THE name of Elissa Koebel came up again after dinner, and Kerran suddenly felt obliged to fling down a challenge. He declared roundly that she could not sing.
“She has a beautiful voice,” he said. “There are lovely notes in it. She’s a superb actress. But she’s not really a very good singer.”
There were squeaks of expostulation from Maude and Louise, and a disgusted grunt from Barny. Gordon put down his newspaper and peered over his spectacles at Kerran with a faint surprise.
“She’s bamboozled you all.”
“And all the critics?” asked Louise.
“Not all the critics. But a surprising number of them, I must admit it. You see, she’s the only prima donna who can act.”
“That is very likely,” observed Gordon. “It has always seemed to me that the level of acting in opera is exceedingly poor. Sometimes it is almost ludicrous. I remember in Bayreuth …”
Nobody listened to him. They had all fallen upon Kerran, and Barny was saying:
“Did you ever see her Senta?”
“Exactly,” agreed Kerran. “Her Senta! What a piece of acting!”
He was obliged to admit that he had been deeply impressed. From the moment the curtain went up on the second act, long before she began to sing, he had found himself intent upon her. Her stillness and her silence dominated all the clamour made by her fifty companions, bawling over their spinning wheels. She sat apart from them, a creature in a trance, caught away into another world, already doomed. She belonged to her fate and no power could ever bring her back to the commonplace safety of these girls. The spinning wheel was no mere property piece, planted down beside her. It was her spinning wheel.
“Acting, not singing,” repeated Kerran. “She made us feel … all that she wished us to feel, before she’d sung a note. If you were to put the Waldstein and the Koebel side by side and tell ’em to sing Caro Nome …”
“I wouldn’t ever tell anyone to sing Caro Nome,” interrupted Barny crossly.
“Or even to sing up a scale …”
“I’d rather hear the Koebel sing up a scale than hear anyone else sing through the whole Ring.”
“You’d rather see her sing a scale, you mean, Barny. If you were to shut her and the Waldstein up in a dark room and tell ’em to sing scales …”
“One of them would come out with a black eye.”
But Barny was annoyed with Kerran. He would have been ready enough to argue over the merits of any other musician, but, like most of Elissa’s admirers, he took any criticism in that quarter as a personal affront. Maude, perceiving his annoyance, hastened loyally to the rescue.
“I’m bound to say I always think she sings ever so much better than Emmi Waldstein. I’ve heard them both in a lot of the same parts. In Faust, for instance, which is my favourite opera. She was perfectly wonderful in Faust; didn’t you think so, Louise?”
“I don’t know,” said Louise yawning. “I’ve never heard Faust.”
“Not heard Faust! Oh, but, Louise, you must. It’s a lovely opera. You’d love it.”
“Should I?”
There was a tiny pause. Gordon opened his mouth and shut it again. Perhaps he had better not remind Louise that she had heard Faust, at least once, in Paris. She must have forgotten and she would not like to be corrected in public.
Maude looked round, suddenly at a loss. She had felt a little superior, just for one second, when she found that she had heard Faust and Louise had not. But now, quite inexplicably, she had been made to understand that Louise, in not having heard Faust, could claim to have scored a point. It was all very puzzling. Was there anything wrong with Faust? Surely it was good music?
Barny hardened and withdrew himself a trifle, as he always did when Louise was unkind to Maude. The conversation wavered upon shipwreck, and it was left to the amiable Kerran to pull it together.
“I heard her in Faust,” he said hastily. “She was extraordinary. I quite agree with Maude. She made one feel she was the only woman who has ever been seduced.”
Maude gave a little start of protest. It was nice of Kerran to agree with her, but he need not have put it quite like that. Unaware of her discomfort, and anxious only to revive the conversation, he went on developing the point at quite unnecessary length.
“That first entrance of hers! It was incarnate innocence crossing the stage for a moment. She was so pure, so untouched, you felt almost frightened. Not that Melba wouldn’t have sung those legato phrases twice as smoothly. But one did feel that only Margarete, the girl herself, would have uttered precisely those sounds. And then, the horrible, cumulative spectacle of ruin that she managed to build up! The jewel song! A lamentable business, technically. (Yes, Barny, it was! If you weren’t so besotted, you’d know it.) But the first suggestion of lost innocence was there all right. The flower was blooming just a little too luxuriantly, as it were. And then there was a revelation of sensuousness in the way she moved … before ever Faust came on the scene she’d fallen a prey to her own frailty. She didn’t yield to him, but to something in herself which she hardly understood. She brought out the inevitability of seduction … the weakness that attracts the exploiter, the weakness which betrayed her in every scene, so that she had no defence against remorse, and despair … disintegration … she had to go mad and die.”
He broke off suddenly, embarrassed at his own volubility, as, indeed, they all were. Again there was a pause which Maude found so significant that she was obliged to exclaim:
“What-ho-she-bumps!”
Louise upset the poker and tongs.
“And yet,” snarled Barny, “you say she can’t sing!”
“She can’t. Her phrasing is bad. Her legato is so-so. She can’t take her top notes pianissimo. She breathes in the wrong places. She hasn’t a trill. Her middle register …”
“I’ve heard her seventeen times …”
“I know. But in this case you’re merely a glorified stage-door Johnnie. Your critical faculty …”
“Damn you, Kerran …”
“Now, now, now!” carolled Maude. “Birds in their little nests agree.”
“Your critical faculty isn’t working. Your bowels yearn but your brain goes to sleep.”
“Possibly, my dear Kerran. But an active brain and sluggish bowels produce a condition which we all know very well, and its called …”
“Barny! Kerran! Barny! Ladies present! We’re shocked! Louise, do tell them to stop.”
Louise would do no such thing. She did not quite relish this talk of bowels in the drawing-room, but if Barny had been spurred into shocking his wife, that was all to the good. So she turned her back on them all and sat staring into the fire, her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands, like some dark and brooding sibyl. Kerran and Barny went over to the piano to settle some dispute about Elissa’s rubato. Gordon returned to his newspaper. There was nothing left for Maude to do but fidget with her bangles.
A great buffet of wind and rain hurled itself against the castle walls. The carpets rose draughtily along the floor. The candle flames flickered, and a fine dust of peat ash blew up from the hearth. Maude yawned. She was cold and she was dull and she was out of it. Barny, it seemed, was in one of his difficult moods, when all her love and care seemed only to irritate him. It wasn’t all roses being married to Barny; he could be very charming if he liked, but she saw the other side of the picture.
Still smiling good-humouredly, she got out her fancy work. It was a square of linen upon which she was embroidering spiders webs in thick crewel cotton. She would finish it in no time if every evening were going to be like this one. She began to push the needle up and down, holding the stuff up close to her eyes, for the candle-light was dim. In imagination she was annihilating Louise:
“Oh, I know you despise me all right. I know you think I’m not good enough for him. But just you try being married to him! If Gordon treated you as Barny does me, it’d do you a lot of good. Just you try being married to a man who’s so soft he’d give every penny he had to the next organ-grinder if I didn’t keep a sharp look-out. Oh, yes, he’s very generous, I know, and all that; I hate a mean man, but there’s such a thing as being too generous when you’ve got a wife to keep. Of course you’ve got plenty of money, so you can take a lofty line about it. You think a lot of yourself, don’t you? What for? You’re not so very much better than other people, all said and done, only you’ve been spoilt and nobody’s ever stood up to you, but you needn’t think we don’t criticise you. If you could hear some of the things Barny says about you in the bedroom you’d sit up; he sees through you all right, and so does your mother even. It’d do you good to see that last letter of hers: I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with a rather uncongenial holiday, for Barny’s sake.
“But she understands me. She sympathises, she knows how I love him and how worried I get. She quite sees how difficult it all is, him being so silly about money, selling out of Consols like that; I knew he’d lose it all. He’s not strong, whatever you say, and they said if he had another attack it’d have to come out. Supposing he had one here! We’re miles from anywhere, that’s the first thing I thought of when Louise … of course we’d have Dick—at least that would be some comfort. Whatever else he is, he’s a good surgeon, so they say, and if he can do a Cæsar … But I wouldn’t trust him an inch.
“Do a Cæssar! Well, anyhow, that’s one thing I’ve escaped, though I’d be more frightened of a clot. There’s something about a clot; I don’t know, only I won’t think about it, because it’s no use grieving and if it’s not to be it’s not to be, though how you can think it’s my fault, well, just look at me! I’m perfectly healthy. It’s Barny. There ought to be something done about it. I oughtn’t to have to be so unhappy, it’s not right. And yet you think I’m not good enough for him. But it’s no use getting bitter about it.
“Where was I before? About Dick doing a Cæsar. About Dick. No, I wouldn’t trust him an inch. A really nice woman knows; she has a feeling. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. I know what men are. I haven’t been a nurse for nothing, and I could tell you a thing or two about the seamy side, my dear. I suppose you think all doctors are angels of light? Well, some are and some aren’t. Some aren’t by a long chalk, and I wouldn’t wonder if this Dick of yours wasn’t a bit of a Don Juan on the Q.T., for all he’s married into the wonderful Annesley family. Haw! Haw!
“Barny doesn’t see it, but then he’s got no intuition; men haven’t, not like women. You’ve got nothing to go on, he says, and of course I haven’t, only intuition, and little things he’s said from time to time. But I know he’s got a horrid mind. No reverence. Disgusting ideas about women. Fancy being Ellen shut up with him in the bedroom! Thank goodness Barny isn’t like that, he respects me. But you can see he’s got a disgusting mind just from little things he says. It’s his brains, I’ve seen it before. They get coarse-minded and cynical. You’d have thought if they were very intellectual they would be more refined; but no, they get so cynical they don’t seem to care about anything, so that a woman can’t influence them. Goodness and brains don’t always go together, Louise, and that’s what you seem to forget. You think you’re very clever and I daresay you are; you take me up so, if I say anything; I can’t answer you. And you look at me as if I were something the cat’d brought in. You and your great-aunt Harriet. We laugh at you behind your back. We just laugh! We laugh!”
Backwards and forwards went the needle. Another spider’s web was finished. For a moment Maude’s smile disappeared as she sucked the end of her cotton. And then it was there again, as courageously good-humoured as ever.