ONE bright morning late in February Dr. Archie was
breakfasting comfortably at the Waldorf. He had got
into Jersey City on an early train, and a red, windy sunrise
over the North River had given him a good appetite. He
consulted the morning paper while he drank his coffee and
saw that "Lohengrin" was to be sung at the opera that
evening. In the list of the artists who would appear was
the name "Kronborg." Such abruptness rather startled
him. "Kronborg": it was impressive and yet, somehow,
disrespectful; somewhat rude and brazen, on the back page
of the morning paper. After breakfast he went to the hotel
ticket office and asked the girl if she could give him some-
thing for "Lohengrin," "near the front." His manner was
a trifle awkward and he wondered whether the girl noticed
it. Even if she did, of course, she could scarcely suspect.
Before the ticket stand he saw a bunch of blue posters
announcing the opera casts for the week. There was
"Lohengrin," and under it he saw:--
ELSA VON BRABANT . . . . Thea Kronborg.
That looked better. The girl gave him a ticket for a seat
which she said was excellent. He paid for it and went out
to the cabstand. He mentioned to the driver a number on
Riverside Drive and got into a taxi. It would not, of
course, be the right thing to call upon Thea when she was
going to sing in the evening. He knew that much, thank
goodness! Fred Ottenburg had hinted to him that, more
than almost anything else, that would put one in wrong.
When he reached the number to which he directed his
letters, he dismissed the cab and got out for a walk. The
house in which Thea lived was as impersonal as the
Waldorf, and quite as large. It was above 116th Street,
where the Drive narrows, and in front of it the shelving
bank dropped to the North River. As Archie strolled about
the paths which traversed this slope, below the street level,
the fourteen stories of the apartment hotel rose above him
like a perpendicular cliff. He had no idea on which floor
Thea lived, but he reflected, as his eye ran over the many
windows, that the outlook would be fine from any floor.
The forbidding hugeness of the house made him feel as if
he had expected to meet Thea in a crowd and had missed
her. He did not really believe that she was hidden away
behind any of those glittering windows, or that he was to
hear her this evening. His walk was curiously uninspiring
and unsuggestive. Presently remembering that Ottenburg
had encouraged him to study his lesson, he went down to
the opera house and bought a libretto. He had even brought
his old "Adler's German and English" in his trunk, and
after luncheon he settled down in his gilded suite at the
Waldorf with a big cigar and the text of "Lohengrin."
The opera was announced for seven-forty-five, but at
half-past seven Archie took his seat in the right front of the
orchestra circle. He had never been inside the Metropoli-
tan Opera House before, and the height of the audience
room, the rich color, and the sweep of the balconies were
not without their effect upon him. He watched the house
fill with a growing feeling of expectation. When the steel
curtain rose and the men of the orchestra took their places,
he felt distinctly nervous. The burst of applause which
greeted the conductor keyed him still higher. He found
that he had taken off his gloves and twisted them to a
string. When the lights went down and the violins began
the overture, the place looked larger than ever; a great pit,
shadowy and solemn. The whole atmosphere, he reflected,
was somehow more serious than he had anticipated.
After the curtains were drawn back upon the scene beside
the Scheldt, he got readily into the swing of the story. He
was so much interested in the bass who sang KING HENRY
that he had almost forgotten for what he was waiting so
nervously, when the HERALD began in stentorian tones to
summon ELSA VON BRABANT. Then he began to realize that
he was rather frightened. There was a flutter of white at
the back of the stage, and women began to come in: two,
four, six, eight, but not the right one. It flashed across
him that this was something like buck-fever, the paralyz-
ing moment that comes upon a man when his first elk
looks at him through the bushes, under its great antlers;
the moment when a man's mind is so full of shooting that
he forgets the gun in his hand until the buck nods adieu to
him from a distant hill.
All at once, before the buck had left him, she was there.
Yes, unquestionably it was she. Her eyes were downcast,
but the head, the cheeks, the chin--there could be no
mistake; she advanced slowly, as if she were walking in
her sleep. Some one spoke to her; she only inclined her
head. He spoke again, and she bowed her head still lower.
Archie had forgotten his libretto, and he had not counted
upon these long pauses. He had expected her to appear
and sing and reassure him. They seemed to be waiting for
her. Did she ever forget? Why in thunder didn't she--
She made a sound, a faint one. The people on the stage
whispered together and seemed confounded. His nervous-
ness was absurd. She must have done this often before;
she knew her bearings. She made another sound, but he
could make nothing of it. Then the King sang to her, and
Archie began to remember where they were in the story.
She came to the front of the stage, lifted her eyes for the
first time, clasped her hands and began, "EINSAM IN TRUBEN
TAGEN."
Yes, it was exactly like buck-fever. Her face was there,
toward the house now, before his eyes, and he positively
could not see it. She was singing, at last, and he positively
could not hear her. He was conscious of nothing but an
uncomfortable dread and a sense of crushing disappoint-
ment. He had, after all, missed her. Whatever was there,
she was not there--for him.
The King interrupted her. She began again, "IN LICHTER
WAFFEN SCHEINE." Archie did not know when his buck-
fever passed, but presently he found that he was sitting
quietly in a darkened house, not listening to but dreaming
upon a river of silver sound. He felt apart from the others,
drifting alone on the melody, as if he had been alone with it
for a long while and had known it all before. His power of
attention was not great just then, but in so far as it went
he seemed to be looking through an exalted calmness at a
beautiful woman from far away, from another sort of life
and feeling and understanding than his own, who had in her
face something he had known long ago, much brightened
and beautified. As a lad he used to believe that the faces
of people who died were like that in the next world; the
same faces, but shining with the light of a new understand-
ing. No, Ottenburg had not prepared him!
What he felt was admiration and estrangement. The
homely reunion, that he had somehow expected, now
seemed foolish. Instead of feeling proud that he knew her
better than all these people about him, he felt chagrined
at his own ingenuousness. For he did not know her better.
This woman he had never known; she had somehow de-
voured his little friend, as the wolf ate up Red Ridinghood.
Beautiful, radiant, tender as she was, she chilled his old
affection; that sort of feeling was not appropriate. She
seemed much, much farther away from him than she had
seemed all those years when she was in Germany. The
ocean he could cross, but there was something here he
could not cross. There was a moment, when she turned to
the King and smiled that rare, sunrise smile of her child-
hood, when he thought she was coming back to him. After
the HERALD'S second call for her champion, when she knelt
in her impassioned prayer, there was again something
familiar, a kind of wild wonder that she had had the power
to call up long ago. But she merely reminded him of Thea;
this was not the girl herself.
After the tenor came on, the doctor ceased trying to
make the woman before him fit into any of his cherished
recollections. He took her, in so far as he could, for what
she was then and there. When the knight raised the
kneeling girl and put his mailed hand on her hair, when she
lifted to him a face full of worship and passionate humility,
Archie gave up his last reservation. He knew no more
about her than did the hundreds around him, who sat in
the shadow and looked on, as he looked, some with more
understanding, some with less. He knew as much about
ORTRUDE or LOHENGRIN as he knew about ELSA--more, be-
cause she went further than they, she sustained the leg-
endary beauty of her conception more consistently. Even
he could see that. Attitudes, movements, her face, her
white arms and fingers, everything was suffused with a
rosy tenderness, a warm humility, a gracious and yet--
to him--wholly estranging beauty.
During the balcony singing in the second act the doctor's
thoughts were as far away from Moonstone as the singer's
doubtless were. He had begun, indeed, to feel the exhila-
ration of getting free from personalities, of being released
from his own past as well as from Thea Kronborg's. It was
very much, he told himself, like a military funeral, exalting
and impersonal. Something old died in one, and out of it
something new was born. During the duet with ORTRUDE,
and the splendors of the wedding processional, this new
feeling grew and grew. At the end of the act there were
many curtain calls and ELSA acknowledged them, brilliant,
gracious, spirited, with her far-breaking smile; but on the
whole she was harder and more self-contained before the
curtain than she was in the scene behind it. Archie did his
part in the applause that greeted her, but it was the new
and wonderful he applauded, not the old and dear. His
personal, proprietary pride in her was frozen out.
He walked about the house during the ENTR'ACTE, and here
and there among the people in the foyer he caught the
name "Kronborg." On the staircase, in front of the coffee-
room, a long-haired youth with a fat face was discoursing
to a group of old women about "die Kronborg." Dr. Archie
gathered that he had crossed on the boat with her.
After the performance was over, Archie took a taxi and
started for Riverside Drive. He meant to see it through
to-night. When he entered the reception hall of the hotel
before which he had strolled that morning, the hall porter
challenged him. He said he was waiting for Miss Kronborg.
The porter looked at him suspiciously and asked whether
he had an appointment. He answered brazenly that he
had. He was not used to being questioned by hall boys.
Archie sat first in one tapestry chair and then in another,
keeping a sharp eye on the people who came in and went
up in the elevators. He walked about and looked at his
watch. An hour dragged by. No one had come in from the
street now for about twenty minutes, when two women en-
tered, carrying a great many flowers and followed by a tall
young man in chauffeur's uniform. Archie advanced to-
ward the taller of the two women, who was veiled and
carried her head very firmly. He confronted her just as
she reached the elevator. Although he did not stand di-
rectly in her way, something in his attitude compelled her
to stop. She gave him a piercing, defiant glance through
the white scarf that covered her face. Then she lifted her
hand and brushed the scarf back from her head. There
was still black on her brows and lashes. She was very pale
and her face was drawn and deeply lined. She looked, the
doctor told himself with a sinking heart, forty years old.
Her suspicious, mystified stare cleared slowly.
"Pardon me," the doctor murmured, not knowing just
how to address her here before the porters, "I came up
from the opera. I merely wanted to say good-night to
you."
Without speaking, still looking incredulous, she pushed
him into the elevator. She kept her hand on his arm while
the cage shot up, and she looked away from him, frowning,
as if she were trying to remember or realize something.
When the cage stopped, she pushed him out of the elevator
through another door, which a maid opened, into a square
hall. There she sank down on a chair and looked up at
him.
"Why didn't you let me know?" she asked in a hoarse
voice.
Archie heard himself laughing the old, embarrassed
laugh that seldom happened to him now. "Oh, I wanted
to take my chance with you, like anybody else. It's been
so long, now!"
She took his hand through her thick glove and her head
dropped forward. "Yes, it has been long," she said in the
same husky voice, "and so much has happened."
"And you are so tired, and I am a clumsy old fellow to
break in on you to-night," the doctor added sympathetic-
ally. "Forgive me, this time." He bent over and put his
hand soothingly on her shoulder. He felt a strong shudder
run through her from head to foot.
Still bundled in her fur coat as she was, she threw both
arms about him and hugged him. "Oh, Dr. Archie,
DR. ARCHIE,"--she shook him,--"don't let me go. Hold
on, now you're here," she laughed, breaking away from
him at the same moment and sliding out of her fur coat.
She left it for the maid to pick up and pushed the doctor
into the sitting-room, where she turned on the lights. "Let
me LOOK at you. Yes; hands, feet, head, shoulders--just
the same. You've grown no older. You can't say as much
for me, can you?"
She was standing in the middle of the room, in a white
silk shirtwaist and a short black velvet skirt, which some-
how suggested that they had `cut off her petticoats all
round about.' She looked distinctly clipped and plucked.
Her hair was parted in the middle and done very close to
her head, as she had worn it under the wig. She looked
like a fugitive, who had escaped from something in clothes
caught up at hazard. It flashed across Dr. Archie that she
was running away from the other woman down at the
opera house, who had used her hardly.
He took a step toward her. "I can't tell a thing in the
world about you, Thea--if I may still call you that."
She took hold of the collar of his overcoat. "Yes, call
me that. Do: I like to hear it. You frighten me a little,
but I expect I frighten you more. I'm always a scarecrow
after I sing a long part like that--so high, too." She
absently pulled out the handkerchief that protruded from
his breast pocket and began to wipe the black paint off her
eyebrows and lashes. "I can't take you in much to-night,
but I must see you for a little while." She pushed him to a
chair. "I shall be more recognizable to-morrow. You
mustn't think of me as you see me to-night. Come at four
to-morrow afternoon and have tea with me. Can you?
That's good."
She sat down in a low chair beside him and leaned for-
ward, drawing her shoulders together. She seemed to him
inappropriately young and inappropriately old, shorn of
her long tresses at one end and of her long robes at the
other.
"How do you happen to be here?" she asked abruptly.
"How can you leave a silver mine? I couldn't! Sure
nobody'll cheat you? But you can explain everything to-
morrow." She paused. "You remember how you sewed
me up in a poultice, once? I wish you could to-night. I
need a poultice, from top to toe. Something very disagree-
able happened down there. You said you were out front?
Oh, don't say anything about it. I always know exactly
how it goes, unfortunately. I was rotten in the balcony.
I never get that. You didn't notice it? Probably not, but
I did."
Here the maid appeared at the door and her mistress
rose. "My supper? Very well, I'll come. I'd ask you to
stay, doctor, but there wouldn't be enough for two. They
seldom send up enough for one,"--she spoke bitterly.
"I haven't got a sense of you yet,"--turning directly to
Archie again. "You haven't been here. You've only an-
nounced yourself, and told me you are coming to-morrow.
You haven't seen me, either. This is not I. But I'll be
here waiting for you to-morrow, my whole works! Good-
night, till then." She patted him absently on the sleeve
and gave him a little shove toward the door.
Read next: PART VI. KRONBORG#Chapter 5
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