At the first glance one might have been inclined to doubt; but at the second anybody would have recognized her—that is, with a little mental rehabilitation: the bright little rouge spots in the hollow of her cheek, the eyebrows well accentuated with paint, the thin lips rose-tinted, and the dull, straight hair frizzed and curled and twisted and turned by that consummate rascal and artist, the official beautifier and rectifier of stage humanity, Robert, the opera coiffeur. Who in the world knows better than he the gulf between the real and the ideal, the limitations between the natural and the romantic?
Yes, one could see her, in that time-honored thin silk dress of hers stiffened into brocade by buckram underneath; the high, low-necked waist, hiding any evidences of breast, if there were such evidences to hide, and bringing the long neck into such faulty prominence; and the sleeves, crisp puffs of tulle divided by bands of red velvet, through which the poor lean arm runs like a wire, stringing them together like beads. Yes, it was she, the whilom dugazon of the opera troupe. Not that she ever was a dugazon, but that was what her voice once aspired to be: a dugazon manquée would better describe her.
What a ghost! But they always appeared like mere evaporations of real women. For what woman of flesh and blood can seriously maintain through life the r?le of sham attendant on sham sensations, and play public celebrant of other women\'s loves and lovers, singing, or rather saying, nothing more enlivening than: "Oh, madame!" and "Ah, madame!" and "Quelle ivresse!" or "Quelle horreur!" or, in recitative, detailing whatever dreary platitudes and inanities the librettist and Heaven connive to put upon the tongues of confidantes and attendants?
Looking at her—how it came over one! The music, the lights, the scene; the fat soprano confiding to her the fact of the "amour extrême" she bears for the tenor, to which she, the dugazon, does not even try to listen; her eyes wandering listlessly over the audience. The calorous secret out, and in her possession, how she stumbles over her train to the back of the stage, there to pose in abject patience and awkwardness, while the gallant baritone, touching his sword, and flinging his cape over his shoulder, defies the world and the tenor, who is just recovering from his "ut de poitrine" behind the scenes.
She was talking to me all the time, apologizing for the intrusion, explaining her mission, which involved a short story of her life, as women\'s intrusions and missions usually do. But my thoughts, also as usual, distracted me from listening, as so often they have distracted me from following what was perhaps more profitable.
The composer, of course, wastes no music upon her; flinging to her only an occasional recitative in two notes, but always ending in a reef of a scale, trill, or roulade, for her to wreck her voice on before the audience. The chef d\'orchestre, if he is charitable, starts her off with a contribution from his own lusty lungs, and then she—oh, her voice is always thinner and more osseous than her arms, and her smile no more graceful than her train!
As well think of the simulated trees, water-falls, and chateaux leaving the stage, as the dugazon! One always imagines them singing on into dimness, dustiness, unsteadiness, and uselessness, until, like any other piece of stage property, they are at last put aside and simply left there at the end of some season—there seems to be a superstition against selling or burning useless and dilapidated stage property. As it came to me, the idea was not an impossibility. The last representation of the season is over. She, tired beyond judgment—haply, beyond feeling—by her tireless r?le, sinks upon her chair to rest in her dressing-room; sinks, further, to sleep. She has no maid. The troupe, hurrying away to France on the special train waiting not half a dozen blocks away, forget her—the insignificant are so easily forgotten! The porter, more tired, perhaps, than any one of the beautiful ideal world about him, and savoring already in advance the good onion-flavored grillade awaiting him at home, locks up everything fast and tight; the tighter and faster for the good fortnight\'s vacation he has promised himself.
No doubt if the old opera-house were ever cleaned out, just such a heap of stiff, wire-strung bones would be found, in some such hole as the dugazon\'s dressing-room, desiccating away in its last costume—perhaps in that very costume of Inez; and if one were venturesome enough to pass Allhallowe\'en there, the spirit of those bones might be seen availing itself of the privilege of unasperged corpses to roam. Not singing, not talking—it is an anachronism to say that ghosts talk: their medium of communication must be pure thought; and one should be able to see their thoughts working, just as one sees the working of the digestive organs in the clear viscera of transparent animalcule. The hard thing of it is that ghosts are chained to the same scenes that chained their bodies, and when they sleep-walk, so to speak, it must be through phases of former existence. What a nightmare for them to go over once again the lived and done, the suffered and finished! What a comfort to wake up and find one\'s self dead, well dead!
I could have continued and put the whole opera troupe in "costume de ghost," but I think it was the woman\'s eyes that drew me back to her face and her story. She had a sensible face, now that I observed her naturally, as it were; and her hands,—how I have agonized over those hands on the stage!--all knuckl............