be sure; but she had seen him; and his venerable figure remained in her memory like a landscape glimpsed at the flare of a lightning-flash.  She had witnessed his arrival in Venice to die in the peace of those canals, in that silence which is broken only by the stroke of the oar—­where many years before he had thought himself dying as he wrote his Tristan—­that hymn to the Death that is pure, to the Death that liberates!  She saw him stretched out in the dark boat; and the splash of the water against the marble of the palaces echoed in her imagination like the wailing, thrilling trumpets at the burial of Siegfried—­the hero of Poetry marching to the Valhalla of immortality and glory upon a shield of ebony—­motionless, inert as the young hero of the Germanic legend—­and followed by the lamentations of that poor prisoner of life, Humanity, that ever eagerly seeks a crack, a chink, in the wall about it, through which the inspiriting, comforting ray of beauty may penetrate.

And the singer gazed with tearful eyes at the broad boina of black velvet, the lock of gray hair, two broken, rusty steel pens—­souvenirs of the Master, that Hans Keller had piously preserved in a glass case.

“You knew him—­tell me how he lived.  Tell me everything:  talk to me about the Poet ... the Hero.”

And the musician, no less moved, described the Master as he had seen him in the best of health; a small man, tightly wrapped in an overcoat—­with a powerful, heavy frame, however, despite his slight stature—­as restless as a nervous woman, as vibrant as a steel spring, with a smile that lightly touched with bitterness his thin, colorless lips.  Then came his “genialities,” as people said, the caprices of his genius, that figure so largely in the Wagner legend:  his smoker, a jacket of gold satin with pearl flowers for buttons; the precious cloths that rolled about like waves of light in his study, velvets and silks, of flaming reds and greens and blues, thrown across the furniture and the tables haphazard, with no reference to usefulness—­for their sheer beauty only—­to stimulate the eye with the goad of color, satisfy the Master’s passion for brightness; and perfumes, as well, with which his garments—­always of oriental splendor—­were literally saturated; phials of rose emptied at random, filling the neighborhood with the fragrance of a fabulous garden, strong enough to overcome the hardiest uninitiate, but strangely exciting to that Prodigy in his struggle with the Unknown.

And then Hans Keller described the man himself, never relaxed, always quivering with mysterious thrills, incapable of sitting still, except at the piano, or at table for his meals; receiving visitors standing, pacing back and forth in his salon, his hands twitching in nervous uncertainty; changing the position of the armchairs, rearranging the furniture, suddenly stopping to hunt about his person for a snuff-box or a pair of glasses that he never found; turning his pockets inside out, pulling his velvet house-cap now down over one eye, now back over the crown of his head, or again, throwing it into the air with a shout of joy or crumpling it in his hand, as he became excited in the course of a discussion!