III THE METAL
XXIII
In the warm, subdued light of a double lamp with apricot glass shades
Howat Penny was turning over the pages, stiff with dry paste, of an
album filled with opera programmes. The date of the brief, precisely
penned label on the black cover was 1883-84; it was the first of a
number of such thick, recording volumes he had gathered; and the operas,
the casts, were of absorbing interest. At once a memento of the heroic
period of American music and of his first manhood, the faded crudely
embellished strips of paper, bearing names, lyric tenors and sopranos of
limpid, bird-like song long ago lost in rosy and nebulous clouds of
fable and cherished affection, roused remembered pleasures sharper than
any calm actuality of to-day. He paused with a quiet exclamation, the
single glass adroitly held in his left, astigmatic, eye fastened on the
announcement of a famous evening, a famous name. His sense of the leaf
before him blurred in the vivid memory of Patti, singing Martha in the
campaign brought by Mapleson in the old Academy of Music against the
forces of the new Metropolitan Opera House. He had been one of a
conservative number that had supported the established opera, declaring
heatedly that the Diva and Mapleson were an unapproachable musical
combination, before which the shoddier magnificence of its rival,
erected practically in a few summer months, would speedily fade.
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