The echoes gave back Parsifal’s brief lament; then the tall white figure on the bridge, although she did not move, seemed to bend her voice above the kneeling boy, summoning him to consolation. As it rose in seduction, in the insolent triumph of the passionate woman who knows that not for her is the balking of desire, it was so warm, so rich, so vast in its compass, that Ordham felt as if the golden waters were rising to suffocate him. When she paused so lingeringly on the final note of seduction, “_Ersten kuss_,” that the words seemed to live on and gather volume in the thrilling rebellious ear, and an angry cry burst from the balcony of the King:—
“Amfortas!— Die wunde! Die wunde!— Sie brent in meinen Herzen— Oh, Klage! Klage! Furchtbare, Klage!—”
he came as angrily to himself. It was the spell whose meshes he cared least to encounter, and he wondered how he could be sensible to it, even under the influence of music, so soon after breaking from an entanglement which the lady had taken with a seriousness incomprehensible to himself. He was in a mood which impelled him to close the eyes of the lover in him forever, and his real interest in Margarethe Styr began when the Princess Nachmeister told him that she was a woman of intellect and hated his sex. He by no means hated hers, but his mind was lonely, and his ego sought blindly for that companionship which all souls claim as their right, and generally go forth to other worlds still seeking.
The voice of the King ceased. Kundry burst forth again. The wild grief, the remorse of her awakened soul at her abandonment of Christ, then her passionate supplication for the joys and compensations of mortal love, hardly removed the impression, nor her promise to make the obstinate youth a god in her embrace. But when she hurled forth her curses, Ordham breathed more freely, although the furies of hell seemed to echo among the hills.
There was a brief pause. Then with a wild and startling transition:—
“Ho-yo-to-ho! Ho-yo-to-ho! Hi-ya-ha! Hi-ya-ha! Ho-yo-to-ho! Ho-yo-to-ho!”
Brünhilde’s jubilant cry sprang from peak to peak; then this strange woman’s vocal interpretation of the gulf that separated Wotan’s daughter from her sisters even before the War-father bereft her of her godhead; the gathering clouds of her approaching humanity; the eternal tragedy of woman’s sacrifice to man.