One of these Ivy House parties in particular I remember vividly, for her old friend, Féodor Chaliapine, that stupendous figure of the world of the theatre who had played such an important part in my own life and career, was, on this occasion, the life of the party. He was in a gargantuan mood. He had already dined before he arrived at Ivy House. I could imagine the dinner he had put away, for often his table abounded with such delicacies as a large salmon, often a side of lamb, suckling pigs, and tureens of schchee and borscht. But despite this, he did ample justice to Pavlova’s buffet and bar. His jokes and stories were told to a spellbound audience. These were the rare occasions on which I have seen this great musician, with his sombre, rather monkish face, really relax.
This night Pavlova was equally animated, and Chaliapine and she vied with each other in story-telling. I studied them both as I watched them. Pavlova had told me of her own origins and first beginnings; about her father, her mother, her childhood poverty. Here she sat, sprung from such a humble start, the world’s greatest dancer, the chatelaine of a beautiful and simple home, the entire world at her feet.
Facing her was another achievement, the poor boy of Kazan, who, in his early life, suffered the pangs of hunger and misery which are the common experience of the Russian poor. He had told me how, as a lad of seventeen in the town of Kazan without a kopeck in his pocket, day after day, he would walk through the streets and hungrily gaze into the windows of the bakers’ shops with hopeless longing. “Hurok,” he had said, “hunger is the most debasing of all suffering; it makes a man like a beast, it humiliates him.”
One of the few serious stories he told that evening was of the time when he and my childhood idol, Maxim Gorky, were working on the boats on the Volga and had to improvise trousers out of two pairs of old wheat-sacks which they tied round their waists. Gorky and Chaliapine were both from Kazan and of the same age. Tonight, as the party wore on, Chaliapine sang folk songs, gay songs, sad songs, ribald songs. Loving fine raiment, tonight he had worn a tall gray top hat. When he arrived and we had greeted him in the hallway, I caught him watching his reflection in the long mirror and getting great satisfaction out of it. Now, as he sang, he became a Tsar, and it was difficult to imagine that he had never been anything but a great Tsar all his life.
The party waxed even gayer, the hour grew late. We were all sitting on the floor: Pavlova, Chaliapine, his wife Masha, and the other guests. Chaliapine had been gazing at Pavlova for some time. Suddenly he turned and fixed his eyes on his wife appraisingly.
“Masha, my dear,” he said, after a long moment, “you don’t object to my having a child by Annushka?”
Masha smiled tolerantly and quickly replied:
“Why don’t you ask her?”
Chaliapine, with all the dignity and solemnity of a Boris Godunoff, put the question to Pavlova. Pavlova’s eyes fixed themselves on his, with equal gravity.
“My dear Fedya,” she said, quite solemnly, “such matters are not discussed in public.”