LX LIFE, THE POTTER

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.

By the King’s command, there was a pause of but three minutes between the first act—close upon an hour and a half in length—and the second. Ordham’s mind wandered to the morrow until the boat came down the Rhine with Gunther and his prey. Then, once more he was ready to sink Styr in Brünhilde, for he had never been able to decide which was the greatest piece of acting on the world’s stage, Styr’s Isolde in the first act of Tristan, or her Brünhilde in this tremendous scene, where she invoked the supernormal birthright of the goddess to intensify the fury and indignation of the outraged woman.

As she stepped from the boat, hanging her head before the throng awaiting the bride Gunther had ravished from the fire-girt rock, she looked so forlorn, so beaten, so wholly womanly that Ordham felt tears in his eyes. Oddly enough his thoughts flew to the lonely coffin in Brompton Cemetery. Mabel, dead in her youth, was mercifully spared the maturer suffering of woman. Not that she ever could have reached the heights and depths so fatally accessible to this woman, but she symbolized youth, whose unhappiness is but a phase of its egotistical pleasures, and was gone before she had lived long enough to suffer with a mind stripped of illusions.

There was no controversy of doubt over Styr’s interpretation of Brünhilde in this act. She let loose every passion of which her sex when scorned has yet conceived. After her vain appeal to Siegfried, standing fatuously beside the Gedrun whose magic potion has bewitched him (more than ever Ordham wondered that Brünhilde could have given her affections to this great child), when those long moments of staring incredulity were over, she burst into such a madness of rage that her voice seemed to darken visibly, to take on strange tones, as deep and crude as colour may have been in that morning of the world when goddesses went to sleep on rocks surrounded by fire and Siegfrieds fought dragons and walked through flames protected by tarnhelm and ring. When she screamed, her voice pierced to the marrow, affrighting as that of a wild beast in a jungle at night. The whole scene was almost unbearable in its intensity; but never did those beautiful arms make an ungraceful movement, the hand that clutched the heart as if to tear it out never rose an inch too high or low. Her audience might be racked and unbreathed, but Styr was always the absolute artist, vivified but never distracted by the furnace within.

Nevertheless, those that knew nothing of acting would have vowed that Styr’s brain was suffocated by Brynhildr’s. To-night when Siegfried and Gedrun had gone, and, alone with Gunther and Hagen, she stood staring before her, an immense horror in her eyes, her lips slightly parted, her arms limp, as if on the edge of the world watching it sink into the black void of space, Ordham involuntarily glanced behind him at the King. He had hitched his chair forward, his arms were pressing the rail, his hat was on the back of his head, his eyes flamed with light. He looked like a lost immortal, long straying from star to star, who at last sees the distant gates of Valhalla open, and awaiting him. Ordham wondered why this poor idealist had never sought out Styr, hoping to find in her the embodiment of his unearthly dreams; wondered again if it were because of the knowledge that his mortal career had made it impossible for him to find the goddess in any woman. His eyes were filmed with more than common weakness, his senses drugged, dead; he could but dream of some tier of heaven reserved for great souls like his, which came to their own only when free of the flesh. But there was no doubt that Styr in such scenes as this gave him immortal moments.

Brünhilde came out of her stupor, and after a fruitless lament for the lost arts of her godhood, with which, woman-like, she fancied she might have held Siegfried against the wiles of a younger woman, deliberately sentenced him to death. As she described the only vulnerable part of the mighty Siegfried, that fearless back which he would never show to any foe, her calm was far more awful than her wrath had been. During her long meditation, she had divined the trick which had been played upon the warrior, but that light by no means mitigated the evil; if she could not possess him neither should Gedrun. It was the primitive woman’s method of revenge that modern woman has not disdained to follow, but so grand was her portrayal of a woman conscious that she had once been the mighty daughter of Wotan, that never for a second did she descend to the level of Earthians. She was Brünhilde acting according to her lights, and the lights of her day must have been as blinding as an electric storm caught in an underground cavern.

The scene shifted. Siegfried drank from the horn into which the ever malignant Hagen had squeezed the restorative herb, and sang of Brünhilde, forgetting Gedrun and all that had happened since he left the rock. With the enchanting strains of the love music of the last act of the third opera of the tetralogy embracing him—tender and ecstatic—followed by the slowly unwinding Brünhilde motif, coming as it did after so much misery, wickedness, and violence, and preceding crime and the final disaster, Ordham dropped his face into his hands and gave up his thoughts to the bliss he anticipated. He was recalled by the deepest sigh he had ever heard. It came down upon him like a gust of death, dulling the almost excruciating sweetness of the music. He raised his head and thanked God that he was not Ludwig, King of Bavaria. For him there was a future on Earth.

The Trauermarsch, in which all the dead of not only Earth, but of the Universe, seem to rise and tramp across the bridge of oblivion, was finished. Brünhilde entered the hall of the Gibichungs to find Gedrun wailing over Siegfried’s body, Gunther slain by Hagen. Of late Styr had played the character consistently through to the end as a woman. But to-night she appeared to defer once more to Wagner—possibly to the King—and to be about to symbolize the “negation of the will to live,” the eternal sacrifice of woman, the immolation of self; although she had contended, and for that reason sang no more at Bayreuth, that such an interpretation was absurd as a finale for Brünhilde, no matter what its beauty and truth in the abstract. The gods were doomed, her renouncement of life did not save them, and as for the sacrifice of woman to man, that she had accomplished twice over. Brünhilde died as other women had died since, and doubtless before, in the hope of uniting with the spirit of her man, and because life was become abhorrent.

To-night, as she entered the hall, she was so still, so majestic, that she no longer looked a woman at all, save in so far as her slain womanhood may have risen to feed the purpose of the daughter of Wotan—calm, inexorable, the personification of Will. As she stood by the bier and ordered the funeral pyre built and began that great dirge which expresses the end of all things mortal, her face was expressionless, as fixed as that of the beautiful Medusa in the Glyptothek of Munich. Her head, her body, might have been an organ out of which rolled such notes as no other audience had ever heard. Ordham almost stood up, the voice was so sublime, so unearthly; he wondered if his brain, his senses, had been so unmercifully beaten upon during the long hours of the opera that he was suffering from delusion. He had not known that even Styr could sing like that. So must the heroines of the old Sagas have sung when Europe was still the battleground of gods and men, so may Brynhildr’s voice have gone up in its mighty swan song before Valhalla flamed and fell to ashes.

Never on any stage has there been such a picture as Styr always made, when, standing before the funeral pyre on whose summit lay the body of Siegfried, with her flaming torch held high in her right hand and her hair streaming behind her, looking even taller than her own majestic height, she sang:

“Flieght heim, ihr Raben

?raun’t es euren Herrn

?was hier am Rhein irh geh?rt!”

and to-night, as she sang that magnificent p?an to death, she fairly filled the stage, as if some power of the soul literally permitted her body to grow to the heroic proportions of that old daughter of the gods.

But all the time the immobility of her face never broke; it was fate itself. She thrust her torch into the pyre, greeted and unbridled her horse still with the same awful calm. It was only when the fire was roaring from floor to ceiling and she was about to mount Grane that her voice abruptly lost its solemnity and pealed out in the wildest ecstasy:

“Fühl’ meine Brust auch,

?wie sie entbrennt;

?helles Feuer

?das Hertz mir erfasst,

?ihn zu umschlingen,

?umschlossen von ihm,

?in m?chtigster Minne

?verm?hlt ihm zu sein!

?Heiaho! Grane!

?grüsse deinem Herrn!

?Siegfried! Siegfried! Sieh!

?Selig grüsst dich dein Weib!”

The last line was flung straight into Ordham’s ear, but he did not pause to reflect upon its significance, holding his breath for this final moment of Styr’s stupendous acting, Brynhildr’s immolation. She leaped on her horse, and with head erect and arms uplifted to the smouldering body on the pyre, dashed straight into the flames. It was over in a second, but its realism was so intense and affrighting, that, as ever, Ordham gasped and nearly sprang from his seat, while the King gave a loud shout of rapture.

Ordham sank back with a deep sigh of amused relief. He knew that those flames produced by spirits did not really meet, and that Styr’s horse was too well trained to make a misstep or linger. Still no one else save Vogel had ever essayed this feat, which could be simulated on the darkened stage, and overlooked in the simultaneous conflagration of the castle, the rise of the waters of the Rhine, the vision in the sky of Valhalla in flames.

The walls began to fall, Hagen and the Rhine maidens to search furiously for the ring, retainers to fly about in distraction. Ordham had never seen the confusion as well represented as to-night. The shrieks sounded genuine, the faces of the survivors were distraught. No doubt these born artists and loyal Bavarians were always afire when performing for their King alone. The curtain went down amidst the crash of orchestration. Ordham, seeing that the King’s box was empty, slipped out, meditating upon those last words of Brünhilde. “Thy wife!” She had made her final decision, then, bade her farewell to the stage in that long dirge. It was indeed her swan song! For the first time he wholly realized the enormity of the sacrifice, the egoism of love. But he did not care. He exulted, as inexorably the male as Siegfried or Gunther.

He had half made up his mind to ignore Styr’s injunctions and go to her dressing-room; but when he reached the open air, he suddenly realized that he was very tired. The long unbroken strain of an opera which, even with pauses, makes a severer drain on the nervous system than any opera ever written, following a sleepless night of travel and many hours of mental excitement, left him suddenly exhausted, devitalized; he was glad to fall into the cab which his friend the doorkeeper had had the forethought to order, and drive to his hotel. The dawn was cold and grey, a bleak and disheartening contrast to the scene of mysterious splendour from which he seemed to have been shot straight into the chilliest stratum of a dismal inhospitable Earth. He shivered, wondered had it all been a dream, longed for sleep. He did not even glance down Maximilianstrasse, to the stage door, out of which the performers were streaming, gesticulating, weeping.