The Last Room

I

THE rehearsal of certain scenes from Die Walküre, held for the benefit of Herr Jansen preparatory to his first American performance, was over, and the aids and supernumeraries were disappearing with mysterious dispatch. But Brünhilde, in a gray street-dress, holding shield and spear, still remained upon the empty stage chatting with Siegmund, in English tweed, and Sieglinde, in an American shirt-waist. All three had met and sung together before in the land of their common tongue. They were of widely differing types, however. Jansen, from the vicinity of the Danish border, was racially if not geographically a Dane. He was a finelooking, well-built man over six feet in height, and noticeably lean for a Wagnerian tenor. Of him the press agent had already prophesied that he would become a matinée idol — the American equivalent for the German ‘ Schwänn.’ Hilda Bergmann, the Sieglinde, was a pure northern blonde from Saxony; Ilma Samara, the most famous Brümhilde of the period, had no suggestion of the Teutonic type, nor indeed of any type. She was an Austrian from a Slav province on the shores of the Adriatic. In her delicate features, her dark eyes, her subtle personality, one seemed to feel the mysteries of a remote Asiatic inheritance.

They walked together to the stage entrance, where a nurse and a fairhaired child waited in an open carriage to receive Sieglinde. Brünhilde and Siegmund stood a moment on the sidewalk.

‘What a fine boy. She seems very happy.’

Ilma Samara’s sympathetic interest lingered upon the younger singer greeting her child as if after a long absence.

‘And your Evchen, she must be a tall girl now?’ Jansen questioned.

A different expression came into Brünhilde’s eyes.

‘She comes to my shoulder, but I think she will never be so tall as I am. She is now seventeen.’

‘Brünhilde having married a mortal, her daughter is perhaps only a woman.’

Jansen had the light manner of the man of the world, rather than the impressive mannerisms usually characteristic of the operatic artist.

Briinhilde’s dark eyes rested a moment on his face.

‘To that Brünhilde came in the end: to be only a woman.’

‘Say superwoman,’ Jansen amended.

Ilma smiled. ‘Which way do you go, Herr Jansen?’

‘Your way, if I am permitted.’

The tenor waited with something more than his usual effect of chivalrous devotion for her permission.

‘With pleasure. I think I shall walk, my hotel is so short a distance.’

‘And Evchen, will she inherit Brünhilde; has she a voice?’ Jansen inquired as they walked on together through the cross street .

Ilma Samara glanced at him, her expressive eyebrows lifted in a whimsical smile.

‘You too, Carl Jansen! Here in America they must always hurry on the thing which comes next. They hurry from the opera to the ball while Isolde sings her death-song and Briinhilde lights her funeral pyre. You see the women with their summer hats in March — Well, that you perhaps do not see —' with an implication of pity for his unobservant masculinity — ‘ but. it is the case. They adore the Wunderkind. They cannot wait to see the spear of Wotan struck from his hand by the young Siegfried. But you — I am surprised at you. At home we are generally content to let the old singers become first ausgesungen.’

Jansen smiled. ‘You call yourself an old singer, most beautiful of Brünhildes. But you can afford to say it!'

‘My age, alas, is no secret. But a singer, I suppose, is at least as young as her voice.’

‘By that sign then you are the youngest as well as the most beautiful, gnädige Frau.'

She laughed with a little shake of the head, a soft laughter that brought a radiance to her face without obliterating its melancholy suggestion.

‘The same Carl, always ready with compliments.’

‘I state only the obvious fact.’ The tenor guided her competently across the traffic-tangled street. On the other side he repeated his question. ‘But you do not tell me — has Evchen a voice? I remember she had a remarkable ear as a child.’

Ilma answered a little slowly. ‘Yes. But it is not a great voice. I do not wish her to become a singer.’

Jansen gave her a quick glance. The engrossing egoism and jealousy of the operatic artist were a familiar spectacle to him. A philosophic cast of mind, a sense of humor, and an artistic appreciation of femininity had combined to save him from becoming a prey to it. But Ilma — the naïveté of egoism displayed by the majority of their colleagues would of course be impossible to her subtle, civilized psychology. But could it be that she was self-deceived in this matter? She had always seemed to him a devoted mother.

He watched her as he put the question. ‘And Evchen—how does she feel about it?’

‘It is inevitable that she should have the idea, living in the atmosphere of the life.’

‘And she has studied?’

‘ She has studied — yes. She is a natural musician. When she began to sing, unconsciously at first I told her what to do, what not to do. I had not thought much of where it would carry her. She was just to me Evchen, my little girl.’

He glanced at her finely-cut profile, observant of the subtle, reserved line of the lips.

‘And you are sure about her voice. Is it not rather soon to tell?’

‘I think not. At her age I was already singing small parts. And even if she might rise to the top of her profession I prefer her to be a happy wife and mother, if that be possible.’

‘You did not find that enough.’

It was a moment before Ilma answered. ‘I would have her life very different from mine.’

He looked at her again, — that face so expressive in her art, in a sense so at the mercy of her emotions, yet after all so inscrutable. One seemed to see the thing there visible, palpitant as a captured bird; but while the sensitive eyebrows betrayed the presence of an emotion, the sombre eyes kept its nature a secret.

‘ Ilma,’ — he spoke her familiar name for the first time with a change of tone.

‘Forgive the frankness of a man who has loved you; but is it possible that you who have seemed always so cold, so engrossed in your art, have come at last to see that no human being can live without love? I said it to you many years ago, but you always denied it.’

‘Ah!’ she drew a breath, a shimmer of some deep feeling passed over her face. ‘I had to deny it to myself so often, Carl Jansen.’

He was silent, stirred by something in her voice.

After a moment she added, ‘Do you imagine that I married without love?’

He glanced at her, then quickly away again, for she had power still to set his heartstrings in motion, in spite of all the feminine episodes that had intervened, and that were no doubt yet to come.

‘But you were so young, and Berling’ — He broke off.

She continued quietly — a quietness, he seemed to see all at once, acquired at the cost of many things. ‘I was young, it is true. But I loved as much, I think, as any mature woman can love. I gave all of myself — all. I can speak of it now that it is so far behind me. Otto was — incapable of love. I mistook what I had inspired in him for love. It was long before I found out. ’

‘Yet you remained in the opera after your marriage, although it separated you.’

‘That was his wish, not mine. It gratified his pride and ’ — she paused — ‘hampered him less. It hurt me that he should wish it, yet I believed in him, and so I stayed and worked for him, that he should be proud of me. My remaining there in the opera separated us as you have said, so that he was with me very little. When he was with me he was still my lover as he had been before.’ She paused. ‘Do you know that I was Otto’s wife for five years before I really knew him? Then it was of my choice that we lived apart. And then after I had taken the step it seemed to him that he wanted me, but it was too late. So I felt, I feel still that I know enough of men, Carl Jansen, although I am not so bitter as to believe all men to be like Otto. There, I have spoken to you as I have to no one.’

‘Ilma— ’ he began, and could say no more.

She went on: —

' Six years ago — you heard — Otto died. But if I could have had my life as I wished it’—She paused, then said very simply, ‘Love would have been all that I asked.’

Their eyes met. He spoke gravely: ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, I am sure, Carl Jansen.’

Then for an instant he seemed to see revealed in her beautiful eyes the possibilities of that wasted love. He wished that he might bend and kiss her hand. He walked beside her some distance in silence; then he said, ‘And now?’

She shook her head. ‘It is too late. If you take a vine when it is young, and first begins to put out little tendrils and clings about something, and you tear it loose, you break some of the roots and tendrils, and the vine droops for a time, and many little buds die, and never come to anything. But after a while the vine begins to grow again about the new support, and it keeps on growing until the two are one and you cannot pull it free.’

‘I see,’ he said; and again for a time they walked on in silence.

‘After all, it comes to the same thing in the end, beautiful Ilma.’ He spoke with his eyes upon the cañon-like perspective of the Avenue. ‘Love goes, the voice goes — whatever it is we set our worldly hopes upon — it goes. In the end we are always alone.’

‘We are not alone if we love without selfishness,’ was Ilma’s answer to that.

He shook his head.

‘Does one ever love like that?’

‘A mother can,’ was her answer, ‘almost —

He smiled. ‘Almost! But even so, to love unselfishly is to accept loneliness.’

‘I can’t quite agree to that.’

‘ Wait then, Brünhilde, until you have walked all through the house of life, and find yourself in the last room face to face with — ’ He paused, they were approaching her hotel, and walked more slowly. She waited for him to finish: ‘ face to face with your own soul. ’

‘But even then there must be a window from which one can look out.’

He turned and looked into her eyes that seemed to have seen so much. ‘ For those who have the courage to look, but there is always the same prospect.’

She looked at him curiously. ‘This from you, Carl, always so light-hearted. ’

He smiled whimsically. ‘One cannot afford to be otherwise. Life is too grave a matter to be serious about.’

They had reached her hotel. He removed his hat, and stood in the sunlight. with bared head. Some young girls passing tittered self-consciously, and turned their heads over their shoulders to stare at him. Ilma’s eyes were fixed upon the blurred mass of bare branches in the park, his were upon her face.

‘But not all people travel so far as that room,’ he said.

She turned and looked at him. ‘But I think I have been there already.’

He shook his head. ‘You have not been in that room until ’ —

Again he paused until she supplemented, ‘Well, until—?’

‘Until there is nothing more that life can take from you.’

She shivered between a frown and a smile, and noting the touch of apprehension upon her revealing eyebrows, he felt a quick self-reproach.

’Hein, pay no attention to the talk of an idle German pessimist! It is for such as Carl Jansen over his beer, and not for such beautiful realities as you, Ilma Samara.’

She smiled and put out her hand. ‘Of what should real people talk then, if not of real things?’

He detained the hand a moment. ‘I think the real people do not talk them, they live them.’

Then, rather as if something about him enabled her to think aloud than that she confided in him, she said, ‘Yet to me my life as I look back upon it seems not real at all, except for Eva. It is for that reason I wish hers to be different.’ She gave his hand an added shake of friendliness, then dropped it. ‘You won’t come in?’

‘ Not to-day. Another time, if I may.’

He stood a moment watching her until she vanished within the revolving circle of the door, still vividly conscious of the look in her eyes. She had always had it, the look of one predestined to loss. ‘Fateful,’ Otto had called it. That such a woman should have loved Otto Berling!

II

As the clock struck twelve the young girl lying on the floor, bent in an absorbed heap over the score of Traviata, glanced up and paused in her sotto voce singing. It was time for her mother to be home from rehearsal. But the next moment her eyes went back to the music. As her interest grew, her voice unconsciously increased in volume, until with the ‘Addio Del Passato,’ she was singing in full voice. It was a voice of a pleasing but light quality, if one could judge by this performance, destined to such rôles as this she was scanning rather than those of the dramatic heroines of modern opera.

Just as she was beginning upon ‘Ah gran Dio,’ her accustomed ear caught the sound of a step in the hall, and in an instant she was on her feet, and at the door.

Ilma Samara, releasing herself from the girl’s embrace, laid a light hand upon her cheek.

‘I don’t need to ask what you have been doing.’

Eva flushed; her eyes went to the abandoned opera score. The mother’s hand slipped to the girl’s shoulder. ‘What an untidy room, dear child!' Her glance referred to the scattered newspapers about the floor; but the reproof was almost a caress.

As they stood side by side, the absence of resemblance between mother and daughter was striking. Eva was a pretty girl, possessed of little distinction beyond the unconscious charm of youth and fresh coloring. lima, tall enough to deserve the Wagnerian adjective heroic, was yet not large enough to be overpowering in a drawing-room. The heroic suggestion lay rather in an inherent nobility,a disciplined strength, that was the very essence of her personality. Indeed, although she was a large woman, there was an indescribable effect of the elusive, the impalpable, about her. Superimposed upon the pure classic regularity of her beauty was a shimmering suggestive quality that gave it that mysterious powder to call up images, ineffable things, to the mind of poet, and artist.

Eva helped her mother to remove her wraps, then bent to pick up the scattered papers. lima, readjusting her heavy, dark hair after the removal of her hat, inquired, —

‘By the way, what did Albertson say of the Todesverklärung Saturday?’

Eva did not answer at once. Ilma smiled.

‘Did he say that I sang two tones false in “Nur Todgewühten”?’

Eva nodded reluctantly.

Ilma seemed to w’atch the glaring, crowded street. ‘It is true,’ she said at last, ‘it is difficult to bring down the tone after the cry. But I have never done so before.’

Eva flung herself passionately upon her mother, yet with not quite the usual abandon of a child. The thing about Ilma Samara that kept people at a certain distance had its effect even upon her own daughter. ‘ It makes no difference. No one sings as you do.’

Ilma drew the girl’s hand against her cheek. ‘I grow older, dear child. These things must come.’

‘You are but thirty-eight. That is young, extremely young for Briinhilde. Look at Brunzola. It is not time yet.’

‘No, it is not time,’ the singer reflected, ‘yet for each of us the hour is set, and we do not know when it strikes.’ Then seeing tears in the girl’s eyes, she hastened to add, ‘There, make yourself tidy for lunch, Evchen. We are late.’

But when, a moment later, she returned to her daughter’s room through the open communicating door, she found Eva, her toilette preparations hurried through, bent over the Die Walküre score she had laid down the moment before. As she stood there, her presence unnoticed by the absorbed girl, there was a curious expression on her face. To decipher its meaning was like reading a score of complexly interwoven themes, — a strain, one would have said, of some hurting remembrance, love of her child, the less unselfish passion of her art, a premonition perhaps of both wrested from her: Eva torn from her complete allegiance by the lure of art, her own career passing from her as Eva took up her own life. All this and something more bitter from the past that, suddenly overcoming her, wrung a cry from her: ‘Eva!’

Eva was at her side in a moment. ‘Mother darling, what is it?’

Ilma kissed her daughter, her normal calm quickly reasserting itself, ‘Nothing, dear child.’

Eva hesitated, unconvinced. ‘Is it that you don’t like me to think of the opera ? ’

‘It is that I don’t like you to grow up. I can’t bear to lose my baby.’

Eva spoke with her face against her mother’s arm. ‘ But I have not been a baby for a long time, mother. When you were my age you were both operasinger and wife.’

‘ I would save you from my mistakes.’

‘But you do not feel your life a mistake, mother, surely, when you are the greatest Brünhilde in the world.’

lima put the girl gently from her. ‘It is life that is the real thing, dear, not opera. I prefer that you have a happy life in your home.’

As if half frightened at her own temerity, Eva persisted: ‘But, mother darling, you did not do that.’

The very answer Jansen had made her a few moments before.

Ilma’s eyes seemed to look back and forward a long distance. ‘Dear Eva, I want you to have what I have missed. It was not ambition or love of the life that kept me in it.’

Strange that she should be saying it again to-day after her long silence. It was characteristic of their relation that Eva did not question beyond the confidence her mother chose to give. But for.the first time she pressed her little argument further.

‘You say that I have not a great voice, that I cannot go so far as you have gone. But that will not make me unhappy. I would not be so great as you are if I could.’

Ilma smiled a little sadly into the girl’s eager face, drawing her hand tightly down over it. ‘It would be different, little girl, when you were once there behind the footlights. You would care then.’

Eva was silent a moment, then she looked up quickly. ‘Are you quite sure, mother dear, that you will never marry again?’

Ilma smiled, moving toward the door. ‘Quite. What has put that in your head?’

‘The other day I heard Bella speak to Frieda, the wig-maker’s maid, of some man who is in love with you. She said you were so proud you would n’t look at him; and Frieda said —it made me so angry — that some day yet some man would come along who would take down your pride.’

Ilma smiled. ‘One man has already done that. Do not be afraid. Until you find the man that you love better than you love your mother, you will have her, as always, to yourself.’

‘That day,’ declared Eva passionately, ‘will never come.’

The look Ilma turned upon her daughter expressed an encompassing tenderness that was both wide and deep.

‘ That day, I hope, will come in its time, my Evchen.’

III

Eva had for several years been permitted to go with her mother to the opera-house, although until the last two years only for the matinées, Ilma having discovered that the child’s absorption in the performance protected her against any harm from the presence of rough stage-hands or lightminded artists. Upon the occasion of this Die Walküre performance, however, the character of the cast was as conventional as that of the most decorous of afternoon teas, from Wotan down to the least of the Valkyrs. That ungodlike god was impersonated by a middle-aged German gentleman, chaperoned by an anxious, gray-haired wife who served as his valet, and hovered in the wings during his performance. Hunding was a young Australian giant who had served his apprenticeship in a German opera-house, and had reached New York by way of Co vent Garden. The Fricka was Edith Danforth, a young American woman of conventional antecedents, with a piquant prettiness and light-hearted amiability that made her a general favorite. Jansen as Siegmund, and Hilda Bergmann as Sieglinde, completed the cast.

It was but half an hour before the performance when lima and Eva arrived at the opera-house, Briinhilde’s presence not being required until the second act. As they entered the corridor resounding to the familiar sounds of scales and motives, Fricka’s maid came hurriedly toward them, a wig of virulent red flowing from one hand, a bottle of smelling salts in the other, lima detained her to inquire, —

‘Madame Danforth is not ill?’

‘No, it is only the little Friiulcin Schmidt,’ the maid explained. ‘She has fainted.’

‘ Schmidt ? ’ lima repeated vaguely.

Eva volunteered, ‘She sings one of the Walküren.’

Then, with expressions of sympathy for the indisposed Valkyr, they passed into the dressing-room, giving no further thought to the matter.

But Fräulein Schmidt— like many other obscurities—proved to be more important in her illness than in her health. As Hilda Bergmann in the third stage of her make-up, having covered grease-paint with powder, was adding the accents of art to her candid blue eyes, a knock came at her door, and Bella, the general maid of the women’s dressing-rooms, a facile, amiable, untidy person, thrust an indifferentlycoifled head in at the door.

‘ Have you any cognac, madame? Fräulem Schmidt is sick.’

Hilda turned around in shocked compassion; one eye ringed with cobalt in a preparatory stage produced a startling effect; the other, beautifully finished, showed a neat arrangement of painted eyelashes like those of a wax doll on the lower lid.

‘ Poor litt’l thing. I am awfle sorry. I have nothing, only Apollinaris.’

Bella disappeared. Hilda finished the remaining eye by superimposing black upon the cobalt, and adding a touch of rouge at the corners. Then she rang for Bella to assist her into Sieglinde’s traditional garments of white cloth and fur. The sound of a Valkyr testing her powers caused her to frown.

‘ How she sings all tight in her throat! It is terrible.’

‘I guess Fräulein Schmidt don’t sing at all to-night,’ Bella observed, not without some relish in the excitement. ‘They’re ’phoning all over town to get some one.’

She fastened the last hook deftly, then stood off, regarding her handiwork.

Hilda did not exhibit any emotion over this familiar operatic contingency. A Fräulein Schmidt was easily supplied, in her estimation. She scrutinized herself intently in the glass, observing, ‘Iam perhaps a litt’l too pink.’

‘I think you look tine,’ Bella reassured her.

Then, dismissing the maid with a smile, Hilda opened the score of the opera and devoted the remaining minutes to a fragmentary rehearsal.

As she sang she walked slowly across the room with the solemn step of tragedy, one hand extended to mark the phrasing, an emotional reflection of the music etherealizing her face. Perceiving however, as she walked, her discarded civilian shoes in the middle of the floor, she bent, still singing, to pick them up, and walking on, disposed them neatly against the wall without losing the expression of either face or voice.

Then a rap came at her door and the call-boy’s voice, ‘Ten minutes’; and gathering up her skirts, Sieglinde passed out into the corridor, threaded her way across the familiar darkness of the region back of the stage, automatically avoiding electric-light wires, out on to the scene of the first act. Hunding, with folded arms, paced the narrow confines of his hut. Sieglinde greeted him cordially, and after casting an eye on the packed house through a hole in the curtain, t urned to chat with Jansen, who strolled up, more picturesque than grotesque in his primitive garments, the outline of his fur girdle perpendicular instead of showing the familiar outward slant of the Teutonic tenor.

No one remembered Fräulein Schmidt lying white and helpless in the dressing-room she shared with two of her divine sisters. Then a concentrated, harassed-looking man walked up and down, calling, ‘Clear stage,’ and Siegmund retired to the back entrance, Sieglinde to the left, and Hunding betook himself to an open space behind the wings occupied by stage-hands, electric-light apparatus, and unused pieces of scenery. Here he walked uneasily up and down, giving himself over to a sotto voce rehearsal. Then sounds of the storm began in the orchestra, raging to fury, gradually dying down as the curtain went up. Siegmund, with a last smile for a pretty young Valkyr lingering in his wake, staggered in through the doorway of the hut; and Sieglinde, preparatory to her entrance, mounted the short flight of steps that composed the interior of Hunding’s sleeping apartment.

Hunding continued to stride up and down, oblivious of the stage-hands exchanging their uncouth jests as freely as if they lounged upon a street corner. A few pale Hebrew attendants stood in the wings watching the performance, occasionally singing with the singer. When a motive connected with his future utterances occurred in the music, Hunding sang, strengthening his hold on the key. After a moment he heaved a deep sigh, and seated himself on a soft rock provided for the convenience of Siegmund in the next act.

Bella, passing with a trailing scalp of valkyr hair pendant from each hand, paused to remark, ‘ Mr. Marsh is half crazy. They have n’t found a substitute for Fräulein Schmidt.’

‘Oh, they’ll find one.’

Hunding was unstirred by the impending tragedy; beads of perspiration stood out on his grease-paint. Mythological beards and furs were heating, and he was nervous, a condition against which his British pride revolted. But later in the act, when he had made his appearance and exit, and having harshly ordered Sieglinde from the room had rejoined her upon terms of cordial equality in the wings, they were greeted by Mr. Marsh with a face haggard and furrowed with apprehension. The opera singers almost invariably associated Mr. Marsh’s face with this expression. He was a sort of stormy petrel who seldom appeared in fair weather, but rose into prominence in the event of a sudden change of opera, indispositions, and the like.

‘Here’s a fine mess. Little Schmidt can’t sing. We’ve dredged the town for a substitute. Whiteley’s on the wire now, after a last forlorn hope in Harlem.’

‘Surely many girls of chorus know these parts,’ Hilda exclaimed.

‘Yes, but most of them are in Philadelphia.’

Sieglinde, being by nature social and sympathetic, and fond of giving advice, would have been glad to continue the conversation, but Siegmund’s voice rising in the final measures of Wälse warned her of her entrance. Hunding, still indifferent, repaired to his dressing-room to cool off. Brünhilde, in full armor but without her shield and spear, followed by Eva in her simple schoolgirl dress, slipped into their place in the wings to watch.

‘A fine voice. Some day she will sing Brunhilde,’ she observed, as Sieglinde concluded the narrative of the sword.

‘But never as you sing it,’ was Eva’s jealous response.

lima, turning to smile at her, found herself confronted by the despairing features of Mr. Alarsh.

‘Well, we are up against it all right, all right!’ was his opening remark.

‘How is that?’ inquired Brunhilde, sufficiently inured to American slang to comprehend.

‘No substitute for Schmidt. It’s preposterous, incredible. I suppose every other soprano in the German chorus knows her part. I tell you this giving opera all over the U. S. at once is n’t all it’s cracked up to be.’

‘ What shall you do?’ Ilma wondered.

Mr. Marsh made a gesture seeming to indicate that he threw up his hands, Ilma, beginning to realize the imminence of operatic catastrophe, looked serious. She felt a timid touch on her arm, and looked around to see Eva looking at her with transfigured face.

‘I can sing it, mother.’

She spoke in German and almost in a whisper, but the quick ears of Mr. Marsh had heard.

‘What’s that?’ He shot the question out fiercely.

‘I can sing it,’ Eva repeated in English. ‘I know all the parts of the chorus. Siegrune is mezzo, but it is not too low for my voice.’

‘ Eva!’ cried lima faintly.

‘ How about that ?' Mr. Marsh’s eyes sent out a steely spark.

‘It is impossible. No —’ Ilma whispered.

‘She can’t do it then?’ Mr. Marsh snapped out tensely.

’I do not wish it.’ Ilma spoke with difficulty.

‘But can she do it?’

‘She knows the music. Who can say what a young girl would do out there for the first time. Besides — I do not wish it.’

Mr. Marsh was silent. Even the irreverent expeditiousness of the business office dared not press Ilma Samara.

Eva repeated breathlessly, ‘I can do it, mother. Please let me.’

Ilma caught at the framework of Hunding’s home, her breath came unevenly. She could forbid Eva — and that would end it. She knew that. Yet somehow the words would not come, her prohibitive force seemed paralyzed. She felt the thing slipping out of her hands. She heard Eva’s voice again, ‘Mother darling, I won’t do it if you don’t want me to. But please let me.’

‘The Lord knows what’s to become of us if she does n’t,’ muttered Mr. Marsh.

Still Ilma could not speak. An electric-light hand stumbled past, brushing them roughly without apology. The stage-manager’s voice, raging expletives, followed him. She heard Mr. Marsh wretchedly turning over the problem. ‘One of them might double up, but they’re sure to make a mess of it. They’re all green except Danforth and Wandhoff.’

‘And there would still be the part missing in the ensemble,’ Ilma responded mechanically.

The crashing climax of irresistible love came in the orchestra. Siegmund and Sieglinde ran past them, then walked around to a side wing from which they would emerge to go before the curtain. Stage-hands began running past in every direction, as distracted apparently as if scene-shifting were a totally new experience. Ilma found herself closely studying Hilda Bergmann’s smile as she acknowledged her share of the applause. How silly they looked there, bowing like marionettes! She studied intently a misplaced strap protruding from Hunding’s black fur shoulder. A long time seemed to have passed when she turned to face Eva’s eager eyes, and the anxious frown on Mr. Marsh’s official countenance. She looked a moment into the girl’s face.

‘As you wish,’ she said at last. Then she knew that she had expected Eva to reply, ‘Not if you don’t wish it, mother dear.’ But instead Eva sprang lightly off like an arrow released from a bow in the direction of the Valkyrs’ dressing-room.

‘Thank God!’ exclaimed Mr. Marsh, mopping his brow. ‘I hope she gets through all right!’

Mechanically dodging the pieces of scenery being swiftly and violently dismantled, lima walked slowly back to her dressing-room. For the first time since Eva had come to the theatre she was not there waiting for her.

IV

When the call-boy’s knock came at her door Ilma, recalling suddenly that there was some variation in the new setting for this act, went out on the stage at once to make sure of her acquaintance with the pathway down the canvas rocks. As she stood tentatively upon her peak, testing a board that seemed to be loose, Jansen joined her.

‘ Schone Aussicht,’observed in the popular phrase of the German tourist.

Ilma smiled. ‘The same perhaps as from the window of that last room of which you spoke.’

Jansen glanced at her quickly. ‘So soon, beautiful Ilma,’ he thought. ‘I am afraid it is always lonely upon the heights,’ he replied, looking away from her.

She changed the subject abruptly.

‘Evchen makes her début to-night as a Valkyr sister. Did you know that?’

He gave her a quick look. ‘How is that?’ Then he spoke again quickly to save her answering. ‘She will come through all right. She is too young to be nervous. Do not think of it.’

‘I must not,’ she said with an effort; and the betraying expression of her brows sent a pang through him.

Then the stage was cleared and Jansen left her upon her peak, still, shining, wonderful, potent to create illusion even to his accustomed professional eyes.

Her first Valkyr cry was a glorious outburst, a veritable voice from the clouds, a sound of nature. But at the last prolonged ‘Hi ya ha,’ Siegmund bit his lip, and the brows of a musical stage-hand contracted. Ilma’s voice had slipped and wavered on the last tone. Few in the audience realized it, but the singers behind the scenes noticed and commented.

‘She worries for Evchen,’Sieglinde observed sympathetically to Fricka, whose unwelcome visit was even then announced by Brünhilde. Swiftly arranging her vivacious features into the semblance of righteous wrath, Fricka moved solemnly upon the scene. Jansen, standing in the opposite wing, thought of Ilma while Fricka exhorted, and the weak-minded god evaded in human fashion. He wondered if this business about Eva was going to upset Ilma’s performance. Then he became conscious that Fricka was advancing with a stern and forbidding countenance toward the spot in which he stood, one hand clenched against her breast. The moment however that the canvas rocks hid her from the sight of the audience she extended the hand to him, her features transformed by a radiant smile of welcome. It was the first time they had met since Jansen’s arrival in America.

They stood chatting of their meeting in Bayreuth the summer before, until Jansen was obliged to leave for his entrance. She turned, conscious of Brünhilde’s arrival at her side.

‘He will make a fine Siegfried. You must be glad you are to sing with him in the cycle.’

‘It is certainly agreeable in the love scenes to have a tenor whose head is not below your shoulder,’ Ilma answered with a smile.

Fricka laughed. ‘Why are tenors short? It is an unanswered conundrum.’

Then she remembered that Ilma Samara did not like to talk between her scenes, and did not speak again.

When Brünhilde, moving slowly from the mouth of the cave, stood, the vision of death, before the ill-fated Volsung, the awe infused into Siegmund’s question, ‘Who art thou?’ was as an unconscious response. There wras something about Ilma — he thought about it with a divided consciousness partly centred upon the formation of his forthcoming tones. She was somehow set apart from other women. It must be that she dwelt upon lonely heights. He had always felt it.

‘Only those doomed to death can look upon me.’ It was the voice of a being from another world, possessed of more than human vision.

The dialogue went on. ‘Shall Siegmund possess Sieglinde there? ’ he sang; and then, with something indescribable in her voice of solemnity, finality, tenderness, Briinhilde pronounced the doom of the lovers: ‘Sieglinde sieht Siegmund dort night.’

When, at the end of the act, the enthusiasm of the audience having been appeased by repeated appearances of the singers, they were passing through the region of dismantled scenery to their respective dressing-rooms, Ilma discovered Eva standing among the Valkyr sisters, — an unfamiliar Eva, taller, older, in the shining armor and trailing blue mantle of Fraulein Schmidt.

It fits me exactly, only I am a little taller. But I like the skirt short so. Mother dear, how do I look?’

Ilma with a smile considered her daughter transformed into a Valkyr sister. ' As if you had sung it a whole season. Go nowand look over the score with Frau Wandhoff. She enters with you and will show you what to do out there. Go as soon as the scene is set.’

‘Oh, mother dear, I know that scene by heart. I just can’t make a mistake.’

Ilma smiled again. ‘Rehearse it, nevertheless.’ Then she passed on to her dressing-room, and seating herself before her dressing-table, tried to concentrate her thoughts upon the forthcoming scene. Her voice must not fail her again as it had in the last act. The remembrance brought upon her the momentary panic of the artist, and with her will she summoned to her help a force associated with that secondary part of herself that belonged in the opera-house.

Then the moment arrived for the Walküren to assemble upon the rocks, and for one moment, in the midst of the hurrying, jostling throng, she and Eva looked into each other’s eyes. Ilma spoke calmly, —

‘Think only of the music. Listen, and think how you form your tones. Do not force them.’

‘Yes, mother,’ Eva whispered. Then, in the fashion of her German childhood, she bent and kissed her mother’s hand. That familiar act, seeming as it did to the mother at that moment the last remnant of Eva’s childhood, almost unnerved her, and turning quickly away she slipped into an empty chair in the wings. Eva passed on to the place from which she sang her first phrase from without. An assistant prompter stood before her with the score, to start her. Absorbed, tremulous with anticipation rather than apprehension, for the first time in her life Eva had forgotten her mother. Once Ilma stole a glance at her. The make-up changed her. It seemed a strange Eva, but unafraid — as she was of life itself waiting to hurt her. The mother’s heart reached out in a passionate futile instinct of protection. Then her subconsciousness following each step of the music made her pulses beat. Eva’s moment had come.

‘ Arbeit’s sind gab ’ — Her voice rang out in the swift phrase clear and true. The cries of the Walkiiren echoed back and forth, the music ascended, then descended, with shivering cymbals picturing their furious ride on the winds.

Ilma, waiting where she must enter with Sieglinde, was joined now by that ill-fated daughter of the gods, who observed cheerfully, ‘She sings like echte artiste. Now you must be no longer nervous.’

Ilma contrived a smile. It was time for Eva to appear within sight of the audience. There was no telling how that might affect her — but she entered with two others, and Wandhoff was a seasoned warrior-maiden. Now, she had made her entrance—she was smiling. It was well that she did not have to sing her first phrase before the footlights alone — There, it was over. She was conscious of Hilda Bergmann’s kind voice again, ‘That was beautiful. Have no fear for her any more.’

Now they all united in the cry. Eva was standing high upon a peak, — radiant, triumphant, the Briinhilde of the future in her own eyes no doubt, and in the eyes of many who saw her. Already Ilma fancied the accustomed watchers behind the scenes prophesying, ‘No doubt she will take her mother’s place.’ The child would be filled with false hopes; that meant just so much hurt coming to her. It was time for her own entrance. Eva’s voice anticipated her approach. The sisters flew back and forth, ail the winds of heaven swirled in the strings and wood wind, the tempo grew swifter, the horns louder, rising to the climax of Briinhilde’s flight from the wrath of Wotan. Ilma put out her arm, Hilda Bergmann relaxed upon it, and they rushed on with the haste of the pursued.

‘Shield me and help me in direst need.’ Ilma’s voice had the character of a broken, despairing cry. Then as she began Brünhilde’s impassioned plea to her sisters, something indescribable happened to Ilma Samara. It was as if all that she had gone through in this last hour, all the heart-break of her past, went into her expression of the music from that moment on to the end. Through it, in a curious dual way, she was conscious of Eva’s presence. It touched her as if with some cruel significance when, after she had pleaded with Siegrune, Eva, turning aside in denial, sang, ‘Must we also be dragged to thy doom?’ She had but one more fragment to sing, except in the ensemble, ‘To the east lies a wood.’ There it was, safely,: successfully over. No mortification for Eva, no young heartbreak.

The Valkyrs were driven wailing from the scene, and Brünhilde was left alone to face the wrath of Wotan.

As she half rose from her prostrate position before the angry god, she caught a glimpse of Eva in the wings receiving congratulations.

‘Was it so shameful the thing I have done?’ It was the bewildered question of the untouched immortal beginning to apprehend human suffering. No one surely had ever so poignantly defined emotion in music as lima Samara. Then with the anguished cry of a great soul facing ignominy, she implored the cruel god not to inflict this degrading penalty upon her. ‘Kill thy child, but do not make her pay this price — Let no weakling win me — Encircle my mountain with flames so that none but a hero shall find me.’

It was over, the flames of the gods were extinct, and Brünhilde was roused from her couch to acknowledge the applause which fairly shook the house as the audience transposed their deeper emotions into the conventional form of appreciation. But she scarcely smiled as she acknowledged the ovation.

‘She has felt it so much,’ a sentimental feminine applauder in the front row remarked.

But when Brünhilde joined her daughter in the wings she smiled.

‘ So, little Valkyr, it has begun for you.’

For the first time she missed — no one could guess how she missed — the girl’s worshiping homage, for the first words Eva said were, ‘Oh, mother, how was it? Did I get through all right?’

‘You made no mistake. I am proud of you,’ Ilma answered.

Then Hilda Bergmann, in an enveloping cloak not of mythological cut, Jansen in civilian’s clothes, and Wotan still in armor, stopped to add congratulations. ‘She is her mother’s daughter,’ said Hilda; and Wotan, a wit in private life, added, ‘Look out, Evchen, that you do not remain Einspringerin.'

‘Meantime we must not make her vain,’ said Ilma; and putting a hand on the girl’s arm she urged her gently in the direction of the dressing-room, with a parting smile for her colleagues. But Jansen followed her, detaining her at the door after Eva had passed in.

’You were right. The girl’s voice will never be great.’

‘You had doubted me? But I forgive you, old friend. In our egoism I think that we artists often deceive ourselves. Yet in this case I believe I have not been selfish.’

Again the sense of mystery and awe that she could inspire came over him as he looked at her. He bent and kissed her hand.

‘Beautiful Ilma. It is much only to have known you,’ he said.

That night she lay long awake trying to foresee the future of a young girl in silver armor standing above her with radiant eyes and upraised shield. Well — if the life must hold disappointment for Eva, if she must be less than she dreamed in this restless, striving, struggling world of opera, the thing must take its course now. It was out of her hands. There was no real reason for this sense of isolation, desolation, that seemed to engulf her. She had lost her little girl — that had to come; she had not lost her love.

The next morning’s papers were full of rhapsodies upon Ilma’s performance. One critic wrote that she was epic, and well stood for the symbolism of the earth’s mythology. She seemed, he said, more than woman, a being whose domain was some kingdom vaster than the earth.

Reading on in a paper of another cast, Ilma came upon a paragraph beginning, ‘An interesting feature of this most memorable performance was the unexpected debut of the singer’s young daughter.’ Then came rather an amusing account of the difficulties resulting from the indisposition of Fräulein Schmidt, followed by speculation and prophecy concerning Eva’s operatic future.

The spear of Wotan struck from his hand by the young Siegfried — that prophetic simile had not occurred to the facile reviewer, but it came again to the singer. The public with its eager anticipatory eye fixed upon the future. But no! the spear of Brünhilde was still firmly grasped in her own hand. If her art was to be all that was left to her for her own — it was hers still. She had gone over all this before. But then she had had her child, her own as only a young child can be. Jansen was right. She had never before traveled so far as this room. And the window — was it a window that looked out upon a far horizon, or only a mirror which gave back her own face?

But there was still her art. She rose unconsciously, a light kindling in her eyes. Then suddenly the whole human hurt of it, past and present, smote her down, and the two figures, husband and child, seemed merged into one, and she saw Eva looking at her with her father’s hard eyes. With an uncontrollable cry she pressed her hands against her face to shut out the sight. Then she started up quickly, for she heard the girl’s step.

‘Mother dear, have you seen the papers?’

‘Yes, little Siegrune, I have just been reading them.’

Eva came over for her morning kiss. No, they were not her father’s eyes. They had the same love in them. The same — yet the mother, studying her child intensely, recognized a difference. They held something else now besides that worshiping love; a light, a look, fixed on something beyond.

Eva had begun to live her own life.