“Don’t you want to hear her sing?” I asked.
“No, I want to hear you talk,” said he.
VII
Miss Harris is going to appear in a concert. She came glowing and beaming into my room to tell me. Vignorol, her teacher, had arranged it—with a violinist and a baritone—in Brooklyn.
“Why not New York?” I asked.
“Not yet,” said Miss Harris, moving about the room with a jubilant dancing step, “but after this is over—wait and see!”
Great things are expected to come of it. The public’s attention is to be caught, then another concert, maybe an engagement in one of the American opera companies—just for experience. It is to be the opening of a career which will carry her to the Metropolitan Opera House. The baritone is another of Vignorol’s pupils, Berwick, a New Englander—nothing much, just to fill up. The violinist is a Mrs. Stregazzi, who also fills up, and little Miss Gorringe accompanies. I was shown a pencil draft of the program with Liza Bonaventura written large at the top—“Yes, it’s to be Bonaventura; I had a superstition about it,” and the dress is to be white, or, with a sudden bright air:
“I might borrow your green satin—but of course I couldn’t. You’re too small.”
Since then the house has resounded with practising from the top floor. Heavy steps and light feminine rustlings have gone up and down the stairs. Once the strains of a violin came with a thin whine through the register as if some melancholy animal was imprisoned behind the grill. In the dusk of the lower hall I bumped into a young man with tousled hair and frogs on his coat, whom I have since met as Mr. Berwick.
The star is in a state of joyful excitement which has communicated itself to the rest of us. When in the evening she goes over her repertoire, the Westerners and Miss Bliss sit on the bottom steps of their stairs, Mr. Hamilton and the count on the banisters of theirs and I on the top step of mine. A Niagara of sound pours over us, billowing and rushing down through the well, buffeted between the close confining walls. When each piece is ended Miss Harris comes out on her landing, leans over the railing and calls down: