"... Traut allein,
Ewig heim....
Du Isolde,
Tristan ich,
Nicht mehr Tristan,
Nicht Isolde....
Endloss ewig
Ein-bewusst:
Heiss erglühter Brust
Hochste Leibes-Lust!"
"I always wish that the music of Peer Gynt could have been written by Wagner," said Evelyn. "Think what he would have made of Anitas' last words: and the magic of the Troll Kingdom, and the great scene, as eerie in its way as the Brocken scene in Faust—don't you really know it? Towards the end of the play, just before he meets the Button-Moulder, Peer Gynt, the failure, is standing alone on the moor with charred trees and desolation all about him. Mist has risen, and all the world is full of little voices. Tiny thread balls sweep before him—they are the thoughts he should have followed. Dewdrops fall—his unshed tears; withered leaves drift to and fro in his path and dazzle him—watchwords he should have spoken; broken straws lie at his feet—an epitome of his life. It's all so like one's own life, void and valueless. And yet things started well enough. The very trees flowered, the dewdrops were like gold in the sunshine, and one heard pleasant voices in the woods, as a child."
"I've been thinking of my childhood too to-night," said Farquharson. "My love for Glune has been with me through everything. Out in Taorna, that night I was waiting in the Place of Sepulchres, I had a dream—a vision, if you like to call it so—and Glune stood before me, as brave, as broken, as courageous as of old. I could see the gorse in bloom and the peewits circling round and round, and Dan waiting patiently as he always waited.... I shall never forget the day that dog died mercifully, it was in my arms. The man who made this music must have been through heaven and hell too in his day. Glune has been through both, and so have most of us Farquharsons."
"I sent my soul through the Invisible,
Some letters of that after-life to spell;
And by and by my soul return'd to me
And answer'd, 'I myself am Heaven and Hell,'"
Evelyn quoted below her breath.
"Oh, aren't those lovely words?" broke in Dora Beadon, impatient at having been left so long to the companionship of Calvert and her father. "Rossetti's, aren't they? Oh, Omar Khayyám, is it? Well, he's much the same. One of my attachés, a student at the Academy, promised to set them to music for me."
"Miss Beadon is a great devotee of music," said Brand gravely; "she has a pianola and three gramophones."
Evelyn laughed.
"Dora dislikes musical people as much as I do. We spread the gramophone story to frighten them away, don't we, Dora?"
"I shouldn't mind them so much if they were only clean," said Miss Beadon. "Or if they wore better clothes! There's always a ready-made thirty-shilling-the-suit look about them, don't you think, Mr. Farquharson? By the way, Evelyn, you mustn't annex Mr. Farquharson any longer; I really insist upon his coming over here for the last act."