THE REHEARSAL
41
of his already long arm, high up, firm. He was naked but for a velvet
loin cloth, with tassels on both sides, which quivered and then stood
still. The orchestra too stopped, in dead silence. He had them then
and there.
After a couple of seconds that seemed eternal, he ended the grave
silence by a sweeping circular motion of his arm downward. The mu–
sicians all had the impression they had come to the end of some
strange work; they did not know what it had been.
On the chair next to the ape's platform the music for this morn–
ing's rehearsal was piled, and he bent down, the baton again in his
teeth, to pick out a score, and then held it up, moving it from left to
right, so everyone in the orchestra could see it: Ravel's
Bolero.
The
orchestra silently adjusted their own books on their stands. That
was one of the unnerving features of these simian rehearsals: there
was not a word spoken, not a word the whole morning. "Gentle–
men," they had been told, in more or less strange accents, in
former rehearsals. "Gentlemen, that was much too loud." "But
please! That should have been apocalyptic! Don't you feel it,
gentlemen?" At least this reminded them that they were men, the
spoken explanations injected an element of rationality into the per–
formance, which was thus kept from rapture. But here: nothing but
the music itself, and gestures. And such expressiveness.
The ape gave much more than the trainer could have imparted
to him. First, however, he did nothing at all. He just stood there,
drooping, touching the platform with his hands somewhat like a
runner at the start of a race, waiting for the starting gun. But by and
by his whole body began to writhe. He was the snake and the
snake charmer, the shrunken, dark figure in the turban, crouching
and piping the melody, and the beast, hypnotized by it. The ape
submitted to the melodious dreariness. It invaded him. It pleaded
with him, saying it again and again and again. The flute, the
bassoon, the soprano clarinet. Meekness made maddening by mul–
tiplication. When he could not bear it any longer, filled to capac–
ity _with the spell he had made them cast on him, the ape rose
suddenly erect, with a subduing motion toward the haunting melody
that came from the woodwinds, and beckoned the percussion instru–
ments into the foreground, where they remained throughout, ever
more dominant and joined in their obsessive rhythm by as many
