Fred began Fricka’s first aria again. “It’s certainly different. Curious how she does it. Such a beautiful idea, out of a part that’s always been so ungrateful. She’s a lovely thing, but she was never so beautiful as that, really. Nobody is.” He repeated the loveliest phrase. “How does she manage it, Landry? You’ve worked with her.”
Landry drew cherishingly on the last cigarette he meant to permit himself before singing. “Oh, it’s a question of a big personality—and all that goes with it. Brains, of course. Imagination, of course. But the important thing is that she was born full of color, with a rich personality. That’s a gift of the gods, like a fine nose. You have it, or you haven’t. Against it, intelligence and musicianship and habits of industry don’t count at all. Singers are a conventional race. When Thea was studying in Berlin the other girls were mortally afraid of her. She has a pretty rough hand with women, dull ones, and she could be rude, too! The girls used to call her die Wölfin.”
Fred thrust his hands into his pockets and leaned back against the piano. “Of course, even a stupid woman could get effects with such machinery: such a voice and body and face. But they couldn’t possibly belong to a stupid woman, could they?”
Landry shook his head. “It’s personality; that’s as near as you can come to it. That’s what constitutes real equipment. What she does is interesting because she does it. Even the things she discards are suggestive. I regret some of them. Her conceptions are colored in so many different ways. You’ve heard her Elizabeth? Wonderful, isn’t it? She was working on that part years ago when her mother was ill. I could see her anxiety and grief getting more and more into the part. The last act is heart-breaking. It’s as homely as a country prayer meeting: might be any lonely woman getting ready to die. It’s full of the thing every plain creature finds out for himself, but that never gets written down. It’s unconscious memory, maybe; inherited memory, like folk-music. I call it personality.”
Fred laughed, and turning to the piano began coaxing the Fricka music again. “Call it anything you like, my boy. I have a name for it myself, but I shan’t tell you.” He looked over his shoulder at Landry, stretched out by the fire. “You have a great time watching her, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes!” replied Landry simply. “I’m not interested in much that goes on in New York. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll have to dress.” He rose with a reluctant sigh. “Can I get you anything? Some whiskey?”
“Thank you, no. I’ll amuse myself here. I don’t often get a chance at a good piano when I’m away from home. You haven’t had this one long, have you? Action’s a bit stiff. I say,” he stopped Landry in the doorway, “has Thea ever been down here?”
Landry turned back. “Yes. She came several times when I had erysipelas. I was a nice mess, with two nurses. She brought down some inside window-boxes, planted with crocuses and things. Very cheering, only I couldn’t see them or her.”
“Didn’t she like your place?”
“She thought she did, but I fancy it was a good deal cluttered up for her taste. I could hear her pacing about like something in a cage. She pushed the piano back against the wall and the chairs into corners, and she broke my amber elephant.” Landry took a yellow object some four inches high from one of his low bookcases. “You can see where his leg is glued on,—a souvenir. Yes, he’s lemon amber, very fine.”