Ordham had waited breathlessly during the few moments that preceded her appearance, the intense stillness pounding in his ears. Then, by what sleight of body he could not guess, she seemed to dart suddenly up from the gorge below the bridge as she uttered the terrible shriek of Kundry when summoned by Klingsor from her enchanted sleep.
“Ach! Ach! Tiefe Nacht—Wahnsinn!—Oh!—Wuth!—”
Ordham fancied he recognized a note of genuine anger in her wild remonstrance, a bitter personal reproach. But she was artist before all, and when she passed on to her scene with Parsifal, her dulcet reminiscences of his infancy when she herself seemed to brood above him, the helpless anguish of the desolate wife and adoring mother, the maternal agony when the boy ran from her out into the world, the waiting, the savage cries of despair, the “dulling of the smart,” the ebbing of life—the strain of exquisite pity in which she told the youth that he was alone on Earth—Ordham shivered more than once, staring back into a brief past where he could recall little of maternal love, wondering how much he would care if he never saw his mother nor any member of his distinguished selfish family again.
The echoes gave back Parsifal’s brief lament; then the tall white figure on the bridge, although she did not move, seemed to bend her voice above the kneeling boy, summoning him to consolation. As it rose in seduction, in the insolent triumph of the passionate woman who knows that not for her is the balking of desire, it was so warm, so rich, so vast in its compass, that Ordham felt as if the golden waters were rising to suffocate him. When she paused so lingeringly on the final note of seduction, “Ersten kuss,” that the words seemed to live on and gather volume in the thrilling rebellious ear, and an angry cry burst from the balcony of the King:—
“Amfortas!—
Die wunde! Die wunde!—
Sie brent in meinen Herzen—
Oh, Klage! Klage!
Furchtbare, Klage!—”
he came as angrily to himself. It was the spell whose meshes he cared least to encounter, and he wondered how he could be sensible to it, even under the influence of music, so soon after breaking from an entanglement which the lady had taken with a seriousness incomprehensible to himself. He was in a mood which impelled him to close the eyes of the lover in him forever, and his real interest in Margarethe Styr began when the Princess Nachmeister told him that she was a woman of intellect and hated his sex. He by no means hated hers, but his mind was lonely, and his ego sought blindly for that companionship which all souls claim as their right, and generally go forth to other worlds still seeking.