Our next stop was Cincinnati—Cincinnata, as it was called! I had there one of the shocks of my life. The leading newspaper of the city, in commenting on our concert, said of me that "this young girl's parents ought to remove her from public view, do her up in cotton wool, nourish her well, and not allow her to appear again until she looks less like a picked chicken"!
No one said anything about my voice! Indeed, I got almost no encouragement before we reached Detroit, and I recall that I cried a good part of the way between the two cities over my failure in Cincinnati. But in Detroit Colson was taken ill, so I had a chance to do the prima donna work of the occasion. And I profited by the chance, for it was in Detroit that an audience first discovered that I had some nascent ability.
I must have been an odd, young creature—just five feet and four inches tall, and weighing only one hundred and four pounds. I was frail and big-eyed, and wrapped up in music (not cotton wool), and exceedingly childlike for my age. I knew nothing of life, for my puritanical surroundings and the way in which I had been brought up were developing my personality very slowly.
That was a hard tour. Indeed, all tours were hard in those days. Travelling accommodations were limited and uncomfortable, and most of the hotels were very bad. Trains were slow, and connections uncertain, and of course there was no such thing as a Pullman or, much less, a dining-car. Sometimes we had to sit up all night and were not able to get anything to eat, not infrequently arriving too late for the meal hour of the hotel where we were to stop. The journeys were so long and so difficult that they used to say Pauline Lucca always travelled in her nightgown and a black velvet wrapper.
All through that tour, as during every period of my life, I was working and studying and practising and learning: trying to improve my voice, trying to develop my artistic consciousness, trying to fit myself in a hundred ways for my career. Work never frightened me; there was always in me the desire to express myself—and to express that self as fully and as variously as I might have opportunity for doing.
It sometimes seems to me that one of the strangest things in this world is the realisation that there is never time to perfect everything in us; that we carry seeds in our souls that cannot flower in one short life. Perhaps Paradise will be a place where we can develop every possibility and become our complete selves.
In one's brain and one's soul lies the power to do almost anything. I believe that the psychological phenomena we hear so much about are nothing but undiscovered forces in ourselves. I am not a spiritualist. I do not care for so-called supernatural manifestations. Many of my friends have been interested in such matters, and I was taken to the celebrated "Stratford Knockings" and other mediumistic demonstrations when I was a mere child; but it has never seemed to me that the marvels I encountered came from an outside spiritual agency. I believe, profoundly, that, one and all, they are the workings of forces in us that we have not yet learned to develop fully nor to use wisely.
I never did anything in my life without study. The ancient axiom that "what is worth doing at all is worth doing well" is more of a truth than most people understand. The thing that one has chosen for one's life work in the world:—what labour could be too great for it, or what too minute?
When I knew that I was to make my début as Gilda, in Verdi's opera of Rigoletto, I settled down to put myself into that part. I studied for nine months, until I was not certain whether I was really Gilda—or only myself!