And so on to the end—the sinister dawn with the chill spectres of day, the discovery, the crossed blades and Tristan’s wound.
Such things are too much for a poor lonely and hungry artist on a lovely evening in May.
“The deuce is in it,” he muttered, “the very deuce! Why after that should a poor devil sit and carve in wood?”
But Lundstrom sat with his chin on his hand and gazed out of the distance, paying hardly any attention to Leonard’s violent gestures. The old man’s shadow was outlined on a blue background, large, vague, as though ready to merge in the dimness of the thousand recesses around it.
Leonard was no longer interested in him, he would have preferred to be alone. Pshaw! the poor old codger hasn’t a notion of what is seething down there, he thought. He’s just moidering around with old stage properties. But thereupon Lundstrom lifted his gray head and said something which indicated that he nevertheless could fish memories out of the stream of tone.
“Sometimes when I sit here I get to be with them that lie out in the church-yard,” he muttered. “Wife and children and friends. It’s as if the music rinsed one out inside. Everything gets clearer and one sees that what’s been is still.”
“I see only what will never come to pass in life for my part, and that’s a cursed lot different,” burst out Leonard with greater bitterness than he himself realized. In his heat he was constrained to use strong words. But in reality he felt the beginning of a relaxation and release.
Then came the third act.
Tristan lies in feverish dreams by the shore of the sea. He waits for his Isolde. But when she finally comes, he, in the wild joy of desperation, tears open his unhealed wound and bleeds to death before it is vouchsafed him to kiss her. So, too, it had to be. Passion has overleaped all human bounds. It is a cool, wondrous alleviation that finally his blood may pour forth with the poison of the potion, with all the endless, tempestuous, lamenting, jubilating desire.
They got up softly and pressed out through the glowing dust over mighty craters of tone.