The Wagnerian Romances. Gertrude Hall Brownell

by a long significant glance to direct his glance to a spot in the ash-tree. The sword-motif, distinct and sharp, accompanies her look. Hunding, becoming aware of her lingering, with a peremptory gesture orders her again to be gone; and gathering up his own armour, with a warning to the Wölfing that on the morrow he will strike home—let him have a care!—withdraws, audibly bolting the door behind him.

      Left alone, Siegmund lies down beside the dying fire. To remove himself during the night as far as possible from Hunding's reach is not the solution suggesting itself naturally to him. Yet there he stands, pledged to meet an enemy, and not a weapon to his hand of offence or defence. The difficulty of his position is certainly as great as could be, and, reaching the full consciousness of it, he recalls to mind that his father had promised him a sword, which he should find in the hour of his greatest need. "Unarmed I am fallen in the house of the enemy; here I rest, devoted to his vengeance. A woman I have seen, gloriously fair. … She to whom my longing draws me, who with a rapturous charm constrains me, is held in thraldom by the man who mocks my unarmed condition. … " Could need, indeed, be greater? With the whole strength of that need, in a cry, long, urgent, fit to pierce the walls of Walhalla, he calls upon his father for the promised sword: "Wälse! Wälse! Where is your sword? … "

      A flame leaps from the embers and illuminates the ash-tree, bringing into view, at the spot Sieglinde had indicated to him with her eyes, a sword-hilt. But though his eyes are caught by the glitter, he does not recognise it for what it is; he watches it, without moving, as it shines in the firelight, and, lover-like, soon lapsing into undivided dreaming of the "flower-fair woman," plays tenderly with the conceit of the gleam on the ash-tree being the trace of her last bright glance. Forgetting his swordlessness and altogether unpromising plight, he goes on weaving poetry about her until the fire is quite out and he so nearly dozes that when a white form comes gliding through the door bolted by Hunding, he does not stir until addressed: "Guest, are you asleep?"

      Sieglinde has mixed narcotic herbs in her husband's drink, and bids the stranger make use of the night to provide for his safety. "Let me advise you of a weapon. … Oh, might you obtain it! The most splendid of heroes I must call you, for it is destined to the strongest alone." And she relates how at the marriage-feast of Hunding, while the men drank, and the woman who "unconsulted had been offered him for wife by ignoble traffickers" sat sadly apart, a stranger appeared, an elderly man in grey garb, whose hat-brim concealed one of his eyes. But the brilliant beam of the other eye created terror in the bystanders—all save herself, in whom it aroused an aching longing, sorrow and comfort in equal measure. The sword in his hand he swung, and drove into the ash-tree up to the hilt, leaving it there, a prize to whomsoever should be able to draw it out. The men present had all made the essay in vain; guests coming and going since then had tried, equally without success. "There in silence waits the sword." There in the ash-tree. "Then I knew," Sieglinde concludes, "who it was had come to me in my sorrow. I know, too, who it is alone can conquer the sword. Oh, might I find him here and now, that friend; might he, from the unknown, come to me, most wretched of women! All I have ever suffered of cruel woe, all the shame and indignity under which I have bowed—sweetest amends would be made for it all! All I ever lost, all I ever mourned, I should have recovered it all—if I might find that supreme friend, if my arm might clasp that hero!" Siegmund, to whom it could not occur for the fraction of a second to doubt his strength to draw any sword from any tree, at these words catches her impetuously to his breast: "The friend now clasps you, fairest of women, for whom weapon and woman were meant! Hot in my breast burns the oath which, noble one, weds me to you!" and, in her very strain: "All I ever yearned for, I met in you! In you I found all I ever lacked. If you suffered ignominy and I endured pain, if I was outlawed and you were dishonoured, a joyful revenge now calls to us happy ones! I laugh aloud in a holy elation, as I hold you, radiant one, embraced, as I feel the throbbing of your heart!"

      The great door of the hall, silently, without apparent reason, swings wide open, like a great curious eye unclosing to watch this beautiful marvel of their love, expanded so suddenly, like a huge aloe-flower. It lets in a flood of moonlight, and the glimmering vision of the vapourous green-lit nocturnal Spring-world. "Who went out? … Who came in?" cries Sieglinde, starting in alarm. "No one went," Siegmund reassures her, "but some one came: See, the Spring laughing in the room!" And he pours forth poetry of adorable inspiration, in explanation of the singular action of the door: Spring was outside, and Love, his sister, inside; Spring burst open the severing door, and now, brother and sister, Love and the Spring, are met!

      It is touching, the capacity for happiness the two have accumulated in the long, thwarted years. An ecstatic joy marks this hour of forgetting all the world outside themselves; the love-music is all of a fine free sustained rapture. One poignant and subtle and profound thing she says to him: "Foreign and unrelated to me seemed until now everything I saw, hostile everything which approached me. As if I had never known them were always the things that came to me. … But you I knew at once, clearly and distinctly; my eye no sooner beheld you, than you belonged to me; and all that lay concealed within my breast, the thing which I verily am, bright as the day it rose to the surface; like a ringing sound it smote my ear, when in the cold lonesome strange world for the first time I beheld my Friend!"

      Seated in the light of the full moon, they have freedom at last each to pore over the other's winning beauty. She is struck, fondly peering into his features, with the sense of having seen him before; and trying to think when and where reaches the assurance that it was on the surface of the pool which reflected her own image. Again, when he speaks, she is struck by the assurance that she has heard his voice before. She thinks, for a moment, that it was in childhood, … but corrects the impression by a second: she has heard it recently, when the echo in the woods gave back her own voice. His luminous eyes she has seen before: thus shone the glance of the grey guest at the wedding-feast, whom his daughter recognised by that token. Earnestly she asks this other guest: "Is your name in very truth Wehwalt?" "That is no longer my name since you love me!" he replies exuberantly, "I command now the sublimest joys! … Do you call me as you wish me to be called: I will take my name from you!" "And was your father indeed Wolf?" "A Wolf he was to cowardly foxes. But he whose eye shone with as proud an effulgence as, Glorious One, does yours, Wälse was his name!" Beside herself with joy, Sieglinde springs up: "If Wälse was your father—if you are a Wälsung, for you it was he drove his sword into the tree-trunk. Let me give you the name by which I love you: Siegmund shall you be called!" Siegmund leaps to seize the sword-handle: "Siegmund is my name, and Siegmund am I! (Sieg: victory.) Let this sword bear witness, which fearlessly I seize! Wälse promised me that I should find it in my greatest need. I grasp it now. … " Very characteristically, this greatest need, as he feels it, is not the need of a weapon with which to defend his life against Hunding; it is, in his soaring words: "Highest need of a holiest love, devouring need of a love full of longing, burns bright in my breast, drives me onward to deeds and to death. … Nothung! Nothung! So do I name you, sword! (Noth: need. Nothung: sword-in-need.) Nothung! Nothung! Out of the scabbard, to me!" With a mighty tug he draws it forth and holds it before the marvelling eyes of Sieglinde: "Siegmund the Wälsung stands before you, woman! As a wedding-gift he brings you this sword. Thus he wooes the fairest of women; from the enemy's house thus he leads you forth. Far from here follow him now, out in the laughing house of the Spring. There Nothung, the sword, shall protect you, when Siegmund lies overthrown, in the power of love!" "If your are Siegmund," cries the woman, "I am Sieglinde, who have so longed for you! Your own sister you have won at the same time as the sword!" Siegmund is given no pause by this revelation. At the realisation of this double dearness, the joy flares all the higher of the lawless pupil of Wotan. "Bride and sister are you to your brother. Let the blood of the Wälsungen flourish!" And with arms entertwined, forth they take their madly exulting hearts out into the "laughing house of the Spring."