It was all very delightful. And before long the illustrious coloratura
was prevailed upon to sing a few songs, though she said the usual things
about being in wretched voice, without expecting that they should be
taken too seriously.
The impresario excitedly seated himself at the piano and spread out some
music and they conferred in earnest whispers. He sat looking up at her
with such a look of loving and hopeful anticipation as must move any one
not utterly barricaded against sentiment. It was really beautiful to see
them together. He was so manifestly proud of the songbird he had rescued
from the Galesburg choir, while she showed such touching confidence in
him—even if, when the strain was all over and bouquets of praise poured
in, she would forget to give the zealous maestro any particular credit.
The singer drew in deeply, lowered her head a little, focused the
whole force of her being into the momentous first tone, and sang. It
was an aria from that sublime and noble work, _Linda di Chamounix_, in
which, of course, the heroine goes mad in the second act or so, for no
entirely apparent reason, and lets her hair down her back, and sings
cascades in competition with a long-suffering flute. The “business end”
of Miss Valentine’s voice was the vital stretch between B and E; it was
these impressive top notes that made her, in reality, a coloratura to
be reckoned with—that kept the harassed impresario also in a state of
perpetual alarm.
“It’s her range,” he confessed afterward to Flora. “It puts me so on pins
and needles. Every time she opens her mouth I’m afraid of losing her
to one of the big managers.” He was, indeed, forever finding pearls on
ash-heaps, for ultimate confiscation higher up. “Lord, the singers I’ve
lost because of a little special talent!” Curry dropped his hands from an
expended gesture and wriggled the jewelled fingers helplessly. “They’ll
get her—you’ll see. I can’t afford to keep a voice like that.” So life
went. “From him who hath not....” Xenophon Curry was a born impresario,
carrying in his heart a genuine sense of lift and grace which always
touched his poor ragged performances with at least the virtue of lyrical
buoyancy; but an impresario, alas, born to mediocrity and the provinces.
Presently Captain Utterbourne’s eyes became riveted upon a couple
strolling back from the beach.
“Mr. Curry,” he drawled, his lips curling in mirth, “if I’m not mistaken,
that’s the young man you had to dinner at the Pavillon d’Orient.”
“Yes,” laughed the impresario, “and thereby hangs a tale”—which he
forthwith told, in his big, human way, omitting some of the more
painfully satiric touches and stressing rather the new grip on life and
the affairs of the world which the once obscure clerk seemed obtaining.
“Isn’t it simply gorgeous,” murmured the Captain in a tone of softly
contemplative ecstasy, “the multiplicity of ever fresh reactions one
discovers in the human organism! Here one sees a perfectly ordinary and
unimaginative young man—h’m?—going along year after year. Then suddenly
he’s carried off by a caprice of fortune and placed in a wholly new
environment—h’m? And immediately the mechanism of consciousness begins to
act along unpremeditated lines—throws up defences—digs trenches of new
affirmation—h’m? h’m? It’s extraordinary—that alertness, that look of
vigorous ‘becoming’....”
And the Captain sat there watching Jerome and watching, his eyes half
closed in a quizzical, poising way.