What Will People Say? - The Original Classic Edition. Hughes Rupert

When Forbes stepped to the edge of the box, he seemed to be the entire audience, another mad King of Bavaria come to witness a performance in solitude. The famous red horseshoe stretched its length a hundred yards or more on either side of him. In each of its little scallops a family of empty chairs sat facing the stage in solemn silliness. The owners were still filling chairs at dinner-tables. [Pg 97]

       But when Forbes took the next step forward he found a multitude. Above him he saw other horseshoes in tiers dense with faces peering downward. Below him a plain of Babel inhabited by the tops of heads, numberless pates in long windrows, the men's skulls close-cropped or bald, and their shoulders black; the women's elaborately coiffed, over an enormous acreage of bared shoulders and busts.

       Suddenly all the white-gloved hands fluttered in coveys with the show and sound of innumerable agitated pigeons. Toscanini was

       picking his way through the orchestra to the desk.

       From the opening phrase of the Vorspiel Forbes became a Wagnerian. Those first stifled moans of almost sullen desire so whelmed him that he wondered how Persis and Mrs. Neff and her guests should dare to be late and lose this precious expression. Before the opera had finished breaking his heart on its eternal wheel of anguish, he wondered that any one should care to submit to its intolerable beauty a second time.

       Yet here were thousands thronging to its destroying blaze like fanatic moths--moths that paid a high price to be admitted to the lamp, and clamored to be consumed in its divine distress.

       Forbes smiled at the universal lust for artistic and vicarious suffering that has made other people's pathos the most lucrative of all forms of entertainment.

       The time was to come when he himself would pay dearly for the privilege of great pain; when his mind would strive futilely to dissuade his heart from clenching upon the thorn that made it bleed. Humanity has almost always preferred strong emotions at any cost, to peace however cheap.

       The prelude was one long stream of bitter-sweet honey, and it affected Forbes as music had never affected him. He wondered how people could ever have ridiculed or resisted this man Wagner. He wished that Persis would[Pg 98] come soon. He thought of her as "Persis"--or "Isolde"; he could not think of her as Miss Cabot to this music.

       The first act was ended and the long intermission almost over before she arrived, with Enslee, followed immediately by Bob and

       Winifred, and last of all by the hostess, Mrs. Neff.

       Everybody greeted Forbes with the casual informality of old friendship, except Willie Enslee, who nodded obliquely, and murmured:

       "H' are yu, Mr. Ward."

       Nobody corrected him, least of all Forbes, who was too much disgusted with Willie's existence there to feel any minor resentment. The three women fell to wrangling, altruistically, of course, over the two front seats. Mrs. Neff was trying to bully Persis and Winifred into occupying them. Winifred's demurrer was violent:

       "If I sit there nobody can see the stage. You're such a little wisp I can see round you or through you." Persis preferred almost anything to a disturbance, and her protest was a mere form.

       Only the rising curtain brought the battle to a close. Persis dropped into a chair on the right. Winifred pushed Mrs. Neff into the other, and sat back of her. Willie annexed the chair behind Persis, Bob Fleming took that aft of Winifred, and motioned Forbes to the center chair. Then Mrs. Neff beckoned him to hunch forward into the narrow space between her and Persis.

       All along the horseshoe people were just arriving or returning from visits among the boxes. There was much chatter. The orchestra might as well have been wasting its sweetness on a crowded restaurant.

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       Forbes pretended to be looking over the audience on his right, but he was looking at Persis. The music of the garden where Isolde awaited her Tristan, and the far-off rumorous hunting-horns of the King, her husband, were working a magic upon her. He could see its influence on her face.[Pg 99]

       She wore brighter raiment than at the theater; her head-dress was more imperious, and more jewelry glittered about her. When she breathed or moved the diamonds at her ears, her throat, and in her corsage flashed and dulled as if they had eyelids; the pearls had a veiled radiance.

       She was a combination of beauty unadorned and most adorned. Despite her trappings of gem and fabric, even more of her was candidly presented than at the theater last night--or was it not a year ago? Surely he must have known her for more than a day.

       Her bodice would have seemed to be shamelessly low, had it not been as high as almost any other there. This was one of those com-

       mon yet amazing sessions where thousands of women of every age and class agree to display as much of their skins as the police will allow, and far more than their husbands and fathers approve.

       But Forbes had not yet reached the stage where a man resents the publication of his charmer's charms. He was still hardly more than a fascinated student of Persis. He found her a most engrossing text.

       She was so thoroughly alive--terribly alive all over! Wordsworth's phrase would have suited Forbes' understanding of her: she "felt her life in every limb." Her brows now moved sinuously, and now relaxed as Isolde sang of her longing and quenched the torch for a signal to her lover. One moment Persis' eyelids throbbed with excitement; the next they fell and tightened across her eyes. Accesses of emotion swelled her nostrils and made her lips waver together. Her throat arched and flexed and was restless; and her lovely disparted bosom filled and waned.

       If she sat with clasped hands, the fingers seemed to convene and commune. She was incessantly thrusting back her hair and stroking her temples, or her forearms. Her knees were always exchanging places one above the[Pg 100] other; her feet crossed, uncrossed, and seemed unable to settle upon precedence.

       If she had been a child she would have been called fidgety, but all her motions were discreet and luxurious. She was like a lotos-eater

       stirring in sleep and just about to open her eyes.

       The second act of the opera proved to be hardly more than a prolonged duet. The rapture of it outlasted Forbes' endurance; it did not bore him, it wore him out. He grew weary of eavesdropping on these two. He was jealous to love and be loved on his own account.

       The woman next him was becoming more beautiful every moment. He felt a craving to touch her--with reverence; to link arms in comradeship, and to clench hands with her when the music stormed the peaks.

       An aura seemed to transpire mistily from his pores to meet the aureole that shimmered about her.

       His mood was far above any thought of flirtation, or evil desire. He was too knightly at heart to dream of adventure against her sacred isolation. But he wished and wished that he knew her better; had known her longer. Unconsciously he plagiarized the sigh of Johanna Ambrosius' poem: "Ach, hatt' ich fruher dich geseh'n!"

       But Fate can play the clown as well as the tragedian, and accomplish as much by an absurd accident as by elaborate glooms.

       That afternoon, when Forbes was lured into the haberdashery, he had invested in black silk hosiery, very sheer and very dear. Later he had acquired a pair of new pumps. The shoes were not too small, but their rigid edge cut his instep like a dull knife. By the time that Isolde's husband had found her in Tristan's arms, and begun to deplore his friend's treachery at great length, the pressure upon Forbes' heart relaxed enough to let his feet attract his attention. They proclaimed their discomfort acutely.[Pg 101]

       After some hesitation he resolved to slip them out of their glistening jails a moment, under cover of the darkness.

       A sense of immense relief rejoiced him when he sat with his silk-stockinged feet perched on top of instead of inside of his shoes. Though he was unaware of it, he was not the only one in that box to seize the opportunity. Heaven alone knew how much empty foot-gear was scattered along the floors of that opera-house. Persis for one had vacated her slippers long ago. She always did at every opportunity.

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       Eventually she tucked her little left foot back of her and bent it round the leg of her chair. By and by Forbes, in shifting his position, straightened his right knee.