The audience received her cordially, and listened attentively. At the close of the fable of the two pigeons, a passage which she delivered with much charm and tenderness, there was such applause as she had never heard before. After each act she was called out again and again, and at the end of the play received an unprecedented ovation. Even those members of the company who had tried to prevent her appearance were won over by her power, her grace, and her immediate success, and appeared in her dressing-room to congratulate her. Next day all the papers praised her, and during the next week the cards and invitations that formed the tribute of Warsaw society poured in upon her.
Within a few days Modjeska had signed a contract to play at the Imperial Warsaw Theatre the rest of her life, the term of her service to begin in the autumn of 1869, for she had still (in 1868) to complete her season in Cracow. In view of the conditions under which American and English actors, even those of the first rank, are to-day obliged to work, it is interesting to note the terms of Modjeska’s contract at Warsaw. She was to have twenty-five thousand florins[53] a year, four months holiday in each year, eight hundred roubles[54] yearly for gowns, and an annual benefit performance. She was to be permitted to act each year in six new plays of her own choice (a great concession on the part of a conservative management) and was to be expected to appear only three times a week! When she departed for Cracow, the people of Warsaw crowded to the station, throwing flowers into her carriage, and shouting their farewells. The visit to Warsaw had indeed been a triumph.
Count Chlapowski’s interest in a new political party and his editorship of its daily paper in Cracow brought about him and his wife, who after the end of the season in the spring of 1869 laid aside for the moment her theatrical work, a political and literary salon. Poets, patriots, scientific men, artists, all were found at the house of the charming actress and the nobleman-editor[55]. During her three seasons at Cracow she had played one hundred and thirteen parts—an impressive achievement in itself. Modjeska was now expected to act in Warsaw for the rest of her life. Instead, she remained less than seven years.
Her departure was brought about by several causes. It was not long before she became the moving spirit of the whole vast organization. As the extension of the repertoire was largely in her hands, it was to her that translators and authors had to apply. She therefore had considerable responsibility, which she appreciated, concerning the development of the Polish drama. The management found itself deferring to her in all kinds of matters. Moreover, her husband, forced to a choice between his own career and hers, had given up his Cracow interests, and together in Warsaw they soon found themselves the center of social interest. Their salon became an established and brilliant affair. Her domination of an artistic and social world to which she was a newcomer naturally aroused envy, and resulting attempts to make her uncomfortable had their part in wearying her of Warsaw. Then, in her ambition to enlarge and enrich the theatre’s repertoire, she had constantly to combat the autocracy and unintelligence of the Russian censorship. When she wished to produce Hamlet the censor objected to a play in which a King was murdered, as a possible suggestion of disloyal ideas, and it was only when he was shown that the murder was a family affair, not a public assassination, that he reluctantly relented. To another play he objected on the ground that it contained a Polish king, to a Russian an unthinkable person. The king had to be changed to a prince. Covert allusions to the wrongs of Poland were suspected where none existed and even certain words were taboo. A love passage might be suspected to be an apostrophe to the oppressed mother country; the word “slave” was considered objectionable, and “negro” substituted; if a character said: “I love my country and my people,” his affections were transferred by official order to his wife and children, and, in one play the words: “He walked arm in arm with the emperor and whispered in his ear,” were changed to “He walked three steps behind the emperor and whispered in his ear”! Such obstructions to Modjeska’s plans, though often amusing, were oftener maddening.
In 1875 Madame Mouchanoff, the wife of the president of the Warsaw theatre, died. A woman of great refinement, intellect, and force, she had befriended and inspired Modjeska, and the loss of her was severe. In the same year Felix Benda died, another blow, for her half-brother had been a good friend and wise counselor. In the meantime Modjeska had herself had a severe illness. Now, in the spring of 1876, the nervousness induced by her strenuous career on the stage and in society combined with sorrow over the attacks on her and irritation with the censor to induce a melancholy, a pessimism, that brought her to a dangerous state of discouragement and ill-health.
One night the Chlapowskis and their guests were discussing America and the coming Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia. At first in jest, a general emigration to America was suggested. They would have there an ideal community, a care-free natural life far removed from Russian oppression, and Pani Helena[56] could have her much needed rest. The idea took root. The would-be emigrants were thought foolish by most of their friends, but Henryk Sienkiewicz (afterwards the famous author of Quo Vadis?), Count Chlapowski himself, his friends Jules Sypniewski and Lucian Paprocki, were all soon in deadly earnest. California they had heard of as an earthly paradise, where life was idyllic and the earth yielded up not only an easily won living, but fortune.
The suddenly achieved result was that Sienkiewicz sailed for America in a few months, and the others arranged to follow. Modjeska obtained leave of absence from the president of the theatre, who cheerfully expected her to come back, but fixed a forfeit of six thousand roubles if she did not. In June, 1876, she appeared in Warsaw for the last time. There was a great popular demonstration. The house was crowded and to the highest degree enthusiastic. After the performance the audience formed a double rank to the gates of the theatre grounds and shouted their farewells and praises. The public, at least, was with her to the last.[57]
In July, 1876, she sailed from Bremen for New York, with Count Chlapowski, her son Rudolphe, Jules Sypniewski, his wife and two children, and Lucian Paprocki,—a strange band of pilgrims, artists with little but their ideals and comradeship to fit them for pioneering in a strange country, headed by a woman who was giving up a career of grande dame and première artiste for the prospect of life on a farm eight thousand miles or so from the scene of her triumphs!
Modjeska had never seen the ocean, and the voyage of thirteen days was invigorating. Her party spent about a month in New York, making excursions to Philadelphia to see the exposition, where she admired the vegetables and fruits from California, experimented with those dainties new to her, pop-corn and peanuts, and found them tasteless, and visited the art exhibits. New York of 1876 she thought a “monstrous, untidy bazaar.” In August they started for California, taking ship for Panama. She found charming her first glimpse of the tropics, during the railroad trip across the Isthmus, and the three weeks’ voyage on the Pacific went far to restore her vigor and peace of mind.
The impression has been that Modjeska returned to the stage because of the failure of the farming experiment which was now to be made. To a certain extent this is true, but even before she reached California she certainly had vague plans to act again. In a letter from New York she had said: “It seems that I may be able to play in English, but first we must go to California, according to our original plan.... Perhaps after we get established in this new paradise I may pick up enough English to play there, and when I get more mastery over the new language, I may come here; for, however unattractive New York seems to me, it is the metropolis of America, and it will give me pleasure to conquer it.” This was surely forecasting the future. When she reached San Francisco, Edwin Booth was playing there. It was proposed that she act Ophelia in Polish, to his Hamlet. Rather to her relief, Booth, who had never heard of her, declined. She saw him as Antony and as Shylock and of course recognized him as the great actor that he was, though as yet she could not understand English.[58]