Yet his was not the point of view of Mr. Pate, and the capacity to sing was the least of the qualities for which he looked. To a sufficing extent, the capacity would be present in all of to-night’s competitors, even in those who sang only in chorus, and what Mr. Chown was looking for was best indicated by the algebraic symbol, X. He couldn’t, himself, have defined the quality he sought. The reflection of Mr. Montagu about the actor Tom Hall may be recalled. Tom Hall was a sound actor, lacking X. If there is a word for X, it is personality. Good locks went for something, and so did the evident possession of either sex but the whole of X depended neither upon good looks nor upon sex, and was a mystery of the stars whom Mr. Chown, with his trustworthy flair, discovered before they were stars. Technique could be acquired, and Mr.
Chown did not condemn technique, but X was and it was not possible to acquire it. Add X to technique and the result was a hundred pounds a week: technique without X was Tom Hall, “The Woman Who Paid” and the whisky of conscious failure in life.
He sat down with a silent prayer that an X performer would appear on the platform and that he might not repeat his poignant disappointment of last year when he had found an unmistakable X only to learn that its possessor was a Wesleyan who looked upon a theater door as the main entrance to hell. “But you’re a great artist,” he had told her and “I’m a Christian woman,” she had replied and left him frustrate.
His program informed him that the first part of the evening would be occupied by choral singing, and he settled himself on a spartan chair to await, with what patience he might, the turn of the soloists. There were ten choirs on the program; at least two hours of it, he reckoned, but Mr. Chown was no quitter and the zeal of the conductors and the rusticity of the choirs’ clothing might be trusted to afford him some amusement. And yet he flagged; the monotony was drugging him, and the Wheatsheaf had done him very well....
Had he slept? That was the question he asked himself as he saw the girl. Had he slept through the choral and perhaps half of the solo singing? He sat up sharply, and, as he did so, realized that a full choir was on the platform. But his first impression had been that the girl was alone, and, even now, he found it difficult to see that there were thirty-nine other people with her.
She eclipsed them. “She’s got it,” he prevented himself with difficulty from shouting aloud—and Mr. Chown was no easy prey to enthusiasm. Still, a girl who could wipe out thirty-nine other people, who could glow uniquely in a crowd! “Put her on a stage,” he was thinking, “and they’ll feel her to the back row of the gallery.” He noted as additional facts, accidentals but fortifying, that she had youth and good looks. He tried, honestly, to fix his attention on a large-headed man in the choir who had a red handkerchief stuck into his shirt-front, and a made-up tie that had wandered below his ear. The fellow was richly droll, but it was no use: the girl drew him back to her. He tried again, with an earnest spinsterish lady who looked strong-minded enough for anything: and the girl had him in the fraction of a minute. “She’ll do,” he thought—“if she hasn’t got religion,” he added ruefully. “Number seven—Staithley Bridge Choral Society,” he read on his program. That was a simplification, anyhow: the girl must live in Staithley.
They were the home choir, Staithley’s own, and the applause was long, detaining them in embarrassed acknowledgment on a platform they vehemently wished to quit, but Mr. Chown, making for the pass-door under cover of the applause, observed that there was no embarrassment about the girl. “Um,” he thought, “no nerves. They’re better with them. Well, one can’t have everything.” At the pass-door, a steward stood sentinel. “Press,” said Mr. Chown with aplomb, using an infallible talisman, and the sentinel made way for him.
When the verdict was announced, the winning choir was to appear again on the platform to sing a voluntary and to receive acclamations and the challenge shield. Meanwhile, the whole four hundred contestants were herded together in the Drill Hall cellarage and Mr. Chown added himself inconspicuously to their number. Mistaken, as he hoped to be, for a Staithlwite just come off the platform, he found beer pressed fraternally upon him, and, heroically, he drank. Self-immolation and research are traditional companions. He felt that the beer had made him one of them, but could not withhold a backward glance at the vanity of West End tailoring. When he had said “Press” to the steward at the pass-door he had wondered if his costly cut were plausible and now that same cut was blandly accepted amongst the nondescript swallowtails of this unconforming mob. But he welcomed their inappreciation; he wanted to make the girl’s acquaintance first as one of themselves.
A press of women came down the stairs into the cellar and Mary Ellen was with them but not of them. They chattered incessantly, excitedly, letting taut nerves relax in a spate of shouted words; she was silent, unmoved by the ordeal of the platform and the applause, nursing her sulky, secret resentment of Walter Pate who had refused to let her compete amongst the soloists. Mr. Pate was guarding his treasure against premature publicity; he was guarding her, specifically, against Mr. Chown, that annual raider who had so damnably ruined the Staithley Hand Bell Ringers by taking them to the music-halls; he hid her in the Choral Society and he underrated Mr. Chown’s perceptiveness.
She had taken many things from Walter Pate—the good food which had so unrecognizably developed her, with the physical exercises he prescribed, from a sexless child into a woman of gracious curves; the good education, the good musical instruction; the good beginnings of every kind; and in return she gave him work. He was almost certain of her now: the tin was gone from her golden voice and when he let his hoarded secret loose upon the world he knew that, under God, he would be making a great gift to the concert-platform. He would give a glorious voice, perfectly trained, and perhaps more than that. But the more was still only “perhaps.”