It had at first been intended to give the tableaux vivants, or as they call them in Germany, lebende Bilder, in the small hall of the pretty little Malkasten, or artists’ club; but so numerous had been the applications for places, that it was decided instead to have them in a larger room belonging to the building where all the concerts were held—the public Tonhalle. This proved quite successful, and every seat was taken a week beforehand.
It was a very pretty sight: all Elberthal was there; assembled, too, in good time, and everyone talking, laughing, moving about with a freedom, an ease, and an absence of ceremony peculiar to German entertainments of the kind.
Sara Ford and Avice went with the Wilhelmis, who, being important persons in the affair, had naturally secured a number of the uppermost seats. Sara’s parts were in the second and fourth pictures. She accordingly had to go and dress for her part of Thusnelda while the first picture was being given. She left Avice, seated between Luise Wilhelmi and her mother, and therefore safely chaperoned. Luise was in a state of wild excitement, which indeed was her chronic condition. She was a very sprightly, pretty brunette, fond of brilliant colours, and given to attiring herself in a somewhat stagey manner. On this occasion she was strikingly but becomingly dressed in hues of amber and pomegranate, with many slits and slashes, tags and ends and furbelows. Nothing would induce her to yield to her father’s requests that she would dress with a noble and classic simplicity, or to her lover’s representations that white muslin and blue ribbon and a generally inexpensive shepherdess style of thing would become her wonderfully well. Fräulein Luise loved silk and satin, rich fabrics and bright jewels, and so long as anyone could be found to provide her with them, she would wear them. Avice Wellfield, beside her, looked like an inhabitant of another world. It was the first time she had been out anywhere since her father’s death; and her plain black frock and white crêpe ruffles at neck and wrists formed a pointed contrast to Luise’s flashing colours and glittering rings and chains and bangles. Avice had plaited her hair up into a coronet, which gave her an older, staider look. The girl was fulfilling, more and more every day, Sara’s prophecy to her brother, that she would one day be beautiful. Her new life, happier despite its poverty than the old one, had called forth that beauty, while the intellect, which had formerly been repressed and was now in every way encouraged to develop itself, gave dignity and depth to the mere outward loveliness of hue and feature and moulding. She sat quite still, watching with enchantment what was to her an entirely new scene. It was her first entertainment of the kind; and she enjoyed it with a zest only known in such long-deferred pleasures. Luise was jumping up and sitting down twenty times in five minutes, teasing her father to know how Max would ‘do,’ and if he was nervous—if it would be better for her not to look at him too hard, at which Avice suppressed a smile, and Wilhelmi, with his rollicking Jovine laugh, cried:
‘Look at him as hard as you can stare, little simpleton. Do you think he will turn his head to look at you? It would ruin the whole artistic effect of the picture, and to-night it is Art who will be paramount before even you.’
At which she pouted, and the orchestra suddenly struck up most eloquent music; delicious to hear, and unseen singers accompanied them. It was a portion of Liszt’s Entfesselter Prometheus that they played and sang, a chorus of grape-gatherers, and the melody was exquisitely sweet, and was dying gently away as the curtain rose upon a magic scene—a ‘midday rest in the grape-harvest.’ The picture thus copied was a celebrated one. A background of vine-covered, autumn-tinted Italian hills, and in the foreground a richly picturesque group of men and maidens, women and children, in every attitude of beauty and grace that could be imagined. In the very centre stood a splendidly handsome woman, dark, tall, and amply formed, in an Italian peasant’s dress; her arms were thrown upwards as she shook a tambourine and looked behind her to a youth who raised a spray of deeply tinted vine-leaves to bind them in her abundant strong black hair. The others were variously occupied; some in watching this principal couple and in jesting aside about them. One child was industriously devouring grapes; two lads were half wrestling with one another; a couple of girls were whispering with their lovers. The music still played soft strains, and the Chor der Winzner died into silence, while every figure stood out with a mellow distinctness, breathing and living, yet still—still and motionless, as the painted figures on the canvas themselves.
Twice the beautiful picture was shown, amidst applause and delight. Then ensued the first interval, during which comments were freely exchanged, and much laughter and gossip about the various performers went on.
‘It must be fearfully difficult,’ remarked Avice, in an almost awestruck tone. ‘How could she go on holding the tambourine for so long without its making even one tiny tinkle?’
‘Wait till the next,’ said Wilhelmi, who appeared to have pinned his hopes on the Hermannsschlacht picture. ‘Luise, pray that thy Max may not lose his heart to the Princess of Germania.’
Luise laughed a heart-whole laugh. The frantic devotion of her huge lover to his tyrannical little bride was too well-known for her to feel any qualms of jealousy.