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French, with gestures. Emilie, questioned, piped that she was glad to be there. Yvonne said she remembered meeting the King & Queen there three years before. Then, with grave determination, they all sang There'll Always Be An England in English.
Finale: Emilie marched onstage uniformed as a sailor, Cecile as an airman, Annette as a soldier, Yvonne as a member of the RCAF women's division, Marie as a member of the Women's Army Corps. Backed up by a towering line of Royal Canadian Mounted Police they sang 0 Canada; presently they raised the Union Jack, stood rigidly at attention, and saluted the flag as the curtain rolled down.
Past Masters
Back into the capital of the concert world, Manhattan's Carnegie Hall, for the first time since a truck cracked his skull in the spring of 1941, entered grey-mopped, 67-year-old Fritz Kreisler. With his accustomed dogged melancholy he plunged into his first number; critics aware of his long illness held tight, but presently relaxed. At concert's end Carnegie Hall shouted itself hoarse.
Bald, barrel-chested, bushy-browed Friedrich Schorr announced that this season—his 19th—was his last as the Metropolitan Opera's leading Wagnerian baritone. The 54-year-old "Boss of Valhalla," who has probably played Wotan more times (250) than any other singer, retired to teach.
To an old whisper newly resurrected, Vegetarian George Bernard Shaw made public response. The whisper: he had innocently been eating beef juice in his salad for years. "A very old lie—too stale now to be swallowed," declared the 86-year-old playwright. "I had difficulty preventing two ladies who cooked for me from suing the papers in which it appeared, and it still infuriates my consort."