She also mentioned a family name that caused the New Yorker to stare. What, was this girl with the determined chin and brows the identical one who almost set Russia quarrelling with another nation and upset the peace of Roumania? Yes, it was, and Paul no longer puzzled over her face. It had been common property of the photographers and newspaper illustrators a few years ago, and as he mentally indexed its features he almost said aloud that her curious beauty had never been even faintly reproduced.
His imagination was stirred; Roumania had always seemed so remote, and here was he, Paul Godard, a plain American citizen, face to face with the heroine of one of those mysterious Eastern intrigues in which kings, crowns, queens, and ladies-in-waiting were all delightfully mixed up. So he chatted with Helena about Wagner and Degeneracy, and discovered that she was an admirer of Ludwig of Bavaria, Nietzsche, Guy de Maupassant, Poe, Schumann, Chopin, Marie Bashkirtseff, and all the rest of the sick-brained people born during the sick-brained nineteenth century. She, too, had written a book, which was soon to appear. It was full of the Weltschmerz of Schopenhauer and the bold upspringing individualism of Nietzsche. She had odd theories concerning the Ring of the Nibelungs, and had read Browning’s Sordello. She told Paul that she found but one stumbling-block in Wagner. How, she asked gravely, with a slight blush—how could Parsifal become Lohengrin’s father?
Paul said he didn’t know. It must have occurred long after his experiences with Kundry and the Flower Girls, and perhaps it was a sort of——
“Oh, no, M. Godard!” she quickly answered. “Not that. The swan died, you know; besides, Parsifal was always a Pure Fool.” Paul suggested that it might have been another of the same name but of a different family. And then the conversation went to pieces, for the soprano called out:
“Voilà! Baireuth, the Wagner theatre!” and they all craned their necks to catch the first glimpse of that mystic edifice built on the hill, the new musical Pantheon, the new St. Peter’s of the Bewitched Ones.
And the Englishman continued to calmly read about the Loki-motif as the train slowly steamed into Baireuth.
III
Paul found comfortable lodgings in the Lisztstrasse and his new friends went to the Hotel Sonne. At half-past four he was up on the hill looking at the world, and as immaculately dressed as if he stood in the bow window of the Calumel Club, ogling Fifth Avenue girls. He was only vaguely interested in the approaching performance, and his pulses did not quicken when Donner’s motif told the gabbling, eager throng that the great Trilogy was about to unfold its fables of water, wood, and wind. He took his seat unconcernedly, and then the house became black and from space welled up those elemental sounds, not merely music, but the sighing, droning swish of waters. The Rhine calmly, majestically stole over Paul’s senses, he forgot New York, and when the curtains parted he was with the Rhine Daughters, with Alberich, and his heart seemed to stop beating. All sense of identity vanished at a wave of Wagner’s magic wand, and not being a music-critic, his ego was absorbed as by the shining mirror in the hand of a hypnotist. This, then, was Wagner, a Wagner who attacked simultaneously all the senses, vanquished the strongest brain, smothered, bruised, and smashed it; wept, sang, surged, roared, sighed in it; searched and ravished your soul until it was put to flight, routed, vanquished, and brought bleeding and captive to the feet of the master.
The eye was promise-crammed, the ears sealed with bliss, and Paul felt the wet of the waters. He panted as Alberich scaled the slimy steeps, and the curves, described by the three swimming mermaids, filled him with the joy of the dance.
The rape of the Rhinegold, the hoarse shout of laughter from Alberich’s love-forsworn lips, and the terrified cries of the three watchers were to Paul as real as Wall Street.