He came back alone. At first he evaded questions. Then he confessed that these ladies did not expect to rejoin me. I could not, and would not, believe him.
“Very well,” he said. “These are the precise words which the mother uttered while we were on the train. ‘Now that she has started you,’ she said, to her daughter, ‘you have no more use for her.’ To which the daughter replied, ‘Well, I haven’t the least desire to go back to Loie.’”
When these ladies were ready to return to Budapesth they allowed my orchestra leader to go without sending any message to me. I telegraphed to find out if I was not to see them again. My dancer replied with a telegram so worded: “Only in case you will deposit to my credit ten thousand francs in a Viennese bank before nine o’clock to-morrow morning.”
This proceeding was all the more cruel as she knew that I had just lost more than one hundred thousand francs through a Viennese manager who had broken his contract with my Japanese company. Besides, my expenses were very heavy and I was badly embarrassed. After I left Budapesth the dancer came there to fill the engagement I had secured for her. Then she went to Vienna and gave some performances there. I have been told that she went to all the people to whom I had presented her and asked them to take tickets. She thus disposed of seats amounting to some thousands of florins. Everybody was ready to help her, including the wife of the English ambassador and the Princess of Metternich. Above all, I must have gained a reputation as an impostor, for my friend continued to appear in public in what I had called her practising gown.
Some years later at Brussels I learned that my dancer said to somebody who wanted to know whether she was acquainted with Loie Fuller that she did not know me.
XXI
AMERICAN AFFAIRS
A STRANGER, and especially a Frenchman who has never travelled in America simply cannot imagine what our country is like. A Frenchman may get an idea of Germany without having seen it; of Italy, without having been there; of India even, without having visited it. It is impossible for him to understand America as it is.
I had proof of the truth of this observation in certain circumstances that were altogether unexpected. This experience I recall frequently as one that was peculiarly amusing, so amusing indeed that I regard the incident as one of the most comic I have ever encountered.
The hero of the adventure was a young journalist and man about town named Pierre Mortier. One might imagine that from the fact of his profession, which usually gives those who follow it a reasonable smattering of everything, that he would be less liable to surprise and astonishment than some shop assistant or railway employee. The actual occurrences proved the contrary.
But let us view this farce from the rising of the curtain.