electricity in the atmosphere, the spell of the dark woman’s sad eyes,
her harsh reproof and her undoubted musical temperament acted on him
like a whiplash. He called the page and rambled over the keyboard. Miss
Anstruther sat near the pianist. Soon the vague modulations resolved
into a definite shape, and the march from the Fantaisie in F minor was
heard. It took form, it leaped into rhythmical life, and when the
rolling arpeggios were reached, a crash over the house caused Miss
Pickett to scream, and then the page entered with a tray.
Harold stopped playing. Miss Anstruther, her low, broad brow dark with
resentment, said something to the boy, who showed his gums and grinned.
“It’s de wine, missy,” he said, and went out on ostentatious tiptoe.
The group in the conservatory watched the comedy in the drawing-room
with unrelaxed interest, though little Miss Belt declared the thunder
made her so nervous that she was going to bed. Madame Recamier rang the
gong twice, and a few minutes later a smell of cooking mounted from
the area kitchen. Harold started afresh. The storm without modulated
clamorously into the distance, and orange-colored lightning played in
at the window as he reached the big theme of the bass. It was that
wonderful melody in F minor which Beethoven might have been proud
to pen, and was followed by the exquisite group of double notes, so
fragrant, so tender, so uplifting, that Anne Pickett forgot her wine;
and the other girl, her eyes blazing, her cheek-bones etched against
the skin, sat and knotted her fingers and followed with dazed attention
the dance of the atoms in her brain. She saw Harold watching her as
she went to school; Harold peeping in at the lodge of her college;
Harold waiting to waylay her when she left her father’s house, and
she saw Harold that terrible night! He had reached the meditation in
B and her pulses slackened. After the crash of the storm, after the
breathless rush of octaves, Miss Anstruther felt a stillness that did
not come often into her life. The other pair were sitting very close,
and the storm was growling a diminuendo in the east. Already a pungent
and refreshing smell of earth that had been rained upon floated into
the apartment, and Harold, his eyes fixed on hers, was rushing away
with her soul on the broad torrent of Chopin’s magic music. She was
enthralled, she was hurt; her heart stuck against her ribs and it
pained her to breathe. When the last harp-like figure had flattened her
to the very wall, she sank back in her chair and closed her eyes.
“Ho, Margery, wake up; your wine’s getting warm!” cried lively Anne
Pickett as she sipped her glass, and Ned rang the bell for the page.
Harold sat self-absorbed, his hands resting on the ivory keys. He
divined that he had won the soul of the woman who sat near him, and
he wondered. He looked at her face, a strong face, in repose with a
few hard lines about the eyes and mouth. He gazed so earnestly that
she opened her eyes, and catching his regard, blushed--blushed ever so
lightly. But he saw it and wondered again. More wine came, but Miss
Anstruther refused and so did Harold. By this time the other pair were
jolly. Ned called out:
“Harold, play something lively. Wake up the bones, old man! Your girl
isn’t getting gay.” Harold looked at her, and she walked slowly toward
the conservatory. Miss Pickett, crazy Anne, as they called her, went to
the piano and dashed into a lively galop. Ned drank another glass of
wine and began to dance from the end of the room to the piano.
“Come on, let’s have a good racket!” he yelled, as the piano rattled
off in rag-time while Miss Anstruther and Harold sat on near the
conservatory. The whispering increased behind them, but the girl
did not hear it. The music unlocked her heart, and her commonplace
surroundings faded. If she had but met a man like him that other time!
She realized his innate purity, his nobility of nature. Little wonder
that his playing aroused her, made live anew the old pantomime of her
life. She unconsciously placed in the foreground of her history the
figure of the man beside her, yet she had never before seen him. It was
wonderful, this spiritual rebirth. Only that morning she told the girls
at breakfast she could never love again--she hated men and their ways.
“They are animals, the best of them!” and Madame Recamier laughed the
loudest.
Harold left her, took another glass of wine, and seeing Miss Pickett
light a cigarette, asked permission to do the same.
“Can’t I bring you another glass of wine?” Harold tenderly asked. The
gang of girls in the conservatory nudged one another and stared with
burning eyes at Miss Anstruther through the lattice. She gently shook
her head, and again he saw her blush. She did not stir. He began the
luscious nocturne in B--the Tuberose Nocturne, and Madame Recamier’s
gong sounded. The page entered and said:
“No more piano playing to-night. Madame wants to sleep.”
Miss Anstruther started so angrily that there was a titter behind the
lattice. But she did not notice it; her whole soul was bent on watching
Harold. He spoke to Ned, and Miss Pickett’s jarring laugh was heard.
Then he went over to her, and, sitting down beside her, leaned and
touched her face with his finger. The girl grew white and she felt her
heart beat. At the next word, the old, tired, cold look came back, and
she faced him as she had first received him.
Then suddenly the laughter behind the lattice grew noisy. Anne Pickett
screamed out:
“Another of Margery’s dreams shattered!”
Ned laughed and rang for more wine.
As they came down the steps the next morning Harold said to Ned:
“My boy, there are worse crimes than murdering a woman.”
“Oh, let’s get a cocktail,” croaked Ned.
IV
VENUS OR VALKYR?
Paul Godard found the ride between Nuremberg and Baireuth
discomforting. The hot July breezes that blew into the first-class
coupé of the train were almost breath-arresting; and Paul had left
Stuttgart that morning in a savage mood. The slowness of the railway
service irritated him, the faces of his travelling companions irritated
him, and he had shocked an Englishman by remarking early in the
afternoon:
“If the old engine doesn’t run any faster than this we had better get
out and walk, or--push.”
The other simply peered at the speaker and then resumed Wolzogen’s book
on Leading-Motives.
Three Roumanian ladies laughed in oily Eastern accents. They understood
English, and the sight of a human being, a strong young man, in a
passion about such a little matter as European railroad punctuality
struck them as ridiculous. So they laughed again and Paul finally
joined in, for he was an American.
He had been rude, but he couldn’t help it; besides, it looked as if
they would reach Baireuth too late for the opening performance, and
his was the laughter of despair.
The youthful pilgrim journeying to Baireuth was born in New York. He
had studied music like most young people in his country, and had begun
with that camel, that musical beast of all burdens, the piano. This
he practised most assiduously at intervals, because he really loved
music; but college, lawn-tennis, golfing, dancing, and motor-boating
had claims not easily put aside. Naturally, the piano suffered until
Paul left college; then for want of something better to do he took
lessons from Joseffy and edified that master by his spurts of industry.
His club began to encroach on his attention, and again the piano was
forgotten. Paul, whose parents were rich, was not a society butterfly,
but his training, instincts, and associations forced him to regard a
good dinner, a good tailor, and a racing motor-car as necessary to his
existence. From his mother he inherited his love of music, and his
father, dead many years, had bequeathed him a library; better still, a
taste for reading.
An average cultivated American, intensely self-conscious, too
self-conscious to show himself at his best, ashamed of his finer
emotions, like most of his countrymen, and a trifle spoiled and shallow.
One day Edgar Saltus told Paul he should read Schopenhauer, and he at
once ordered the two volumes of The World as Will and Representation.
It was not difficult reading, because he had been in Professor Bowne’s
class at college and enjoyed the cracking of metaphysical nuts. He
began to get side glimpses of Wagner’s philosophy, but despite the wit
of the German Diogenes his pessimism repelled him. He could not agree
with Saltus’s ingenious defense of pessimism in his two early books,
and he looked about for diversion elsewhere. Walter Pater’s silken
chords, velvety verbal music, had seduced Paul from the astringencies
of Herbert Spencer, and Chopin made moonlight for his soul on morbid
nights.
Yet Paul, with his selfish, well-bred, easy life, had encountered no
soul-racking convulsions; he had never been in love, therefore he
played the nocturnes of Chopin in a very unconvincing manner.
He always declared that Poe was bilious, and this remark gained for him
the reputation of wit and scholar among his club associates.
The Calumel Club is not given to velléités of speech....
II
Then Paul Godard fell into the clutches of Richard Wagner and swallowed
much of him.
Chopin seemed tiny, exotic, and feminine compared to the sirocco blasts
of the Baireuth master. Paul was not too critical, and, like most
Americans, he measured music by its immediate emotional result. The
greater the assault upon the senses, the greater the music. The logic
was inescapable.
Friedrich Nietzsche was the next milestone in Paul’s mental
journeyings. The attack on Wagner, the attack on the morals that made
our state stable, the savage irony, sparkling wit, and brilliant
onslaught on all the idols, filled the mind of the young man with joy.
He dearly loved a row, and though he recognized Nordau’s borrowed
polemical plumage, he liked him because of his cockiness.
So he devoured Nietzsche, reckless of his logical inferences, reckless
of the feelings of his poor mother, a most devoted Episcopalian of
the High Church variety. Paul always pained her with his sudden
somersaults, his amazing change of attitude, and, above all, his
heartless contempt for her idols, the Church and good society.
Society sufficed her soul hunger, and Paul’s renunciation of Mozart
and Donizetti--she simply loved Lucia--his sarcastic flouting of
churchgoers and his refusal to range himself, were additional weeds of
woe in her mourning life.
There was Edith Vicker; but Paul was such a hopeless case and wouldn’t
see that a nice, pretty, rich, moderately intelligent, well-reared
young woman was slipping through his fingers. Mrs. Godard often sighed
that winter in her sumptuous uptown apartment.
Nietzsche revealed new intellectual vistas for Paul and he actually
became serious. The notion of regarding one’s own personality as a
possible work of art to be labored upon and polished to perfection’s
point, set him thinking hard. What had he done with his life? What
wasted opportunities! He deserted his club and began piano-playing
again, and when reproached by his friends for his fickleness he excused
himself by quoting Nietzsche; a thinker, as well as a snake, must shed
his skin once a year, else death. He also was ready with Emerson’s
phrase about fools being consistent, and felt altogether very fine,
and superior to his fellow-beings. Nietzsche feeds the flame of one’s
vanity, and Paul was sure that he belonged to the quintessential band
of elect souls that is making for the Uebermensch--the Superman!
He really was a nice, boyish lad, and he could never pass a pretty
girl--whether a countess or a chambermaid--without making soft eyes
at her. Paul was popular; and so the Roumanian ladies laughed at him
admiringly. Paul had left his mother in Paris, the heat was too trying
for travel, and he was close to Baireuth on this torrid summer day, one
Sunday afternoon in July.
Yet another hour before him, he turned his critical attention to the
laughing trio. One was a princess. She told Paul so, and spoke of
the sultry diversions of Bucharest. The second was a fat singer, who
startled the Englishman by inquiring if there wasn’t a good coloratura
part in Parsifal. If there were, she intended asking Frau Cosima
Wagner to let her sing it; but if there wasn’t, she supposed she
would have to be content with the Forest Bird; even Melba had been a
Waldvogel, why couldn’t she be one also?
Her sparkling eyes and mountain of flesh amused Paul exceedingly. He
knew Heinrich Conried very well, and he told the singer that when
Parsifal was sung next season at the Metropolitan Opera House he would
speak to the impresario and get her the part of Kundry. It was for
a lark-like voice, such as the lady said she possessed, and full of
Bellinian fioritura.
As he gravely related these fables he was conscious of the penetrating
gaze of the third woman. She was tall, frail-looking, with a dark
skin, hair black and glossy, and she had the most melancholy eyes in
the world. Paul returned her glance with discretion. His eyes were
Irish blue-gray and full of the devil at times, and they could be very
sympathetic and melting when he willed. The two young people examined
each other with that calm regard which, as Schopenhauer declares, mars
or makes the destiny of a new generation. But metaphysics and the
biology of the sexes bothered not at all the youth and maiden. Paul
admired the classic regularity of her nose and forehead, and wondered
why her face seemed familiar. Her mouth was large, irregular, perverse.
It suggested Marie Bashkirtseff’s, and it was just as yearning and
dissatisfied. Despite their sadness, fun lurked in the corners of her
eyes, and he knew that she enjoyed his harmless hoax.
Then they both burst out laughing, and the princess said in a surprised
voice:
“Helena, why do you laugh with the young American gentleman?”
She also mentioned a family name that caused the New Yorker to stare.
What, was this girl with the determined chin and brows the identical
one who almost set Russia quarrelling with another nation and upset the
peace of Roumania? Yes, it was, and Paul no longer puzzled over her
face. It had been common property of the photographers and newspaper
illustrators a few years ago, and as he mentally indexed its features
he almost said aloud that her curious beauty had never been even
faintly reproduced.
His imagination was stirred; Roumania had always seemed so remote,
and here was he, Paul Godard, a plain American citizen, face to face
with the heroine of one of those mysterious Eastern intrigues in which
kings, crowns, queens, and ladies-in-waiting were all delightfully
mixed up. So he chatted with Helena about Wagner and Degeneracy, and
discovered that she was an admirer of Ludwig of Bavaria, Nietzsche, Guy
de Maupassant, Poe, Schumann, Chopin, Marie Bashkirtseff, and all the
rest of the sick-brained people born during the sick-brained nineteenth
century. She, too, had written a book, which was soon to appear. It
was full of the Weltschmerz of Schopenhauer and the bold upspringing
individualism of Nietzsche. She had odd theories concerning the Ring of
the Nibelungs, and had read Browning’s Sordello. She told Paul that she
found but one stumbling-block in Wagner. How, she asked gravely, with a
slight blush--how could Parsifal become Lohengrin’s father?
Paul said he didn’t know. It must have occurred long after his
experiences with Kundry and the Flower Girls, and perhaps it was a sort
of----
“Oh, no, M. Godard!” she quickly answered. “Not that. The swan died,
you know; besides, Parsifal was always a Pure Fool.” Paul suggested
that it might have been another of the same name but of a different
family. And then the conversation went to pieces, for the soprano
called out:
“Voilà! Baireuth, the Wagner theatre!” and they all craned their necks
to catch the first glimpse of that mystic edifice built on the hill,
the new musical Pantheon, the new St. Peter’s of the Bewitched Ones.
And the Englishman continued to calmly read about the Loki-motif as the
train slowly steamed into Baireuth.
III
Paul found comfortable lodgings in the Lisztstrasse and his new friends
went to the Hotel Sonne. At half-past four he was up on the hill
looking at the world, and as immaculately dressed as if he stood in
the bow window of the Calumel Club, ogling Fifth Avenue girls. He was
only vaguely interested in the approaching performance, and his pulses
did not quicken when Donner’s motif told the gabbling, eager throng
that the great Trilogy was about to unfold its fables of water, wood,
and wind. He took his seat unconcernedly, and then the house became
black and from space welled up those elemental sounds, not merely
music, but the sighing, droning swish of waters. The Rhine calmly,
majestically stole over Paul’s senses, he forgot New York, and when
the curtains parted he was with the Rhine Daughters, with Alberich,
and his heart seemed to stop beating. All sense of identity vanished
at a wave of Wagner’s magic wand, and not being a music-critic, his
ego was absorbed as by the shining mirror in the hand of a hypnotist.
This, then, was Wagner, a Wagner who attacked simultaneously all the
senses, vanquished the strongest brain, smothered, bruised, and smashed
it; wept, sang, surged, roared, sighed in it; searched and ravished
your soul until it was put to flight, routed, vanquished, and brought
bleeding and captive to the feet of the master.
The eye was promise-crammed, the ears sealed with bliss, and Paul
_felt_ the wet of the waters. He panted as Alberich scaled the slimy
steeps, and the curves, described by the three swimming mermaids,
filled him with the joy of the dance.
The rape of the Rhinegold, the hoarse shout of laughter from
Alberich’s love-forsworn lips, and the terrified cries of the three
watchers were to Paul as real as Wall Street.
Walhall didn’t bore him, and he began at last to catch faint clues of
the meaning of the mighty epic. He went to the underworld, and saw
the snake, the ring, and the tarnhelm; he heard the anvil chorus--so
different from Verdi’s!--he saw the giants quarrelling over their
booty, and the rainbow seemed to bridge the way to another, brighter
world. As the Walhall march died in Paul’s ears he found himself in the
open air, and he thought it all over as he slowly went with the crowd
down the hill, that new Mount of Olives trod by the feet of musical
martyrs. He had a programme, but he was too confused, too overcome by
the clangor of his brain-particles, to read it. He was not dreaming,
nor yet was he awake; he was Wagnerized. The first attack is not always
fatal, but it is always severe, even to the point of pain. Paul Godard
had become a Wagnerite, and his Nietzsche and Schopenhauer skins melted
from him as melts the snow in sunshine.
Striking through his many exalted moods was the consciousness of having
recognized one of the Rhine Daughters. It was the contralto, an Eastern
girl from Maine. Rue Towne was her odd name, and she had been once
a pupil of a New England vocal school, but she had lived that down,
and after the usual hard, interesting struggle abroad she had reached
Baireuth. Paul remembered her well. A blonde girl, eyes indescribably
gray, with dark lashes, a face full of interesting accents, a rhythmic
chin and cheek-bones that told of resolution. Her figure was lovely,
and Paul resolved to call on her the very next day.
He soon discovered Rue’s address; Baireuth is small and full of
information for the curious. Paul on Monday morning went to the
Alexanderstrasse, where she resided, only to find her at a rehearsal of
Die Walküre. He was rather put out, as he was accustomed to accomplish
what he wanted without much exertion. He then bethought him of Helena,
the Roumanian beauty, and he warmed at the recollection of a glance he
had received the afternoon previous. That, and the hand pressure, had
been unmistakable. So he went to the Sonne Hotel and sent up his card.
The three ladies were at breakfast. Would Mr. Godard call in an hour?
Paul cursed his luck and walked to Wahnfried, wondering if he was to
be bored during his stay. The reaction from the exalted condition
after Rhinegold had set in. Paul was not a beer-drinker, so he could
not avail himself of the consolations offered by Gambrinus, the Drowsy
Deity of Germany. He had taken a pint of bad champagne and some
tough chicken and slept badly. His cigar, too, was abominable, and
he felt absolutely disillusioned as he paced the historic garden of
Wahnfried. The true Wagnerite is always in heaven or hades. There is
no middle-distance in his picture of life and art. At Wagner’s grave
Paul felt a return of the thrill, but it passed away at the barking of
a boarhound. He went slowly toward the hotel and was in such a perverse
mood that he avoided it and turned into the Ludwigstrasse. Then he met
some one.
A girl passed him, gave him a shy, half-startled glance, hesitated, and
spoke to him. It was Rue Towne.
“Mr. Godard, I found your card a moment ago. I am very glad to see you.
How did you like Rhinegold?”
Paul was standing in the street, the girl looking down into his eyes;
he made a conventional answer, their hands touched, and they went down
the street together.
That afternoon Paul received a pretty note from the Roumanian. She
wrote of her sorrow at his not having called again, and asked him to
join them during the first entr’acte of Die Walküre. He tossed the
note away, for his brain was filled with the vision of a girl in a
straight-brimmed straw hat, a girl with a voice like a wooing clarinet
and eyes that were dewy with desire. Paul was hard hit, and, as one
nail drives out another, the blonde woman supplanted the brunette in
his easily stirred imagination.
The first act of Die Walküre did not lay the fair ghost in his brain;
he went out on the esplanade and encountered the three Roumanians.
Helena detached herself and came to him with that gracious gait and
proud lift of head and throat that gave her a touch of royalty. She
reproached him with her magnetic gaze, and soon the pair were strolling
in the leafy lanes about the theatre.
Paul had never met a woman who mentally tantalized him as did Helena.
She had a manner of half uttering a sentence, of putting a nuance into
her question that interested while it irritated him. Artistic people
are mutually attracted, and there was a savor in the personality of
this distinguished girl that was infinitely enticing to his cultivated
taste and at the same time slightly enigmatic. Without effort they
glided into confidences, and the Sword-motive sounding for the
second act found them old friends. Youth is not the time for halting
compromise.
Lilli Lehmann’s art took Paul out of himself, and the beauty and vigor
of the act stirred him again. But he could not recapture the first
fine, careless rapture of the night before. To the nerves, virginal of
Wagner, that thrill comes once only.
In the long intermission Paul found Helena and took her to the crowded
café across the road to get something to eat and drink. It was a
quarter after seven, and Wagner wears on the stomach. Even a poetical
Roumanian girl has earthly appetites. So they drank champagne and ate
pasties of goose liver, and confessions were many. Nothing establishes
a strong bond of sympathy like the hunger and thirst of two healthy
young humans. Paul seemed to have forgotten Rue and the splendour of
her hair and complexion. He was rapidly losing his head in the subtle
blandishments of the Eastern woman. He saw that she was a coquette, but
her seriousness, her fierceness, that broke through the shell of silky
manners, gave him a glimpse of a woman worth winning, and he was just
gambler enough, American enough to dare. When he left her he carried
away a look that was an unequivocal challenge.
Paul’s brain was on fire during the Ride of the Valkyries, and hardly
realized that it was Hans Richter’s masterly reading. The stage failed
to interest him until he discovered Rue in Valkyrean garb, and then
he watched with his soul in his eyes. Her profile, so charming in its
irregularity; her freedom of pose, her heroic action filled him with
admiration. By the light from the stage he read her name, Fräulein Rue
Towne, and she was the last in the list of the Valkyries. He watched
with indifferent gaze the close of the act, and mentally voted the
Paris version of the Magic-Fire scene far superior to Baireuth’s.