Read Ebook: Fifteen years of a dancer's life by Fuller Loie France Anatole Author Of Introduction Etc

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Ebook has 1447 lines and 59852 words, and 29 pages

"What!" said the president, "haven't you heard that Loie recited some poetry last Sunday?"

My mother was quite overcome with surprise. I threw myself upon her and fairly smothered her with kisses, saying,

"I forgot to tell you. I recited my piece."

"Oh, yes," said the president, "and she was a great success, too."

My mother asked for explanations.

The president then told her: "During an interval between the exercises, Loie climbed up on the platform, made a pretty bow as she had seen orators do, and then, kneeling down, she recited a little prayer. What this prayer was I don't remember."

But my mother interrupted him.

"Oh, I know. It is the prayer she says every evening when I put her to bed."

And I had recited that in a Sunday School thronged by free-thinkers!

"After that Loie arose, and saluted the audience once more. Then immense difficulties arose. She did not dare to descend the steps in the usual way. So she sat down and let herself slide from one step to another until she reached the floor of the house. During this exercise the whole hall laughed loudly at the sight of her little yellow flannel petticoat, and her copper-toed boots beating the air. But Loie got on her feet again, and, hearing the laughter, raised her right hand and said in a shrill voice: 'Hush! Keep quiet. I am going to recite my poem.' She would not stir until silence was restored. Loie then recited her poem as she had promised, and returned to her seat with the air of having done the most natural thing in the world."

The following Sunday I went as usual to the Lyceum with my brothers. My mother came, too, in the course of the afternoon, and took her seat at the end of a settee among the invited guests who took no part in our exercises. She was thinking how much she had missed in not being there the preceding Sunday to witness my "success," when she saw a woman rise and approach the platform. The woman began to read a little paper which she held in her hand. After she had finished reading my mother heard her say:

"And now we are going to have the pleasure of hearing our little friend Loie Fuller recite a poem entitled: 'Mary had a little Lamb.'"

My mother, absolutely amazed, was unable to stir or to say a word. She merely gasped:

"How can this little girl be so foolish! She will never be able to recite that. She has only heard it once."

In a sort of daze she saw me rise from my seat, slowly walk to the steps and climb upon the platform, helping myself up with feet and hands. Once there I turned around and took in my audience. I made a pretty courtesy, and began in a voice which resounded throughout the hall. I repeated the little poem in so serious a manner that, despite the mistakes I must have made, the spirit of it was intelligible and impressed the audience. I did not stop once. Then I courtesied again and everybody applauded me wildly. I went back to the stairs and let myself slide down to the bottom, as I had done the preceding Sunday. Only this time no one made fun of me.

When my mother rejoined me, some time after, she was still pale and trembling. She asked me why I had not informed her of what I was going to do. I replied that I could not let her know about a thing that I did not know myself.

"Where have you learned this?"

"I don't know, mamma."

She said then that I must have heard it read by my brother; and I remembered that it was so. From this time on I was always reciting poems, wherever I happened to be. I used to make little speeches, but in prose, for I employed the words that were natural for me, contenting myself with translating the spirit of the things that I recited without bothering much over word-by-word renderings. With my firm and very tenacious memory, I needed then only to hear a poem once to recite it, from beginning to end, without making a single mistake. I have always had a wonderful memory. I have proved it repeatedly by unexpectedly taking parts of which I did not know a word the day before the first performance.

On the Sunday of which I have been speaking, my mother experienced the first of the nervous shocks that might have warned her, had she been able to understand, that she was destined to become the prey of a dreadful disease, which would never leave her.

From the spring which followed my first appearance at the Folies-Berg?re until the time of her death she accompanied me in all my travels. As I was writing this, some days before her end, I could hear her stir or speak, for she was in the next room with two nurses watching over her night and day. While I was working I would go to her from time to time, rearrange her pillows a little, lift her, give her medicine, or some little thing to eat, put out her candle, open the window a moment, and then I would return to my task.

After the day of my debut at the Chicago Progressive Lyceum I continued my dramatic career. The incidents of my performances would suffice to fill several volumes. For without interruption, adventures succeeded one another to such an extent that I shall never undertake the work of describing them all.

I should say that when this first theatrical incident took place I was just two and a half years old.

HOW I CREATED THE SERPENTINE DANCE

In 1890 I was on a tour in London with my mother. A manager engaged me to go to the United States and take the principal part in a new play entitled, "Quack, M.D." In this piece I was to play with two American actors, Mr. Will Rising and Mr. Louis de Lange, who has since then been mysteriously assassinated.

I bought what costumes I needed and took them with me. On our arrival in New York the rehearsals began. While we were at work, the author got the idea of adding to the play a scene in which Dr. Quack hypnotised a young widow. Hypnotism at that moment was very much to the fore in New York. To give the scene its full effect he needed very sweet music and indeterminate illumination. We asked the electrician of the theatre to put green lamps along the footlights and the orchestra leader to play a subdued air. The great question next was to decide what costume I was to wear. I was unable to buy a new one. I had spent all the money advanced me for my costumes and, not knowing what else to do, I undertook to run over my wardrobe in the hope of finding something that would be fit to wear.

In vain. I could not find a thing.

All at once, however, I noticed at the bottom of one of my trunks a small casket, a very small casket, which I opened. Out of it I drew a light silk material, comparable to a spider's web. It was a skirt, very full and very broad at the bottom.

I let the skirt dangle in my fingers, and before this little heap of fragile texture I lingered in reverie for some time. The past, a past very near and yet already far away, was summoned up before me.

It had happened in London some months before.

A friend had asked me to dine with several officers who were being wined and dined just before leaving for India, where they were under orders to rejoin their regiment. The officers were in handsome uniforms, the women in low dresses, and they were pretty, as only English women are.

At table I was seated between two of the youngest officers. They had very long necks and wore extremely high collars. At first I felt myself greatly overawed in the presence of people so imposing as my neighbours. They looked snobbish and uncommunicative. Presently I discovered that they were much more timid than I, and that we should never be better acquainted unless one or the other of us resolved to overcome his own nervousness and, at the same time, that of his companions.

But my young officers were afraid only in the presence of women. When I told them I hoped they might never be engaged in a war, and especially that they might never have to do any killing, one of them answered me very simply:

"I fancy I can serve as a target as well as any other man, and certainly the people who draw on me will understand that war is on."

They were essentially and purely English. Nothing could unsettle them, provoke them or change them in the least. At our table they seemed timid. They were nevertheless men of the kind who go into the presence of death just as one encounters a friend in the street.

At this period I did not understand the English as I have subsequently come to know them.

I left the table without remembering to ask the names of my neighbours, and when I thought about the matter it was too late.

I recalled, however, that one of them took the trouble, in the course of our conversation, to learn the name of the hotel at which I was staying. I had quite forgotten the incident when, some time after, I received a little casket, addressed to me from India.

It contained a skirt of very thin white silk, of a peculiar shape, and some pieces of silk gauze. The box was not more than sixteen inches long and was hardly taller than a cigar box. It contained nothing else, not a line, not a card. How odd! From whom could it come?

I knew no one in India. All at once, however, I remembered the dinner and the young officers. I was greatly taken with my pretty box, but I was far from suspecting that it contained the little seed from which an Aladdin's lamp was destined to spring for my benefit.

This, of course, was the casket which I had just discovered in my trunk.

Deep in thought I stooped and gathered up the soft, silky stuff. I put on the Hindu skirt, the skirt sent me by my two young officers, those young men who must by this time have "served as targets" somewhere out there in the jungle, for I never heard from them again.

My robe, which was destined to become a triumphal robe, was at least a half a yard too long. Thereupon I raised the girdle and so shaped for myself a sort of empire robe, pinning the skirt to a d?collet? bodice. The robe looked thoroughly original, perhaps even a little ridiculous. It was entirely suitable for the hypnotism scene, which we did not take very seriously.

We "tried the play on the dog" before offering it to the New York public, and I made my debut as a dancer at a theatre in a small city of which the average New Yorker had hardly heard. No one, I suppose, outside its boundaries took the slightest interest in what went on in that city. At the end of the play, on the evening of the first presentation, we gave our hypnotism scene. The stage scenery, representing a garden, was flooded with pale green light. Dr. Quack made a mysterious entrance and then began his work of suggestion. The orchestra played a melancholy air very softly, and I endeavoured to make myself as light as possible, in order to give the impression of a fluttering figure obedient to the doctor's orders.

He raised his arms. I raised mine. Under the influence of suggestion, entranced--so, at least, it looked--with my gaze held by his, I followed his every motion. My robe was so long that I was continually stepping upon it, and mechanically I held it up with both hands and raised my arms aloft, all the while that I continued to flit around the stage like a winged spirit.

There was a sudden exclamation from the house:

"It's a butterfly! A butterfly!"

I turned on my steps, running from one end of the stage to the other, and a second exclamation followed:

"It's an orchid!"

To my great astonishment sustained applause burst forth. The doctor all the time was gliding around the stage, with quickening steps, and I followed him faster and faster. At last, transfixed in a state of ecstasy, I let myself drop at his feet, completely enveloped in a cloud of the light material.

The audience encored the scene, and then encored it again--so loudly and so often that we had to come back twenty times, or more.

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