She was glad that he had noticed that when she fainted at the sight of Mephistopheles, she slowly revived as the curtain was falling and pointed to the place where he had been, seeing him again in her over-wrought brain. This she did think was a good idea, and, as he said, "seemed to accomplish something."
He thought her idea for her entrance in the following act exceedingly well imagined, for, instead of coming on neatly dressed and smiling like the other Margarets, she came down the steps of the church with her dress and hair disordered, in the arms of two women, walking with difficulty, only half recovered from her fainting fit. "It is by ideas like this," he said, "that the singer carried forward the story, and made it seem like a real scene that was happening before our eyes. And after her brother had cursed Margaret, when he falls back dead, Miss Innes retreats, getting away from the body, half mad, half afraid. She did not rush immediately to him, as has been the operatic custom, kneel down, and, with one arm leaning heavily on Valentine's stomach, look up in the flies. Miss Innes, after backing far away from him, slowly returned, as if impelled to do so against her will, and, standing over the body, looked at it with curiosity, repulsion, terror; and then she burst into a whispered laugh, which communicated a feeling of real horror to the audience.
"In the last act, madness was tangled in her hair, and in her wide-open eyes were read the workings of her insane brain, and her every movement expressed the pathos of madness; her lovely voice told its sad tale without losing any of its sweetness and beauty. The pathos of the little souvenir phrases was almost unbearable, and the tragic power of the finish was extraordinary in a voice of such rare distinction and fluid utterance. Her singing and acting went hand in hand, twin sisters, equal and indivisible, and when the great moment in the trio came, she stepped forward and with an inspired intensity lifted her quivering hands above her head in a sort of mad ecstasy, and sang out the note clear and true, yet throbbing with emotion."
The paper slid from Evelyn's hand. She could see from Ulick's description of her acting that she had acted very well; if she had not, he could not have written like that. But her acting only seemed extraordinary when she read about it. It was all so natural to her. She simply went on the stage, and once she was on the stage she could not do otherwise. She could not tell why she did things. Her acting was so much a part of herself that she could not think of it as an art at all; it was merely a medium through which she was able to re-live past phases of her life, or to exhibit her present life in a more intense and concentrated form. The dropping of the book was quite true; she had dropped a piece of music when she first saw Owen, and the omission of the scream was natural to her. She felt sure that she would not have seen Mephistopheles just then; she would have been too busy thinking of the young man. But she thought that she might take a little credit for her entrance in the third act. Somehow her predecessors had not seen that it was absurd to come smiling and tripping out of church, where she had seen Mephistopheles. She read the lines describing her power to depict madness. But even in the mad scenes she was not conscious of having invented anything. She had had sensations of madness—she supposed everyone had—and she threw herself into those sensations, intensifying them, giving them more prominence on the stage than they had had in her own personal life.
Many had thought her a greater actress than a singer; and she had been advised to dispense with her voice and challenge a verdict on her speaking voice in one of Shakespeare's plays. Owen would have liked her to risk the adventure, but she dared not. It would seem a wanton insult to her voice. She had imagined that it might leave her as an offended spirit might leave its local habitation. Her Margaret had been accepted in Italy, so she must sing it as well as she acted it. But when she had asked the Marquis d'Albazzi if she sang it as well as her mother, he had said, "Mademoiselle, the singers of my day were as exquisite flutes, and the singers of your day give emotions that no flute could give me," and when she had told him that she was going to be so bold as to attempt Norma, he had raised his eyebrows a little and said, "Mademoiselle will sing it according to the fashion of to-day; we cannot compare the present with the past." Ah! Ce vieux marquis était très fin. And her father would think the same; never would he admit that she could sing like her mother. But Ulick had said—and no doubt he had already read Ulick's article—that she had rescued the opera from the grave into which it was gliding. None of them liked it for itself. Her father spoke indulgently about it because her mother had sung it. Ulick praised it because he was tired of hearing Wagner praised, and she liked it because her first success had been made in it.
These morning hours, how delicious they were! to roll over in one's silk nightgown, to feel it tighten round one's limbs and to think how easily success had come. Madame Savelli had taught her eight operas in ten months, and she had sung Margaret in Brussels—a very thin performance, no doubt, but she had always been a success. Ulick would not have thought much of her first Margaret. Almost all the points he admired she had since added. She had learnt the art of being herself on the stage. That was all she had learnt, and she very much doubted if there was anything else to learn. If Nature gives one a personality worth exhibiting, the art of acting is to get as much of one's personality into the part as possible. That was the A B C and the X Y Z of the art of acting. She had always found that when she was acting herself, she was acting something that had not been acted before. She did not compare her Margaret with her Elizabeth. With Margaret she was back in the schoolroom. Still she thought that Ulick was right; she had got a new thrill out of it. Her Margaret was unpublished, but her Elizabeth was three times as real. There was no comparison; not even in Isolde could she be more true to herself. Her Elizabeth was a side of her life that now only existed on the stage. Brunnhilde was her best part, for into it she poured all her joy of life, all her love of the blue sky with great white clouds floating, all her enthusiasm for life and for the hero who came to awaken her to life and to love. In Brunnhilde and Elizabeth all the humanity she represented—and she thought she was a fairly human person—was on the stage. But Elsa? That was the one part she was dissatisfied with. There were people who liked her Elsa. Oh, her Elsa had been greatly praised. Perhaps she was mistaken, but at the bottom of her heart she could not but feel that her Elsa was a failure. The truth was that she had never understood the story. It began beautifully, the beginning was wonderful—the maiden whom everyone was persecuting, who would be put to death if some knight did not come to her aid. She could sing the dream—that she understood. Then the silver-clad knight who comes from afar, down the winding river, past thorpe and town, to release her from those who were plotting against her. But afterwards? This knight who wanted to marry her, and who would not tell his name. What did it mean? And the celebrated duet in the nuptial chamber—what did it mean? It was beautiful music—but what did it mean? Could anyone tell her? She had often asked, but no one had ever been able to tell her.
She knew very well the meaning of the duet, when Siegfried adventures through the fire-surrounded mountain and wakes Brunnhilde with a kiss. That duet meant the joy of life, the rapture of awakening to the adventure of life, the delight of the swirling current of ephemeral things. And the duet that she was going to sing; she knew what that meant too. It meant the desire to possess. Desire finding a barrier to complete possession in the flesh would break off the fleshly lease, and enter the great darkness where alone was union and rest.
But she could not discover the idea in the "Lohengrin" duet? Senta she understood, and she thought she understood Kundry. She had not yet begun to study the part. But Elsa? Suddenly the thought that, if she was going to Dulwich, she must get up, struck her like a spur, and she sprang out of bed, and laying her finger on the electric bell she kept the button pressed till Merat arrived breathless.
"Merat, I shall get up at once; prepare my bath, and tell the coachman I shall be ready to start in twenty minutes."
"Twenty minutes? Mademoiselle is joking."