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Updated: June 11, 2025
Have you ever heard of Melba or Patti?" "Certainly," answered Margaret, rather wondering at the apparently irrelevant turn the conversation had suddenly taken. "Well, then, in me you behold a future Melba and a Patti rolled into one." "Do you mean that you are a singer?" asked Margaret. "A future Melba Patti Tetrazzini, I should have said," Eleanor returned gravely.
Suppose I substituted 'Faust, for instance, and announced it with Melba as Marguerite, and suppose again that the famous Astralasian prima donna caught an attack of the American grip that same afternoon, it would hardly do to substitute Marie Cahill or May Irwin to take her place, that is, provided we could have induced either of those distinguished artists to become the great diva's substitute.
"Yes; I was at home I dined at home, and, God knows why, I conceived a sudden desire to go to the opera, Melba is the Juliet, and forgetting that you were engaged to the Earlscourts you told me last week that you were going, but I stupidly forgot, I drove across here to ask you to be my companion. Oh, yes, I have been here since since nine, mind that! nine nine ask the servants.
"I wonder," she said, looking at him over the spoonful of pêche Melba which she was going to put in her mouth, "I wonder whether you have the faintest idea who I am and what I am and what I'm doing here all by myself, and why you and I are lunching together in this delightful fashion. You have told me all about yourself but you seem to take me for granted."
What with the pianola going all out, the gramophone giving us Melba records, and the ship's company's gramophone squawking out Harry Lauder's opposition numbers, Ponting cinematographing everything of interest and worthy of pictorial record, little Anton rushing round with nosebags for the ponies, Meares and Dimitri careering with the dog teams over ice, beach, packing cases, and what not, sailors with coloured tam-o'-shanters bobbing around in piratical style, the hot sun beating down and brightening up everything, one might easily have imagined this to be the circus scene, in the great Antarctic joy-ride film.
He had often sung with Melba, and she did this or that, and he had sung with Bonanni and knew exactly how she sang the difficult passages, and he reeled off the precepts and practice of half-a-dozen other lyric sopranos, giving Margaret to understand that he was willing and able to teach her a good deal.
At any time any opera house would have been proud of two such tenors as Caruso and Bonci, or of two such sopranos as Melba and Tetrazzini, while there is no period in which a Sembrich would not have been a rara avis.
Even the dyspeptic forgets his doctor's orders in the general excitement and chases oysters down the narrow stairway of his throat with thick soup, follow thick soup with lobster, and lobster with turkey and turkey with a savoury, and the savoury with a pêche Melba, and at the end of it will not reject cheese and a banana, all of this accompanied with streams of liquid in the form of wine coffee and brandy.
It has frequently come under my notice that players with little facility in other ways, can make a good trill. Some singers have this gift; Mme. Melba is one who never had to study a trill, for she was born with a nightingale in her throat. I knew a young man in London who was evidently born with an aptitude for octaves.
Ella was her dearest friend, and nothing that she had said or done should be dismissed as profitless. What on earth had Ella meant by appearing in that wonderful costume that night? It was not a toilet for the opera, even on a Melba night; even on a "Romeo and Juliet" night, unless, indeed, the wearer meant to appear on the stage as Juliet, was the thought which occurred to the girl.
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