Читать книгу My Life - Isadora Duncan - Страница 15

The stupidity of the "Geisha" was the last straw in my relations with Augustin Daly. I remember one day he came through the dark theatre and found me lying on the floor of a box, crying. He stooped down and asked me what was the matter, and I told him that I could no longer stand the imbecility of the things that went on in his theatre. He told me he did not like the "Geisha" any more than I did, but he had to think of the financial side of the affair. Then, to comfort me, Daly slipped his hand down the back of my dress, but the gesture simply made me angry.

"What's the good of having me here, with my genius," I said, "when you make no use of me?"

Daly only looked at me with a startled expression and said, "H'm!" then went away.

That was the last time I saw Augustin Daly: for a few days later, taking all my courage in my hands, I gave in my resignation. But I had learned to have a perfect nausea for the theatre: the continual repetition of the same words and the same gestures, night after night, and the caprices, the way of looking at life, and the entire rigmarole disgusted me.

I left Daly and returned to the studio in Carnegie Hall, and there was very little money, but again I wore my little white tunic and my mother played for me. As we had very little use of the studio during the day, my poor mother often played for me all night.

At this time I was much attracted by the music of Ethelbert Nevin. I composed dances to his "Narcissus," "Ophelia," "Water-Nymphs" and so forth. One day when I was practising in the studio, the door opened and there rushed in a young man with wild eyes, and hair standing on end. And although he was quite young, he seemed to be already attacked by that dreadful disease which afterwards caused his death. He rushed up to me, exclaiming:

"I hear you are dancing to my music! I forbid it, I forbid it! It isn't dance music, my music. Nobody shall dance it."

I took him by the hand and led him to a chair.

"Sit there," I said, "and I will dance to your music. If you don't like it, I swear I will never dance it again."

Then I danced his "Narcissus" for him. I had found in the melody the imagining of that youth Narcissus who stood by the brook until he fell in love with his own image, and in the end pined away and turned into a flower. This I danced for Nevin. The last note had hardly died away when he jumped up from the chair, rushed towards me and threw his arms around me. He looked at me and his eyes were filled with tears.

"You are an angel," he said. "You are a devinatrice. Those very movements I saw when I was composing the music."

Next I danced his "Ophelia" for him, and after that the "Water-Nymphs." He became more and more enthusiastically entranced. Finally he himself sat down at the piano and composed for me, on the instant, a beautiful dance which he called "Spring." It has always been a regret to me that this dance, although he played it for me many times, was never written down. Nevin was completely carried away and he proposed at once that we should give some concerts together in the small Music Room of Carnegie Hall. He would play for me himself.

Nevin himself arranged the concert, taking the hall, making the réclame, etc., and he came each evening to rehearse with me. I have always thought that Ethelbert Nevin had all the possibilities of a great composer. He might have been the Chopin of America, but the terrible struggle which he had to keep body and soul together in the cruel circumstances of his life was probably the cause of the terrible malady which caused his early death.

The first concert was a great success and was followed by others which caused quite a sensation in New York, and probably if we had been practical enough to find a good impresario at this moment, I would have begun a successful career then. But we were curiously innocent.

Many society women were in the audiences and my success led to engagements in different New York drawing-rooms. At this time I had composed a dance to the entire poem of Omar Khayyám as translated by FitzGerald. Sometimes Augustin read it aloud for me as I danced, sometimes my sister Elizabeth.

Summer was approaching. I was invited by Mrs. Astor to dance in her villa at Newport. My mother, Elizabeth and I went to Newport, which, at that time, was the most ultra-fashionable resort. Mrs. Astor represented to America what a Queen did to England. The people who came into her presence were more awed and frightened than if they had approached royalty. But to me she was very affable. She arranged the performances on her lawn, and the most exclusive society of Newport watched me dance on that lawn. I have a picture taken of this performance which shows the venerable Mrs. Astor sitting beside Harry Lehr, and rows of Vanderbilts, Belmonts, Fishes, etc., around her. Afterwards I danced in other villas in Newport, but these ladies were so economical of their cachets that we hardly made enough to pay the trip and our board. Also, although they looked upon my dancing and thought it very charming, they hadn't any of them the slightest understanding of what I was doing, and, on the whole, our visit to Newport left an impression of disappointment. These people seemed so enwrapped in snobbishness and the glory of being rich that they had no art sense whatever.

In those days they considered artists as inferior—a sort of upper servant. This feeling has changed very much since, especially since Paderewski became the Premier of a republic.

Just as the life in California did not satisfy me in any way, so I began to feel a strong wish to find some more congenial atmosphere than New York. And I dreamed of London, and the writers and painters one might meet there—George Meredith, Henry James, Watts, Swinburne, Burne-Jones, Whistler. . . . These were magic names, and, to speak the truth, in all my experience of New York I had found no intelligent sympathy or help for my ideas.

In the meantime Elizabeth's school had grown and we had removed from the Carnegie Hall studio to two great rooms on the ground floor of the Windsor Hotel. The price of these rooms was $90 a week, and we soon realised, with the prices people paid for dancing lessons, the impossibility of meeting this sum for rent, as well as other expenditures. In fact, though we were outwardly successful, our banking account at that time showed a deficit. The Windsor was a gloomy hotel and we found very little joy in living there and trying to meet these heavy expenses. One night my sister and I were sitting by the fire, wondering how we were going to find the necessary cash to foot the bill. Suddenly I exclaimed: "The only thing that can save us is for the hotel to burn down!" There was a very rich old lady who lived on the third floor in rooms filled with antique furniture and pictures, and she had a habit of coming down to the dining-room every morning at 8 o'clock sharp for her breakfast. We planned that I should meet her the next morning and ask her for a loan. Which I did. But the old lady was in a very bad temper and she refused the loan and complained of the coffee.

"I have stayed in this hotel for many years," she said, "but if they don't give me better coffee, I am going to leave."

She did leave that afternoon, when the whole hotel went up in flames, and she was burned to a crisp! Elizabeth heroically saved her dancing school by her presence of mind, bringing them out of the building hand-in-hand, in Indian file. But we were unable to save anything, and we lost all of our belongings, including family portraits that were very precious to us. We went up to a room in the Buckingham Hotel on the same avenue as a refuge, and in a few days we found ourselves in the same state as when we came to New York, i.e., without a penny. "This is fate," I said. "We must go to London."