"I did not make enough on Faust to pay for one," was the bitter answer.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE SEASON WITH LUCCA
AFTER the London season and before returning to America we went to Switzerland for a brief holiday. During this little trip there occurred a pleasing and somewhat quaint incident. On the Grünewald Glacier we met a young Italian-Swiss mountaineer who earned his living by making echoes from the crags with a big horn and by the national art of yodeling. There was one particular echo which was the pride of the region and, the day we were exploring the glacier, he did not call it forth as well as usual. Although he tried several times, we could distinguish very little echo. Finally, acting on a sudden impulse, I stood up in our carriage and yodeled for him, ending with a long trill. The high, pure air exhilarated me and made me feel that I could do absolutely anything in the world with my voice, and I actually struck one or two of the highest and strongest notes that I ever sang in my life and one of the best trills. The echoes came rippling back to us with wonderful effect.
The young mountaineer took off his Tyrolean hat and bowed to me deeply.
"Ah, mademoiselle!" he said, "if I could call into being such an echo, my fortune here would be made!"
Our stay there was all too short to please me and the day soon came for us to start for home. We crossed on the Cuba of the Cunard Line, and a very poor steamer she was. It was not in the least an interesting trip. There was no social intercourse, because all the passengers were too seasick to talk or even to listen. It seemed to them like a personal affront for anyone not to succumb to mal de mer.
"You mean thing," one woman said to me, "why aren't you seasick!"
Our passenger list was, however, a somewhat striking one. Rubenstein and Wieniawski were on board and Clara Doria; Mark Smith, the actor; Edmund Yeats and Maddox, the editor whom I had known in London, and, of course, Pauline Lucca. She was registered as the Baroness von Raden and had her baby with her—the one generally believed to have a royal father—and, with her baby and her seasickness, was very much occupied. Her father and mother accompanied her. Lucca, as we know, had been a ballerina. Her toes were all twisted and deformed by her early years of dancing. She once showed them to me, a pitiful record of the triumphs of a ballet dancer. There was something of the ballerina in her temperament, also, which she never entirely outgrew. Certainly she was far from being a prima donna type. An irresistible sense of fun made her a most amusing companion; and her charm lay largely in her unexpectedness. One never could guess what she was going to do or say next. I recall an incident that occurred a little later in Chicago that illustrates this. A very handsome music critic—I will not mention his name—came behind the scenes one night to see us. He was a grave young man, with a brown beard and beautiful eyes, and his appearance gave a vague sense of familiarity as if we had seen it in some well-known picture. Yet I could not place the resemblance. Lucca stood off at a little distance studying him owlishly for a minute or two as he was chatting to me in the wings. Presently she whisked up to him with her brown eyes dancing and, looking up at him in the drollest way, said laughingly:
"And how do you do, my Jesus Christ!"
On this voyage home I saw more or less of Edmund Yeats who kept us amused with a steady flow of witty talk and who kept up an equally steady flow of brandy and soda, and of Maddox who was not seasick and was willing to both walk and talk. Maddox was an interesting man, with many strange stories to tell of things and people famous and well-known. Among other personalities we discussed Adelaide Neilson, whose real name, by the way, was Mary Ann Rogers. I was speaking of her refinement and pretty manners on the stage, her gracious and yet unassuming fashion of accepting applause, and her general air of good breeding, when Maddox told me, to my great astonishment, that this was more remarkable than I could possibly imagine since the charming actress had come from the most disadvantageous beginnings. She had, in fact, led a life that is generally characterised as "unfortunate" and it was while she was in this life that Maddox first met her, and, finding the girl full of ambition and aspirations toward something higher, had put her in the way of cultivating herself and her talents. These facts as told me by Maddox have always remained in my mind, not in the least to Neilson's discredit, but quite the reverse, for they only make her charming and artistic achievements all the more admirable. I have always enjoyed watching her. She was always just diffident enough without being self-conscious. It used to be pretty to see her from a box where I could look at her behind the scenes compose herself before taking a curtain call. She would slip into the mood of the part that she had just been playing and that she wished still to suggest to the audience. Which reminds me that Henry Irving once told me that he and Miss Terry did exactly this same thing. "We always try to keep within the picture even after the act is over," he said. "An actor should never take his call in his own character, but always in that which he has been personating."