We had reached the coffee stage of the dinner, and the cigars were being passed. The ladies did not withdraw, according to the mediæval and popular English habit, but the company remained unbroken, and while the gentlemen smoked, the ladies kept them in conversation. Presently, some one proposed Patti’s health, and we all stood, singing “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”
That put the ball of merriment in motion. One of the young ladies, a goddaughter of our hostess, carolled a stanza from a popular ditty. At first I thought it audacious that any one should sing in the presence of La Diva. It seemed an act of sacrilege. But in another instant we were all at it, piping the chorus, and Patti leading off. The fun of the thing was infectious. The song finished, we ventured another, and Patti joined us in the refrains of a medley of music-hall airs, beginning with London’s latest mania, “Daisy Bell, or a Bicycle Made for Two,” and winding up with Chevalier’s “Old Kent Road” and the “Coster’s Serenade,” Coburn’s “Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo,” and the transatlantic “Daddy Wouldn’t Buy me a Bow-Wow.”
Madame turned with an arch look—“You will think our behavior abominable.”
“On the contrary, I find it very jolly, not to say a rare experience; for it is not everybody who has heard you sing comic songs.”
Patti’s answer was a peal of laughter, and then she sat there singing very softly a stanza of “My Old Kentucky Home,” and as we finished the chorus she lifted a clear, sweet note, which thrilled us through and through, and stirred us to rapturous applause. “What have I done?” Patti put the question with a puzzled look. The reply came from the adjoining library: “High E.” One of our number had run to sound the piano pitch. Then I recalled what Sir Morell Mackenzie had told me a little while before he died. I was chatting with the great physician in that famous room of his in Harley Street. We happened to mention Madame Patti. “That great singer,” said Sir Morell, “has the most wonderful throat I have ever seen; it is the only one I have ever seen with the vocal chords in absolutely perfect condition after many years of use. They are not strained, or warped or roughened, but, as I tell you, they are absolutely perfect. There is no reason why they should not remain so ten years longer, and with care and health twenty years longer.”
MADAME’S BOUDOIR.
Remembering this, I asked Madame Patti if she had taken extraordinary care of her voice. “I have never tired it,” said she; “I never sing when I am tired, and that means that I am never tired when I sing. And I have never strained for high notes. I have heard that the first question asked of new vocalists nowadays is ‘How high can you sing?’ But I have always thought that the least important matter in singing. One should sing only what one can sing with perfect ease.”
“But in eating and drinking? According to all accounts you are most abstemious in these things.”