Page:Thea von Harbou Metropolis eng 1927.pdf/129

 METROPOLIS 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 lire.

At the same time there radiated from the girl a coldnessan unbearable, cutting colduess. 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 ndelity in the humau 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 nakeduess of the others. Hatred, born of shame, smouldered among us. Tora was crying. I could have struck her. . . Then the girl danced. No, it wa$ 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 percepbble trembling. It was no frightened trembling. It was like the trembling of the noal spinal nns 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 incitement to every single soul in the room. "Then she went up the steps, stepping backwards, with tentative feet, without lowering her hands, and she dis~ appeared into a velvet-deep darkness. The servants opened the door to the street. They lined up with backs bent.

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