“I mean the morning when I walked out of Belarab's stockade on your arm, Captain Lingard, at the head of the procession. It seemed to me that I was walking on a splendid stage in a scene from an opera, in a gorgeous show fit to make an audience hold its breath. You can't possibly guess how unreal all this seemed, and how artificial I felt myself. An opera, you know. . . .”
“I know. I was a gold digger at one time. Some of us used to come down to Melbourne with our pockets full of money. I daresay it was poor enough to what you must have seen, but once I went to a show like that. It was a story acted to music. All the people went singing through it right to the very end.”
“How it must have jarred on your sense of reality,” said Mrs. Travers, still not looking at him. “You don't remember the name of the opera?”
“No. I never troubled my head about it. We—our lot never did.”
“I won't ask you what the story was like. It must have appeared to you like the very defiance of all truth. Would real people go singing through their life anywhere except in a fairy tale?”
“These people didn't always sing for joy,” said Lingard, simply. “I don't know much about fairy tales.”
“They are mostly about princesses,” murmured Mrs. Travers.
Lingard didn't quite hear. He bent his ear for a moment but she wasn't looking at him and he didn't ask her to repeat her remark. “Fairy tales are for children, I believe,” he said. “But that story with music I am telling you of, Mrs. Travers, was not a tale for children. I assure you that of the few shows I have seen that one was the most real to me. More real than anything in life.”
Mrs. Travers, remembering the fatal inanity of most opera librettos, was touched by these words as if there had been something pathetic in this readiness of response; as if she had heard a starved man talking of the delight of a crust of dry bread. “I suppose you forgot yourself in that story, whatever it was,” she remarked in a detached tone.
“Yes, it carried me away. But I suppose you know the feeling.”