Until la Svengali appeared, the world had only known apples—Catalanis, Jenny Linds, Grisis, Albonis, Pattis! The best apples that can be, for sure—but still only apples!
If she had spread a pair of large white wings and gracefully fluttered up to the roof and perched upon the chandelier, she could not have produced a greater sensation. The like of that voice has never been heard, nor ever will be again. A woman archangel might sing like that, or some enchanted princess out of a fairytale.
Little Billee had already dropped his face into his hands and hid his eyes in his pocket-handkerchief; a big tear had fallen on to Taffy’s left whisker; the Laird was trying hard to keep his tears back.
She sang the verse a second time, with but little added expression and no louder; but with a sort of breathy widening of her voice that made it like a broad heavenly smile of universal motherhood turned into sound. One felt all the genial gayety and grace and impishness of Pierrot and Columbine idealized into frolicsome beauty and holy innocence, as though they were performing for the saints in Paradise—a baby Columbine, with a cherub for clown! The dream of it all came over you for a second or two—a revelation of some impossible golden age—priceless—never to be forgotten! How on earth did she do it?
Little Billee had lost all control over himself, and was shaking with his suppressed sobs—Little Billee, who hadn’t shed a single tear for five long years! Half the people in the house were in tears, but tears of sheer delight, of delicate inner laughter.
Then she came back to earth, and saddened and veiled and darkened her voice as she sang the verse for the third time; and it was a great and sombre tragedy, too deep for any more tears; and somehow or other poor Columbine, forlorn and betrayed and dying, out in the cold at midnight—sinking down to hell, perhaps—was making her last frantic appeal! It was no longer Pierrot and Columbine—it was Marguerite—it was Faust! It was the most terrible and pathetic of all possible human tragedies, but expressed with no dramatic or histrionic exaggeration of any sort; by mere tone, slight, subtle changes in the quality of the sound—too quick and elusive to be taken count of, but to be felt with, oh, what poignant sympathy!
When the song was over the applause did not come immediately, and she waited with her kind wide smile, as if she were well accustomed to wait like this; and then the storm began, and grew and spread and rattled and echoed—voice, hands, feet, sticks, umbrellas!—and down came the bouquets, which the little pageboys picked up; and Trilby bowed to front and right and left in her simple débonnaire fashion. It was her usual triumph. It had never failed, whatever the audience, whatever the country, whatever the song.
Little Billee didn’t applaud. He sat with his head in his hands, his shoulders still heaving. He believed himself to be fast asleep and in a dream, and was trying his utmost not to wake; for a great happiness was his. It was one of those nights to be marked with a white stone!
As the first bars of the song came pouring out of her parted lips (whose shape he so well remembered), and her dovelike eyes looked straight over Svengali’s head, straight in his own direction—nay, at him—something melted in his brain, and all his long-lost power of loving came back with a rush.
It was like the sudden curing of a deafness that has been lasting for years. The doctor blows through your nose into your Eustachian tube with a little India-rubber machine; some obstacle gives way, there is a snap in your head, and straightway you hear better than you had ever heard in all your life, almost too well; and all your life is once more changed for you!
At length he sat up again, in the middle of la Svengali’s singing of the “Nussbaum,” and saw her; and saw the Laird sitting by him, and Taffy, their eyes riveted on Trilby, and knew for certain that it was no dream this time, and his joy was almost a pain!
She sang the “Nussbaum” (to its heavenly accompaniment) as simply as she had sung the previous song. Every separate note was a highly finished gem of sound, linked to the next by a magic bond.
You did not require to be a lover of music to fall beneath the spell of such a voice as that; the mere melodic phrase had all but ceased to matter. Her phrasing, consummate as it was, was as simple as a child’s.
It was as if she said: “See! what does the composer count for? Here is about as beautiful a song as was ever written, with beautiful words to match, and the words have been made French for you by one of your smartest poets! But what do the words signify, any more than the tune, or even the language? The ‘Nussbaum’ is neither better nor worse than ‘Mon ami Pierrot’ when I am the singer; for I am Svengali; and you shall hear nothing, see nothing, think of nothing but Svengali, Svengali, Svengali!”
It was the apotheosis of voice and virtuosity! It was il bel canto come back to earth after a hundred years—the bel canto of Vivarelli, let us say, who sang the same song every night to the same King of Spain for a quarter of a century, and was rewarded with a dukedom, and wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.
And, indeed, here was this immense audience, made up of the most cynically critical people in the world, and the most anti-German, assisting with rapt
