When the audience found that Miss Tucker’s singing did not belie her charming appearance, they cast discretion to the winds and loved her. Appleton himself marveled at the beauty of her performance as it budded and bloomed under the inspiration of her fellow artists and the favor of the audience, and the more he admired the more depressed he became.
“She may be on the threshold of a modest ‘career,’ of a sort, after all,” he thought, “and she will never give it up for me. Would she be willing to combine me with the career, and how would it work? I shouldn’t be churl enough to mind her singing now and then, but it seems to me I couldn’t stand ‘tours.’ Besides, hers is such a childlike, winsome, fragrant little gift it ought not to be exploited like a great, booming talent!”
The audience went wild over Donald Tovey’s songs. He played, and Tommy sang them from memory, and it seemed as if they had been written then and there, struck off at white heat; as if the composer happened to be at the piano, and the singer chanced with his help to be interpreting those particular verses for that particular moment.
His setting of “Jock o’Hazeldean” proved irresistible:
| “They sought her baith by bower an ha’; The ladie was not seen.” |
And then with a swirl and a torrent of sound, a clangor of sword and a clatter of hoofs:
| “She’s o’er the Border and awa’ Wi’ Jock o’ Hazeldean.” |
Appleton didn’t see any valid reason why Tovey should kiss Tommy’s hand in responding to the third recall, but supposed it must be a composer’s privilege, and wished that he were one.
Then the crowd made its way into the brilliant Torquay sunshine, and Appleton lingered in the streets until the time came for the tea-party arranged for the artists at the hotel.