‘Have you ever known a prima donna?’
‘No, but I’ve read all the autobiographies and memoirs that I could find. I’ve gone into it pretty thoroughly. Not only the obvious things, you know, but I’ve hunted around in all sorts of byways to get the revealing touch or the suggestive anecdote.’
‘And have you got what you wanted?’
‘I think so.’
He began to describe his heroine to me. She was young and beautiful, wilful it is true and with a quick temper, but magnanimous. A woman on the grand scale. Music was her passion; there was music not only in her voice, but in her gestures and in her inmost thoughts. She was devoid of envy, and her appreciation of art was such that when another singer had done her an injury she forgave her when she heard her sing a role beautifully. She was of a wonderful generosity, and would give away everything she possessed when a story of misfortune touched her soft heart. She was a great lover, prepared to sacrifice the world for the man she loved. She was intelligent and well-read. She was tender, unselfish, and disinterested. In fact she was much too good to be true.
‘I think you’d better meet a prima donna,’ I said at last.
‘How can I?’
‘Have you ever heard of La Falterona?’
‘Of course I have. I’ve read her memoirs.’
‘She lives just along the coast. I’ll ring her up and ask her to dinner.’
‘Will you really? It would be wonderful.’
‘Don’t blame me if you don’t find her quite what you expect.’
‘It’s the truth I want.’
Everyone has heard of La Falterona. Not even Melba had a greater reputation. She had ceased now to sing in opera, but her voice was still lovely, and she could fill a concert hall in any part of the world. She went for long tours every winter, and in summer rested in a villa by the sea. On the Riviera people are neighbours if they live thirty miles from one another, and for some years I had seen a good deal of La Falterona. She was a woman of ardent temperament, and she was celebrated not only for her singing, but for her love affairs: she never minded talking about them, and I had often sat entranced for hours while with the humour which to me was her most astonishing characteristic she regaled me with lurid tales of royal or very opulent adorers. I was satisfied that there was at least a measure of truth in them. She had been married, for short periods, three or four times, and in one of these unions had annexed a Neapolitan prince. Thinking that to be known as La Falterona was grander than any title, she did not use his name (to which indeed she had no right, since after divorcing him she had married somebody else) but her silver, her cutlery, and her dinner-service were heavily decorated with a coat of arms and a crown, and her servants invariably addressed her as madame la princesse. She claimed to be a Hungarian, but her English was perfect; she spoke it with a slight accent (when she remembered), but with an intonation suggestive, I had been told, of Kansas City. This she explained by saying that her father was a political exile who had fled to America when she was no more than a child; but she did not seem quite sure whether he was a distinguished scientist who had got into trouble for his liberal views, or a Magyar of high rank who had brought down on his head the imperial wrath because he had had a love affair with an Archduchess. It depended on whether she was just an artist among artists, or a great lady among persons of noble birth.
With me she was not natural, for that she could never have been if she had tried, but franker than with anyone else. She had a natural and healthy contempt for the arts. She genuinely looked upon the whole thing as a gigantic bluff, and deep down in her heart was an amused sympathy for all the people who were able to put it over on the public. I will admit that I looked forward to the encounter between Peter Melrose and La Falterona with a good deal of sardonic amusement.
She liked coming to dine with me because she knew the food was good. It was the only meal she ate in the day, for she took great care of her figure, but she liked that one to be succulent and ample. I asked her to come at nine, knowing that was the earliest hour she dreamt of eating, and ordered dinner for half past. She turned up at a quarter to ten. She was dressed in apple-green satin, cut very low in front, with no back at all, and she wore a string of huge pearls, a number of expensive-looking rings, and on her left arm diamond and emerald bracelets from the wrist to the elbow. Two or three of them were certainly real. On her raven-black hair was a thin circlet of diamonds. She could not have looked more splendid if she had been going to a ball at Stafford House in the old days. We were in white ducks.
‘How grand you are,’ I said. ‘I told you it wasn’t a party.’
She flashed a look of her magnificent black eyes at Peter.
‘Of course it’s a party. You told me your friend was a writer of talent. I am only an interpreter.’ She ran one finger down her flashing bracelets. ‘This is the homage I pay to the creative artist.’
I did not utter the vulgar monosyllable that rose to my lips, but offered her what I knew was her favourite cocktail. I was privileged to call her Maria, and she always called me Master. This she did, first because she knew it made me feel a perfect fool, and secondly because, though she was in point of fact not more than two or three years younger than I, it made it quite clear that we belonged to different generations. Sometimes, however, she also called me you dirty swine. This evening she certainly might very well have passed for thirty-five. She had those rather large features which somehow do not seem to betray age. On the stage she was a beautiful woman, and even in private life, notwithstanding her big nose, large mouth, and fleshy face, a good-looking one. She wore a brown make-up, with dark rouge, and her lips were vividly scarlet. She looked very Spanish and, I suspected, felt it, for her accent at the beginning of dinner was quite Sevillian. I wanted her to talk so that Peter should get his money’s worth, and I knew there was but one subject in the world that she could talk about. She was in point of fact a stupid woman who had acquired a line of glib chatter which made people on first meeting her think she was as brilliant as she looked; but it was merely a performance she gave, and you soon discovered that she not only did not know what she was talking about, but was not in the least interested in it. I do not think she had ever read a book in her life. Her knowledge of what was going on in the world was confined to what she was able to gather by looking at the pictures in the illustrated press. Her passion for music was complete bunkum. Once at a concert to which I went with her she slept all through the Fifth Symphony, and I was charmed to hear her during the interval telling people that Beethoven stirred her so much that she hesitated to come and hear him, for with those glorious themes singing through her head, it meant that she wouldn’t sleep a wink all night. I could well believe she would lie awake, for she had had so sound a nap during the Symphony that it could not but interfere with her night’s rest.
But there was one subject in which her interest never failed. She pursued it with indefatigable energy. No obstacle prevented her from returning to it; no chance word was so remote that she could not use it as a stepping-stone to come back to it, and in effecting this she displayed a cleverness of which one would never have thought her capable. On this subject she could be witty, vivacious, philosophic, tragic and inventive. It enabled her to exhibit all the resources of her ingenuity. There was no end to its ramifications, and no limit to its variety. This subject was herself. I gave her an opening at once and then all I had to do was to make suitable interjections. She was in great form. We were dining on the terrace and a full moon was obligingly shining on the sea in front of us. Nature, as though she knew what was proper to the occasion, had set just the right scene. The view was framed by two tall black cypresses, and all round us on the terrace the orange trees in full flower exhaled their heady perfume. There was no wind, and the candles on the table flamed with a steady softness. It was a light that exactly suited La Falterona. She sat between us, eating heartily and thoroughly appreciating the champagne, and she was enjoying herself. She gave the moon a gla
nce. On the sea was a broad pathway of silver.
‘How beautiful nature is,’ she said. ‘My God, the scenery one has to play in. How can they expect one to sing? You know, really, the sets at Covent Garden are a disgrace. The last time I sang Juliet I just told them I wouldn’t go on unless they did something about the moon.’
Peter listened to her in silence. He ate her words. She was better value than I had dared to hope. She got a little tight not only on the champagne but on her own loquaciousness. To listen to her you would have thought she was a meek and docile creature against whom the whole world was in conspiracy. Her life had been one long bitter struggle against desperate odds. Managers treated her vilely, impresarios played foul tricks on her, singers combined to ruin her, critics bought by the money of her enemies wrote scandalous things about her, lovers for whom she had sacrificed everything used her with base ingratitude; and yet, by the miracle of her genius and her quick wits, she had discomfited them all. With joyous glee, her eyes flashing, she told us how she had defeated their machinations and what disaster had befallen the wretches who stood in her way. I wondered how she had the nerve to tell the disgraceful stories she told. Without the smallest consciousness of what she was doing she showed herself vindictive and envious, hard as nails, incredibly vain, cruel, selfish, scheming, and mercenary. I stole a glance now and then at Peter. I was tickled at the confusion he must be experiencing when he compared his ideal picture of the prima donna with the ruthless reality. She was a woman without heart. When at last she left us I turned to Peter with a smile.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘at all events you’ve got some good material.’
‘I know, and it all fits in so beautifully,’ he said with enthusiasm.
‘Does it?’ I exclaimed, taken aback.
‘She’s exactly like my woman. She’ll never believe that I’d sketched out the main lines of the character before I’d ever seen her.’
I stared at him in amazement.
‘The passion for art. The disinterestedness. She had that same nobility of soul that I saw in my mind’s eye. The small-minded, the curious, the vulgar put every obstacle in her way and she sweeps them all aside by the greatness of her purpose and the purity of her ends.’ He gave a little happy laugh. ‘Isn’t it wonderful how nature copies art? I swear to you, I’ve got her to the life.’
I was about to speak; I held my tongue; though I shrugged a spiritual shoulder I was touched. Peter had seen in her what he was determined to see. There was something very like beauty in his illusion. In his own way he was a poet. We went to bed, and two or three days later, having found a pension to his liking, he left me.
In course of time his book appeared, and like most second novels by young people it had but a very moderate success. The critics had overpraised his first effort and now were unduly censorious. It is of course a very different thing to write a novel about yourself and the people you have known from childhood and to write one about persons of your own invention. Peter’s was too long. He had allowed his gift for word-painting to run away with him, the humour was still rather vulgar; but he had reconstructed the period with skill, and the romantic story had that same thrill of real passion which in his first book had so much impressed me.
After the dinner at my house I did not see La Falterona for more than a year. She went for a long tour in South America and did not come down to the Riviera till late in the summer. One night she asked me to dine with her. We were alone but for her companion-secretary, an Englishwoman, Miss Glaser by name, whom La Falterona bullied and ill-treated, hit and swore at, but whom she could not do without. Miss Glaser was a haggard person of fifty, with grey hair and a sallow, wrinkled face. She was a queer creature. She knew everything there was to be known about La Falterona. She both adored and hated her. Behind her back she could be extremely funny at her expense, and the imitation she gave in secret of the great singer with her admirers was the most richly comic thing I have ever heard. But she watched over her like a mother. It was she who, sometimes by wheedling, sometimes by sheer plainness of speech, caused La Falterona to behave herself something like a human being. It was she who had written the singer’s exceedingly inaccurate memoirs.
La Falterona wore pale-blue satin pyjamas (she liked satin) and, presumably to rest her hair, a green silk wig; except for a few rings, a pearl necklace, a couple of bracelets, and a diamond brooch at her waist, she wore no jewellery. She had much to tell me of her triumphs in South America. She talked on and on. She had never been in more superb voice and the ovations she had received were unparalleled. The concert halls were sold out for every performance, and she had made a packet.
‘Is it true or is it not true, Glaser?’ cried Maria with a strong South American accent.
‘Most of it,’ said Miss Glaser.
La Falterona had the objectionable habit of addressing her companion by her surname. But it must long since have ceased to annoy the poor woman, so there was not much point in it.
‘Who was that man we met in Buenos Aires?’
‘Which man?’
‘You fool, Glaser. You remember perfectly. The man I was married to once.’
‘Pepe Zapata,’ Miss Glaser replied without a smile.
‘He was broke. He had the impudence to ask me to give him back a diamond necklace he’d given me. He said it had belonged to his mother.’
‘It wouldn’t have hurt you to give it him,’ said Miss Glaser. ‘You never wear it.’
‘Give it him back?’ cried La Falterona, and her astonishment was such that she spoke the purest English. ‘Give it him back? You’re crazy.’
She looked at Miss Glaser as though she expected her there and then to have an attack of acute mania. She got up from the table, for we had finished our dinner.
‘Let us go outside,’ she said. ‘If I hadn’t the patience of an angel I’d have sacked that woman long ago.’
La Falterona and I went out, but Miss Glaser did not come with us. We sat on the veranda. There was a magnificent cedar in the garden, and its dark branches were silhouetted against the starry sky. The sea, almost at our feet, was marvellously still. Suddenly La Falterona gave a start.
‘I almost forgot. Glaser, you fool,’ she shouted, ‘why didn’t you remind me?’ And then again to me: ‘I’m furious with you.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t remember till after dinner,’ I answered.
‘That friend of yours and his book.’
I didn’t immediately grasp what she was talking about.
‘What friend and what book?’
‘Don’t be so stupid. An ugly little man with a shiny face and a bad figure. He wrote a book about me.’
‘Oh! Peter Melrose. But it’s not about you.’
‘Of course it is. Do you take me for a fool? He had the impudence to send it me.’
‘I hope you had the decency to acknowledge it.’
‘Do you think I have the time to acknowledge all the books twopenny-halfpenny authors send me? I expect Glaser wrote to him. You had no right to ask me to dinner to meet him. I came to oblige you, because I thought you liked me for myself, I didn’t know I was just being made use of. It’s awful that one can’t trust one’s oldest friends to behave like gentlemen. I’ll never dine with you again so long as I live. Never, never, never.’
She was working herself into one of her tantrums, so I interrupted her before it was too late.
‘Come off it, my dear,’ I said. ‘In the first place the character of the singer in that book, which I suppose is the one you’re referring to . . .’
‘You don’t suppose I’m referring to the charwoman, do you?’
‘Well, the character of the singer was roughed out before he’d even seen you, and besides, it isn’t in the least like you.’
‘How d’you mean, it’s not like me? All my friends have recognized me. I mean, it’s the most obvious portrait.’
‘Mary,’ I expostulated.
‘My name is Maria and no one knows it better than you,
and if you can’t call me Maria you can call me Madame Falterona or Princess.’
I paid no attention to this.
‘Did you read the book?’
‘Of course I read it. When everyone told me it was about me.’
‘But the boy’s heroine, the prima donna, is twenty-five.’
‘A woman like me is ageless.’
‘She’s musical to her finger-tips, gentle as a dove, and a miracle of unselfishness; she’s frank, loyal, and disinterested. Is that the opinion you have of yourself?’
‘And what is your opinion of me?’
‘Hard as nails, absolutely ruthless, a born intriguer, and as self-centred as they make ’em.’