Little Madame Durand-De Rosa took Margaret behind the scenes just
before the second act of Romeo and Juliet was over. The famous
teacher of singing was a privileged person at the Opéra, and the man
who kept the side door of communication between the house and the stage
bowed low as he opened for her and Margaret. Things are well managed in
the great opera-houses nowadays, and it is not easy to get behind when
anything is going on.
The young girl felt a new sensation of awe and excitement. It was the
first time she had ever found herself on the working side of the vast
machinery of artistic pleasure, and her first impression was that she
had been torn from an artificial paradise and was being dragged through
an artificial inferno. Huge and unfamiliar objects loomed about her in
the deep shadows; men with pale faces, in working clothes, stood
motionless at their posts, listening and watching; others lurked in
corners, dressed in mediæval costumes that glittered in the dark.
Between the flies, Margaret caught glimpses of the darkened stage, and
the sound of the orchestra reached her as if muffled, while the tenor's
voice sounded very loud, though he was singing softly. On a rough bit
of platform six feet above the stage, stood Madame Bonanni in white
satin, apparently laced to a point between life and death, her hands
holding the two sides of the latticed door that opened upon the
balcony. In a loft on the stage left a man was working a lime-light
moon behind a sheet of blue glass in a frame; the chorus of old
retainers in grey stood huddled together in semi-darkness by a fly,
listening to the tenor and waiting to hear Madame Bonanni's note when
she should come out.
Margaret would have waited too, but her teacher hurried her along,
holding her by the hand and checking her when they came to any obstacle
which the girl's unpractised eyes might not have seen in time. To the
older woman it was all as familiar as her own sitting-room, for her
life had been spent in the midst of it; to Margaret it was all strange,
and awe-inspiring, and a little frightening. It was to be her own life,
too, before long. In a few months, or perhaps a few weeks, she, too,
would be standing on a platform, like Madame Bonanni, waiting to go out
into the lime-light, waiting to be heard by two thousand people. She
wondered whether she should be frightened, whether by any possibility
her voice would stick in her throat at the great moment and suddenly
croak out a hideous false note, and end her career then and there. Her
heart beat fast at the thought, even now, and she pressed her teacher's
guiding hand nervously; and yet, as the music reached her ears, she
longed to be standing in Madame Bonanni's place with only a latticed
balcony door between her and the great public. She was not thinking of
Lushington now, though she had thought all day of his face when she had
met him for one moment under the trees, yesterday morning, and had felt
that something was gone from her life which she was to miss for a long
time. That was all forgotten in what she felt at the present moment, in
the wild quivering longing to be in front, the centre of the great
illusion, singing as she knew that she could sing, as she had never
sung before.