Many times she had stared up into the dark rows of empty seats as she did her dance. In her mind’s eye she could see them even now. But now, too, she caught the rustle of programs. The seats were filling, filling with Americans—to her the great unknown. In wild panic she fled to her dressing room.
The place was bare, barn-like. Only Tico greeted her. It was cruel that Florence could not be here now.
“But she will come,” she assured herself, as a feeling of great hope surged through her being. “They will be there in the audience, she and the gypsy woman. I will see them. They will give me much courage.”
As she changed to her stage costume, a great peace stole over her. But this was not for long.
The sound of the orchestra’s opening number sent fresh chills up her spine. What was she to do? How could she find fresh courage for this hour? No answer came.
The curtain went up. Then, amid such a hush as she had never before experienced, she tremblingly took her place on the stage. The scene was a French gypsy camp, for the play told of gypsy life during the World War.
Fortunately her part in the first act, also in the second, was small. She sat unobtrusively beside the bear in her corner, or moved silently to the side of the ancient gypsy fortune teller.
The story of the gypsies during that war is a fascinating one. Their young men volunteered. They died as bravely as any other true Frenchmen. The older ones, the women and children, wandered here, there, everywhere, enduring the suffering and privation that had fallen upon the land.
In the story of this play, at its beginning, like Cinderella, Petite Jeanne, a diminutive figure, was held in the background. Marie Condelli, a fascinating dark-eyed gypsy girl, dressed in many bright silk skirts, took the front of the stage. It was she for whom feasts were arranged, she with whom a great American officer fell madly in love on the very day before his heroic death on the battlefield, she who was the very darling of gypsy camp and war camp alike.
One night, so the play ran in its second act, the two girls, the dark-eyed one and Petite Jeanne, sat at the feet of the fortune teller when that aged person spread her arms wide as she cried: