window she had already scrambled through it and dropped to a roof five or six feet below. We leaped after her and ran across a space sloping like a deck. Guilbert and the poet had not yet spoken a word. I had begun to laugh—a wild, hysterical laugh which irritated McTeague, so that while we ran he remonstrated with me: “Germans—’ll hear—come after us,” he panted. “What—’s matter—now?”

Yvette stopped abruptly before a whitewashed wall and gazed up at an open window three feet above the level of her head.

“Lift me up, messieurs,” she whispered, catching her breath.

“Why?” I demanded.

“Quick! We must escape this way.”

“Jamais de la vie!” I stuttered. “It’s right to escape, but I won’t be caught breaking and entering somebody’s house.”

“But quick!”

“No!”

“But I know this room,” she sobbed. “I have the right.”

“You have what?”

“The right to enter. Mon Dieu! C’est la chambre de mon ami, messieurs!”

Nothing is stranger than truth; nothing more grotesque, more dramatic, more truly unreal. I can imagine how this revelation would have been received on the stage in any of the five continents: the gestures of the outraged husband, the tableau of the horrified perceptor, and the amazement of the guests. But clinging to our precarious footing on the roof, we received it only as a stroke of luck—a means of escape from our awful predicament. We thanked Heaven for Yvette’s lover!

“Up with her!” I hissed at the poet. “Stoop down, man, and I’ll lift her into the room.”

He leaned obediently against the bricks. I grasped the dancer firmly by the sole of her soft dancing buskin and boosted her against the wall, the poet clumsily bent lower still, and she clambered over him to the window sill. Scraping, gasping, struggling, she reached it, slipped her arms over the sill, and rose. There was a flutter of stiff dancing skirt, her twinkling, white-clad legs and feet slipped over the ledge and out of sight. Then came a pause. McTeague and I stared at each other soberly. “Hm!” he breathed deeply. “Hm! Hm!”

Her head, with the Liberty Cap ridiculously awry, peeped over the window ledge. “It’s all right. He isn’t here. I’ll help you in, messieurs,” Yvette said calmly, and in two minutes more we stood beside her in the unlighted bedroom of her ami.

“Follow,” she said. “If you please. Here is my hand.”

In single file we tiptoed across the room and reached the door. I heard the knob turn softly; a rush of hot air streamed over our perspiring faces, we pattered out to a landing from which descended another flight of stairs, and stood breathlessly listening. The night seemed to pant with the heat, the dull heavy noises of life spoke behind closed doors, and far away I heard the tramp of a squad of soldiers off to relieve the guard.

“Come,” said Yvette softly. “It would not do for my friend to find us here, n’est-ce pas? One of you, messieurs, he might mistake for a rival!” I am afraid I laughed as she said this; for McTeague, who usually treated me with great respect, laid his hot moist hand on my mouth. “Hush!” he said. “You mustn’t laugh at her. You mustn’t approve. These people don’t look at these things as we do. They’re unmor——”

A door slammed in the darkness below us, and the scrape of heavy boots echoed from the stair-well! “Mon Dieu!” Yvette whispered. “It is he! It must be he! Here!” She leaped back into the gloom, hustling us with her, and crouched in the farthest corner of the hall. McTeague was first in the line; then I; then the poet; then Guilbert; then Yvette. The heavy tread of the newcomer sounded louder and louder, but no louder than the anguished beating of our hearts. He reached the top of the stair. An odour of lambic or faro scented the fetid air. We could see in the darkness an immense bulk, and Yvette trembled. It was her that he must have heard, for even while his hand was on the knob, he turned.

“Hello, old fellow,” he called jocularly. “What have you got there? Let me see?”

In the vague semi-darkness I saw McTeague scramble slowly to his feet. I thought he would surrender at discretion, but the sound of his voice disillusioned and astonished me. “Go into that room, you villain,” he roared, advancing on the friendly inebriate and bawling fit to wake the dead. “Go in! Go in!”

His voice or his impressive advance frightened Yvette’s friend. The door banged open; there was a short pause; then it slammed shut and I could hear a panting, frightened human mass flung hard against it to keep out the intruder.

“Go away, you dirty Germans!” bawled a muffled voice. “Sales Boches!”

McTeague gripped the handle of the door and tried to turn it, but Yvette—more wise than he—clutched him about the waist and flung him with all her force toward the stair. “Hurry, hurry, we must run!” she sobbed. “Hurry, hurry!” And we charged down the dark well.

At the door we peered cautiously out. No one had been aroused. The hot night breathed about us as softly as a sleeping child, ignorant, indifferent, and calm. Tragedy, comedy, farce—we had played them all unwittingly, and no one knew or cared but we!

An old herdick hitched to a decrepit horse stood in the shadow of the street corner! We thrust Yvette, Guilbert, and the poet into its shelter and waved them good-night. “Au revoir, messieurs!” the three called to us gaily.

“Adieu!” McTeague responded. “It is not au revoir: it is good-bye!” Then he added, sotto voce, to me, “They are true artists—unmoral—like marionettes—just figures of the dance, aren’t they?... Come!” he said, after a pause. “They have forgotten it already, but we must go back to the CafÉ du Cid and get the proprietor out of this scrape. Right?”

“Right,” I responded. And we slowly followed the creaking herdick down the narrow street.