CHAPTER TWENTY

A Memory--And Some Songs

One of the most wonderful evenings of my life was when, in the heart of the Australian Bush, Melba sang for me alone.

I ought, if I had a tidy mind, to describe how I got to the Australian Bush, and how so divine a person as Melba should be singing to me at all. But that can come in due course. For the moment I want to recapture that scene as I lived it.

There is a long room, panelled in green, lit only by the misty glow from outside the windows, fragrant with the scent of yellow roses. There are wonderful old mirrors that catch the dying sparkle of a Marie Antoinette Chandelier. In the half-light so many lovely things shine dimly ... a picture of dark, closely-clustered flowers, a case of fans, delicate as the world of fairies....

I am standing at the window. There is a long veranda, and in the distance I can see, faintly outlined, the pillars of the loggia that leads to an Italian garden. Mountains, fabulously blue, rise on the horizon and everything is very quiet. Only a few hours ago the air had been rent with the shrill cries of parrots, flying to their resting-place in the forests. Even while we had dined we could hear the liquid warbling of magpies, that strange noise, like water gurgling from a flask, which brings all Australia before me as I write. And after dinner, while we had taken our coffee, the whole of the fields around had echoed with the chirping of crickets. But now ... silence.

And then, like a moonbeam stealing into an empty room, that voice, which is as no other has ever been...

_Dans ton cœur dort un clair de lune..._

The notes die away and there is silence again. I go on looking at the blue mountains. Then, from the other end of the room, a sudden laugh, the sort of laugh that people may make in Heaven, and--

‘Well, did you like me?’

I laugh too. It seems so utterly fantastic to attempt to appreciate in words an art like this. Nobody ought ever to clap Melba. They ought to remain silent. The greatest things in art are above applause.

It was in, I believe, 1923, that I first had the delight of meeting her, but it was not till the season had really begun, and I found myself in Covent Garden, listening to the first opening bars of ‘_Mi Chiamano Mimi_,’ that I really came under her spell. It was not the first time I had heard her sing. As a small boy of nine I had been taken to one of her concerts by my mother, and had greatly irritated my family by informing them, when I returned home, that I thought she sang exactly like myself.

In a sense, there was truth as well as youthful complacency in that criticism. Her voice _is_ like a choirboy’s, as crystalline, as utterly removed from things of the earth.

One day she said to me, with characteristic directness, ‘You’re not well. You’re poisoned. You’ve been working too hard. You ought to come out to Australia and help me with my Opera Season.’

I denied indignantly that I was poisoned. (My doctor afterwards confirmed her diagnosis.) I said that I knew nothing about Opera. But all the same, though it was some six months later, I went out to join her in Australia--that was in the beginning of 1924.

Melba is so great a woman--I use the word ‘great’ in the fullest sense--that one cannot possibly attempt a full-length portrait of her in a few pages. But, from the notebook of my imagination, I may perhaps draw out a few pages, roughly scribbled over with thumbnail sketches, that may make you feel you know her a little.

I shall take the sketches simply as they occur, without attempting to put them in order. The first one is labelled ‘energy.’ The face of Melba appears, rising calmly over a heavy _chaise-longue_ which, unassisted, she is pushing across the room. It is one of her furniture-moving days. The whole of her boudoir is upside down. Pictures stand in rows against the walls, china is ranged along the floor, and over the chairs and sofas are scattered quantities of bibelots--pieces of jade, little mother-of-pearl boxes bearing the words _Souvenir_ and _Je pense à toi_, crystal clocks, a tiny gold case containing a singing bird with emerald eyes.

The furniture-moving goes on. I endeavour to help, and am told with great frankness that I am far more bother than I am worth, and that I had better content myself with watching. And so I watch, amazed. Little by little the room takes shape. At one moment she is standing on a chair, and the next she is kneeling on the floor, doing the work of six British labourers. _Voilà._ It is done. And she is at the piano again, trilling like a newly fed thrush.

If Melba had had no voice she might have made a fortune as an art connoisseur. I have been driving with her sometimes, and have seen, on the other side of the street, a window full of antiques. ‘Look,’ I have said. ‘Don’t you think there might be some fascinating things in there?’ She looks. In the space of ten seconds her eye has taken in the entire contents of the window, and she either says ‘All fake,’ or she stops the car. I have never known her wrong. It is as inexplicable to me as the feat of the eagle which can see a mouse hidden in a field of corn a mile beneath.

So many people who like to pretend that they are artistic will tell you that they cannot bear to live with ugly things. They will say this with pained expressions, even when they are sitting, apparently unmoved, beneath a Landseer stag, on a Victorian settee. With Melba it really is pain. Whenever I see her in an ugly room I know the exact feeling of the Oyster who is irritated by a piece of sand. She is restless. Her eyes dart hither and thither. She bites her lips. For two pins she would get up and hurl things out of the window.

I shall never forget once when she was singing three times a week in the Opera at one of the great Australian cities, and was staying in an hotel in order to be near the theatre. She came down at about ten o’clock to go for a drive. I met her in the hall. As we were going out she paused in the entrance way and said:

‘Those pots. Look at them. They’re hideous enough in all conscience, but they’re made ten times worse by being pushed out in that ridiculous position. Let’s push them back against the wall.’

Now wherever Melba goes in Australia there is always a little crowd in her wake, as though she were the Queen of the Continent, which indeed she is. And the prospect of moving pots in the entrance of an hotel struck me as alarming in the extreme.

I mumbled something about ‘waiting.’ She looked at me scornfully. ‘Wait?’ she said. ‘What for? Come on.’

Without the faintest interest in the sensation she was making, she bent over and began to move the first pot into position. I shall never forget the sparkling look of satisfaction on her face, the slight flush that the effort caused, the waving ospreys in her hat, and the cry of ‘There--isn’t that better?’ when the first pot was placed in position.

I saw a tall red-faced individual glowering down on us.

‘Excuse me,’ he said.

‘I’m Melba,’ she said. ‘I’m doing some furniture-moving for you.’

He was quite speechless for a moment. Then, after a gulp he managed to say, ‘But, Madame....’

‘Oh, I shan’t charge you anything,’ she remarked.

Those pots are as she placed them to this day.

The next sketch is labelled ‘The Singing Lesson.’ There are the outlines of a long bare room, a platform, some seats in front, occupied by professor and pupils. Melba sits by herself in a corner, biting a pencil. A pupil steps on to the platform and begins to sing. Suddenly the voice rings out, ‘Stop!’

As though she had been shot, the pupil stops dead. Melba gets up from her seat, goes to the platform, says to the accompanist, ‘Let me sit down a minute,’ and then turns to the girl.

‘I’m not going to eat you,’ she says. Her own smile brings an answering smile to the face of the girl.

‘Sing me “Ah.”’

‘Ah.’

‘No--“Ah”--’ up here, in the front of the mouth.

‘Ah!’

‘No. You’re still swallowing it. Listen. Sing mah. Close your lips, hum, and then open them suddenly. Mah, mah, mah.’

‘Mah, mah, mah.’

‘That’s better. Now higher. Right. Higher.’

She takes her up the scale. At F sharp she stops. ‘Piano. Please, please, _pianissimo_! You’ll ruin your voice if you sing top notes so loud. Better, but still too loud. _Pianissimo!_’ She leans forward, one finger to her lips.

Somewhere about the top B flat the girl cracks. She blushes and turns appealingly to Melba. Melba takes no notice and strikes a note higher.

‘I don’t think I can....’

‘I don’t care what you think,’ says Melba. ‘Sing it.’

‘But I shall crack.’

‘That doesn’t matter, I don’t mind what sort of noise you make. I just want to hear it.’

The girl attempts it again, the note is pure and round.

Melba rises from the piano and steps briskly from the platform. ‘She’s got a lovely voice,’ she says. ‘A lyric soprano. She’s taking her chest notes too high, that’s all. Send her up to me and I’ll make that all right.’

I wonder how many other prima donnas there are in this world who would do that, who would put themselves to endless pains and expense, simply for the love of song.

I have yet to be informed of their names and addresses.

The third sketch is labelled--the artist. The scene is a rehearsal of _Othello_. For three hours she has been singing, directing, talking at one moment to the orchestra, at the next, to the stage hands, to anybody and everybody. The scene is set for the last act, and with her meticulous sense of detail she has been busying herself with the crimson draperies that overhang the bed. Now she is standing in mid-stage, sending her voice up to the men who work the lights. ‘More yellow,’ she is crying, ‘more yellow. This isn’t a surgery. You’re blinding me. That’s better. Wait a minute. Not so much of that spot light on the bed. I am not a music-hall artist.’ Then, _sotto voce_, ‘How on earth does the poor man think that Desdemona could go to sleep with a light like that in her eyes?’

She is almost the only woman I have ever known who has an absolute horror of the slip-shod. Study her day when she is singing in opera. She is up with the lark. After breakfast she is in her boudoir, ‘warming’ her voice, studying her rôle from start to finish. She lunches frugally, drinking only water. After lunch she drives or walks. At five there is the pretence of a meal--an omelette or a little fish. From now onwards she eats nothing till after the performance.

She is in her dressing-room from an hour and a half to two hours before the performance. Her make-up is scrupulous. She describes in her autobiography the importance which she attaches to the minutest details of make-up, but I don’t think that even her own description quite makes one realize the perfection of it. From her wig to her shoes, everything is as it should be. I have seen her reject fifty shawls for the part of Mimi, simply because they were not in keeping with her idea of the character.

Sketch four might be named Courage. I remember a day when we were driving together, and, as she stepped from the car, the chauffeur slammed the door full on to her fingers, crushing them cruelly. She cried--‘Oh, my hand!’ and the door was feverishly dragged open again. She bit her lip, walked into the theatre, sat down and closed her eyes. That was all. There was no hysterics, no ‘Vapours,’ not even a tear.

It is not only in physical courage that she excels. She has the sort of gay fearlessness which allows her to motor late at night through the Australian Bush with only a single chauffeur, and jewels of more value than I should care to estimate. One night she was motoring home with Lady Stradbroke, who is the wife of the Governor of Victoria. The car broke down in the middle of a forest. The chauffeur had to run off into the darkness, leaving the women alone. There they sat for a full hour. Any tramp, any of the roving, husky ‘sun-downers’ with whom the Bush abounds, might have come along and taken all they wanted. Lady Stradbroke told me that though she herself was shaking in her shoes, Melba kept up a perpetual babble of chatter. I asked her when at two o’clock in the morning they arrived, if she had not been fearfully agitated. She laughed her unforgettable laugh. ‘Agitated? Me? They wouldn’t hurt _me_. I’m Melba.’

‘I’m Melba.’ It is something to be able to say that. Something to be able to go up to an old woman selling roses in the streets of Paris and say ‘_C’est_ Melba’ and to have the roses pressed into your hands in a sort of homage. Something to know that wherever music is played or songs are sung all over the world, the artist who is playing before you is giving his utmost. Something to be able to lean back in the theatre stalls at a first night, and to say to Bernard Shaw, as I once observed, ‘I know who _you_ are’ and to receive the answer: ‘You don’t know me nearly as well as I know you.’

And to remain, at the end of it all, so simple that you are never happier than when eating macaroni in a restaurant where you may have your fill for two shilling, so humble that you will kiss the cheek of the youngest débutante whom, you feel, has in her something of the divine fire.

Melba, I salute you. It is not my fault that this sketch of you is so inadequate. It is yours. I cannot paint landscapes on threepenny bits.