“The footlights--across, into the audience. And she ought to, but
they were as cold as frogs till Berwick woke them up with _The Three
Grenadiers_. _He_ can do it. He hasn’t got any better voice or method
but,” she gave a little ecstatic gesture, “temperament--oh, my!”
“Has she got no temperament at all?” I asked.
“I’ve never played for anybody who had less.” Miss Gorringe held up the
green scarf. “Here’s the sash.”
“Not a bit of thrill,” Miss Bliss chanted, prone before the fire.
“Can’t a person get temperament, learn it in some way?”
Miss Gorringe pondered:
“They can teach them rôles, hammer it into them. When a person’s got
the looks she has they sometimes do it. But I guess they’ve done all
they can for her. She’s been with Vignorol for two years. He wouldn’t
have taken her unless he thought there was something in it. And John
Masters has been training her besides, and I’ve heard people say
there’s no one better than Masters for that. You see they can teach her
how to walk and stand and make gestures, but they can’t put the thing
into her head or her voice. She doesn’t seem to understand, she doesn’t
feel.”
I was silent. She did feel, I knew it, I’d seen it. There was some
queer lack of coordination between her power to feel and her power to
express.
Miss Gorringe administered the coup de grâce.
“She sang the duet from _The Valkyrie_ as if she was telling Siegmund
to put on his hat and come to supper.”
“It’s imagination,” I said.
“It’s temperament,” Miss Gorringe corrected. “And without it, the way
she is, she’d better go in for church singing, or oratorio, or even
teaching.”
The dusk was gathering and I was alone when she came down. She threw
herself into the wicker chair beside my sofa. Her face looked thinner
and two slight lines showed round her mouth.
“Well?” I said, investing my voice with a fictitious lightness. “Where
have you been all day?”
“I’m tired or I’d have been down earlier. Have you seen the others?”
With her deadly directness she had gone straight to the point I dreaded.
“Yes, they’ve been in.”
“Did they like it?”
One of the most formidable things about this woman is the way she
keeps placing you in positions where you must either lie and lose your
self-respect or tell the truth and incur her sudden and alarming anger.
I was not afraid of that now, but I couldn’t hurt her. I tried to find
a sentence that would be as truthful and painless as the circumstances
permitted. The search took a moment.
“They didn’t,” she answered for me.
She turned her face to the window and drummed on the chair-arm with her
fingers, then said defiantly:
“They don’t know anything.”
“Of course they don’t,” I cried. “An Italian count, an artist, a model,
a woman who rents floors.”
Her eye fell on the green dress.
“Miss Gorringe has been here.”