“You cannot understand,” he said gently, “for you have not long been a trouper. You could not know that they were all practically born on the stage; that their fathers and mothers, yes and their grandparents before them, were stage people. They have traveled together, some of them, for years. As they moved from city to city, the people of each city were only an audience to be amused. They have made the audience laugh; they have made it cry. But always they have thought of that audience as a great lump of humanity. Not one individual in that lump cared for one of them in a personal way. Only among their own group have they found companions. Little by little a strong bond has been formed. Hemming them in, it keeps others out. That is their golden circle.”
“It is a most wretched circle!” cried Jeanne with a touch of anger. “It is not a golden circle, but a circle of brass, brass about their necks; the sign of slavery.”
After this Jeanne made no further attempts to mingle with her fellow workers. When not on the stage she sat in a corner, reading a French novel.
But her cup of woe was not full. She had hoped to dance her native dances from the gypsyland of France, just as she had learned them there. This was not to be. The director, the tall, dark, youngish man, he of the chilled steel face who never smiled, had a word to say about this. The dances, he decreed, were not right. They must be changed. A girl named Eve, head of the chorus, must teach Jeanne new steps.
Eve taught her, and did a thorough job of it. Born on the west side, Eve had made her way up by sheer nerve and a certain feeling for rhythm.
No two persons could be more unlike than this Eve and our Petite Jeanne. Petite Jeanne was French to the tips of her toes. She loved art for art’s sake. Beauty and truth, sweetness and light, these were words of infinite charm to her. Had the same words been pronounced to Eve, she would have suspected the speaker of pronouncing a spelling lesson to her. Eve lived for one thing only—applause. It had been the thunder of applause that had caused her to set her foot on the first round of the ladder to fame. That same thunder had kept her toiling year after year.
Petite Jeanne cared little for applause. When she went before an audience it was as if she said to those assembled before her, “See! Here I have something all together beautiful. It has been handed down to us through countless ages, a living flame of action and life, a gypsy dance. This is beauty. This is life. I hope you may forget me and know only this marvel of beauty and truth, sweetness and light.”
And now, under the ruthless hand of Eve, she saw her thing of beauty torn apart and pieced with fragments of bold movements and discordant notes which made her dances much more brazen.
But that was not all. “Your toes,” decreed the merciless, dark-faced director, “are too limber; your legs are too stiff. You must look to the brass rail for remedy.”
“The brass rail?” She did not say the words. Soon enough she found out. In a cold back room she stood for half an hour, gripping a long brass rail safely anchored some three feet from the floor, twisting her toes and bending her poor limbs until she could have screamed with pain. It helped not a bit that a dozen members of the chorus, who never spoke a word to her, were going through the same painful performance.