Ordham sat alone in the vast black auditorium of the Hof. Old Kurt had met him at the station with a note from Countess Tann which informed him briefly that the King had commanded a midnight performance of G?tterd?mmerung, and that she had without difficulty bribed the doorkeeper to smuggle in the Englishman so favourably remembered; in these days there was little awe of the King’s displeasure, but he must be careful to make no sound. “I shall sing to you, not to the King,” the note concluded. “Do not forget that, but make no attempt to see me until to-morrow afternoon at one. It will be dawn before the performance finishes, and I shall be nothing but a worn-out prima donna with not a wish on earth but for supper and sleep. I shall hide in one of the hotels this evening and console myself by writing you a letter, which you will find at your hotel upon your return. Mind you tell Kurt where you are stopping.”
Ordham raged at the further delay. But when he had worn his temper down with a long walk and a German supper, he began to feel agreeably alive to the adventure. At a quarter before midnight he presented himself at the side entrance of the Hof. The door was slightly ajar and opened upon his approach. Re?nforcing the hand held out to him in the darkness, he tiptoed through the vestibule and foyer, then, left inside a door near the middle of the parkett, he fumbled unaided to a seat.
The orchestra was tuning and covered what sound he made. The jets of light above the scores of its musicians, and the solitary globe in the box of the King were all that relieved the black vacuum in which he found himself. He could not make out a feature of the familiar tiers which always formed a part of the mental picture of this graceful opera house when he fell to dreaming of it. Dowdy as many of the women might be, they made a brilliant scene in totality, and there were always familiar faces, particularly in the balkon. And all were music lovers, come to hear, not to be seen, hardly daring to breathe audibly until the curtain went down. To-night, Ordham could have sworn the galleries were full of ghosts, so difficult was it to believe that he was to hear a performance of G?tterd?mmerung in an empty house. He turned his head, whimsically expectant of seeing the space behind the parkettsitz crowded with shadowy forms: the students, men and women, who felt themselves fortunate in being able to pay for standing room, and to stand for five hours!
And since he was forced to put an extinguisher on the lover in him until the morrow and had finished cursing the King, he gave his fancy rein and found it no effort to imagine himself in some vast underground cavern watching restless spirits bearing each a tiny torch at the entrance, and a throne cut in the rock behind him high up toward the dome. In truth the air in which he sat was damp and cold, although the month was August; the opera house had been closed since the first of July.
His mind indulged in fantasies but for a few moments however, presently returning to Styr’s note. He had read it twice and wished he might strike a match and read it again. Something in it had induced a vague sensation of uneasiness, of doubt. In spite of her assurance that she should sing to him alone, it had been abrupt, almost cold. She might be wise in refusing to see him before the performance; but at least she could have written something of the regret she might reasonably be expected to feel; but this omission, no doubt, was due to the ill temper generally induced by these commands to sing at midnight. Then fear assailed him. Did she mean to convey some message of renunciation to-night? Prepare him for her decision in favour of art? He had never questioned that for this great artist to renounce the stage at the height of her powers and in the dawn of a world-wide fame would be no light matter. In his breast pocket were the fiery vows he had received a few hours before his departure from London. There were no half measures about Styr; this letter had enveloped him in an electric mist. But her last note might have been written the summer before. Had she faltered when she received his last telegram from Cologne?—sternly admonished, perhaps, by that twin sister of hers in Valhalla, Brynhildr, whose temporary reincarnations, mayhap, it was that made Ludwig despise the women of Earth? . . .
Ordham felt his long jaw grow prognathic. Munich was not England. He forgot the death of his brother. He was in a romantic city, in a romantic adventure, he was youth on fire, man balked once more in his desire for the woman he loved with the strength of both youth and maturity. He vowed to own her in the uninterrupted possession of marriage if he had to blast the voice in her throat. He felt as primitive as the characters in the drama about to be presented, as he sat there, frowning, dogged, almost growling, in the cavernous darkness of that opera house which he has never set foot in since, nor ever will again.
The musicians stood up and faced about, standing in an attitude of extreme respect. Ordham turned his head. The King had entered his box. He still wore a light overcoat, as if he had but just now stepped from the carriage that brought him from one of his castles. He also did not think it worth while to remove his hat, a large soft hat, tipped over his heavy white face. Altogether he bore little resemblance to the romantic and brilliant youth, probably the handsomest figure that ever ornamented a throne, who had witnessed his first exclusive performance from that box in 1865. He sat down heavily. The musicians took their places. The overture began.
Ordham felt as if he had dropped gently from a fire-swept plain, haunted by furies, into a vast warm rhythmic sea whose tides swept sense to thought and rushed it back again to the senses, until that complete union was effected of which all mortals dream but only the Ordhams and Styrs can attain.
Ordham never made any attempt to follow the motives in an overture; that was not his idea of enjoying music, which he estimated as a gift bestowed on brains like Wagner’s that the intellect of the hearer might be awakened and excited only so far as was necessary to liberate the senses. Nevertheless, to-night he was aware as never before of that deep undertone of fate below the solemn joy and halleluja of the music of G?tterd?mmerung. And fate was personified in the first dark scene, where the three grey Norns sat weaving their ropes and gloomily foretelling the death of gods too confident and ambitious. But when the hideous trio disappeared and Brünhilde and Siegfried came forth from the cave where they had passed their long honeymoon, it needed only Styr’s first love notes, piercingly sweet, while her eyes deliberately sought the spot where she knew Ordham must be, to shake him from head to foot with the reassurance that whatever she might resolve in her cooler moments, love meant all to her that it had meant to this fallen goddess.
Styr may or may not have read the volumes of criticism devoted to the heroine of the Niebelungenlied, but it is probable that in any case she would have penetrated the mists of antiquity and seen the Brynhildr who reigned there, with her own eyes. In Die Walküre she made her alternately the jubilant sexless favourite of Wotan, shadowed subtly with her impending womanhood, and the goddess of aloof and immutable calm, Will personified, even when moved to pity. In G?tterd?mmerung, particularly of late, she had portrayed her as woman epitomized, arguing that all great women had the ichor of the goddess in their veins, and that primal woman was but the mother of a sex modified (sometimes) but not remade. In the last act of Siegfried her voice was wholly dramatic and expressed her delight at coming into her woman’s inheritance in ecstatic cries, almost shouts, which were never to be forgotten by any that heard them, and stirred the primal inheritance in the veriest butterfly of the court. In this beautiful love scene of G?tterd?mmerung, the last of the tetralogy, her voice was lyric, rich and round and full, as her voice must always be, but stripped of its darker quality; and while by no means angelic, a character with which she could invest it when portraying the virgin Elizabeth, was as sweet and clear and triumphant as if bent upon giving the final expression to the first love of woman alloyed with knowledge.
Ordham had heard her in the r?le many times, and he soon appreciated that she had never made as much of this scene as she did to-night, realized she meant to convey that Brynhildr, with some echo in her brain of her old gift of prophecy, took advantage of this last hour of happiness to gratify her woman’s nature to the core. She was tender, ineffably so, doubtful, charming, full of fears, superbly passionate. Her great tones were like golden apples filled with the sharp delicious juices of her bridal memories; and she was the epitome of the helpmate, the apotheosis of exalted womanhood when she bade her man go forth and conquer new worlds, exercise his supreme gifts of strength and courage as a man should, instead of dallying too long in these flowery meadows of love. Ordham, watching her through his glass, wondered that even she could be so beautiful, for her face was illuminated as he had never seen it before. He had not the least doubt that she kept her word and sang to him, and when she cried: “Oh, heavenly powers, holy protectors, view with delight our devotion and love. Apart, who can divide us? Divided, still we are one!” she bent her head from Siegfried’s neck and looked once more full at the spot where, it may be, Ordham’s face made a white blur on the dark.
He paid slight attention to the next scene, although the picturesque hall of the Gibichungs on the Rhine, with the sinister plot hatched there, had always delighted him; but his uneasiness recurred, for in retrospect Styr’s voice and acting were charged with a significance he felt but could not define. His confidence returned, however, during her scene with Waltraute, when he could not doubt that her incredulity at the demand of the gods to give up her bridal ring, and the magnificent scorn with which she announced herself woman, not that pitiful half-remembered thing, a demigoddess, were addressed, not to Valhalla, but to the harrowing demands of an art that still fought for its rights.
“Siegfried loves me! . . . The ring bides with me. . . . get hence to the gods. . . . Sooner to ruins Valhalla’s splendour may crash,” sang Brünhilde, much as Styr, if too hard pressed, might have cried: “To the devil with Art and the world!”
Ordham smiled, then sank the man in the spectator once more as the hapless Brünhilde repulsed and struggled with the disguised and unmemoried Siegfried, for here there could be no message; no mortal would ever come between himself and her; and perhaps that profound knowledge and faith, at the same time devoid of the subtle sting of regret for the loss of a suspense always piquant, was the final proof that, whatever his faults and lacks, as a man he was at least able to love greatly.
As Brünhilde was driven by the fraudulent Gunther into the cave, she looked as if the very bones had gone out of her, primitive woman beaten and captured by the victorious male, bewildered, helpless, sick with disgust and horror, but too broken, too conscious of the futility of revolt even to appeal to the relentless brute force behind her. Ordham recalled Styr’s initiation, and reflected that, although methods had changed since the primordial era, man had not. And while there was no resemblance whatever between himself and that prosaic seducer of an ignorant and beautiful child, bred in a filthy mining town, save in their common sex, still would he, impelled by that imperious call in his blood of man for his mate, have resorted to kidnapping, strategy, bribery, violence, any device old or new, to force this woman into an indissoluble bond with himself.
............