Tante

CHAPTER I


It was the evening of Madame Okraska's concert at the old St. James's
Hall. London was still the place of the muffled roar and the endearing
ugliness. Horse-'buses plied soberly in an unwidened Piccadilly. The
private motor was a curiosity. Berlin had not been emulated in an
altered Mall nor New York in the façades of giant hotels. The Saturday
and Monday pops were still an institution; and the bell of the
muffin-man, in such a wintry season, passed frequently along the foggy
streets and squares. Already the epoch seems remote.

Madame Okraska was pausing on her way from St. Petersburg to New York
and this was the only concert she was to give in London that winter. For
many hours the enthusiasts who had come to secure unreserved seats had
been sitting on the stone stairs that led to the balcony or gallery, or
on the still narrower, darker and colder flight that led to the
orchestra from Piccadilly Place. From the adjacent hall they could hear
the strains of the Moore & Burgess Minstrels, blatant and innocuously
vulgar; and the determined mirth, anatomized by distance, sounded a
little melancholy. To those of an imaginative turn of mind it might have
seemed that they waited in a tunnel at one far end of which could be
perceived the tiny memory of tea at an Aerated Bread shop and at the
other the vision of the delights to which they would emerge. For there
was no one in the world like Madame Okraska, and to see and hear her was
worth cold and weariness and hunger. Not only was she the most famous of
living pianists but one of the most beautiful of women; and upon this
restoring fact many of the most weary stayed themselves, returning again
and again to gaze at the pictured face that adorned the outer cover of
the programme.