“Bah, you’ve been banting!” the doctor exclaimed, pulling out his white gloves as he searched for his handkerchief and throwing them into a chair. Ottenburg was in evening clothes and very pointed dress shoes. His white waistcoat, upon which the doctor had fixed a challenging eye, went down straight from the top button, and he wore a camelia. He was conspicuously brushed and trimmed and polished. His smoothly controlled excitement was wholly different from his usual easy cordiality, though he had his face, as well as his figure, well in hand. On the serving-table there was an empty champagne pint and a glass. He had been having a little starter, the doctor told himself, and would probably be running on high gear before he got through. There was even now an air of speed about him.
“Been, Freddy?”—the doctor at last took up his question. “I expect I’ve been exactly where you have. Why didn’t you tell me you were coming on?”
“I wasn’t, Archie.” Fred lifted the cover of the chafingdish and stirred the contents. He stood behind the table, holding the lid with his handkerchief. “I had never thought of such a thing. But Landry, a young chap who plays her accompaniments and who keeps an eye out for me, telegraphed me that Madame Rheinecker had gone to Atlantic City with a bad throat, and Thea might have a chance to sing Elsa. She has sung it only twice here before, and I missed it in Dresden. So I came on. I got in at four this afternoon and saw you registered, but I thought I wouldn’t butt in. How lucky you got here just when she was coming on for this. You couldn’t have hit a better time.” Ottenburg stirred the contents of the dish faster and put in more sherry. “And where have you been since twelve o’clock, may I ask?”
Archie looked rather self-conscious, as he sat down on a fragile gilt chair that rocked under him, and stretched out his long legs. “Well, if you’ll believe me, I had the brutality to go to see her. I wanted to identify her. Couldn’t wait.”
Ottenburg placed the cover quickly on the chafing-dish and took a step backward. “You did, old sport? My word! None but the brave deserve the fair. Well,”—he stooped to turn the wine,—“and how was she?”
“She seemed rather dazed, and pretty well used up. She seemed disappointed in herself, and said she hadn’t done herself justice in the balcony scene.”
“Well, if she didn’t, she’s not the first. Beastly stuff to sing right in there; lies just on the ‘break’ in the voice.” Fred pulled a bottle out of the ice and drew the cork. Lifting his glass he looked meaningly at Archie. “You know who, doctor. Here goes!” He drank off his glass with a sigh of satisfaction. After he had turned the lamp low under the chafing-dish, he remained standing, looking pensively down at the food on the table. “Well, she rather pulled it off! As a backer, you’re a winner, Archie. I congratulate you.” Fred poured himself another glass. “Now you must eat something, and so must I. Here, get off that bird cage and find a steady chair. This stuff ought to be rather good; head waiter’s suggestion. Smells all right.” He bent over the chafing-dish and began to serve the contents. “Perfectly innocuous: mushrooms and truffles and a little crab-meat. And now, on the level, Archie, how did it hit you?”
Archie turned a frank smile to his friend and shook his head. “It was all miles beyond me, of course, but it gave me a pulse. The general excitement got hold of me, I suppose. I like your wine, Freddy.” He put down his glass. “It goes to the spot to-night. She was all right, then? You weren’t disappointed?”
“Disappointed? My dear Archie, that’s the high voice we dream of; so pure and yet so virile and human. That combination hardly ever happens with sopranos.” Ottenburg sat down and turned to the doctor, speaking calmly and trying to dispel his friend’s manifest bewilderment. “You see, Archie, there’s the voice itself, so beautiful and individual, and then there’s something else; the thing in it which responds to every shade of thought and feeling, spontaneously, almost unconsciously. That color has to be born in a singer, it can’t be acquired; lots of beautiful voices haven’t a vestige of it. It’s almost like another gift—the rarest of all. The voice simply is the mind and is the heart. It can’t go wrong in interpretation, because it has in it the thing that makes all interpretation. That’s why you feel so sure of her. After you’ve listened to her for an hour or so, you aren’t afraid of anything. All the little dreads you have with other artists vanish. You lean back and you say to yourself, ‘No, that voice will never betray.’ Treulich geführt, treulich bewacht.”
Archie looked envyingly at Fred’s excited, triumphant face. How satisfactory it must be, he thought, to really know what she was doing and not to have to take it on hearsay. He took up his glass with a sigh. “I seem to need a good deal of cooling off to-night. I’d just as lief forget the Reform Party for once.