Summary: Walpurgisnacht. Springtime Halloween.<br> A famous tale… of the danger of dance.<br> -The Voice before the Void<br> “The Moon-Slave”<br> Barry Pain<br> The Princess Viola had, even in her childhood, an inevitable submission to the dance; a rhythmical madness in her blood answered hotly to the dance music, swaying her, as the wind sways trees, to movements of perfect sympathy and grace.<br> For the rest, she had her beauty and her long hair that reached to her knees, and was thought loveable; but she was never very fervent and vivid unless she was dancing; at other times there almost seemed to be a touch of lethargy upon her. Now, when she was sixteen years old, she was betrothed to the Prince Hugo. With others the betrothal was merely a question of state. With her, it was merely a question of obedience to the wishes of authority; it had been arranged; Hugo was comme ci, comma ca — no god in her eyes; it did not matter. But with Hugo it was quite different — he loved her.<br> The betrothal was celebrated by a banquet, and afterwards by a dance in the great hall of the palace. From this dance the Princess soon made her escape, quite discontented, and went to the furthest part of the palace gardens, where she could no longer hear the music calling her.<br> “They are all right,” she said to herself as she thought of the men she had left, “but they cannot dance. Mechanically they are all right; they have learned it and don’t make childish mistakes; but they are only one-two-three machines. They haven’t the inspiration of dancing. It is so different when I dance alone.”<br> She wandered on until she reached an old forsaken maze. It had been planned by a former king. All round it was a high crumbling wall with foxgloves growing on it. The maze itself had all its paths bordered by high opaque hedges; in the very center was a circular open space with tall pine trees growing round it. Many years ago the clue to the maze had been lost; it was but rarely now that anyone entered it. Its gravel paths were green weeds, and in some places the hedges spreading beyond their borders had made the way almost impassable.<br> For a moment or two Viola stood peering in at the gate — a narrow gate with curiously twisted bars of wrought iron surmounted by a heraldic device. Then the whim seized her to enter the maze and try to find the space in the center. She opened the gate and went in.<br> Outside everything was uncannily visible in the light of the full moon, but here in the dark shaded alleys the night was conscious of itself. She soon forgot her purpose and wandered about quite aimlessly, sometimes forcing her way when the brambles had flung a lace barrier across her path, and a dragging mass of convolvulus struck wet and cool upon her cheek. As chance would have it she suddenly found herself standing under the tall pines, and looking at the open space that formed the goal of the maze. She was pleased that she had got there. Here the ground was carpeted with sand, fine and, as it seemed, beaten hard. From the summer night sky immediately above, the moonlight, unobstructed here, streamed straight down upon the scene.<br> Viola began to think about dancing. Over the dry, smooth sand her little satin shoes moved easily, stepping and gliding, circling and stepping, as she hummed the tune to which they moved. In the center of the space she paused, looked at the wall of dark trees all round, at the shining stretches of silvery sand and at the moon above.<br> “My beautiful, moonlit, lonely old dancing room, why did I never find you before?” she cried, “But,” she added, “you need music — there must be music here.”<br> In her fantastic mood she stretched her soft, clasped hands upward toward the moon.<br> “Sweet moon,” she said in a kind of mock prayer, “Make your white light come down in musi...
