“Here is my card,” I said, “put that in it.” And then I gave her the address and the hour. I wrote some little nonsense on the card, about tender melodies and spring-time, and then I went back to the hotel to attend Madame.
A more bustling, aggressive little artist you would not want to find. When I called at eight-thirty—the recital was at nine—I found several musical satellites dancing attendance upon her. There was one beautiful little girl from Mayence I noticed, of the Jewish type, who followed Madame A. with positively adoring glances. There was another woman of thirty who was also caught in the toils of this woman’s personality and swept along by her quite as one planet dislocates the orbit of another and makes it into a satellite. She had come all the way from Berlin. “Oh, Madame A.,” she confided to me upon introduction, “oh, wonderful! wonderful! Such playing! It is the most wonderful thing in the world to me.”
This woman had an attractive face, sallow and hollow, with burning black eyes and rich black hair. Her body was long and thin, supple and graceful. She followed Madame A. too, with those strange, questioning eyes. Life is surely pathetic. It was interesting, though, to be in this atmosphere of intense artistic enthusiasm.
When the last touch had been added to Madame’s coiffure, a sprig of blossom of some kind inserted in her corsage, a flowing opera cloak thrown about the shoulders, she was finally ready. So busy was she, suggesting this and that to one and another of her attendants, that she scarcely saw me. “Oh, there you are,” she beamed finally. “Now, I am quite ready. Is the machine here, Marie? Oh, very good. And Herr Steiger! O-o-oh!” This last to a well-known violinist who had arrived.
It turned out that there were two machines—one for the satellites and Herr Steiger who was also to play this evening, and one for Madame A., her maid and myself. We finally debouched from the hall and elevator and fussy lobby, where German officers were strolling to and fro, into the machines and were away. Madame A. was lost in a haze of artistic contemplation with thoughts, no doubt, as to her program and her success. “Now maybe you will like my program better,” she suggested after a while. “In London it was not so goot. I haf to feel my audience iss—how do you say?—vith me. In Berlin and here and Dresden and Leipzig they like me. In England they do not know me.” She sighed and looked out of the window. “Are you happy to be with me?” she asked naïvely.
“Quite,” I replied.
When we reached the auditorium we were ushered by winding passages into a very large green-room, a salon, as it were, where the various artists awaited their call to appear. It was already occupied by a half-dozen persons, or more, the friends of Madame A., the local manager, his hair brushed aloft like a cockatoo, several musicians, the violinist Herr Steiger, Godowsky the pianist, and one or two others. They all greeted Madame A. effusively.
There was some conversation in French here and there, and now and then in English. The room was fairly babbling with temperament. It is always amusing to hear a group of artists talk. They are so fickle, make-believe, innocently treacherous, jealous, vainglorious, flattering. “Oh, yes—how splendid he was. That aria in C Major—perfect! But you know I did not care so much for his rendering of the Pastoral Symphony—very weak in the allegro ma non troppo—very. He should not attempt that. It is not in his vein—not the thing he does best”—fingers lifted very suggestively and warningly in the air.
Some artist and his wife did not agree (very surprising); the gentleman was the weaker instrument in this case.
“Oh!”—it was Madame A. talking, “now that is too-oo ridiculous. She must go places and he must go along as manager! Herr Spink wrote me from Hamburg that he would not have him around. She has told him that he affects her playing. Still he goes! It is too-oo much. They will not live together long.”