I did not hear Margarita sing in opera till the night of her début in Faust. Roger, on the contrary, was allowed to attend the last rehearsals: Margarita honestly wished for his criticism, which she knew from the very fact of his utter aloofness from her professional interests would be perfectly unbiased and sincere. It was not without a secret thrill of pleasure through my disappointment that I acquiesced in her decree; I knew that she would be nervous with me, from my very sympathy with her.
I can see the Opéra now—the lights, the jewels, the moustaches, the white shirt-bosoms, the lorgnettes, the fat women with programmes, the great, shrouding curtain.
Sue was there, pallid with excitement, and Tip Elder, who had come over for a much-needed holiday, and Walter Carter, who had been on an errand to Germany, and who had (of all unexpected people!) convinced Madam Bradley that her own hard pride should no longer be forced to regulate her children's enmities, and come to extend the olive-branch to Roger.
I was as nervous as could be and Roger, I think, was not quite so calm as he seemed and gnawed his lower lip steadily.
But Margarita, one would suppose, had not only no nerves but not even any self-consciousness. She told us afterward that before the curtain rose she was nearly paralysed with terror and was convinced that her voice had gone—it caught in her throat. She could not remember the words of the Jewel Song and her stomach grew icy cold—if Roger had been there, she said, she would have begged him to take her away and hide her on the Island! But he was not there. No one was there but Madame and her maid, and she could not run away alone.
When she sat spinning at her wheel behind the layers of gauze, and Faust saw her in his dream, her legs shook so that she could not work the treadle. But when she paced slowly onto the scene in her grey gown all worked with tiny, nearly invisible little butterflies—they had made her put aside the big ones—she was as calm and composed as the chorus around her and her voice was as beautiful as I have ever heard it.
"The child was born for the stage, there is no doubt!" Sue whispered to me excitedly, and I nodded hastily, not wishing to lose a note or a movement.
It was her best-known part and she was very lovely and magnetic in it, but I do not think it really suited her so well as the Wagner dramas would have, later. It is with Marguerite as a great English comedienne expressed it to me some years later, of Juliet: one must be forty to play it properly—and then one is too old to play it properly!
But what a gait she had! Her stride just fitted the stage, her carriage of neck and head was such as great artists have worked years to attain—and she was unconscious of it. Her eyes looked sky-blue under the blonde wig, and the blonde tints were lovely, if not so fascinatingly surprising as her own.
When she stopped, fixed her great eyes upon Faust reproachfully and sang, like a sweet, truthful child,