I got out my tuning fork, and struck the note after her
“Perfect pitch again!” I cried.
“Oh, yes,” she replied listlessly, “I can always do that.”
“Now take the closest interval you can, below the c.”
She did so. Then the next—and the next. I would not permit an apportamento, but made her separate the notes. She sang three distinct notes between the c and the b-natural that, on the piano, is the next step down.
I clapped my hands.
A little color came into her cheeks. She took a deep breath and kept at it. Her performance was not quite perfect—she got in only two clean notes between a and a-flat. But at that it was easily the most delicately precise bit of singing I have ever heard. She played with those close intervals with a facility that was amazing. And baring perhaps Sembrich and the earlier Melba, I have never heard such perfection of breath control (Patti doubtless had it, but I never heard her).
She stepped forward, threw her shoulders back (without raising them), swung up on the balls of her feet, and with a fine un-self-consciousness spun out those light, clear threads of tone. When she breathed it was with a quick inhalation that expanded the whole upper part of her body and made you forget how slim she had seemed. She became for the moment a strong, vibrant creature with a light in her eyes. But when she stopped singing that light died out.
“Come!” I cried. “We shall get this down now. We shall prove it on the phonograph. We shall settle that von Westfall beast forever!”
And I rushed back into my own room and prepared the instrument, without so much as ushering her in first. This was rude of me. But I have admitted I was not quite myself.