"Where's the flower? The flower! The flower!" was taken up in endless echoes here and there, above and below, from the wings, on the stage, and now from the last rows of the parquet--a circumstance which only increased the artists' inclination to titter.
A few more lights were turned on, and a remarkable, great red paper flower was set on the stage. Lilienfeld, now better satisfied, reappeared and entered into a conversation with the three musicians.
"Have you studied the dance I told you to?" he demanded, humming the tune and stressing the accented parts to impress it upon them. "Now then," he said, "let's hear what you can do." He raised his bamboo cane like a conductor's baton and said commandingly, "Well, begin."
And the musicians began to play that provoking, passionate melody, that barbaric music, now dull and suppressed, now loud and screeching, which, ever since it first began to excite his nerves, had pursued Frederick night and day. He thanked heaven that the darkness helped conceal his emotion. It was that hard, convulsive motive conjuring up the demons which had been the beginning of his obsession in the _Künstlerhaus_ in Berlin. Over and again those sounds had lured him and led him on.
What was this strange Ariel's intention with him? At whose bidding was he acting when he assailed his victim with inner storms and almost let him perish in a real storm on the seas? Why did he prick Frederick's flesh with this music? Why did he cast its inseverable hempen cords about his throat and limbs? How was it that after so tremendous an eternal tragedy had been enacted out there on the cosmic solitudes of the ocean, after the waters had unmercifully swallowed so vast a number of men, loving life--how was it that this music had remained untouched and unweakened, that it had here resumed its fantastic devilishness? Frederick felt as if new cords were biting into his flesh and tightening about his throat. Something like the anguish and frenzy of a bull with a lasso about its horns came over him--a bull whom a cruel power will misuse for a senseless, bloody show in the arena. Frederick did not hit about him. He did not run away, and yet he came near doing both. His head, it seemed to him, was wrapped up heavily in thick sail-cloth. He must do something finally to rid himself of that enforced blindness. He must look straight in the face of his grotesque opponent--Prospero or Caliban?