Memoirs of an American Prima Donna Part 6

"That piece doesn't end in the same key in which it begins!"

Lanier looked surprised and said:

"No, it doesn't. It is one of my own compositions."

He thought it remarkable that I could catch the change of key in such a long and intricately modulated piece of music. The little old maids of Boston were somewhat scandalised by my effrontery; but there was even more to come. After another lovely thing which he played for us, I was so impressed by the rare tone of his instrument that I asked:

"Is that a Bohm flute?"

He, being a musician, was delighted with the implied compliment; but the old ladies saw in my question only a shocking slight upon his execution.

Turning to one another they e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed with one voice, and that one filled with scorn and pity:

"She thinks it's the _flute_!"

This difference between professionals and the laity is odd. The more enchanted a professional is with another artist's performance, the more technical interest and curiosity he feels. The amateur only knows how to rhapsodise. This seems to be so in everything. When someone rides in an automobile for the first time he only thinks how exciting it is and how fast he is going. The experienced motorist immediately wants to know what sort of engine the machine has, and how many cylinders.

I have always loved a flute. It is a difficult instrument to play with colour and variety. It is not like the violin, on which one can get thirds, and sixths, and sevenths, by using the arpeggio: it is a single, thin tone and can easily become monotonous if not played skilfully.

Furthermore, there are only certain pieces of music that ever ought to be played on it. Wagner uses the flute wonderfully. He never lets it bore his audience. The Orientals have brought flute playing and flute music to a fine art, and it is one of the oldest of instruments, but, unlike the violin and other instruments, it is more perfectly manufactured to-day than it was in the past. The modern flutes have a far more mellow and sympathetic tone than the old ones.

That whole evening at Miss Cushman's was complete in its fulness of experience, as I recall it, looking back across the years. How many people know that Miss Cushman had studied singing and had a very fine _baritone_ contralto voice? Two of her songs were _The Sands o' Dee_ and _Low I Breathe my Pa.s.sion_. That night, the last time I ever heard her sing, I recalled how often before I had seen her seating herself at the piano to play her own accompaniments, always a difficult thing to do.

Again I can see her, at this late day, turning on the stool to talk to us between songs, emphasising her points with that odd, inevitable gesture of the forefinger that was so characteristic of her, and then wheeling back to the instrument to let that deep voice of hers roll through the room in

"Will she wake and say good night?"...

During that first Boston season of mine, my mother and I used to give breakfasts at the Parker House. We were somewhat noted characters there as we were the first women to stop at it, the Parker House being originally a man's restaurant exclusively; and breakfast was a meal of ceremony. The _chef_ of the Parker House used to surpa.s.s himself at our breakfast entertainments for he knew that such an epicure as Oliver Wendell Holmes might be there at any time. This _chef_, by the way, was the first man to put up soups in cans and, after he left the Parker House kitchens, he made name and money for himself in establis.h.i.+ng the canned goods trade.

[Ill.u.s.tration: =Charlotte Cushman, 1861=

From a photograph by Silsbee, Case & Co.]

Dear Dr. Holmes! What a delightful, warm spontaneous nature was his, and what a fine mind! We were always good friends and I am proud of the fact. Shall I ever forget the dignity and impressiveness of his bearing as, after the fourth course of one of my breakfasts, he glanced up, saw the waiter approaching, arose solemnly as if he were about to make a speech, went behind his chair,--we all thought he was about to give us one of his brilliant addresses--shook out one leg and then the other, all most seriously and without a word, so as to make room for the next course!

Years later Dr. Holmes and I crossed from England on the same steamer.

He had been feted and made much of in England and we discussed the relative brilliancy of American and English women. I contended that Americans were the brighter and more sparkling, while English women had twice as much real education and mental training. Dr. Holmes agreed, but with reservations. He professed himself to be still dazzled with British feminine wit.

"I'm tired to death," he declared. "At every dinner party I went to they had picked out the cleverest women in London to sit on each side of me.

I'm utterly exhausted trying to keep up with them!"

This was the voyage when the benefit for the sailors was given--for the English sailors, that is. It was well arranged so that the American seamen could get nothing out of it. Dr. Holmes was asked to speak and I was asked to sing; but we declined to perform. We did write our names on the programmes, however, and as these sold for a considerable price, we added to the fund in spite of our intentions.

My first season in Boston--from which I have strayed so far so many times--was destined to be a brief one, but also very strenuous, due to the fact that in the beginning I had only two operas in my _repertoire_, one of which Boston did not approve. After _Linda_, I was rushed on in Bellini's _I Puritani_ and had to "get up in it" in three days. It went very well, and was followed with _La Sonnambula_ by the same composer and after only one week's rehearsal. I was a busy girl in those weeks; and I should have been still busier if opera in America had not received a sudden and tragic blow.

The "vacillating" Buchanan's reign was over. On March 4th Lincoln was inaugurated. A hush of suspense was in the air:--a hush broken on April 12th by the shot fired by South Carolina upon Fort Sumter. On April 14th Sumter capitulated and Abraham Lincoln called for volunteers. The Civil War had begun.

CHAPTER VI

WAR TIMES

At first the tremendous crisis filled everyone with a purely impersonal excitement and concern; but one fine morning we awoke to the fact that our opera season was paralysed.

The American people found the actual dramas of Bull Run, Big Bethel and Harpers Ferry more absorbing than any play or opera ever put upon the boards, and the airs of _Yankee Doodle_ and _The Girl I Left Behind Me_ more inspiring than the finest operatic _arias_ in the world. They did not want to go to the theatres in the evening. They wanted to read the bulletin boards. Every move in the big game of war that was being played by the ruling powers of our country was of thrilling interest, and as fast as things happened they were "posted."

Maretzek "the Magnificent," so obstinate that he simply did not know how to give up a project merely because it was impossible, packed a few of us off to Philadelphia to produce the _Ballo in Maschera_. We hoped against hope that it would be light enough to divert the public, at even that tragic moment. But the public refused to be diverted. Why I ever sang in it I cannot imagine. I weighed barely one hundred and four pounds and was about as well suited to the part of Amelia as a sparrow would have been. I never liked the _role_; it is heavy and uncongenial and altogether out of my line. I should never have been permitted to do it, and I have always suspected that there might have been something of a plot against me on the part of the Italians. But all this made no difference, for we abandoned the idea of taking the opera out on a short tour. We could plainly see that opera was doomed for the time being in America.

Then Maretzek bethought himself of _La Figlia del Reggimento_, a military opera, very light and infectious, that might easily catch the wave of public sentiment at the moment. We put it on in a rush. I played the Daughter and we crowded into the performance every bit of martial feeling we could muster. I learned to play the drum, and we introduced all sorts of military business and bugle calls, and altogether contrived to create a warlike atmosphere. We were determined to make a success of it; but we were also genuinely moved by the contagious glow that pervaded the country and the times, and to this combined mood of patriotism and expediency we sacrificed many artistic details. For example, we were barbarous enough to put in sundry American national airs and we had the a.s.sistance of real Zouaves to lend colour; and this reminds me that about the same period Isabella Hinckley even sang _The Star Spangled Banner_ in the middle of a performance of _Il Barbiere_.

Our attempt was a great success. We played Donizetti's little opera to houses of frantic enthusiasm, first in Baltimore, then in Was.h.i.+ngton on May the third, where naturally the war fever was at its highest heat.

The audiences cheered and cried and let themselves go in the hysterical manner of people wrought up by great national excitements. Even on the stage we caught the feeling. I sang the Figlia better than I had ever sung anything yet, and I found myself wondering, as I sang, how many of my cadet friends of a few months earlier were already at the front.

[Ill.u.s.tration: =Clara Louise Kellogg as Figlia=

From a photograph by Black & Case]

I felt very proud of these friends when I read the despatches from the front. They all distinguished themselves, some on one side and some on the other. Alec McCook was Colonel of the 1st Ohio Volunteers, being an Ohio man by birth, and did splendid service in the first big battle of the war, Bull Run. He was made Major-General of Volunteers later, I believe, and always held a prominent position in American military affairs. From Fort Pulaski came word of Lieutenant Horace Porter who, though only recently graduated, was in command of the battlements there.

He was speedily brevetted Captain for "distinguished gallantry under fire," and after Antietam he was sent to join the Army of the Ohio. He was everywhere and did everything imaginable during the war--Chattanooga, Chickamauga, the Battle of the Wilderness--and was General Grant's _aide-de-camp_ in some of the big conflicts. McCreary and young Huger I heard less of because they were on the other side; but they were both brave fellows and did finely according to their convictions. It is odd to recall that Huger's father, General Isaac Huger, had fought for the Union in the early wars and yet turned against her in the civil struggle between the blues and the greys. The Hugers were South Carolinians though, and therefore rabid Confederates.

With the war and its many memories, ghosts will always rise up in my recollection of Custer, the "Golden Haired Laddie,"--as his friends called him. He was a good friend of mine, and after the war was over he used to come frequently to see me and tell me the most wonderful, thrilling stories about it, and of his earliest fights with the Indians.

He was a most vivid creature; one felt a sense of vigour and energy and eagerness about him; and he was so brave and zealous as to make one know that he would always come up to the mark. I never saw more magnificent enthusiasm. He was not thirty at that time and when on horseback, riding hard, with his long yellow hair blowing back in the wind, he was a marvellously striking figure. He was not really a tall man, but looked so, being a soldier. Oh, if I could only remember those stories of his--stories of pluck and of danger and of excitement!

It has always been a matter of secret pride with me that, in my small way, I did something for the Union too. I heard that our patriotic and inartistic _Daughter of the Regiment_ caused several lads to enlist. I do not know if this were true, but I hoped so at the time, and it might well have been so.

I had a dresser, Ellen Conklin, who had some strange and rather ghastly tales to tell of the slave trade in the days before the war. She had been in other opera companies, small troupes, that sang their way from the far South, and the primitive and casual manner of their travel had offered many opportunities for her to visit any number of slave markets.

She frequently had been harrowed to the breaking point by the sight of mothers separated from their children, and men and women who loved each other being parted for life. The worst horror of it all had been to her the examining of the female slaves as to their physical equipment, in which the buyers were more often brutal than not. Ellen was Irish and emotional; and it tore her heart out to see such things; but she kept on going to the slave sales just the same.

[Ill.u.s.tration: =General Horace Porter=

From a photograph by Pach Bros.]

"They nearly killed me, Miss," she declared to me with tears in her eyes, "but I could never resist one!"

Though I quite understood Ellen's emotions, I found it a little difficult to understand why she invited them so persistently. But I have learned that this is a very common human weakness--luckily for managers who put on harrowing plays. Many people go to the theatre to cry. When I sang Mignon the audience always cried and wiped its eyes; and I felt convinced that many had come for exactly that purpose. Two women I know once went to see Helena Modjeska in _Adrienne Lecouvreur_ and, when the curtain fell, one of them turned to the other with streaming eyes and gasped between her choking sobs:

"L--l--let's come--(sob)--again--(sob)--t--t--to-morrow night! (sob, sob)."

Personally, I think there are occasions enough for tears in this life, bitter or consoling, without having somebody on the stage draw them out over fict.i.tious joys and sorrows.

In the beginning of the war the feeling against the negroes was really more bitter in the North than in the South. The riots in New York were a scandal and a disgrace, although very few people have any idea how bad they actually were. The Irish Catholics were particularly rabid and a.s.serted openly, right and left, that the freeing of the slaves would mean an influx of cheap labour that would become a drug on the market.

It was an Irish mob that burned a coloured orphan asylum, after which taste of blood the most innocent black was not safe. Perfectly harmless coloured people were hanged to lamp-posts with impunity. No one ever seemed to be punished for such outrages. The time was one of open lawlessness in New York City. The Irish seem sometimes to be peculiarly possessed by this unreasoning and hysterical mob spirit which, as Ruskin once pointed out, they always manage to justify to themselves by some high abstract principle or sentiment. A story that has always seemed to me ill.u.s.trative of this is that of the Hibernian contingent that hanged an unfortunate Jew because his people had killed Jesus Christ and, when reminded that it had all happened some time before, replied that "that might be, but they had only just heard of it!" It is a singularly significant story, with much more truth than jest in it. Years later, I recollect that those Irish riots in New York over the negro question served as the basis for some exceedingly heated arguments between an English friend of mine at Aix-les-Bains and a Catholic priest living there. The priest sought to justify them, but his reasonings have escaped me.

At the time of these riots our New York home was on Twenty-second Street where Stern's shop now stands. We rented it from the Bryces, Southerners, who had a coloured coachman, a fact that made our residence a target for the animosity of our more ignorant neighbours who lived in the rear. The house was built with a foreign porte-cochere; and, time and again, small mobs would throng under that porte-cochere, battering on the door and trying to break in to get the coachman. The hanging of a negro near St. John's Chapel was an occasion for rejoicing and festivity, and the lower cla.s.s Irish considered it a time for their best clothes. One hears of bear-baiting and bull-fights. But think of the barbarity of all this!

Once, when we went away for a day or two, we left Irish servants in the house and, on returning, I found that the maids had been wearing my smartest gowns to view the riots and lynchings. A common lace collar was pinned to one of my French dresses and I had little difficulty in getting the waitress to admit that she had worn it. She explained _navely_ that the riots were gala occasions, "a great time for the Irish." She added that she had met my father on the stairs and had been afraid that he would recognise the dress; but, although she was penitent enough about "borrowing" the finery, she did not in the least see anything odd in her desire to dress up for the tormenting of an unfortunate fellow-creature.

Everybody went about singing Mrs. Howe's _Battle Hymn of the Republic_ and it was then that I first learned that the air--the simple but rousing little melody of _John Brown's Body_--was in reality a melody by Felix Mendelssohn. Martial songs of all kinds were the order of the day and all more cla.s.sic music was relegated to the background for the time being. It was not until the following winter that public sentiment subsided sufficiently for us to really consider another musical season.