"You'll excuse me," he says.
And he goes.
What's the matter now?
X.
I cannot conceive anything so fascinating in an operatic composer's life as the rehearsals of a new work of his. When he first hears in reality the tunes, the harmonies, the combinations of sounds which he had up to that moment heard only in his fancy, a profound terror overcomes him. The positive, actual achievements of the singers and the orchestra are so far from the ideal abstractions his fancy had supposed. Can it be possible that this shapeless noise should represent his score? The melodies are hardly recognizable, erroneous intentions of the singers deteriorate the musical sense, wrong notes hurt the poor composer's ears. But by and by the whole thing improves. Mistakes are corrected, the meanings of musical phrases are explained and the distress of the unhappy man vanishes.
I will not tell you the alarm, the consternation of Patrick Cooper when, at the beginning of the rehearsals, his masterpiece—for secretly, in the inmost recess of his heart, he considered Lady Macbeth as a masterpiece—appeared to him to be not only disorganized, but thoroughly rotten.
"Oh!" cried he silently, and his sufferings were all the more formidable as his vociferations were so very silent, "oh, why did I disobey my good mother? Why did I not follow the ideal career of an insurance broker? Why did I not foresee these shocking experiences? It is all horrible, appalling, awful!"