CHAPTER IV
THE VOICE OF THE CHARMER
"She is singing an air that is known to me; A passionate ballad gallant and gay, A martial song like a trumpet's call."
Tennyson.
All that had been in November. It was now January--which brings me backto the Phoenix Hut, where Golden van Huysen was preparing to sing.
Advancing to the edge of the platform, she said, smiling, but as quietlyas if she'd been proposing a game in a room full of children:
"What'll I sing you, boys?"
An instantaneous chorus of men's voices answered her, and she laughed.Evidently she had heard, though Olwen hadn't caught a word of which songit was they all wanted.
It was "the" sentimental song of the moment, that song whose name variesfrom season to season. As I write, it is called differently from what itwill be called by the time you read. Once it was "Until," once "Roses ofPicardy." The soul of it remains the same. "Cheap and common," smile thesuperior. Yes! Cheap as the air we breathe. Common as sunlight.
Golden van Huysen pronounced its present name to the accompanist, whostruck four cords on the piano. Then, into a dead silence, her voicestole out.
It might have been the gushing of honey from a suddenly broken comb.Already her speaking voice could set Olwen's heartstrings vibrating inresponse to the sound, but Golden's singing voice (a rich mezzo-soprano)was almost more than her little Welsh friend could endure for pleasure.It cleft the middle of the note, the middle of the heart. Olwen sat, herhands clenched under those furs, listening, listening. She could nothave told you what the words were about. She only knew that when theimmortal nightingale sang to his rose, it must be in some such song asthis.... The two verses of the song ended, and the applause thatfollowed them was as much a murmur of deep voices as it was a clappingof hands from Americans, British tars, Canadian, kilties.... Without apause, the singer whispered to her accompanist. The wonderful voice rosein a second song, of which the words might have been trivial, but whichwere music because of their singer. Not a man or woman in that hut madea movement.... In all she sang three songs.
Just before her last song she took a couple of steps backward, andstood, tall and resplendent, between the two flags with a hand uponeach.
She had not sung three notes before the audience had risen to theirfeet, with every soldier and sailor in the hall standing to attention.For it was "The Star-Spangled Banner" that Golden van Huysen was singingnow.
There are some songs that never age. Of these are those a mother singsto her child; of these, too, are those a Motherland sings to her absentsons. This one----Well, all in that hall had heard it a thousand timesbefore, yet this might have been the first time. Golden sang it as onceSims Reeves sang "Maud," as Patti sang "Home, Sweet Home"--in theperfection of simplicity.
At the end she neither bowed nor smiled. She just backed out, as beforesome Royalty of emotion, between the English and the American flags.
With a deep breath the audience felt that it was as though a light hadbeen put out....
It was this radiant personality of hers, as well as her power of holdingher hearers spellbound in hut, hospital, theatre, and soldiers' club,that had gained her the name by which half London knew her now--"thatwonderful American they call the Sunburst Girl."