Nights in London Part 6

"Say, don't mind me, do you? But here, I know all about you. I been watching you, and the old girl's told me, too. She given you notice?

Listen. I got a good old stew going in here. More'n enough for two. Come on!"

What would you have done? I was seventeen; and she, I imagine, was about twenty. But a girl of twenty is three times older than a boy of seventeen. She commanded. She mothered. I felt infinitely childlike and absurd. I thought of refusing; but that seemed an idiotic attempt at dignity which would only amuse this very mature young person. To accept seemed to throw away entirely one's masculinity. Somehow, I.... But she stepped right into the room then, instinctively patting her hair and smoothing herself, and she took me by the arm.

"Look here, now. Don't you go on this silly way; else you'll be a case for the morchery. Noner your nonsense, now. You come right along in."

She flitted back, pulling me with her, to the lit doorway of her room, a yellow oblong of warmth and fragrance. "Niff it?" she jerked in allusion to the stew. I nodded; and then I was inside and the door shut.

She chucked me into a rickety chair by the dancing fire, and chattered cheerily while she played hostess, and I sat pale and tried to recover dignity in sulky silence.

She played for a moment or so over a large vegetable dish which stood in the fender, and then uprose, with flaming face and straying hair, and set a large plate of real hot stuff before me on the small table.

"_There_ you are, me old University chum!" served as her invitation to the feast. She shot knife, fork, and spoon across the table with a neat shove-ha'p'ny stroke. Bread followed with the same polite service, and then she settled herself, squarely but very prettily, before her own plate, mocking me with twinkling eyes over her raised spoon.

Her grace was terse but adequate: "Well--here's may G.o.d help us as we deserve!" I dipped my spoon, lifted it with shaking hand, my heart bursting to tell the little dear girl what I thought about her, my lips refusing to do anything of the sort; refusing, indeed, to do anything at all; for having got the spoon that far, I tried to swallow the good stuff that was in it, and--well ... I ... I burst into tears. Yes, I did.

"What the devil----" she jerked. "Now what the devil's the matter with---- Oh, I know. I see."

"I can't help it," I hiccuped. "It's the st-st-st-stew! It's so goo-goo-good!"

"There, that's all right, kid. I know. I been like that. You have a stretch of rotten luck, and you don't get nothing for perhaps a day, and you feel fit to faint, and then at last you get it, and when you got it, can't touch it. Feel all choky, like, don't you? I know. You'll be all right in a minute. Get some more into you!"

I did. And I was all right. I sat by her fire for the rest of the evening, and smoked her cigarettes--twelve for a penny. And we talked; rather good talk, I fancy. As the food warmed me, so I came out of my sh.e.l.l. And gradually the superior motherliness of my hostess disappeared; I was no longer abject under her gaze; I no longer felt like a sheepish schoolboy. I saw her as what she really was--a pale, rather fragile, very girlish girl. We talked torrentially. We broke into one another's sentences without apology. We talked simultaneously. We hurled autobiography at each other....

That was my last week in Kingsland Road; for luck turned, and I found work--of a sort. I left on the Sat.u.r.day. I parted from her at Cudgett Street corner. I never asked her name; she never asked mine. She just shook hands, and remarked, airily, "Well, so long, kid. Good luck."

A MUSICAL NIGHT

THE OPERA, THE PROMENADES

_AT THE PIANO_

_Cane chairs, a sleek piano, table and bed in a room Lifted happily high from the loud street's fermentation; Tobacco and chime of voices wreathing out of the gloom, Out of the lilied dusk at the firelight's invitation.

Then, in the m.u.f.fled hour, one, strange and gracious and sad, Moves from the phantom hearth, and, with infinite delicacies, Looses his lissome hands along the murmurous keys._

_Valse, mazurka, and nocturne, prelude and polonaise Clamour and wander and wail on the opiate air, Piercing our hearts with echo of pa.s.sionate days, Peopling a top front lodging with shapes of care.

And as our souls, uncovered, would shamefully hide away, The radiant hands light up the enchanted gloom With the pure flame of life from the shadowless tomb._

A MUSICAL NIGHT

THE OPERA, THE PROMENADES

For a few months of the year London is the richest of all cities in the matter of music; but it is only for a few months. From the end of August to the end of October we have Sir Henry Wood's Promenade Concerts. From the end of May to mid-July we have the Grand Season at Covent Garden.

Interspersed between these, at intervals all too rare, we have individual concerts at the Queen's, Steinway, and aeolian Halls; sometimes an Autumn Season of opera or Russian ballet; and the Sat.u.r.day and Sunday concerts, the former at the Albert and Queen's Halls, and the latter, under the auspices of the Sunday League, at pretty well every theatre and music-hall in London and the suburbs.

There are, however, long spells of emptiness when nothing or little is doing in musical London, and that little hardly ever at night, though Sir Thomas Beecham, the greatest philanthropist of his time, is doing splendid work in feeding the hungry music-lover.

I should like, just here, to enter a protest against the practice prevalent among our best soloists of giving their concerts in the afternoons. Does it not occur to MM. Pachmann, Paderewski, Backhaus, Mischa Elman, Hambourg, and others that there are thousands of music-lovers in London who are never free at afternoons, and cannot turn their little world upside down in order to s.n.a.t.c.h an afternoon even for something so compelling as their recitals? Continually London gives you these empty evenings. You do not want theatre or vaudeville; you want music. And it is not to be had at any price; though when it is to be had it is very well worth having.

No artist of any kind in music--singer, pianist, violinist, conductor--considers himself as established until he has appeared in London and received its award of merit; and whatever good things may be going in other continental cities we know that, with the least possible waste of time, those good things will be submitted to us for our sealing judgment. There is only one other city in the world which has so firm a grip on the music of the hour, and that is Buenos Ayres.

Let the superior persons, like Mr. Oscar Hammerstein, who says that London is not musical, because it sniffs at Schonberg, and doesn't get excited over the dead meat of Rossini, Auber, and Bellini, pay a visit any night to Queen's Hall during the Promenade Season. Where are the empty seats? In the five-s.h.i.+lling tier. Where is the hall packed to suffocation? In the s.h.i.+lling promenade. In the promenade there are seats for about one hundred, and room for about seven hundred. That means that six hundred Londoners stand, close-packed, with hardly room for a change of posture and in an atmosphere overcharged with heat and sound, for two hours and a half, listening, not to the inanities of Sullivan or Offenbach or Arditi, but to Weber, Palestrina, Debussy, Tchaikowsky, Wieniawski, Chopin, Mozart, Handel, and even the starch-stiff Bach.

Personally I prefer the sugar and spice of Italian Opera. I know it is an execrable taste, but as I am a most commonplace person I cannot help myself. I have loved it since childhood, when the dull pages of my Violin Tutor were lit by crystalline fragments of Cherubini and Donizetti, and when the house in which I lived was chattering day and night Italianate melody. One of my earliest recollections is of hearing, as a tiny thing in petticoats, the tedious noises of the professional musician, and the E A D G of the fiddle was the accompaniment to all my games. From noon until seven in the evening I played amid the squeak of the fiddle, the chant of the 'cello, the solemn throb of the double ba.s.s, and the querulous wail of flute and piccolo; and always the music was the music of Italy, for these elders worked in operatic orchestras.

So I learned to love it, and especially do I still love the moderns--Leoncavallo, Wolf-Ferrari, Mascagni, Puccini--for it was in "La Boheme" that I heard both Caruso and grand opera for the first time; and whenever I now hear "Che gelida manina," even badly sung, I always want to sit down and have a good cry. It reminds me of a pale office-boy of fifteen, who had to h.o.a.rd his pence for a fortnight and wait weary hours at the gallery door of Covent Garden to hear Caruso, Scotti, Melba, and Journet as the Bohemians. What nights! I remember very clearly that first visit. I had heard other singers, English singers, the best of whom are seldom better than the third-rate Italians, but Caruso.... What is he? He is not a singer. He is not a voice. He is a miracle. There will not be another Caruso for two or three hundred years; perhaps not then. We had been so accustomed to the spurious, manufactured voices of people like de Reszke and Tamagno and Maurel, that when the genuine article was placed before us we hardly recognized it. Here was something lovelier than anything that had yet been heard; yet we must needs stop to carp because it was not quite proper. All traditions were smashed, all laws violated, all rules ignored. Jean de Reszke would strain and strain, until his audience suffered with him, in order to produce an effect which this new singer of the South achieved with his hands in his pockets, as he strolled round the stage.

The Opera in London is really more of a pageant than a musical function.

The front of the house frequently claims more attention than the stage.

On Caruso and Melba nights it blazes. Tiers and tiers of boxes race round in a semicircle. If you are early, you see them as black gaping mouths. But very soon they are filled. The stalls begin to leap with light, for everybody who is not anybody, but would like to be somebody, drags out everything she possesses in the way of personal adornment, and sticks it on her person, so that all the world may wonder. At each box is a bunch of lights, and, with the arrival of the silks and jewellery, they are whipped to a thousand scintillations.

The blaze of dancing light becomes painful; the house, especially upstairs, is spitefully hot. Then the orchestra begin to tumble in; their gracefully gleaming lights are adjusted, and the monotonous A surges over the house--the fiddles whine it, the golden horns softly blare it, and the wood-wind plays with it.

But now there is a stir, a sudden outburst of clapping. Campanini is up.

Slowly the lights dissolve into themselves. There is a subdued rustle as we settle ourselves. A few peremptory _Sh-sh-s.h.!.+_ from the ardent galleryites.

Campanini taps. His baton rises ... and suddenly the band mumbles those few swift bars that send the curtain rus.h.i.+ng up on the garret scene.

Only a few bars ... yet so marvellous is Puccini's feeling for atmosphere that with them he has given us all the bleak squalor of his story. You feel a chill at your heart as you hear them, and before the curtain rises you know that it must rise on something miserable and outcast. The stage is in semi-darkness. The garret is low-pitched, with a sloping roof ending abruptly in a window looking over Paris. There is a stove, a table, two chairs, and a bed. Nothing more. Two people are on. One stands at the window, looking, with a light air of challenge, at Paris. Down stage, almost on the footlights, is an easel, at which an artist sits. The artist is Scotti, the baritone, as Marcello. The orchestra shudders with a few chords. The man at the window turns. He is a dumpy little man in black wearing a golden wig. What a figure it is!

What a make-up! What a tousled-haired, down-at-heel, out-at-elbows Clerkenwell exile! The yellow wig, the white-out moustache, the broken collar.... But a few more brusque bars are tossed from Campanini's baton, and the funny little man throws off, cursorily, over his shoulder, a short pa.s.sage explaining how cold he is. The house thrills.

That short pa.s.sage, throbbing with tears and laughter, has rushed, like a stream of molten gold, to the utmost reaches of the auditorium, and not an ear that has not jumped for joy of it. For he is Rudolfo, the poet; in private life, Enrico Caruso, Knight of the Order of San Giovanni, Member of the Victorian Order, Cavalier of the Order of Santa Maria, and many other things.

As the opera proceeds, so does the marvel grow. You think he can have nothing more to give than he has just given; the next moment he deceives you. Towards the end of the first Act, Melba enters. You hear her voice, fragile and firm as fluted china, before she enters. Then comes the wonderful love-duet--"Che gelida manina" for Caruso and "Mi chiamano Mimi" for Melba. Gold swathed in velvet is his voice. Like all true geniuses, he is prodigal of his powers; he flings his lyrical fury over the house. He gives all, yet somehow conveys that thrilling suggestion of great things in reserve. Again and again he recaptures his first fine careless rapture. His voice dances forth like a little girl on a sunlit road, wayward, captivating, never fatigued, leaping where others stumble, tripping many miles, with fresh laughter and bright quick blood. There never were such warmth and profusion and display. Not only is it a voice of incomparable magnificence: it has that intangible quality that smites you with its own mood: just the something that marks the difference between an artist and a genius. There are those who sniff at him. "No artist," they say; "look what he sings." They would like him better if he were not popular; if he concerned himself, not with Puccini and Leoncavallo, but with those pretentiously subtle triflers, Debussy and his followers. Some people can never accept beauty unless it be remote. But true beauty is never remote. The art which demands transcendentalism for its appreciation stamps itself at once as inferior. True art, like love, asks nothing, and gives everything. The simplest people can understand and enjoy Puccini and Caruso and Melba, because the simplest people are artists. And clearly, if beauty cannot speak to us in our own language, and still retain its dignity, it is not beauty at all.

Caruso speaks to us of the little things we know, but he speaks with a lyric ecstasy. Ecstasy is a horrible word; it sounds like something to do with algebra; but it is the one word for this voice. The pa.s.sion of him has at times almost frightened me. I remember hearing him at the first performance of "Madame b.u.t.terfly," and he hurt us. He worked up the love-duet with b.u.t.terfly at the close of the first act in such fas.h.i.+on that our hands were wrung, we were perspiring, and I at least was near to fainting. Such fury, such volume of liquid sound could not go on, we felt. But it did. He carried a terrific crescendo pa.s.sage as lightly as a school-girl singing a lullaby, and ended on a tremendous note which he sustained for sixty seconds. As the curtain fell we dropped back in our seats, limp, dishevelled, and pale. It was we who were exhausted. Caruso trotted on, bright, alert, smiling, and not the slightest trace of fatigue did he show.

It seems to have been a superb stroke of fortune for us that Caruso should have come along contemporaneously with Puccini. Puccini has never definitely written an opera for his friend; yet, to hear him sing them, you might think that every one had been specially made for him alone.

Their temperaments are marvellously matched. Each is Italian and Southern to the bone. Whatever Caruso may be singing, whether it be Mozart or Gounod or Ma.s.senet or Weber, he is really singing Italy.

Whatever setting Puccini may take for his operas, be it j.a.pan, or Paris, or the American West, his music is never anything but Italian.

And I would not have it otherwise. It may offend some artistic consciences that b.u.t.terfly, the j.a.panese courtesan, should sob out her lament in music which is purely Italian in character and colour; but what a piece of melody it is!

Puccini's is a still small voice; very pleading, very conscious of itself and of the pathos of our little span of living; but the wistfulness of its appeal is almost heartbreaking. He can never, I suppose, stand among the great composers; dwarfed he must always be against Mozart or Weber, or even Verdi. But he has done what all wise men must do: he has discovered the one thing he can perform well, and he is performing it very well indeed. His genius is slim and miniature, but he handles it as an artist. There is no man living who can achieve such effects with so slender material. There is no man living who can so give you, in a few bars, the soul of the little street-girl; no man living who can so give you flavour of a mood, or make you smell so sharply the atmosphere of a public street, a garret, a ballroom, or a prairie. And he always succeeds because he is always sincere. A bigger man might put his tongue in his cheek and sit down to produce something like "La Boheme," and fail miserably, simply because he didn't mean it.

When Puccini has something to say, though it may be nothing profound or illuminating, he says it; and he can say the trite thing more freshly, with more delicacy, and in more haunting tones, than any other musician.

His vocabulary is as marvellous as his facility in orchestration and in the development of a theme. He gets himself into tangles from which there seems no possible escape, only to extricate himself with the airiest of touches. Never does his fertility of melodic invention fail him. He is as prodigal in this respect as Caruso in his moments. Where others achieve a beautiful phrase, and rest on it, Puccini never idles; he has others and others, and he crowds them upon you until the ear is surfeited with sweetness, and you can but sit and marvel.

There it is. Sniff at it as you will, it is a great art that captures you against your reason, and when Puccini and Caruso join forces, they can shake the soul out of the most rabid of musical purists. What they do to commonplace people like myself is untellable. I have tried to hint at it in these few remarks, but really I have told you nothing ...

nothing.

I am not over-fond of the Promenade Concerts. You have, of course, everything of the best--the finest music of the world, the finest English orchestra, and a neat little concert-hall; but somehow there is that about it that suggests Education. I have a feeling that Sir Henry is taking me by the hand, training me up in the way I should, musically, go. And I hate being trained. I don't want things explained to me. The programme looks rather like "Music without Tears" or "First Steps for the Little Ones." I know perfectly well what Wagner meant by the "Tannhauser" overture, and what Beethoven wants to say to me in the Ninth Symphony. I don't want these things pointed out to me, and sandwiched between information as to when the composer was born, how long he lived, and how many hundred works he wrote. However, all that apart, the Promenades are an inst.i.tution which we should cherish. For a s.h.i.+lling you can lean against the wall of the area, and smoke, and take your fill of the best in music. If there is anything that doesn't interest you, you can visit the bar until it is concluded. The audience on the Promenade is as interesting as the programme. All types are to be found here--the serious and hard-up student, the musically inclined working-man, probably a member of some musical society in his suburb, the young clerk, the middle-aged man, and a few people who KNOW.