Читать книгу My Life - Isadora Duncan - Страница 17

Table of Contents

If we could see a psychical cinematograph of our own lives would we not be amazed, and exclaim, "Surely that did not happen to me?" Certainly the four people I remember walking about the streets of London might just as well have existed in the imagination of Charles Dickens, and at the present moment I can scarcely believe in their reality. That we youngsters could remain cheerful through such a series of disasters is not astonishing, but that my poor mother, who had already experienced so many hardships and troubles in her life, and who was no longer young, could take them as the ordinary run of things, seems incredible as I look back upon those days.

We walked along the streets of London with no money, no friends and no possible means of finding shelter for the night. We tried two or three hotels, but they were adamant upon the necessity of payment in advance, in default of luggage. We tried two or three lodging houses, but all the landladies acted in the same heartless manner. Finally we were reduced to a bench in the Green Park, but even then an enormous policeman appeared and told us to move on.

This continued for three days and three nights. We lived upon penny buns and yet, such was our amazing vitality, we spent our days in the British Museum. I remember I was reading the English translation of Winckelmann's "Journey to Athens" and, our strange situation quite forgotten, I wept, not for our own misfortunes, but over the tragic death of Winckelmann returning from his ardent voyage of discovery.

But with the dawn of the fourth day I decided that something must be done. Admonishing my mother, Raymond and Elizabeth to follow me and not to say a word, I walked straight into one of the finest hotels in London. I informed the night porter, who was half asleep, that we had just come on the night train, that our luggage would come on from Liverpool, to give us rooms in the meantime, and to order breakfast to be sent up to us, consisting of coffee, buckwheat cakes and other American delicacies.

All that day we slept in luxurious beds. Now and then I telephoned down to the porter to complain bitterly that our luggage had not arrived.

"It is quite impossible for us to go out without a change of clothes," I said, and that night we dined in our rooms.

At dawn of the next day, judging that the ruse had reached its limit, we walked out exactly as we had walked in, but this time without waking the night porter!

We found ourselves on the streets greatly refreshed and ready once again to face the world. That morning we strolled down to Chelsea and were sitting in the graveyard of the old church, when I noticed a newspaper lying on the path. Picking it up, my eyes fell upon a paragraph stating that a certain lady, in whose house I had danced in New York, had taken a house in Grosvenor Square and was entertaining largely. I had a sudden inspiration.

"Wait here," I said to the others.

I found my way alone to Grosvenor Square just before lunch, and found the lady at home. She received me very kindly, and I told her I had come to London and was dancing in drawing-rooms.

"That would be just the thing for my dinner-party on Friday night," she said. "Could you give some of your interpretations after dinner?"

I consented, and delicately hinted that a small advance was necessary to hold the engagement. She was most gracious, and at once wrote out a cheque for £10, with which I raced back to the Chelsea graveyard, where I found Raymond holding a discourse on the Platonic idea of the soul.

"I am to dance Friday night at Mrs. X.'s house in Grosvenor Square; probably the Prince of Wales will be there; our fortunes are made!" and I showed them the cheque.

Then Raymond said, "We must take this money and find a studio and pay a month in advance, for we must never again subject ourselves to the insults of these low, common lodging-house women."

We searched for a studio and found a small one just off the King's Road, Chelsea, and that night we slept in the studio. There were no beds and we slept on the floor, but we felt that we were again living as artists and we agreed with Raymond that we could never again occupy so bourgeois a home as lodgings.

With what remained of the money, after paying the rent of the studio, we bought some canned food as provision for the future, and I bought a few yards of veiling at Liberty's, in which I appeared on Friday evening at Mrs. X.'s party. I danced the "Narcissus" of Nevin, in which I was a slight adolescent, for I was then very thin, enamoured of his own image in the water. I also danced the "Ophelia" of Nevin, and I heard people whisper, "Where did the child get that tragic expression?" At the close of the evening I danced Mendelssohn's "Spring Song."

My mother played for me; Elizabeth read some poems of Theocritus, translated by Andrew Lang, and Raymond gave a short conference upon the subject of dancing and its possible effect on the psychology of future humanity. This was slightly above the heads of the well-fed audience, but at the same time it was very successful and the hostess was delighted.

It was typical of an English well-bred assembly that no one remarked that I danced in sandals and bare feet, and transparent veils, although this simple apparition made the klatch of Germany some years later. But the English are such an extremely polite people that no one even thought of remarking upon the originality of my costume, and, alas! neither did they remark upon the originality of my dancing. Every one said, "How pretty," "Awfully jolly," "Thank you so much," or something of the sort—but that was all.

But from this evening I received many invitations to dance in many celebrated houses. One day I would find myself dancing before Royalty, or in the garden at Lady Lowther's, and the next with nothing to eat. For sometimes I was paid, more often I was not. Hostesses were apt to say: "You will dance before the Duchess of So-and-So, and the Countess of So-and-So, and so many distinguished people will see you that your name will be made in London."

I remember one day when I danced for four hours in aid of a charity performance, that, as a reward, a titled lady poured out my tea and gave me strawberries with her own hand, but I was so ill from not having had any solid food for some days that those strawberries and the rich cream made me very miserable indeed. At the same time another lady held up a huge bag filled with golden sovereigns and said: "Look at the mint of money you have made for our Blind Girls' Home!"

My mother and I were both too sensitive to tell these people of what unheard-of cruelty they were guilty. On the contrary we denied ourselves proper food in order to have the money to appear well-dressed and prosperous.

We bought some cot beds for the studio and hired a piano, but we spent most of our time in the British Museum, where Raymond made sketches of all the Greek vases and bas-reliefs, and I tried to express them to whatever music seemed to me to be in harmony with the rhythms of the feet and Dionysiac set of the head, and the tossing of the thyrsis. We also spent hours every day in the British Museum Library, and we lunched in the Refreshment Room on a penny bun and café au lait.

We were crazy with enthusiasm at the beauty of London. All the things that were culture and architectural beauty I had missed in America, but now I was able to drink my fill of them.

Before we left New York a year had passed since I had last seen Ivan Miroski, and then, one day, I received a letter from a friend in Chicago telling me that he had volunteered for the Spanish War, had got as far as the camp in Florida, had there been stricken with typhoid fever, and had died. The letter was a terrible shock to me. I could not believe that the news was true. One afternoon I walked down to the Cooper Institute and looked through the files of old newspapers, and there I found, in very small print, among hundreds of others, his name among the dead.

The letter had also given me the name and address of his wife in London, so one day I took a hansom cab and started out to find Madame Miroski. The address was very far out, somewhere in Hammersmith. I was still more or less under the Puritanical influence of America and so I considered it dreadful that Ivan Miroski had left a wife in London of whom he had never spoken to me. So I told no one of my project. Giving the cabman the address, I drove for what appeared to be miles, almost to the outskirts of London. There were rows and rows of small grey houses, each one exactly like the other, with most melancholy and dingy front gates, each bearing a designation more imposing than its neighbour. There were Sherwood Cottage, Glen House, Ellesmere, Ennismore and other totally inappropriate names, and finally Stella House, where I rang the bell and the door was opened by a more than usually gloomy London maid. I asked for Madame Miroski and was shown into a stuffy parlour. I was dressed in a white muslin Kate Greenaway dress, a blue sash under the arms, a big straw hat on my head, and my hair in curls on my shoulders.

I could hear feet trampling overhead, and a sharp, clear voice saying, "Now, girls, order, order." Stella House was a school for girls. I was labouring under an emotion that was a mixture of fright and, in spite of Ivan's tragic death, a gnawing jealousy, when there entered one of the strangest little figures I have ever seen in my life, not more than four feet high, thin to emaciation, with shining grey eyes, and sparse grey hair, a small white face with thin compressed pale lips.

Her welcome was not very cordial. I tried to explain who I was.

"I know," she said, "you are Isadora; Ivan wrote to me about you in many of his letters."

"I am so sorry," I faltered. "He never spoke to me about you."

"No," she said, "he would not, but I was to have gone out to him and now—he is dead."

She said this with such an expression of voice that I began to cry. Then she began to cry, too, and with that it was as though we had always been friends.