“Then quite suddenly I caught sight of myself in a huge looking-glass, and I thought I had never seen such beautiful clothes in my life, and wondered who it was. And then I remembered it was I, and that I was going to sing Lohengrin to you on a real proper stage, with a band to play fast or slow just exactly as I wished, and a real live conductor to follow my lips and tell the band how I felt. Why, it was the biggest fun in the world! Anything so heavenly had never happened, except perhaps when you told me you were Andrew Robb. And there was I in my beautiful clothes and my beautiful new swan ready, and as we set off from the wings I just quivered all over with pleasure, and said, ‘Here we go—here we go!’”
This was real, and Edith leaned back in the carriage and laughed for pleasure.
“Oh, Hughie, how like you!” she said. “And you are so satisfactory; you are always yourself and never by any chance anybody else. Go on, you darling! All my beautiful, sublime thoughts are gone, but it is such fun!”
“Well, and so out we came into the very middle of the stage, and stopped without any jerk at all. Everybody was waiting for me to begin, and as soon as I said ‘Nun,’ oh, Edith, I knew I was absolutely in the middle of the note, not anywhere else, not on the side of it and not slipping about on the edge of it. I knew too when I had sung three notes that they had gone up into the gallery and to each of the stalls and into every box, and that there wasn’t the slightest suspicion of a tremolo, not even an aspen-leaf quiver. And at that, when I knew that, somehow all the sense of fun, all the ‘Here we go!’ ceased. It was hugely, splendidly serious instead. But, anyhow, I felt all right, so I looked up at you, as I said I would. Do you remember? Did you see?”
“Yes, I seemed to remember you had said something of the sort,” said she.
“Oh, well, I thought you might have forgotten! No, I don’t think I did.”
He took up her hand again.
“Yes, the fun ceased, as sometimes suddenly when you and I are playing the fool together the fun ceases, because the big thing, that which we are to each other, pops out. It was the same then. All the fun of having the band to play for me and London to listen ceased because, I suppose, music popped out. And there was Elsa looking at me—by Jove, wasn’t she perfectly splendid!—and she and I had been given this treasure, this golden story with its golden songs, to make real, to make to live. We not only were going to take you hundreds of years back, to pull up the years that had gone from the deep, cool well of the past, but we were going to show you how Wagner pulled them up and set them in jewels.”
Hugh’s voice had risen in sudden excitement, and he turned quickly now to his wife.
“And that was not all the miracle,” he cried, “for again and again it was not Elsa whom I sang to, but it was you. In the love duel it was like something ghostly; if I had not been so absorbed, so intent on it, I should have been frightened. I could have sworn that there was no Frau Dimlich there; it was you. Did you know that? I felt as if you must have known you were on the stage with me.”