My work on the stage was so fatiguing that when I had finished dancing the mechanicians would carry me to my appartement, which was connected with the theatre. I continued this work for a whole season without being sufficiently well fed to keep up my strength, and being all the while in an appartement the sanitation of which was defective. Therein, I am certain, lay one of the reasons for the progress of my mother’s illness. My health, too, was affected to such an extent that I am no longer able to endure fatigue as I once endured it.
However, it all happened as a result of circumstances, and I have no wish to blame anybody.
The manager of the theatre had given me this appartement and had had it arranged specially for me in order that I might not be obliged to go out into the street, heated with dancing.
Since then I have never returned to Russia, for every time that a journey to that country was mentioned my poor mother trembled with fright, and there was never any question of my undertaking it.
This adventure at least caused me to believe in one thing—inspiration. For if the priest in the railway compartment was not inspired, then what was he?
VIII
SARAH BERNHARDT—THE DREAM AND THE REALITY
I WAS scarcely sixteen years old. I was then playing ingenue roles on the road, when on the theatrical horizon there appeared the announcement that the greatest tragedienne of modern times, Sarah Bernhardt, the most distinguished of French actresses, was about to come to America! What an event! We awaited it with feverish curiosity, for the divine Sarah was not a human being like the rest of us. She was a spirit endowed with genius.
The circumstance which made my heart throb and caused me to shed tears copiously was that I was uncertain of being able to see this wonderful fairy of the stage. I knew beforehand that there would be no seat for one so insignificant as I was. The newspapers were printing column upon column about her, and I read everything that I could get hold of. The papers said that the seats were all bought up, and that not a hundredth part of those who wanted to see her would achieve their ambition. The box office was besieged by speculators. All that, alas! meant that there was scarcely any hope for me. I do not know whether Sarah had visited America before, for I had all along been on the road with little travelling companies in the Western States. So far as I was concerned this was positively her first visit.
At last the famous day arrived. A steamer, with delegations and an orchestra aboard, went down the bay to meet her. All that impressed me greatly. I saw in it genuine homage rendered to genius. She had come at last. She was here. If I could only see her, even from a distance—from a great distance!
But where and how? I did not know, and I kept on reading the papers, fairly intoxicating myself with the articles describing her. It seemed magic, unreality, a fairy tale.