“That’s no matter. Who is she?”
“She says her name is something like Sarah Bernhard,” said the man.
“Good God!” said Forbes, wilting. “Give her the train.”
In my student days there were two “gags” on Sarah. One was, “Yesterday an open carriage drove up to the Théâtre Français out of which got Sarah Bernhardt.” The other was a caricature of Sarah and Sarcey, the critic; she taking fattening, and he anti-obesity, pills. While he is interviewing her one of his pills falls out of the box and is eaten by Sarah’s pet tiger, which is crouched beside her on the floor. The tiger immediately becomes a rug. Sarah screams and gives it one of her pills; it becomes a tiger again.
Duse is a direct contrast, at least to an outside observer, to Sarah. I was walking in Union Square, approaching the place where Tiffany used to be, when out of the door came a somewhat elegant, but modest-appearing figure in black, moving swiftly toward a private carriage at the curb. Something about her seemed familiar and I recognized Duse. Then I saw, to my astonishment, that she was lame. She did not impress me at all on the street, but on the stage she is the finest woman actor I have ever seen. Just realize the physical handicap—you never see it behind the footlights.
What a marvelous quality she gets out of that death-bed scene in “Camille”—her simple nightgown, her expression while waiting for the nurse to leave the room that she might reach under the bolster and get a letter from “him,” the tragedy of her face as her fingers do not find it, and the breaking of the sky after the storm. Her hand had touched it! My respect rose for the great simplicity of this Italian actress.
Duse’s Armand throws everything at her when he begins to think she cares for material things alone. I was telling this in The Players, when an actor, since knighted by the British government, said when he was acting Armand, he threw the bag of gold at her. Imagine a “bag” of gold. In my first days in Paris I saw the effects of the woman Dumas used for the heroine of “Camille” sold at auction.
Duse seemed to me a failure in “Magda.” It had a northern humor that required a Modjeska to sense. The second meeting with the former lover, the country baron, which has always been such a tragedy to most actresses, produced in Modjeska nothing but amusement and a sense of irony. She had the most beautiful hands and arms I ever saw. I once sent her a sonnet about them, and, although it was ten years later before I met her, she remembered it, saying that I was the only man who had discovered the secret of her appeal to her public. Even when she was old and played “La Bataille des Dames,” her arms spoke to the audience and expressed what she wished.
I have met few actresses and have been behind the scenes in the theater only once or twice in my lifetime. Aside from paying my respects to that superb raconteur, Madame Yvette Guilbert, painting a portrait of the fascinating Nazimova, meeting Ellen Terry at tea, and being kissed by the beautiful Maxine Elliott for saying she was a better actor than her husband, I have come into personal contact with only one other—an American.
One rainy March day, while walking down Thirty-sixth Street when The Lambs was in that delightful house that Stanford White built, a closed carriage stopped between me and a Dutch stoop and a young woman got out. She looked up in the air, annoyed, and was going to scuttle up the steps, when I stepped forward to put my umbrella over her. I would have done the same for a washerwoman. She took my arm like a thoroughbred, and I saw her to her door. I had hardly gotten back to the walk when a boy from The Lambs, opposite, came up, saying, “Some gentlemen in the club wish to see you, sir.” I crossed over and went upstairs to confront a line of men drawn up in martial order. There were twenty of them at least, who saluted, chanting: