XV
MUSIC STILL HAS CHARMS
A broad highway offering several fine vistas brought me at noon to Bayreuth. The street that led me to the central square was called Wagnerstrasse and passed directly by the last home of the famous composer. As soon as a frock-tailed hotel force had ministered to my immediate necessities I strolled back to visit the place. Somewhere I had picked up the impression that it had been turned into a museum, like the former residences of Goethe and Schiller. Nearly a year before, I recalled the Paris papers had announced the death of Frau Wagner, and certainly the Germans would not allow the home of their great musician to fall into other hands. I turned in at the tall grilled gate, fastened only with a latch, and sauntered along the broad driveway, shaded by magnificent trees that half hid the wide house at the end of it. This was a two-story building in reddish-yellow brick, rectangular of façade under its almost flat roof, the door gained by a balustraded stone veranda without covering and with steps at either end. A large bust, not of the composer, as I had fancied at a distance, but of his royal companion, Ludwig, stared down the driveway at my approach. As I paused to look at this the only person in sight glanced up at me with what seemed an air between anger and surprise. He was an aged gardener, shriveled in form and face, who was engaged in watering the masses of flowers of many species that surrounded the house on every side. Something in his manner, as he set down his watering-pot and shuffled toward me, plus the absence of any of the outward signs of a public place of pilgrimage, suggested that I was in the wrong pew.
“Does some one live here?” I hazarded, lamely.
“Certainly, the Wagner family,” he replied, sharply, glaring at me under bushy eyebrows.
“But—er—Frau Wagner being dead, I thought....”
“Frau Wagner is as alive as you or I,” he retorted, staring as if he suspected me of being some harmless species of maniac.
“Frau Cosima Wagner, wife of the composer?” I persisted, smiling at what seemed to be the forgetfulness of an old man; “why, my dear fellow, her death was in the papers a year ago....”
“Frau Cosima Wagner, jawohl, mein Herr,” he retorted. “As I cut flowers for her room every morning and see her every afternoon, I suppose I know as much about it as the papers. It was quite another Frau Wagner who died last year; and the fool newspapers seldom know what they are talking about, anyway. Then there is....”
His voice had dropped to a whisper and I followed the gaze he had turned into the house. Over the veranda balustrade a bareheaded man stared down at us like one who had been disturbed from mental labors, or an afternoon nap, by our chatter. He was short and slight, yet rather strongly built, too, with iron-gray hair and a smooth-shaven face. A photograph I had seen somewhere suddenly rose to the surface of my memory and I recognized Siegfried Wagner, son of the musician, whose existence I had for the moment forgotten. Having glared us into silence, he turned abruptly and re-entered the house.
“Herr Siegfried and his wife and his two children live here also,” went on the gardener, in a whisper that was still harsh and uninviting, “and....”