To my great astonishment sustained applause burst forth. The doctor all the time was gliding around the stage, with quickening steps, and I followed him faster and faster. At last, transfixed in a state of ecstasy, I let myself drop at his feet, completely enveloped in a cloud of the light material.
The audience encored the scene, and then encored it again—so loudly and so often that we had to come back twenty times, or more.
We were on the road about six weeks. Then came our opening in one of the New York suburbs, where Mr. Oscar Hammerstein, who has since become a famous impresario, owned a theatre.
The play was unsuccessful, and even our hypnotism scene was not strong enough to save it from the attacks of the critics. No New York theatre cared to give it house room, and our company broke up.
The day after this opening at Mr. Hammerstein’s theatre a local newspaper of the little community in which we had successfully presented this “Quack, M.D.,” which the New York managers refused to touch, wrote a ridiculously enthusiastic article on what it called my “acting” in the hypnotism scene. But as the play had not “made good,” no one thought that it would be possible to take a single scene out of it, and I was left without an engagement.
Nevertheless, even in New York, and in spite of the failure of the play, I personally secured some good press notices. The newspapers were in agreement in announcing that I had a remarkable string to my bow—if I only knew how to make the most of it.
I had brought my robe home to sew up a little tear. After reading these comforting lines I leaped from the bed and arrayed only in my night-gown, I put the garment on and looked at myself in a large glass, to make sure of what I had done the evening before.
The mirror was placed just opposite the windows. The long yellow curtains were drawn and through them the sun shed into the room an amber light, which enveloped me completely and illumined my gown, giving a translucent effect. Golden reflections played in the folds of the sparkling silk, and in this light my body was vaguely revealed in shadowy contour. This was a moment of intense emotion. Unconsciously I realised that I was in the presence of a great discovery, one which was destined to open the path which I have since followed.
Gently, almost religiously, I set the silk in motion, and I saw that I had obtained undulations of a character heretofore unknown. I had created a new dance. Why had I never thought of it before?
Two of my friends, Mrs. Hoffmann and her daughter Mrs. Hossack, came from time to time to see how I was getting on with my discoveries. When I found an action or a pose which looked as if it might amount to something they would say: “Hold that. Try it again.” Finally I reached a point where each movement of the body was expressed in the folds of silk, in a play of colours in the draperies that could be mathematically and systematically calculated.