Pagliacci was to be followed as usual by "Cavalleria." It was the swan
song of the opera season.
In a part that he acted as well as he sang, Caruso had been permitted
finally to retire, wringing wet, to his dressing room. With all the
dignity of a man of genuine feeling and sensitiveness he had taken call
after call on the fall of the curtain and stood bent almost double
before the increasing breakers of applause. Once more he had done his
best in a role which demanded everything that he had of voice and
passion, comedy and tragedy. Once more, although his soul was with his
comrades in battle, he had played the fool and broken his heart for the
benefit of his good friends in front.
In her box on the first tier Mrs. Cooper Jekyll, in a dress
imaginatively designed to display a considerable quantity of her
figure, was surrounded by a party which attracted many glasses. Alice
Palgrave was there, pretty and scrupulously neat, even perhaps a little
prim, her pearls as big as marbles. Mrs. Alan Hosack made a most
effective picture with her black hair and white skin in a
geranium-colored frock--a Van Beers study to the life. Mrs. Noel d'Oyly
lent an air of opulence to the box, being one of those lovely but all
too ample women who, while compelling admiration, dispel intimacy.
Joan, a young daffodil, sat bolt upright among them, with diamonds
glistening in her hair like dew. Of the four men, Gilbert Palgrave,
standing where he could be seen, might have been an illustration by Du
Maurier of one of Ouida's impossible guardsmen. He made the other
three, all of the extraordinary ordinary type, appear fifty per cent,
more manly than they really were--the young old Hosack with his
groomlike face and immaculate clothes, the burly Howard Cannon, who
retained a walrus mustache in the face of persistent chaff, and Noel
d'Oyly, who when seen with his Junoesque wife made the gravest
naturalists laugh at the thought of the love manners of the male and
female spider.
Turning her chair round, Alice touched Joan's arm. "Will you do
something for me?" she asked.
Joan looked at her with a smile of disturbing frankness. "It all
depends whether it will upset any of my plans," she said.
"I wouldn't have asked you if I had thought that."