MELBA'S MEMOIRS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19218, 6 January 1926, Page 6

MELBA'S MEMOIRS.

LOS ANGELES. RETURN TO ENGLAND. (Copyright). CHATTER XXYni.—(Continued). How charming this littlo colony of film stars was! I havo memories of it very different from the lurid pictures of drugged, abandoned orgies to which wo havo recently been treated by the moro sonsational sections of tho press. I have never met, for example, a move delightful couplo, moro utterly unsophisticated than Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. I don't think they had been long married when they came my way, and they were so wrapped up in one another that sometimes Mary would stop in the middlo of a sentence, look shyly at her husband who was probably leaping over a wall or jumping a hedge, and say softly, " Isn't he wonderful ?" In spite of tho colossal sums of money ■which these two young geniuses were earning, thoy were entirely devoid of affectation. I shall never forget a little episode which occurred when Lady Susan asked Mary Pickford for a photograph. " Of course," she said, and ran to a bureau where thero was a stock of photographs six feet high, all waiting to bo despatched to ardont admirers. She chose a particularly nice one. " Would you liko me to sign it for you ?" " Please," said Lady Susan. 1 Mary dipped the pen in tho ink. There was a pause, and sho frowned prettily. Tlion sho looked up shyly at Lady Susan, and said, very seriously: " Would you please tell mo how to writo your name? You see—l'm not used to meeting Royalty." In tho same spirit of complete simplicity, sho told us how, when sho had becu asked to go to New York to meet President Wilson, her great ambition was that her mother should go too, and how sho had spent hours in discussing what would bo the most suitable dresses for them both to wear. I never heard if Mrs. Pickford went, but I hope so, for she was a charming woman. Our last day in Los Angeles was again spent with Charlie Chaplin. Lady Susan had discovered, to her great joy, that in a tiny cottage by the sea there was living an old woman rejoicing in the name of Kitty, who had long teen in tho service of tho Hardwicke family o,nd who had actually nursed her whon sho was a baby. This news was communicated to Charlie Chaplin, who was thrilled, "Wo must go down and havo tea with Kitty," he said, and leapt away to send tho old lady a wire. I havo never seen him moro delightfully happy than at this reunion. The old lady, who was liko a lovely, faded picture among her roses and her pot? and pans, was in tho seventh heaven at the visit. To receive a visit not only from little Lady Susan, but also from two other " lesser celebrities," was almost itnoro than sho coold bear, and sho had provided' a tea that would have satisfied the requirements of a small army. Charlie was determined, that she should not bo disappointed, and partook of bread and butter, eggs, rock cake and steaming cups of tea, until I feared for his health. Finally, when he could eat no more, ho sat back and munched lumps of sugar, watching us, I well believe, with tears in his eyes. The visit I am glad to say had the happiest results, for, shortly afterwards.,, Kitty was reinstated in England, to spend the T est of her days in the heart- of the Hardwicke family, whose interests she had always served so loyally. CHAPTER XXIX. And now for England again. I do not suppose I shall ever recapture the same thrill which I experienced when, the war ever, I started on my journey for home. It was with a feeling almost of fear that I looked forward to the future, fear, not for myself but for England. What would England be like ? Would my friends still remember me ? Would there still be any smiles loft in the streets ? Would there still be any of that old gaiety which we had so loved in tho days of the London that had gone 1 Or would the whole country be given up to mourning—the ghost of its former self ? All these questions were running through my head as I eventually went on board tho liner in New York. It was in January, of 1919, one of the coldest months that have ever been known. And as I entered my cabin I noticed that all the windows had been broken in it. I went outside and walked down the decks noticing on overj- hand evidences of tho rough usages to which the vessel had recently bee;. put. The paint was old and chipped, the chairs were rocky, the decks were laceratod, there was none of that feeling Which one used to have of being on board some wonderful floating hotel. I found the steward, and told him of my predicament, which ho seemed to take quite as a matter of course, and with an encouraging smile he said that ho would clear out of his own cabin for me. And so I slept in that. When I arrived at Liverpool it was almost as much as I could do to prevent myself from breaking down altogether. Almost as I stepped on to the deck, from the grey and desolato sky overhead, a few tiny flakes of snow were drifting down, and it seemed to mo by some queer twist of the brain that this was intended i as a welcome. English snow! What | memories it brought back; memories stretching right back to the days when as a young singer I had looked out with wondering eyes from the window of <a hansorn cab, as I trotted through the first snowstorm I had ever known, on my way to a concert. And now I put out my hand and took on the tip of my finger one of the flakes which had landed on my fur, and ate it. I shall never forget to this day the cool tang of that northern snow and the sudden feeling of " getting back " that it gave me. I knew, of course, that London would be changed. I recalled with a sudden shock my last birthday party which I had given in May, 1914, when tho Marquis do Several, Count Mensdorff, Mrs. Hwfa Williams Lady de Grey, and so many others had been present. There had been in all some twenty men, of whom sixteen were eligible for military services, and as I ran through their names in my head I discovered that of these sixteen, ten had been killed. And how well I remember Lady Juliet Duff and her husband dancing together, with an expression of such happiness on their faces. He was one of tho first to go. But London! It was not until I had been for several days in London that J realised the yawning gulf which separated this new. untidy, haphazard metropolis, so grey and so strange from the London which I had known. "Don't you find London very dirty," said the Queen to me on the first occasion when I had tho honour of seeing Her Majesty at Buckingham Palace after the War. And I was forced to admit that I did. It is an ironic comment on the frailty of human nature that the change should be most graphically brought homo to me by a simple question of focd. Adelina, Duchess of Bedford rang me up a day or two after my arrival and asked me to lnnch at a restaurant. No sooner had we sat down to lunch than she produced two little 1 go'd pots and placed them with a a*, gesture of triumph before hor on tho table. n

"Whatever are these?" I said, because, I am a curious individual, and want to know what is going on in the world. , "Ah!" said the Duchess. "That s something you won't often see in London." "Reallv," I exclaimed. "Do let me look." ' Very gravely she took off the lids of the two little pots and disclosed a small piece of butter and sugar. I looked at her in astonishment. Had everybody gone mad ? What I saw before me was obviously sugar and butter, and yet it was being produced as though it were some rare delicacy. Then I remembered, and the memory made me almost cry. In Australia, and in America, we had had as much butter, as much sugar, as much everything as we wanted, and the delight on the faces of those around mo at being greeted with such a simple commodity was infinitely pathetic. That lunch was full of surprises. Wo had paper table napkins, and when eventually coffee was served, the maitro d'hotel discovered to his consternation that the restaurant had no sugar spoons. I think that was what hit his honest heart as hardly ns anything else; but he arose to tho emergency and gave us salt spoons instead.

I remember going back to my club in Dover street after that lunch and asking myself: Is there anything I can do to help London to regain something of its old charm ? Is there any way in which I can try to make people forget ? And it was really this feeling that was uppermost in my mind when later on I accepted the honour of opening tho Covent Garden, after tho War. That first night at Covent Garden will always stand out ns one of the supreme memories of my life. To drivo to the old stage door, to walk upstairs and down the long corridor to a dressing room at the end of the passage; to sit down before tho same mirror, to make up again; to put on once more the simple dress of Mimi—all as though nothing had happened, as though I had only been away for a holiday—and yet, to feel around me, in every shadow cast by the lights, in every bustling noise outside the door, in tho very air that 1 breathed—ghosts. "It is not you," I said to myself as I peered into tho glass. "It cannot bo Melba. It is somebody else. So many have gone, and so many new faces havo come—-it can't be that you havo remained." I am standing outside tho door of the attic in which the students of Bohemo havo been making revel. From inside you can hear Rudolpno ;-ing his phrase " non sono in vena," followed by the sudden sweeping change of key in the orchestra. And then I am mechanically finding myself singing Scusi! And I open the door, to step once more on that stage which has been for me the scene of so much that is wonderful in life. Rudolpho runs forward and gives me his arm, and I sink into the chair, the candle dropping from my hand, a few phrases coming from long habit to my lips. But it is more than tho simulated exhaustion of Mimi, the little seamstress, which has gripped me now. For I find myself looking into the great space of the auditorium, and feeling once again that I am singing to an audience of ghosts. Lady do Grey had gone, Alfred de Rothschild had gone. Several, the Beresfords, all gone; and yet I felt them there, I seemed in my imagination to see their faces again, looking out from the Shadows in their boxes, and it was for them, rather than for this great audience, that I sang. It was that night at Covent Garden which made mo realise the full extent to which London had changed. It is true that I could rememberino occasions on which I received, in the professional sense of the word, a greater ovation. No occasion, indeed, on which I have ever. been more satisfied, as far as one ever is satisfied, with my performance. But though there was as much, if not more, enthusiasm than before, thero was so little of the old brilliance. Can you imagine in the old days, men walking into Covent Garden on a Melba night, or cn any other night, and sitting in the stalls, in shabby tweed coats? Yes, that is whai I saw on this night, and though I have no objection to brown tweed coats, or to shabbiness, I could not help feeling a sensation almost of resentment that men who could afford to pay for stalls, could not also afford to wear the proper clothes. It was not, however, so much a mere question of material things, but a question of spirit. London just then, to one who had known it at its best and come back to see it at its worst, provided a constant succession of shocks, and none were more startling than in the realm of art. I have often wished when I heard some young singers to whom God has given divine voices, uttering songs which they have obviously not studied, slipshod in phrasing, in breathing, in' the very spirit even of the words, that they, too, might have had, as I did, a course of Marchesi. She at least would have taught them that no one is an artist who has not taken infinite pains, that there is no other sure road to success, and that detail, detail, detail, must be the rule by which their lives are guided. You cannot take art flippantly, and flippancy seems just at the moment to be the order of the day. I think that tho most flippant and the most idiotic remark I ever heard in my life was made by an American woman, not long ago, about Covent Garden. Imagining that she was being c'iever, she turned to me and said: "I always think Covent Garden rather like a Punch and Judy show." It may surprise you to learn that I refrained from giving her a smack on tho face, and merely countered her with another flippancy, in which I referred to the boxes" at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York as bearing a distinct resemblance to brass bedsteads. (To-morrow: Simplicity of Royalty.)