There was an excellent store of men's costumes to call on; beautiful embroidered coats and waistcoats from the eighteenth century, real uniforms of many regiments of bygone days, and the best Wagnerian barbaric stuff I have ever seen, with the exception of van Rooy's.
One of the principal men singers was a tall dark fellow, with a most passionate disposition. We played together often and he fell very much in love with me. One day when we were all together at a wood coffee house, his wife asked him how he had broken his watch which she found smashed on the floor one morning. He said he had dropped it while reading the night before, but he told me he had been sitting thinking of me long after his wife had retired, and suddenly saw his watch shattered in a thousand pieces on the floor across the room, where he had hurled it. He was devoted to his little son, a charming sunny little chap, with the dark colouring of his mother.
When I think of these good comrades of mine I cannot but wonder what the war has done to them. The Hun element seemed to be in very few of them, but I can remember it in one. This impossible person, frightfully conceited, lacking absolutely in humour, annoyed and goaded me through two long years with his boorish manners, low ideas of American life, loudly expressed, and crass ignorance of all ideals of living. I came to rehearsal one day and found the colleagues assembled in the green room looking very grave over something. This man H—— said "Ah, here she is!" Then he proceeded to hand round to every one a clipping, which seemed to hurt and annoy them all. He would not show it to me, insinuating that I knew all about it. This I stood for an hour and a half; finally I insisted on seeing the clipping which was from the leading paper of a neighbouring city. The critic reviewed a première we had just given, slating every one but myself, and saying that I belonged on the world-stage. This had been sufficient grounds for my persecutor to explain the bad criticisms of my other colleagues to them, by telling them that I had an affair with this to me of course, utterly unknown, unheard of critic. When I realized just what he meant, I saw black, seized a property crook stick that lay on the table, and struck him violently on the arm. I then came to, and rushed to the window to cool off. He took the blow without a word, and when I finally turned back from the window ready in a revulsion of feeling to tell him that I was sorry to have hurt him, I found the others all smiling broadly, in relief that I had cleared the matter up. Of course none of them had believed for a second what he had tried to make them believe.
We gave the whole of Goethe's "Faust" in four evenings. We had Lassens' music and I sang two angels and an archangel, a sphinx and a siren during the performances. The mechanical part of the production with its flying witches, flying swings for Faust and the devil, traps, dark changes, built-up effects reaching from the footlights to almost the top of the proscenium arch at the back of the stage, and a thousand and one details were managed without a hitch.
"Butterfly" we gave for the first time while I was there, and the Grand Duke took a great interest in the performance. He sent down some beautiful kimonos from his private collection for the Butterfly to wear, but paid me the compliment of letting me get my own. I had searched costumers and Japanese shops in vain, in London, Paris and Berlin, for a plain coloured kimono such as servants wear, and finally got one direct from Japan. The Suzukis I have always seen have been attired like second editions of Butterfly not realizing in the least the value of the contrast to them if they look like a real servant. I have had letters from people who knew the East intimately, who have said very flattering things about my portrayal of the manner of a Japanese, after they have seen my performance, in company with real Japanese. This, considering my height, has always pleased me immensely. If you can feel in a vast audience that even one person knows, understands and appreciates the study you have put upon a rôle to make it true to life, you are rewarded for your pains.
CHAPTER XIX
RUSSIANS, COMMON AND PREFERRED
THE Grand Duke was always very good to me. He liked talking English with my sister and me, and always referred to the Germans as "they," never as "we." He asked me to the palace one evening to dinner. We dined in a room hung with portraits of his beautiful sisters. They looked like fair angels, the portraits having been painted when both the Czarina of Russia and her sisters were quite young girls. We were told by friends that the Czarina used to be perfectly exquisite as a young woman, usually gowned in pale grey with a huge bunch of violets. After dinner we went up to the Grand Duke's own private music room where guests were seldom invited. The piano was set high, on a hollow inlaid sounding box, an idea of His Royal Highness's which improved the tone immensely. Behind it on the wall was a life size painting of a Buddha-like female figure. This was in creamy brown and gold, inlaid with chrysophrases, and lit mysteriously at will from either side, on top, or bottom. The lighting he preferred, and which he told me he used when he played for hours—he knew not what—was provided by four rings of glass, suspended horizontally from the ceiling, through which a radiant sapphire light poured. I don't know how it was managed, but it was very beautiful. In one corner of the room was a grotto, also blue lit with a charming, quiet, nude figure, and a fountain that drip-dripped as you listened.
I sat down at the piano and played and sang all the negro melodies my father had collected in the Bahamas years before. I think the guests were rather bewildered by the swift pattering English, but the Grand Duke and his cousin, the Princess Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein were charmed with them. Princess Victoria and her mother, Princess Christian, King Edward's sister, were afterwards good enough to be patronesses at my first recital in London.
The Grand Duke loved beautiful Oriental effects, and never seemed to me to be in the least German. He came to a supper-dance once, given by a Baronin O——, dressed as an oriental potentate of sorts. He kept the several hundred guests, and the good dinner waiting over an hour, because he insisted on making up the whole court himself. His wife wore a wonderful headdress she made herself, copied from the fresco in his music room. It was all gold beads and emeralds. Round her neck was a huge pear-shaped green stone. I was thinking of the chrysophrases I had seen inset in the wall of the music room, and said: "What wonderful chrysophrases, Your Royal Highness." "Not chrysophrases, emeralds," she gently corrected me.