CHAPTER VII.
THE night is a cold one; the snow is falling in large, heavy flakes, and those who are fond of the frigid, but exhilarating amusement of sleighing, are in hopes that by the morrow they will be able to pass like lightning from one part of the city to the other; in a sleigh decked with warm, gaily trimmed furs; filled with a merry company, and drawn by two high-headed, dashing trotters. The gas lights are just discernible from corner to corner. The number of people in the streets is steadily decreasing, and the sound of their foot-fall is muffled in the snow. About the theatres and the opera house, however, crowds of the idle and curious, gaping at those who are entering these buildings, make it necessary for the police to pace to and fro, ordering back the more presumptuous loiterers, who press forward and obstruct the approach to the doors.
The cab and chaise-men muffled up in their cold-defying great-coats and woolen comforters, are opening the doors of their several vehicles, out of which ladies enveloped in cloaks and hoods are dismounting under cover of umbrellas, held probably by the "best of brothers," but more probably by gentlemen in no way related to them. In the opera house all is bustle and commotion. The officials are selling tickets, receiving tickets, and directing to their places bevies of ladies and gentlemen bewildered in a maze of passages. The audience is impatiently preparing itself for a delightful evening's entertainment. The dandies, who are so unfortunate as not to have accompanied ladies have already brought themselves up to the attack, and have levelled their opera-glasses on all the points where they know well-established objects of admiration are likely to be found. Now and then they bow their recognition in a reserved inclination, or in a careless smiling way that bespeaks the freedom of familiar intimacy.
The fast-men are standing at the doors in knots of three and four, talking over the last trot of Suffolk, or the probable chance of victory in the next day's dog-fight, and making a few, no doubt very fast, but not very proper allusions to the shoulders of some rather sparingly habited belles. The Cubans in the parquette, who, by the by, during their sojourn in this country will best preserve their liberty by remaining north of Mason and Dixon's line, are clearing their voices in very doubtful Spanish, for those animated bravos, which we must admit they always administer in the very best taste, both as to time and quantity. Here and there, some lone young man, desolate in a crowd, who has seldom before been exposed to the full blaze of the all-discovering gas light, not exactly knowing what to do with himself, is endeavouring, with a fictitious indifference, to fill up the vacancies of attention by smoothing down the stubborn folds of badly selected white kids. Five collegians just escaped from the studious universities for a high week in town, have established themselves all together, and commenced a running commentary, carried on chiefly in the Virginia dialect, on men, women, and things, much to the annoyance of a very foreign gentleman behind them—so foreign that he is almost black—who looks stilettos at his cheerful but over-loquacious neighbours. One youth in an excessively white, though unpleasantly stiff cravat, is assisting an equally stiff old chaperon into her place, at the expense of great physical efforts, till his cheeks are thereby suffused with a tint strongly resembling the color of a juvenile beet, while the distended veins of his forehead would make a fine anatomical study for the laborious medical student, if that fabulous biped were still extant. The chaperon being disposed of, four young ladies under her surveillance, two in opera cloaks and hoods, and two in antediluvian mantles and pre-adamitic head-gear, assuring the existence of rural cousinship, by four minor efforts of the same gentleman, are at length safely landed in their places. But now commences a new round of confusion. Each of the four young ladies discovers that she has placed herself on some article of clothing belonging to her companion. Whereupon she half rises, and having drawn forth the disturbing habiliment, resumes her former position: and as this movement is performed by each one of them without regard to the order in which they have placed themselves, and is repeated half a dozen times in as many minutes, the unconscious fair ones become the subjects of the allusions of the fast-men, who immediately institute comparisons between them and various animate and inanimate objects. One of these gentlemen observing that their motions remind him of a flock of aquatic fowl, known by the name of divers, a facetious friend replies that probably he means diving bells; which being considered an extremely happy pun, it meets with a hearty laugh of approbation. But an ambitious fast wit, fearing that his reputation is likely to be lost forever, if he remain silent, says that the whole group of uneasy females recalls the line of Coleman,
"For what is so gay as a bag full of fleas."
Query? Why do the handsomest women at an opera always talk and laugh the loudest?
The noise of conversation which now lulls, now swells out in gentle crescendos, is chiefly the production of this taciturn part of the audience. All at once the gas is let on in a gush of light, the buzz of voices, which up to this time has been carried on in a subdued tone, bursts out into full force, with a suddenness that seems to render it probable that the conversation has been issuing all the while from the gas jets. The augmented light brings down another volley from the foci of a thousand lorgnettes. At this moment the musicians begin to enter the orchestra which has been void of occupants all the evening, with the exception of one meaningless old fellow, who has been attempting to restore order among the stands, seats, and books, but whose laudable efforts have ended in what every single gentleman at lodgings knows all endeavours to "set things to rights," are sure to effect—a state of affairs in which confusion is considerably worse confounded. But after all a music-stand must be adjusted by the performer himself; no one can put the hat of another on the head of the latter so as to be comfortable to him. The latter must pose it for himself. This law applies with peculiar force to music-stands.
The violinists proceed to tighten or slacken the hair of their bows, to throw back the coat collar, or stuff a white handkerchief under it, in order to adjust the violin to the peculiar crook of each neck, with as much apparent anxiety as if they had not been doing the same thing for the last thirty years, and some of their heads had not become bald over the sound-post. In the meantime, the other members of this well-bearded corps are streaming in with their instruments under the arm, and are placing their music books and lamps at the proper elevation on the stands, all the while talking, nodding, and smiling as if rehearsing half the day, and playing half the night, were a mighty good joke.
And then ascend to the highest parts of the house—to the regions of the operatic "paradise," those most singular of all instrumental sounds, those fifty or sixty antagonistic voluntaries with which all the audience would voluntarily dispense, consisting of chromatics in twenty different keys, violin octaves, harmonics, thirds and fifths, clarionet shakes, flute staccatos, horn growlings, ophicleide rumblings, triangular vibrations, and drum concussions.
About the time that the observer has made up in his mind an answer to the following mental queries—how many nights the first violinist could play without getting a crick in the neck—whether the flutist may not sometime blow his eyes so far out of his head that he may never be able to get them back again—how long it would take the operator on the cornet à piston to learn to play on the magnetic telegraph—why such a small man should be suffered to perform on such a big thing as an ophicleide, and how a person with such a huge moustache can get the piccola up to lips defended by such a bulwark of hair, a fermentation is observable in the midst of this musical whirlpool, which indicates the presence of some higher power. Place is given by the humble members of the orchestra, and the director is seen to stand forth in the attitude of mounting the tribunal from whence he guides his submissive subjects with despotic sway. He is a neat figured little man, with a profusion of methodically adjusted curls, a moustache that would render his physiognomy excessively ferocious, if an occasional smile playing over the distinguishable parts of his face, did not modify this expression. He is attired in the costume of the ball room, bearing in his button hole the most delicate rosebud of the conservatory, and in his perfectly gloved hand, an amber headed baton, the sceptre of command. At his appearance a wave of applause floats up from the audience, and the head and breast of the director bend down to meet it in a graceful and reverential bow, accompanied by a smile expressing the highest possible amount of inward gratification. This little acknowledgment of a becoming respect for the good opinion of the house is repeated once or twice, and then with the air of a man who has important business on hand, he mounts his elevated seat. He gives one or two magical taps on the stand, and the chaos of sounds is annihilated with the exception of the lamentations of one refractory violin, over which the owner has been for the last half hour repeatedly, first inclining his head in a horizontal position, and then tugging away at the screws. At this the director seems to be much annoyed, and the poor violinist, more annoyed, mutters to a companion that he wishes himself an unspeakably long way hence—probably in Italy where he could procure some good strings.
The resisting violin having been brought to subjection, the director casts an eye over the whole body of musicians, and having thrown back his head and lifted up both arms, very much in the supposed attitude of Ajax defying the thunder, he remains perfectly motionless for an instant, and then brings forward the whole of his body from the hips upwards, with a rapid and powerful jerk, which introduces his forehead into close proximity with the musical score which he pretends to be reading, the baton strikes the stand with a loud clap, and one old drummer proceeds to touch the drum, but in so gentle a manner, that it sounds as if, instead of using the sticks he were tossing some grains of shot on it. You now tremble for the safety of the director, and you enter into an arithmetical calculation with yourself, the basis of which is, that if the director by such a dangerous inclination of the person can only bring one poor drummer into movement, what amount of bodily labour he will be compelled to undergo, in order to operate on all that concourse of musicians. But your fears are dissipated in a few moments, for you discover that great sounds and little sounds are accompanied with about the same degree of gesticulatory emphasis. In the meantime some horns have commenced to blow on a very small scale, not hard enough, you would suppose, to drive the dust out of them, and if the piston of the cornet did not rattle so, you would pronounce its playing all a sham. The violins and flutes begin to be audible and the violinists are suddenly struck with a simultaneous desire to pick the strings, just as if that would make any music. All the other instruments are now doing duty in very feeble tones, and you take a look round the house to see who are there; and you wonder why that particular family of Smiths, with whom you have the pleasure of an acquaintance has not yet appeared. You think Miss Julia Brown's hair arranged with the usual want of elegance, and then call to mind the fact that at Newport, the previous summer, you complimented her so many times on the peculiar taste which her coiffure always displayed. The aforesaid drummer is now giving the drum considerable ill usage, and then for the first time, you observe that he has two of them which he appears to beat alternately. The director is casting his head from one side to the other, flashes of disapprobation dart from his eyes upon the dilatory violinists, who from time to time, stop as it were, to catch breath, and fail to "come to the scratch" in due season. Every now and then a frown, dark as Erebus, spreads over his brow, as some poor laggard is astray in the mazes of sound, and can't find his place, or turns two pages instead of one, and consequently loses the thread of his harmonious discourse. The music grows so powerful that the conversation of the most enthusiastic and vociferous fast man no longer meets the ear. The orchestra is going as if they were riding an instrumental steeple chase, and the director looks more and more involved in doubt, as to which of his followers is to be left most in the rear.
At length when you have concluded that every musician has exhausted his last resource in the general attempt to make a noise, you are knocked into a start of astonishment by the introduction of a corps de reserve, in the clash of cymbals, which sounds as if a careless servant had stumbled in coming up stairs and mashed an entire set of Sevres china. In the midst of this carnage of crotchets and quavers, the director is obviously the controlling spirit who "rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm." There he sits producing no one sound except an occasional rap of his baton on the desk, and yet rousing to frenzy or lulling into tranquillity the instruments of all this tumult, every now and then, as Mr. Macaulay would say, "hurling foul scorn" at the heaps of little black dots that are crowded over the leaves of his score.
When the intensity of the tones has been diminished and augmented some half dozen times, the overture is concluded in four grand crashes, in which the cymbals make the most conspicuous figure. During the overture, however, there seems to be occasional seasons when there is a cessation of hostilities, and a soft plaintive air is taken up by one clarionet, violincello or oboe, with which air the audience must be very much delighted, for they laugh and talk with the greatest earnestness, and never turn their eyes towards the orchestra.
And now there is a new commotion among the musicians, while arranging every thing for the more serious undertaking, the opera itself. The director goes about like a general on the eve of battle, reconnoitres his forces, and marshals them for the attack. He mounts the elevated seat, gives another contortion to his frame, similar to that which was necessary to put the overture in movement, and then the curtain rises. Heads are slightly projected from the boxes at this movement, and many an alabaster neck is curved forward till the lowered drapery reveals the snowy bosom. The noise of conversation ceases, and the opera commences in earnest.