Mary chanced upon this piece of information and brought it straight to Paula.  “Tell them to go ahead with Pagliacci, then,” Paula said.  “I’ll sing ‘Nedda’ myself.  Get LaChaise on the phone and let me talk to him.”

She did sing it without any rehearsal at all.  And she gave a performance which for most of the persons who saw it, made her the, and the only, “Nedda”; though—­or perhaps, because—­she didn’t give the part quite its traditional characterization; adapted it with the unscrupulousness of the artist to her own purpose.

Paula’s “Nedda” was a sulky slattern, indifferent, lazy, smoldering with passion,—­dangerous.  The sensuous quality of her beauty had never been more apparent than it was in the soiled cheap mountebank fineries which she had worn for so many performances of the part in Europe.  And this beauty, of course, did a lot of the work for her.  Explained the tragedy all by itself.  And, indeed, tragedy hung visibly over her from the moment of her first entrance upon the stage in the donkey cart.  She was the sort of woman men kill and are killed for.

She played the part with an extreme economy of movement, with a kind of feline stillness which made her occasional explosions into action, as when she attacked Tonio with the whip, literally terrifying.  She sang it carelessly and therefore in a manner absolutely gorgeous.  She swept them all, critics as well as the immense audience, clean off their feet.

Also, by way of a foot-note, the managerial announcement that Madame Carresford had volunteered for the part at six o’clock, to rescue them from the necessity of closing the park and was to sing it absolutely without rehearsal, exploded for all time the notion that there was anything of the amateur about her.

“You can do anything,” LaChaise told her as she came out into the wings.  And he kissed her on both cheeks rather solemnly, in the manner of one conferring a decoration.  In full measure pressed down and running over, that was how Paula’s success came to her.

CHAPTER XVII

THE WAYFARER

By the time Paula had got back to her dressing-room after the long series of tumultuous curtain calls was over, the rush of her friends to express their congratulations in person had begun.  After the Tosca, performance she had been adamant about seeing anybody but to-night with a laugh she said, “I don’t care.  For a few minutes.  If they’re people I really know.”

So Mary took her station beside the Rhadamanthus at the stockade gate—­in a proper opera-house, he would have been the stage door-keeper—­to pick out the sheep from the goat-like herd of the merely curious who, but for firm measures, would have stormed the place.  Those who came down again, pushed out by the weight of new arrivals, lingered about the gate talking things over with Mary.  It amused her to see how radically their attitude