He had procured a picture of Aspinwall (through Odingsels, it was now unpleasant to remember) had framed it and hung it in the water-closet which was one flight downstairs from his own apartment. He made a point of using the paper for which Aspinwall wrote in order to wrap his garbage; he bought several copies every week, cut out Aspinwall’s signed articles, and hung them in the water-closet, as a substitute for the toilet roll, though Mrs. Klein and the other lodgers objected strongly. On one embarrassing occasion he took Monica to a concert and, finding that they were sitting behind Aspinwall (which he swore he had not arranged) he badgered the critic by tapping on the back of his seat, and making insulting remarks, just loud enough to be heard, in the intervals. He even began to write obscenely abusive letters to Aspinwall, but Monica and Bun Eccles intercepted them, and so far as they could judge, none had escaped their watch.
“Pay no attention,” Bun had said when she confided her worry to him; “old Giles is a genius, and when he’s working at full steam he gets ratty. Some of the things he does are a bit crook, Monny, but he’s sound as the bank—too right he is. Wait’ll he gets the opera done, then you’ll see.”
Well, she thought, the first thing is to get the opera done, and hope Aspinwall likes it. So she cabled Giles that the money difficulty was settled, explained it in detail in a letter, and worked even harder for the Bridgetower Recital.
(9)
When the day came Monica’s nervousness, as always, took the form of depression, a sense of unworthiness, and a fear not of failure but of a spiritless mediocrity. By now she had some experience of this state, and recent reflection had convinced her that it was part of her heritage from Ma; her imagination, and her ups and downs of feeling, were Ma’s. Well, she must not let them dominate her life, as they had dominated the life of Mrs. Gall.
But it is one thing to reason with depression, and another to lift it. All day she was gloomy. She had procured invitations for her own friends. Would Kevin and Alex draw attention to themselves in some unsuitable way? Would George Medwall, with whom she had had two or three brief, uneasy conversations, come at all, and would it bother her if she could not see him in the audience? The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation had asked to make a tape-recording of part of the concert; was that going to mean a microphone to fix her with its disapproving, steely face, somewhere directly in her view? Why, she wondered, did anyone want to be a singer?
Did she indeed want to be a singer? What singer whom she knew did she admire? In her present mood she could think of none. Singers! The creatures of a physical talent, constantly fussing about draughts in spite of their horse-like health—conscious that their voices might drop a tone if the room were too hot. Evelyn Burnaby, with whom she now had some acquaintance, and whom she admired as an artist—did she really want to be like Evelyn? So dull, except when she sang.
And Ludwiga Kressel—a genuine diva, that one, to whom Domdaniel had introduced her after a performance at Covent Garden. Ludwiga had dominated the party, a powerful, brass-haired woman, with a sense of humour as heavy as her own tread. She had compelled them all to silence while she told them of her experiences with the stage director at the Metropolitan. She had been unable to continue, convulsed by her own fun, yet protesting through her big-throated laughter, “However funny I am I cannot be so funny as Graf.” She had got to the Metropolitan because she had previously secured an engagement in Vienna. “Byng is impressed by Vienna, but Vienna is nothing, nothing at all.” Did she want to think like Ludwiga, who talked endlessly of “concertizing” and “recitalizing?” Did she want to live like Ludwiga, whose ferocious schedule of plane travel made it possible for her to cram the greatest possible number of appearances—operatic and concert—into a single season? No, no; not like Ludwiga.
By six o’clock she was in the depths, and wanted a drink more than anything else. No—obviously not more than anything else, for a drink was easily within her reach; Kevin and Alex had been discreetly keeping her modest needs supplied. But a drink before a concert might disturb her voice, so it was out of the question for her to have one. She knew very well, as she denied herself, that she was by that abnegation settling her shoulders to the singer’s yoke.
The recital was to be at half-past eight, and well before eight she was entering the artist’s door of Fallon Hall. The artist’s door, in this case, simply meant the entrance to a poky little room, piled half-full with folded wooden chairs and ferociously over-heated by steam coils, at one side of the stage. But this was what an “artist’s door” meant in her native land—not the mysterious and somewhat furtive side-doors which led to stages in England, nor the glorious, lamplit courtyard which led to the stage entrance of the Paris Opera; she entered Fallon Hall itself by just the same door as the public used; for after all, what had an artist to conceal, or what marked him off from the general public? Nothing, of course; nothing but a world of dedication.
Having failed to open a window, or find a janitor to do it for her, Monica was fearful that she might take cold even before her concert. The air was hot and dry, so she went into the corridor, and at last found another room, dark and not so hot, where faculty meetings were held, and here she concealed herself until five minutes before the concert was to begin.
Her accompanist, Humphrey Cobbler, had not yet arrived, and Monica worried furiously. But with a minute to spare he appeared, much rumpled and utterly unpressed, but in evening clothes and plainly in very good spirits. During rehearsals she had learned to know and like Humphrey very much, and so now she was able to speak sharply to him about his lateness.
“But I’m not late,” said he, smiling indulgently. “You don’t suppose they’ll get going before eight forty-five? My dear, the nobility and gentry, the beauty and chivalry, not to mention the money and the stretched credit, of Salterton are assembling to hear you. You can smell the moth-balls and the bunny coats away back here if you sniff. And it’s all for you. Don’t fuss; glory in it.”
“I can’t glory. I think I’m going to be sick. Oh, Humphrey, this scares me far worse than the B.B.C., or anything I’ve ever done.”
“But why?”
“Because it’s my home town, that’s why. You couldn’t understand. You’re an Englishman; you haven’t got Salterton in your bones; you didn’t grow up with those people out there meaning the larger world to you. So far as they know me at all, they know me as a stenographer at the Glue Works. And right now that’s exactly what I feel like.”
“Listen, poppet, it’s very charming of you to love your home town, but now is the time to put that love in its proper place—which is right outside Fallon Hall, in a snowbank. Salterton can’t be your measure of success or failure; what you think are its standards are just the standards of childhood and provincialism. You’ve been away long enough to recognize that your home town is not only the Rome and the Athens of your early life, but also in many important ways a remote, God-forsaken dump. Those people out there are just provincial professors, and bankers, and wholesale druggists who want to be proud of you if you give them half a chance, but who will just as readily take any opportunity you give them to keep you down. Now: don’t try to dominate them; you’re not a lion-tamer. Go out on the platform and do what your teachers have told you, and what you know to be right and best, and pay no heed to them at all, except when courtesy—the high courtesy of the artist—demands it. We’ll walk up and down this corridor, you and I, taking deep but not hysterical breaths, until the head usher tells us that all the bunny coats are in their seats. Come on, Monica: head forward and up, back long and easy, and—what does Molloy say?—breathe the muhd.”
(10)
The first part of the Recital was over, and Cobbler returned Monica to the Faculty Room, shut the door and guarded it from outside. It had gone well. That is, she knew that she had sung well, and the audience, after a rather watchful beginning, was prepared to like her.
It was true, as Cobbler had said when she first discussed her program with him, that she was g
iving them something tough to chew. But—“It’s a fine program,” he had said, “and I’m delighted you’re getting away from that fathead notion that music must always be performed in the chronological order of its composition. The audience here has had a thorough Community Concerts training; they’ll be expecting you to start off with a Classical Group, putting your voice through its hardest paces while it’s still cold and before you’ve really got the feel of the hall or the audience, and then a group of Lieder, to show that you know German, and a French group, to show that you know French, and then a Contemporary Group, consisting entirely of second-rank Americans, and topping off with a Popular Group, in which you really let your hair down and show how vulgar and folksy you can be. But this makes sense.”
The program was prepared on a principle which she had learned from Giles; not the chronology of composers, but a line of poetic meaning, was the cord on which the beads were strung. And so she had begun with Schubert’s An die Musik, and after that noble apostrophe she plunged straight into Giles’ own Kubla Khan which was certainly tough chewing for a Salterton audience, as it took fifteen minutes to perform and without being in the mode of what Cobbler called “wrong-note modernism” was written in an idiom both contemporary and individual to the composer. Then, as relief, she had sung a group of folk songs of the British Isles as she had learned them from Molloy. The folk songs had stirred the audience to its first real enthusiasm, for they all felt themselves competent judges of such seeming simplicity.
Now an interval, and then a group of three songs which the audience was asked, in a note on the program, not to applaud. These were the songs which Monica intended as her memorial to her mother. The oak coffin, the five black Buicks at the funeral, and the red granite tombstone, like a chunk of petrified potted meat, which Dad and Alice wanted, were trash. But in these songs she would take her farewell of Ada Gall.
First would be Thomas Campion’s Never weather-beaten Saile. She would follow it with Brahms’ Auf dem Kirchhofe, and if anyone thought it gloomy—well, let them think. And last, Purcell’s Evening Hymn, noble and serene setting of William Fuller’s words. Would any who had known Ma—Dad, for instance, or Aunt Ellen—find the reflection of her spirit which Monica believed to lie in these songs? During the night-watches at her bedside, Monica had thought much about Ma, and about herself. They were, as Ma had said in her last fully rational utterances, much alike. For in Ma, when she told tall stories, when she rasped her family with rough, sardonic jokes, when she rebelled against the circumstances of her life in coarse abuse, and when she cut through the fog of nonsense with the beam of her insight, was an artist—a spoiled artist, one who had never made anything, who was unaware of the nature or genesis of her own discontent, but who nevertheless possessed the artist’s temperament; in her that temperament, misunderstood, denied and gone sour, had become a poison which had turned against the very sources of life itself. Nevertheless, she was like Ma, and she must not go astray as Ma—not wholly through her own fault—had gone. In these songs she would sing of the spirit which might have been her mother’s if circumstances had been otherwise. Alice had not hesitated to say that she had killed their mother by giving in to her wilfulness. Well, it was not true; what was best in her mother should live on, and find expression, in her.
Monica had often heard of singers losing awareness of themselves while facing an audience—of losing the audience, and existing for that time only in their music. She had never quite believed it. But that was her own experience while she sang the three songs which she had, in her own mind, set aside as a memorial to her mother. She was back in the Faculty Room before she emerged from that inner calm. Humphrey Cobbler kissed her on the cheek and—sure sign in him of strong feeling—said not a word, but left her to herself.
Her tribute offered and her final peace made with the spirit, not departed but strongly present, Monica found the remainder of her recital pleasant and, all things considered, easy. She sang a group of settings of poems by John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes and Walter de la Mare which Giles had written for her, and their sombre beauty led the hearers out of the memorial atmosphere which had been created, and left them ready for Berlioz’ Nuits d’été, and the final group of songs, which was four Shakespeare lyrics, in settings by Purcell and Thomas Augustine Arne, which Giles had arranged from the gnomic and scanty original accompaniments. The audience had made up its mind after the memorial songs that it liked Monica—liked her very much and was proud of her—and the applause as she left the stage was warm, and mounting. There were even a few greatly daring, un-Canadian cries of “Bravo!” which Monica attributed, rightly, to Kevin and Alex.
“Sticking to plan?” said Cobbler.
“Yes; go back on the crest of the applause, and one good encore,” said Monica. This was a piece of practical wisdom from Domdaniel; Giles hated encores because they disturbed the shape of his programs; Molloy believed in singing as long as one delighted listener remained in the hall; the balance lay with Sir Benedict.
So, as the applause mounted for fifty seconds, until there was actually some stamping—stamping in Fallon Hall, and from a stiff-shirt audience at that!—Monica remained out of sight, judging the sound. And when it seemed to her that it would go no higher, she returned to the stage, amid a really gratifying uproar. Ushers moved forward with flowers; a large and uncompromising bunch from the Bridgetower Trustees, a very handsome bunch from Kevin and Alex, a bouquet containing a card which read, “With Love and Pride from the Old Heart and Hope Quartet” (which made Monica blush momentarily, for she had havered a little about inviting the Beamises) and two or three others. Cobbler, greatly enjoying the fun, for such recitals did not often come his way, helped her to pile them all on top of the piano, and she sang her single encore.
“Never sing below your weight in an encore; try to do something you haven’t done earlier in the evening; and try to sing something they’ll like but probably haven’t heard before.” These were the words of Domdaniel, talking to her about public appearances several months before. So Monica had determined to sing Thomas Augustine Arne’s Water Parted.
It was a song which she deeply loved, though Giles laughed at her for it. “ ‘May this be my poison if my bear ever dances but to the very genteelest of tunes—Water Parted, or the minuet in Ariadne,’” he would say, to her mystification, until one night when he had taken her to the Old Vic to see She Stoops to Conquer, and had nudged her sharply when the line was spoken. But he had prepared an accompaniment for it, for her special use, and had set it in a key which made the best use of what he called her “chalumeau register,” as well as the brilliance of her upper voice.
Water parted from the sea
May increase the river’s tide—
To the bubbling fount may flee,
Or thro’ fertile valleys glide.
Tho’ in search of lost repose
Thro’ the land ’tis free to roam,
Still it murmurs as it flows
Panting for its native home.
She sang it very well, though this was the first time she had ever sung it in public. She sang it as well, perhaps, as she ever sang it in her life, though in later years her name was to be much associated with it, and audiences were to demand it in and out of season. She performed that feat, given to gifted singers, of making the song seem better than it was, of bringing to it a personal significance which was not inherent in it. But Monica always protested that the song was great in itself, and that she merely revealed in it what had gone unnoticed by others, too hasty to make a personal appraisal of a song by a composer usually dismissed as not really first-rate. She was already, under Revelstoke’s guidance, developing a faculty of finding worth where others had missed it, and this was to give her repertoire a quality which was the despair of her rivals.
But there, in Fallon Hall, she sang Water Parted for the first time, and lifted her audience to an even greater pitch of enthusiasm.
“I think we may call it a triumph,” w
hispered Humphrey Cobbler, as they bowed again and again.
(11)
“An undoubted triumph!” cried Miss Puss Pottinger, as Monica was led by Cobbler into the Bridgetower home. The house was full of people—more people than had been in it since Mrs. Bridgetower’s funeral—and they all appeared to be in that state of excitement which follows a really satisfactory artistic achievement. Their excitement varied, of course. There were those who talked of the concert, and there were those who talked of politics and the stock market; but all their talk was a little more vivacious, or vehement, or pontifical because of what they had experienced; music had performed its ever-new magical trick of strengthening and displaying whatever happened to be the dominant trait in them.
But Cobbler knew his work too well to allow Monica to be snatched from him. With the technique of a professional bodyguard he guided her to the stairway, rushed her up it, and into the little second-floor sitting-room where Solly and Veronica were waiting with food and drink.
Singers must eat, and there have been those among them who have eaten too much. As amorousness is the pastime of players of stringed instruments, and horse-racing the relaxation of the brass section of the orchestra, so eating is the pleasure and sometimes the vice, of singers. After a performance, a singer must be fed before he or she can be turned loose among their admirers, or else somebody may be insulted, or even bitten. Cobbler had told Veronica that Monica would need something substantial, and preferably hot. So, in the upstairs sitting-room, a dish of chops and green peas, a salad, a plate of fruit and a half-bottle of Beaune were in readiness.