The programme was prepared on a principle which she had learned from Giles; not the chronology of composers, but a line of poetic meaning, was the cord on which the beads were strung. And so she had begun with Schubert’s An die Musik, and after that noble apostrophe she plunged straight into Giles’ own Kubla Khan which was certainly tough chewing for a Salterton audience, as it took fifteen minutes to perform and without being in the mode of what Cobbler called “wrong-note modernism” was written in an idiom both contemporary and individual to the composer. Then, as relief, she had sung a group of folksongs of the British Isles as she had learned them from Molloy. The folksongs had stirred the audience to its first real enthusiasm, for they all felt themselves competent judges of such seeming simplicity.

Now an interval, and then a group of three songs which the audience was asked, in a note on the programme, not to applaud. These were the songs which Monica intended as her memorial to her mother. The oak coffin, the five black Buicks at the funeral, and the red granite tombstone, like a chunk of petrified potted meat, which Dad and Alice wanted, were trash. But in these songs she would take her farewell of Ada Gall.

First would be Thomas Campion’s Never weather-beaten Saile. She would follow it with Brahms’ Auf dem Kirchhofe, and if anyone thought it gloomy—well, let them think. And last, Purcell’s Evening Hymn, noble and serene setting of William Fuller’s words. Would any who had known Ma—Dad, for instance, or Aunt Ellen—find the reflection of her spirit which Monica believed to lie in these songs? During the night-watches at her bedside, Monica had thought much about Ma, and about herself. They were, as Ma had said in her last fully rational utterances, much alike. For in Ma, when she told tall stories, when she rasped her family with rough, sardonic jokes, when she rebelled against the circumstances of her life in coarse abuse, and when she cut through the fog of nonsense with the beam of her insight, was an artist—a spoiled artist, one who had never made anything, who was unaware of the nature or genesis of her own discontent, but who nevertheless possessed the artist’s temperament; in her that temperament, misunderstood, denied and gone sour, had become a poison which had turned against the very sources of life itself. Nevertheless, she was like Ma, and she must not go astray as Ma—not wholly through her own fault—had gone. In these songs she would sing of the spirit which might have been her mother’s if circumstances had been otherwise. Alice had not hesitated to say that she had killed their mother by giving in to her wilfulness. Well, it was not true; what was best in her mother should live on, and find expression, in her.

Monica had often heard of singers losing awareness of themselves while facing an audience—of losing the audience, and existing for that time only in their music. She had never quite believed it. But that was her own experience while she sang the three songs which she had, in her own mind, set aside as a memorial to her mother. She was back in the Faculty Room before she emerged from that inner calm. Humphrey Cobbler kissed her on the cheek and—sure sign in him of strong feeling—said not a word, but left her to herself.

Her tribute offered and her final peace made with the spirit, not departed but strongly present, Monica found the remainder of her recital pleasant and, all things considered, easy. She sang a group of settings of poems by John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes and Walter de la Mare which Giles had written for her, and their sombre beauty led the hearers out of the memorial atmosphere which had been created, and left them ready for Berlioz’ Nuits d’été, and the final group of songs, which was four Shakespeare lyrics, in settings by Purcell and Thomas Augustine Arne, which Giles had arranged from the gnomic and scanty original accompaniments. The audience had made up its mind after the memorial songs that it liked Monica—liked her very much and was proud of her—and the applause as she left the stage was warm, and mounting. There were even a few greatly daring, un-Canadian cries of “Bravo!” which Monica attributed, rightly, to Kevin and Alex.

“Sticking to plan?” said Cobbler.

“Yes; go back on the crest of the applause, and one good encore,” said Monica. This was a piece of practical wisdom from Domdaniel; Giles hated encores because they disturbed the shape of his programmes; Molloy believed in singing as long as one delighted listener remained in the hall; the balance lay with Sir Benedict.

So, as the applause mounted for fifty seconds, until there was actually some stamping—stamping in Fallon Hall, and from a stiff-shirt audience at that!—Monica remained out of sight, judging the sound. And when it seemed to her that it would go no higher, she returned to the stage, amid a really gratifying uproar. Ushers moved forward with flowers; a large and uncompromising bunch from the Bridgetower Trustees, a very handsome bunch from Kevin and Alex, a bouquet containing a card which read, “With Love and Pride from the Old Heart and Hope Quarter” (which made Monica blush momentarily, for she had havered a little about inviting the Beamises) and two or three others. Cobbler, greatly enjoying the fun, for such recitals did not often come his way, helped her to pile them all on top of the piano, and she sang her single encore.

“Never sing below your weight in an encore; try to do something you haven’t done earlier in the evening; and try to sing something they’ll like but probably haven’t heard before.” These were the words of Domdaniel, talking to her about public appearances several months before. So Monica had determined to sing Thomas Augustine Arne’s Water Parted.

It was a song which she deeply loved, though Giles laughed at her for it. “ ‘May this be my poison if my bear ever dances but to the very genteelest of tunes—Water Parted, or the minuet in Ariadne’ “,he would say, to her mystification, until one night when he had taken her to the Old Vic to see She Stoops to Conquer, and had nudged her sharply when the line was spoken. But he had prepared an accompaniment for it, for her special use, and had set it in a key which made the best use of what he called her “chalumeau register”, as well as the brilliance of her upper voice.

She sang it very well, though this was the first time she had ever sung it in public. She sang it as well, perhaps, as she ever sang it in her life, though in later years her name was to be much associated with it, and audiences were to demand it in and out of season. She performed that feat, given to gifted singers, of making the song seem better than it was, of bringing to it a personal significance which was not inherent in it. But Monica always protested that the song was great in itself, and that she merely revealed in it what had gone unnoticed by others, too hasty to make a personal appraisal of a song by a composer usually dismissed as not really first-rate. She was already, under Revelstoke’s guidance, developing a faculty of finding worth where others had missed it, and this was to give her repertoire a quality which was the despair of her rivals.

But there, in Fallon Hall, she sang Water Parted for the first time, and lifted her audience to an even greater pitch of enthusiasm.