She was irresistibly comic at times, full of bubbling gaiety and spirits, and an admirable mimic. Jules Huret wrote, while I was at Paris, an article about her, in which he described this side of her admirably.
“Quand elle veut,” he said, “Sarah est d’un comique extraordinaire, par l’outrance de ses images toujours justes, et la violence imprévue de ses reparties. Cette gaieté de Sarah est bien caractéristique de sa force. C’est évidemment un trop plein de sève qui se résout en joie. Elle a des trouvailles, des mimiques, des répliques, une verve, des silences mêmes, qui font irrésistiblement éclater le rire autour d’elle. Elle imite certains de ses amis avec une vérité comique incroyable.”
What struck me most about her, when I saw her in private life, was her radiant and ever-present common-sense. There was no nonsense about her, no pose, and no posturing. She was completely natural. She took herself as much for granted as being the greatest actress in the world, as Queen Victoria took for granted that she was Queen of England. She took it for granted and passed on. She told me once she had never wished to be an actress—that she had gone on to the stage against her will; she would greatly have preferred to have been a painter, and all her life she continued to model as it was, and did some interesting things in this line, especially some bronze fishes and sea-shapes for which she found models at Belle-Isle, but when she found she had got to be an actress, she said to herself: “If it has got to be, then I will be the first.”
She said she had never got over her nervousness in playing a new part, or for the first time before a new audience; if she felt the audience was friendly, this knowledge half-paralysed her; if, on the other hand, she knew or guessed the audience to be hostile, every fibre in her being tightened for the struggle. She said that first nights at Paris, when she knew there would be hostile elements and critics ready to say she could no longer act, always gave her the greatest confidence; she felt then it was a battle, and a battle she could win; she would force the critics to acknowledge that she could act. She told me, too, she had never gone an inch out of her way to seek for friends or admirers; she had always let them come to her; she had never taken any notice of them till they forced their attention on her. At Belle-Isle I never once heard her allude to any of her parts or to any of her triumphs; but she talked a great deal about current events—of the people and politicians she had met in her life, in all the countries of Europe—and said some very shrewd things about the men who were ruling England at that time.
I stayed at Belle-Isle three or four days, then I went back to London, and at the end of July I started for Russia. I had been invited to stay with the Benckendorffs at their house in the country, Sosnofka in the Government of Tambov. I did not yet know one word of Russian. At Warsaw station I had to get out and change. I left my bag for a moment on the seat of the carriage. This bag contained my money, my ticket, my passport, and several other necessaries. When I came back it was gone. I couldn’t even tell anyone what had happened. As the result of a conversation in dumb show, I was put into a train; it was not the express it should have been, but a slow train, and then I had my first experience of the kindness and obligingness of the Russian people, for a fellow-traveller registered my luggage, bought me a ticket, telegraphed to the Benckendorffs for me, to the hotel at Moscow, and supplied me with food and money for the journey, which in this train took three days.
Thanks to the kindness of this traveller, I arrived safely at Moscow, and at Sosnofka the next day. It was a blazing hot August that year in Russia. The country was burnt and parched; the green of the trees had been burnt away. Sosnofka is a large straggling village, with thatched houses. Once every seven years the whole village would probably be burnt down. Russia was very different from what I had expected. I had read several Russian books in translations—Tolstoy and Tourgenev—but the background they had formed in my mind was not like Russia at all. In fact, I had never thought of these books as happening in Russia. The people they described were so like real people, so like people that I had known myself, that I had always imagined the action taking place in England or France. I imagined Anna Karenina happening in London. Not only did the characters seem real and familiar to me, but they struck me as being the only characters I had ever met in any books which gave me the impression that I had myself known them. Dickens’ characters are real enough, and Thackeray’s characters are realistic enough; I believe absolutely in Sam Weller, in Mr. Micawber, in Mr. Guppy, in Mrs. Gamp, Mrs. Nickleby, and any you like to mention; the genius of Dickens has made me believe in them; I also believe in the existence of Major Pendennis and Becky Sharp; I feel I might meet people like that, but I never have; whereas with the characters in Tolstoy’s books I am not sure whether they belong to bookland at all; I am not at all sure they do not belong to my own past, my own limbo, which is peopled by real people and dream people. The background which I called up in my mind was something quite unconnected with Russian books, and something far removed from reality. It was the conventional background borrowed from detective stories, and Jules Verne’s Michael Strogoff, and from many melodramas. That is to say, I imagined barbaric houses, glittering and spangled bedizened Asiatic people. The reality was so different. Russia seemed such a natural country. Everybody seemed to be doing what they liked, without any fuss; to wear any clothes they liked; to smoke when and where they wished; to live in such simplicity and without any paraphernalia at all.
As for the landscape, my first impression was that of a large, rolling plain; a church with blue cupolas; a windmill and another church. The plain is dotted with villages, and every village is like the last; the houses are squat, sometimes built of logs and sometimes built of bricks, and the roofs are thatched with straw. The houses stand at irregular intervals, sometimes huddled close together and sometimes with wide gaps between them; it was dusty when I arrived; the broad road, which is not a real road, but an immense stoneless track like the roads in America and Australia, was littered with straw and various kinds of messes, and along it the creaking carts groaned, the peasants driving them leisurely and sometimes walking beside them. Every now and then there was a well with a large wooden see-saw pole to draw the water with; and everywhere, and over everything, the impression of space and leisureliness and the absence of hurry. The peasants wore loose shirts, with a leather coat thrown carelessly over their shoulder, or left in the cart, and the women looked picturesque in their everyday clothes; the folds of their prints and calicoes, which had something Biblical and statuesque about them, were more impressive to the eye than the silken finery which they wore when they went to church on Sunday.
The Benckendorffs lived at Sosnofka in two small separate two-storied houses, which were close together. The kitchen was in a separate building apart. In the pantry, the night-watchman, André, would play draughts in the daytime with Alexei, who cleaned the boots. By night the watchman watched; and every now and then blew a whistle. The butler, Alexander, was an old soldier in every sense of the word. His ingenuity had no end; nor had his resource. He could make anything and do anything; and in the course of one revolving noon he could be chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon. He could not only play, but he could make any musical instrument. He was an expert mixer of fireworks, an inspired carpenter, and he could mend anything. He bore the traces of an early military training and drill in his upright shoulders; and about once a month he would disappear and be drunk for two or three days. The house was housemaided by two old Russian peasants, Mavra and Masha, who wore kerchiefs over their heads and speckled calico shawls. Mavra’s devotion to the Benckendorff children passed all expression; she cared little for her fate and fortune and for that of her own family as long as they were alive and well. Michael, the coachman, was another great character; he wore a black cap with peacocks’ feathers sticking upright in it, and a black tunic with red sleeves. He drove the troika, three horses abreast, and no road, or rather no absence of road, daunted him; on the edge of an impossible hill, with no track through it, and nothing in sight but bushes and logs, and nothing to guess at except holes, if asked whether it was possible to go on, he would always laconically answer, “Moshno” (“Possible”), and it always was possible. There was an under-coachman called Fro. He had his qualities too; and one of these was the way in the winter he would find and recognise a track after there had been a blizzard, which had entirely obliterated all semblance or trace of any path or roadway. Sometimes a little bit of paper or a stray twig would give him the clue. Only one felt just this: that Michael would have been quite unshaken in face of any catastrophes; the earth might have opened in front of one, a hostile aeroplane might have barred the way, a regiment of machine-gunners might have been reported to be in ambush—he would just have nodded and quietly said, “Moshno,” and nothing more.
After dinner, that summer we used to sit on the balcony or on a stone terrace on one side of the house, and watch the message of light, the warning halo the rising moon sent up from behind the hill before she rose:
“Perchance an orb more wondrous than the moon