The Primadonna | Page 5

living many years with the celebrated Madame Bonanni,
who was a whirlwind, an earthquake, a phenomenon, a cosmic force.
No one who had lived with her in her stage days had ever grown fat; it
was as much as a very strong constitution could do not to grow thin.
Madame Bonanni had presented the cadaverous woman to the young
Primadonna as one of the most precious of her possessions, and out of
sheer affection. It was true that since the great singer had closed her
long career and had retired to live in the country, in Provence, she
dressed with such simplicity as made it possible for her to exist without
the long-faithful, all-skilful, and iron-handed Alphonsine; and the maid,
on her side, was so thoroughly a professional theatrical dresser that she
must have died of inanition in what she would have called private life.
Lastly, she had heard that Madame Bonanni had now given up the
semblance, long far from empty, but certainly vain, of a waist, and
dressed herself in a garment resembling a priest's cassock, buttoned in
front from her throat to her toes.
Alphonsine locked the door, and the Primadonna leaned her elbows on
the sordid toilet-table and stared at her chalked and painted face,
vaguely trying to recognise the features of Margaret Donne, the
daughter of the quiet Oxford scholar, her real self as she had been two
years ago, and by no means very different from her everyday self now.
But it was not easy. Margaret was there, no doubt, behind the paint and
the 'liquid white,' but the reality was what the public saw beyond the
footlights two or three times a week during the opera season, and
applauded with might and main as the most successful lyric soprano of
the day.
There were moments when she tried to get hold of herself and bring
herself back. They came most often after some great emotion in the
theatre, when the sight of the painted mask in the glass shocked and
disgusted her as it did to-night; when the contrasts of life were almost
more than she could bear, when her sensibilities awoke again, when the

fastidiousness of the delicately nurtured girl revolted under the rough
familiarity of such a comrade as Stromboli, and rebelled against the
sordid cynicism of Schreiermeyer.
She shuddered at the mere idea that the manager should have thought
she would drink out of the glass he had just used. Even the Italian
peasant, who had been a goatherd in Calabria, and could hardly write
his name, showed more delicacy, according to his lights, which were
certainly not dazzling. A faint ray of Roman civilisation had reached
him through generations of slaves and serfs and shepherds. But no such
traditions of forgotten delicacy disturbed the manners of Schreiermeyer.
The glass from which he had drunk was good enough for any
primadonna in his company, and it was silly for any of them to give
themselves airs. Were they not largely his creatures, fed from his hand,
to work for him while they were young, and to be turned out as soon as
they began to sing false? He was by no means the worst of his kind, as
Margaret knew very well.
She thought of her childhood, of her mother and of her father, both
dead long before she had gone on the stage; and of that excellent and
kind Mrs. Rushmore, her American mother's American friend, who had
taken her as her own daughter, and had loved her and cared for her, and
had shed tears when Margaret insisted on becoming a singer; who had
fought for her, too, and had recovered for her a small fortune of which
her mother had been cheated. For Margaret would have been more than
well off without her profession, even when she had made her _début_,
and she had given up much to be a singer, believing that she knew what
she was doing.
But now she was ready to undo it all and to go back; at least she
thought she was, as she stared at herself in the glass while the pale
maid drew her hair back and fastened it far above her forehead with a
big curved comb, as a preliminary to getting rid of paint and powder.
At this stage of the operation the Primadonna was neither Cordova nor
Margaret Donne; there was something terrifying about the
exaggeratedly painted mask when the wig was gone and her natural
hair was drawn tightly back. She thought she was like a monstrous

skinned rabbit with staring brown eyes.
At first, with the inexperience of youth, she used to plunge her painted
face into soapsuds and scrub vigorously till her own complexion
appeared, a good deal overheated and temporarily shiny; but before
long