terror in the girl's room where she lay in bed. He saw the room lighted
fitfully by the play of searchlights over the city; the sinister entrance
from a little balcony through the French widow, of the officer in
uniform, his shadow flung ahead of him by the beam of the searchlight. He
saw the man, blood--as well as wine--drunk, garrulous and fanatic with
the megalomania of the conquering invader. He saw the man's intention
made clear from the first, but the execution of it luxuriously postponed.
Safely postponed because of the terrified girl's acceptance of his
assurance that if anything happened to him, if a hand were raised against
him, her father and a dozen more hostages would be shot and the town
burned to the ground. Then came the girl's irrepressible outcry when he
first touched her; the brother's knock at the door; her frantic effort to
reassure him frustrated by the officer's drunken laugh; the forcing of
the door and the fight half in the dark; the killing of the girl and then
of her ravisher.

The thing that wouldn't let March alone, that forced him into the
undertaking, was the declaration of the brutal philosophy of the
conqueror made by the officer while he gloated over the girl who was to
be his prey; the chance to put into musical terms that paranoiac delusion
of world conquest. One recognized in it, vaguely, some of 'Wagner's
themes and some of Straus', distorted and grown monstrous.

The thing had haunted March, as I have said, and he had tried to find
somebody who would write him the book, the indispensable preliminary to
his getting to work. Failing here, he had audaciously made up his mind to
write it himself. It was not his first attempt to do, in the mere light
of nature, a thing commonly supposed to be impossible except at the end
of painful instruction. He had once experimented at painting in oils, he
had tried his hand at the stylus, he had made a few figurines in
modeling-wax. He wrote his play, then, by the simple process of building
first with painstaking accuracy, a model of his stage, the girl's room in
that burgomaster's house with the French windows giving upon the little
balcony. He modeled the furniture in plastiscene. He bought three little
dolls to represent his characters. And then he reported what he saw
happening in that room; what his characters did and what they said. By
the time he had finished this work, the music was all in his head. He
couldn't write it down fast enough.