It had been arranged that, since the opera-house was so close to their hotel, she should not wait for Hugh when it was over, but come straight home, and she waited there some time before he joined her in an exultation of happiness. The ceasing of summer, which was now so close in the measure of minutes, not hours any longer, was banished from her consciousness. Hugh and Tristan, inextricably intermingled, usurped it all. She tried to reconstruct the events of the evening, and found them misty. She only knew that the audience, German, instinctively opposed to an English artist, but critical, lancet-like, and, after all, when their emotions were roused, fair, had lost their heads. Fat London had been moved over Hugh’s Lohengrin; but Germany, not fat, like London, in matters of perception and appreciation, had been much more than moved.
What had happened exactly?... The end of the first act? Yes, Hugh had been nervous, quite obviously nervous, and had not done himself justice, nor had he done justice to the glorious rôle for which he was cast. And then? Edith had sent round a note to him, saying:
“My darling, I am playing Isolde, and I don’t find you. Isolde, Isolde.”
And a note had come back to her.
“I’m so nervous I can’t do anything. But I’ll try, Isolde.”
It appeared that he had tried. As the curtain went down on the second act the theatre rose as if the Emperor had entered. But it was Hugh.
It was Hugh in the third act. Hugh! And critical Germany during the third act committed a unique fault of taste. It had been foreshadowed in a way, because once and again as Tristan yearned for the coming of the ship a sort of under-breathed groan had gone through the packed house. Then, when Tristan had sung his last note, the interruption occurred. The play was stopped; the orchestra, inaudible beneath the shouts, were stopped also, and a huge roar of applause went up, damning the artistic reputation of Munich for years to come. “Tristan! Tristan!” was the cry. But to Edith the cry was “Hugh!”
Ah! but how proud she was of him then, not for that which he had done, but for that which he did not do. He had fallen, loose jointed, and lay with face toward the house, and not a quiver of eyelash, not a movement of the nightingale throat, not a curl of his mouth answered the thunder of the applause. Edith had not, even when that thunder rose to its highest, been afraid that he would respond, but it was glorious to her to see how still he lay. An almost irresistible appeal had come from the thousand throats, but the artist since it was personal, since it was to his voice and his personality to which it was made, was utterly unconscious of it. Tristan, who he was, lay dead. Soon after Isolde sang the Liebestod.
“The death song,” thought Edith. “What if I sing another? Oh, Hugh, Hugh!”
It was then that Hugh came in, as she sat in the window, while the table laid for their supper stood ready. Munich had gone mad about him, and from where she sat in the window she had heard the distant roar that had greeted him as he came out of the theatre, which had grown gradually louder and louder till now the square outside was packed with the music-mad. She had guessed at once what that distant roar meant, and her guess had grown into certainty as it grew louder and nearer. And Hugh came in.