After a while the three men reappeared, carrying large, strange objects, which looked like the bottom of a bed or a big screen.
When they had passed the gate, they turned the screens round and leaned them against the wall; one of them represented a badly painted tiled stove, another the door of a country cottage, perhaps a forester’s cottage. Others a wood, a window, and a library.
She understood. It was the scenery of a play. And after a while she recognised the rose tree from Faust.
The shed was used by the theatre for storing scenes and stage properties; she herself had more than once stood by the side of the rose tree, singing “Gentle flowers in the dew.”
The thought that they were going to play Faust wrung her heart, but she had one little comfort: she had never sung the principal part in it, for the principal part is Margaret’s.
“I don’t mind Faust; but I shall die if they play Carmen or Aida.”
And she sat and watched the change in the repertoire. She knew a fortnight before the papers what was going to be played next. It was amusing in a way. She knew when the Freischütz was going to be played, for she saw the wolves’ den being brought out; she knew when they were going to put on the Flying Dutchman, for the ship and the sea came out of the shed; and Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin, and many others.
But the inevitable day dawned—for the inevitable must happen. The men had again gone into the shed (she remembered that the name of one of them was Lindquist, and that it was his business to look after the pulleys), and presently reappeared with a Spanish market-place. The scene was not standing straight up, so that she could not see at once what it was, but one of the men turned it slowly over, and when he stood it up on its side she could see the back, which is always very ugly. And one after the other, slowly, as if they warded to prolong the torture, huge, black letters appeared: CARMEN. It was Carmen!
“I shall die,” said the singer.
But she did not die, not even when they played Aida. But her name was blotted out from the memory of the public, her picture disappeared from the stationers’ windows, and from the post-cards; finally her portrait was removed from the foyer of the theatre by an unknown hand.