Memoirs of an American Prima Donna Part 11

I was stopping in the Grand Pacific Hotel when the body was brought to Chicago, and my windows overlooked the grounds of the Court House of that city. Business was entirely suspended, not simply for a few memorial moments as was the case when President McKinley was killed, but for many hours during the "lying-in-state." This, however, was probably only partly official. Everyone was so afraid that he would not be able to see the dead hero's face that business men all over the town suspended occupation, closed shops and offices, and made a pilgrimage to the Court House. All citizens were permitted to go into the building and look upon the Martyr President, and vast numbers availed themselves of the privilege--waited all night, indeed, to claim it. From sunset to sunrise the grounds were packed with a silent mult.i.tude. The only sound to be heard was the shuffling echo of feet as one person after another went quietly into the Court House, shuffle, shuffle, shuffle,--I can hear it yet. There was not a word uttered. There was no other sound than the sound of the pa.s.sing feet. One thing that must have been official was that, for quite a long time, not a wheel in the city was allowed to turn. This was an impressive tribute to a man whom the whole American nation loved and counted a friend.

The only diversion in the whole melancholy solemnity of it all was the picking of pockets. The crowds were enormous, the people in a mood of sentiment and off their guard, and the army of crooks did a thriving business. It is a sickening thing to realise that in all hours of great national tragedy or terror there will always be people degenerate enough to take advantage of the suffering and ruin about them. Burning or plague-stricken cities have to be put under military law; and it is said that to the multiplied horrors of the San Francisco earthquake the people look back with a shudder to the ghastly system of looting which prevailed afterwards in the stricken city.

Every imaginable kind of flowers were sent to the dead President, splendid wreaths and bouquets from distinguished personages, and many little cheap humble nosegays from poor people who had loved him even from afar and wanted to honour him in some simple way. No man has ever been loved more in his death than was Abraham Lincoln.

I sent a cross of white camellias. I do not like camellias when they are sent to me, because they always seem such heartless, soulless flowers for living people to wear. But just for that reason, just because they are the most perfect and the most impersonal of all flowers that grow and blossom they seem right and suitable for death. Ever since that time I have a.s.sociated white camellias with the thought of Abraham Lincoln and with my strange, impressive memory of those days in Chicago.

However, nations go on even after the beloved rulers of them are laid in the ground. Our Chicago season opened soon--I in Lucia--and everything went along as though nothing had happened. The only difference was that the end of the war had made the nation a little drunk with excitement and our performances went with a whirl.

Finally the victorious generals, Lieutenant-General Grant and Major-General Sherman, came to Chicago as the guests of the city and we gave a gala performance for them. As the _Daughter of the Regiment_ had been our choice to inaugurate the commencement of the great conflict, so the _Daughter of the Regiment_ was also our choice to commemorate its close. The whole opera house was gay with flags and flowers and decorations, and the generals were given the two stage boxes, one on each side of the house. The audience began to come in very early; and it was a huge one. The curtain had not yet risen--indeed, I was in my dressing-room still making-up--when I heard the orchestra break into _See the Conquering Hero Comes_, and then the roof nearly came off with the uproar of the people cheering. I sent to find out what was happening, and was told that General Grant had just entered his box. We were ridiculously excited behind the scenes, all of us; even the foreigners. They were such emotional creatures that they flung themselves into a mood of general excitement even when it was based on a patriotism to which they were aliens. The wild and jubilant state of the audience infected us. I had felt something of the same emotion in Was.h.i.+ngton at the beginning of the war, when we had done _Figlia_ before, to the frantically enthusiastic houses there. Yet that was different. Mingled with that feeling there had been a grimness and pain and apprehension. Now everyone was triumphant and happy and emotionally exultant.

General Sherman came into his box early in the first act and the orchestra had to stop while the house cheered him, and cheered again.

Sherman was always just a bit theatrical and loved applause, and he, with his staff, stood bowing and smiling and bowing and smiling. The whole proceeding took almost the form of a great military reception. As I look back at it, I think one of the moments of the evening was created by our ba.s.so, Susini. Susini--himself a soldier of courage and experience, a veteran of the Italian rebellion--made his entrance, walked forward, stood, faced one General after the other and saluted each with the most military exactness. They were both plainly delighted; while the house, in the mood to be moved by little touches, broke into the heartiest applause.

I had a moment of triumph also when we sang the _Rataplan, rataplan_.

Since the early hit I had made with my drum I always played it as the Daughter of the Regiment, and when we came to this scene I directed the drum first toward one box and then toward the other, as I gave the rolling salute. The audience went mad again; and again the orchestra had to stop until the clapping and the hurrahs had subsided. It may not have been a great operatic performance but it was a great evening! Such moments written about afterwards in cold words lose their thrill. They bring up no pictures except to those who have lived them. But on a night such as that, one's heart seems like a musical instrument, wonderfully played upon.

Between the acts the two distinguished officers came behind the scenes and were introduced to the artists, making pleasant speeches to us all.

Immediately, I liked best the personality of General Grant. There was nothing the least spectacular or egotistical about him; he was absolutely simple and quiet and unaffected. He bewildered me by apologising courteously for not being able to shake hands with me.

"You have had an accident to your hand!" I exclaimed.

"Not exactly an accident," he said, smiling. "I think I may call it design!"

He explained that he had shaken hands with so many people that he could not use his right hand for a while. He held it out for me to see and, sure enough, it was terribly swollen and inflamed and must have been very painful.

The great evening came to an end at last. We were not sorry on the whole for, thrilling as it had been, it had been also very tiring. I wonder if such mad, national excitement could come to people to-day? I cannot quite imagine an opera performance being conducted on similar lines in the Metropolitan Opera House. Perhaps, however, it is not because we are less enthusiastic but because our events are less dramatic.

In recalling General Sherman I find myself thinking of him chiefly in the later years of my acquaintance with him. After that Chicago night, he never failed to look me up when I sang in any city where he was and we grew to be good friends. He was always quite enthusiastic about operatic music; much more so than General Grant. He confided to me once that above all songs he especially disliked _Marching through Georgia_, and that, naturally, was the song he was constantly obliged to listen to. People, of course, thought it must be, or ought to be, his favourite melody. But he hated the tune as well as the words. He was desperately tired of the song and, above all, he detested what it stood for, and what it forced him to recall.

[Ill.u.s.tration: =General William Tec.u.mseh Sherman, 1877=

From a photograph by Mora]

Like nearly all great soldiers, Sherman was naturally a gentle person and saddened by war. Everything connected with fighting brought to him chiefly the recollection of its horrors and tragedies and always filled him with pain. So it was that his real heart's preference was for such simple, old-fas.h.i.+oned, plantation-evoking, country-smelling airs as _The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane_. One day during his many visits to our home he asked me to sing this and, when I informed him that I could not because I did not know and did not have the words, he said he would send them to me. This he did; and I took pains after that never to forget his preference.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Musical notation; In de lit-tle old log cab-in in de lane.]

One night when I was singing in a concert in Was.h.i.+ngton, I caught sight of him sitting quietly in the audience. He did not even know that I had seen him. Presently the audience wanted an encore and, as was my custom in concerts, I went to the piano to play my own accompaniment. I turned and, meeting the General's eyes, smiled at him. Then I sang his beloved _Little Old Log Cabin_. My reward was his beaming expression of appreciation. He was easily touched by such little personal tributes.

"Why on earth did you sing that queer old song, Louise," someone asked me when I was back behind the scenes again.

"It was an official request," I replied mysteriously. The end of the war was a strenuous time for the nation; and for actors and singers among others. The combination of work and excitement sent me up to New Hartford in sore need of my summer's rest. But I think, of all the many diverse impressions which that spring made upon my memory, the one that I still carry with me most unforgetably, is a _sound_:--the sound of those shuffling feet, shuffle, shuffle, shuffle,--in the Court House grounds in Chicago: a sound like a great sea or forest in a wind as the people of the nation went in to look at their President whom they loved and who was dead.

CHAPTER XII

AND SO--TO ENGLAND!

The following season was one of concerts and not remarkably enjoyable.

In retrospect I see but a hurried jumble of work until our decision, in the spring, to go to England.

For two or three years I had wanted to try my wings on the other side of the world. Several matters had interfered and made it temporarily impossible, chiefly an unfortunate business agreement into which I had entered at the very outset of my professional career. During the second season that I sang, an _impresario_, a Jew named Ulman, had made me an offer to go abroad and sing in Paris and elsewhere. Being very eager to forge ahead, it seemed like a satisfactory arrangement, and I signed a contract binding myself to sing under Ulman's management _if I went abroad_ any time in three years. When I came to think it over, I regretted this arrangement exceedingly. I felt that the _impresario_ was not the best one for me. To say the least, I came to doubt his ability.

At any rate, because of this complication, I voluntarily tied myself up to Max Maretzek for several years and felt it a release as now I could not tour under Ulman even if I cared to. By 1867, however, my Ulman contract had expired and I was free to do as I pleased. I had no contract abroad to be sure, nor any very definite prospects, but I determined to go to England on a chance and see what developed. At any rate I should have the advantage of being able to consult foreign teachers and to improve my method. The uncertainties of my professional outlook did not disturb me in the least. Indeed, what I really wanted was, like any other girl, to go abroad, as the gentleman in the old-fas.h.i.+oned ballad says:

... to go abroad; To go strange countries for to see!

I greatly enjoyed the voyage as I have enjoyed every voyage that I have made since, even including the channel crossing when everyone else on board was seasick, and also the one in which I was nearly s.h.i.+p-wrecked off the Irish coast. I have crossed the Atlantic between sixty and seventy times and every trip has given me pleasure of one kind or another. I am never nervous when travelling. Like poor Jack, I have a vague but sure conviction that nothing will happen to _me_; that I am protected by "a sweet little cherub that sits up aloft!"

At Queenstown, where we touched before going on to our regular port of Liverpool, a man came on board asking for Miss Clara Louise Kellogg. He was from Jarrett, the agent for Colonel Mapleson who was then _impresario_ of "Her Majesty's Opera" in London, and he brought me word that Mapleson wanted me to call on him as soon as I reached London and, until we could definitely arrange matters, to please give him the refusal of myself, if I may so express it. Perhaps I wasn't a proud and happy girl! Mapleson, I heard later, was then believed to be on the verge of failure and it was hoped that my appearance in his company would revive his fortunes. I grew afterwards cordially to detest and to distrust him, and we had more troubles than I can or care to keep track of: and, as for Jarrett, he was a most unpleasant creature with a positive genius for making trouble. But on that day in Queenstown harbour, with the sun s.h.i.+ning and the little Irish fisher boats--their patched sails streaming into the blue off-sh.o.r.e distance,--the man Jarrett had sent to meet me on behalf of Colonel Mapleson seemed like a herald of great good cheer.

When we reached London we went to Miss Edward's Hotel in Hanover Square.

It was a curious inst.i.tution, distinctive of its day and generation, a real old-fas.h.i.+oned English hotel, behind streets that were "chained-up"

after nightfall. It was called a "private hotel" and unquestionably was one; deadly dull, but maintained in the most aristocratic way imaginable, like a formal, pluperfect, private house where one might chance to be invited to visit. Everyone dined in his own sitting-room, which was usually separated from the bedroom, and never a soul but the servants was seen. The Langham was the first London hotel to introduce the American style of hotel and it, with its successors, have had such an influence upon the other hostelries of London as gradually to undermine the quaint, old, truly English places we used to know, until there are no more "private hotels" like Miss Edward's in existence.

We had friends in London and quickly made others. Commodore McVickar, of the New York Yacht Club, had given me a letter to a friend of his, the Dowager d.u.c.h.ess of Somerset. Her cards, by the way, were engraved in just the opposite fas.h.i.+on--"d.u.c.h.ess Dowager." McVickar told me that, if she liked, she could make things very pleasant for me in London. It appeared that she was something of a lion hunter and was always on the lookout for celebrities either arriving or arrived. She went in for everything foreign to her own immediate circle--art, intellect, and Americans--chiefly Americans, in fact, because they were more or less of a novelty, and she had the thirst for change in her so strongly developed that she ought to have lived at the present time. Every night of her life she gave dinners to hosts of friends and acquaintances.

Indeed, it is a fact that her sole interest in life consisted of giving dinner parties and making collections of lions, great and small. I have been told that after dinner she sometimes danced the Spanish fandango toward the end of the evening. I never happened to see her do it, but I quite believe her to have been capable of that or of anything else vivacious and eccentric, although she was seventy or eighty in the shade and not entirely built for dancing.

I was somewhat impressed by the prospect of meeting a real live d.u.c.h.ess, and had to be coached before-hand. In the early part of the eighteenth century the mode of address "Your Grace" was used exclusively, and very pretty and courtly it must have sounded. Nowadays it is only servants or inferiors who think of using it. Plain "Duke" or "d.u.c.h.ess" is the later form. At the period of which I am writing the custom was just betwixt and between, in transition, and I was duly instructed to say "Your Grace," but cautioned to say it _very_ seldom!

[Ill.u.s.tration: =Henry G. Stebbins=

From a photograph by Grillet & Co.]

On the nineteenth of November, Colonel Stebbins and I went to call.

Maria, Dowager d.u.c.h.ess of Somerset lived in Park Lane in a house of indifferent aspect. Its distinctive feature was the formidable number of flunkeys ranged on the steps and standing in front, all in powdered wigs and white silk stockings and wearing waistcoats of a shade carrying out the dominant colour of the ducal coat of arms. It was raining hard when we got there, but not one of these gorgeous functionaries would demean himself sufficiently to carry an umbrella down to our carriage.

In the drawing-room we had to wait a long time before a sort of gilt-edged Groom of the Chambers came to the door and announced,

"Her Grace, the d.u.c.h.ess!"

My youthful American soul was prepared for someone quite dazzling, a magnificent presence. What is the use of diadems and coronets if the owner does not wear them? Of course I knew, theoretically, that d.u.c.h.esses did not wear their coronets in the middle of the day, but I did nevertheless hope for something brilliant or impressive.

Then in walked Maria, Dowager d.u.c.h.ess of Somerset. I cannot adequately describe her. She was a little, dumpy, old woman with no corsets, and dressed in a black alpaca gown and prunella shoes--those awful things that the present generation are lucky enough never to have even seen.

She furthermore wore a _fichu_ of a style which had been entirely extinct for fifty years at least. I really do not know how there happened to be anyone living even then who could or would make such things for her. No modern modiste could have achieved them and survived.

Her whole appearance was certainly beyond words. But she had very beautiful hands, and when she spoke, the great lady was heard instantly.

It was all there, of course, only curiously costumed, not to say disguised.

After Colonel Stebbins had presented me and she had greeted me kindly, he said:

"I am sure Miss Kellogg will be glad to sing for you."

"O," said Her Grace, carelessly, "I haven't a piano. I don't play or sing and so I don't need one. But I'll get one in."

I was amazed at the idea of a d.u.c.h.ess not owning a piano and having to hire one when, in America, most middle-cla.s.s homes possess one at whatever sacrifice, and every little girl is expected to take music lessons whether she has any ability or not. Even yet I do not quite understand how she managed without a piano for her musical lions to play on.