“You ought not to keep these things about, like this, Oliver. The dust from your grate must get at them.”
“It does, but I get them to enjoy them, not to have them. They’re pleasant to glance at and to play with at odd times like this, when one is waiting for tea or something.”
Fred smiled. The idea of Landry stretched out before his fire playing with his fans, amused him. Mrs. McGinnis brought the tea and put it before the hearth: old teacups that were velvety to the touch and a pot-bellied silver cream pitcher of an Early Georgian pattern, which was always brought, though Landry took rum.
Fred drank his tea walking about, examining Landry’s sumptuous writing-table in the alcove and the Boucher drawing in red chalk over the mantel. “I don’t see how you can stand this place without a heroine. It would give me a raging thirst for gallantries.”
Landry was helping himself to a second cup of tea. “Works quite the other way with me. It consoles me for the lack of her. It’s just feminine enough to be pleasant to return to. Not any more tea? Then sit down and play for me. I’m always playing for other people, and I never have a chance to sit here quietly and listen.”
Ottenburg opened the piano and began softly to boom forth the shadowy introduction to the opera they had just heard. “Will that do?” he asked jokingly. “I can’t seem to get it out of my head.”
“Oh, excellently! Thea told me it was quite wonderful, the way you can do Wagner scores on the piano. So few people can give one any idea of the music. Go ahead, as long as you like. I can smoke, too.” Landry flattened himself out on his cushions and abandoned himself to ease with the circumstance of one who has never grown quite accustomed to ease.
Ottenburg played on, as he happened to remember. He understood now why Thea wished him to hear her in “Rheingold.” It had been clear to him as soon as Fricka rose from sleep and looked out over the young world, stretching one white arm toward the new Götterburg shining on the heights. “Wotan! Gemahl! erwache!” She was pure Scandinavian, this Fricka: “Swedish summer”! he remembered old Mr. Nathanmeyer’s phrase. She had wished him to see her because she had a distinct kind of loveliness for this part, a shining beauty like the light of sunset on distant sails. She seemed to take on the look of immortal loveliness, the youth of the golden apples, the shining body and the shining mind. Fricka had been a jealous spouse to him for so long that he had forgot she meant wisdom before she meant domestic order, and that, in any event, she was always a goddess. The Fricka of that afternoon was so clear and sunny, so nobly conceived, that she made a whole atmosphere about herself and quite redeemed from shabbiness the helplessness and unscrupulousness of the gods. Her reproaches to Wotan were the pleadings of a tempered mind, a consistent sense of beauty. In the long silences of her part, her shining presence was a visible complement to the discussion of the orchestra. As the themes which were to help in weaving the drama to its end first came vaguely upon the ear, one saw their import and tendency in the face of this clearest-visioned of the gods.
In the scene between Fricka and Wotan, Ottenburg stopped. “I can’t seem to get the voices, in there.”
Landry chuckled. “Don’t try. I know it well enough. I expect I’ve been over that with her a thousand times. I was playing for her almost every day when she was first working on it. When she begins with a part she’s hard to work with: so slow you’d think she was stupid if you didn’t know her. Of course she blames it all on her accompanist. It goes on like that for weeks sometimes. This did. She kept shaking her head and staring and looking gloomy. All at once, she got her line—it usually comes suddenly, after stretches of not getting anywhere at all—and after that it kept changing and clearing. As she worked her voice into it, it got more and more of that ‘gold’ quality that makes her Fricka so different.”