It was after the garden love-scene that she won her recalls, over and over again. Above the great sheaf of hot-house daisies I sent up to the footlights she bowed and bowed and bowed again and smiled, and the jewels flashed on her white shoulders and the yellow braids shook at her deep, triumphant breaths, as she beamed out over us all, the wonderful, all-embracing smile of the born artist, that cannot be taught. Part of that brilliant smile came straight into my misted eyes, back in the loge, and so extraordinary is the power of such a success, so completely does that row of footlights cut off the victor from us who applaud below, that I, even I, who had literally taught this girl some of the ordinary reserves of decent society, who had found her a savage (socially speaking) only two years ago, now bowed low to her, dazed, humble as the man beside me who never saw her before.
How they pounded and cried, those amusing, sophisticated, babyish Parisians!
"Brava, la petite!" I hear the old gentleman now that turned to me in amazement, chattering like a well-preserved, middle-aged monkey; "but it is that it is an American, they tell me? Ça y est, alors! It is extraordinary, then, impayable! Je n'en reviens pas!"
"And why, Monsieur?" I asked.
"For the reason, simply, that it is well known how they are cold, those women, cold as ice, every one. But this one—Monsieur, I have seen many Marguerites, I who speak to you, but never before has it arrived to me to envy that fat Faust!"
And I (to whom he spoke) believed him thoroughly, I assure you. Though I doubt if the portly tenor was much flattered, for he had accepted the rôle with the idea of carrying off the honours of the evening, and exhibited, in the event, not a little of that acrimony which is so curiously inseparable from any collection of the world's great song-birds. Ever since Music, heavenly maid, was young, she has been so notoriously at variance with her fellow-musicians as to force the uninitiated into all sorts of cynical conclusions! Such as the necessity for some kind of handicap for all these harmonies, some make-weight for these unnaturally perfect chords. And it is but due to the various artists to admit that they supply these counter-checks bravely.
Well I suppose they would be too happy if it were all as harmonious as it sounds, and we should all (the poor songless rest of us) kill ourselves for jealousy! And if the fat Faust had really been as supremely blissful as he should have been when Margarita, with that indescribably lovely bending twist of her elastic body, drooped out of her canvas, rose-wreathed cottage window and threw her white arms about his neck in the most touching and suggestive abandon I have ever seen on the operatic stage—why, we should have been regretfully obliged to tear him to pieces, Roger and I and Walter Carter (I am afraid) and the well-preserved Frenchman!
She was not so philosophical as Goethe nor so saccharine as Gounod, our Margarita, and I don't know that I am more sentimental than another; but when the poor child in all her love and ignorance and simple intoxication with that sweet and terrible brew that Dame Nature never ceases concocting in her secret still-rooms, handed her white self over so trustfully to the plump and eager tenore robusto, a sudden disgust and fury at the imperturbable unfairness of that same inscrutable Dame washed over me like a wave and I could have wept like the silly Frenchman.
Do not be too scornful of that sad and sordid little stage story, ye rising generation—it is not for nothing that the great stupid public of older days, ignorant alike of Teutonics and chromatics, but wise in pity and terror, as old Aristotle knew, took it to their commonplace hearts! Do not trouble yourselves to explain to me that Gretchen was but an episode in a great cosmic philosophy; I knew it once, when I was young like you. But I am nearly sixty now—worse luck!—and I see why the cosmic philosophy has been quietly buried and the episode remains immortal! And so will you some day.
It was a great success for Madame and she basked in it; she had even a compliment for Roger. In our gay little supper, afterward, we had all a kind word—an almost pathetically kind word—for Roger. Margarita herself had never been so attentive to him, so eager for his ungrudging praise, so openly affectionate with him. He was very kind, very gentle, but in a quiet way he discouraged her demonstrative sweetness and led her to talk of her professional future. In her eyes as she looked at him over her wine-glass I seemed to see something I had never seen before, a sort of frightened pity; not the terror of a child cut off by the crowd from its guardian, but rather the fear of one who sees a one-time comrade on the other side of a widening flood, and regrets and fears for him and pities his loss and loneliness, but is driven by Destiny and cannot cross over. I wondered if the others saw it too, but dared not discover.