III
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 décolleté 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.

We were on the road about six weeks. Then came our opening in one of the New York suburbs, where Mr. Oscar Hammerstein, who has since become a famous impresario, owned a theatre.

The play was unsuccessful, and even our hypnotism scene was not strong enough to save it from the attacks of the critics. No New York theatre cared to give it house room, and our company broke up.

The day after this opening at Mr. Hammerstein’s theatre a local newspaper of the little community in which we had successfully presented this “Quack, M.D.,” which the New York managers refused to touch, wrote a ridiculously enthusiastic article on what it called my “acting” in the hypnotism scene. But as the play had not “made good,” no one thought that it would be possible to take a single scene out of it, and I was left without an engagement.

Nevertheless, even in New York, and in spite of the failure of the play, I personally secured some good press notices. The newspapers were in agreement in announcing that I had a remarkable string to my bow—if I only knew how to make the most of it.

I had brought my robe home to sew up a little tear. After reading these comforting lines I leaped from the bed and arrayed only in my night-gown, I put the garment on and looked at myself in a large glass, to make sure of what I had done the evening before.

The mirror was placed just opposite the windows. The long yellow curtains were drawn and through them the sun shed into the room an amber light, which enveloped me completely and illumined my gown, giving a translucent effect. Golden reflections played in the folds of the sparkling silk, and in this light my body was vaguely revealed in shadowy contour. This was a moment of intense emotion. Unconsciously I realised that I was in the presence of a great discovery, one which was destined to open the path which I have since followed.

Gently, almost religiously, I set the silk in motion, and I saw that I had obtained undulations of a character heretofore unknown. I had created a new dance. Why had I never thought of it before?

Two of my friends, Mrs. Hoffmann and her daughter Mrs. Hossack, came from time to time to see how I was getting on with my discoveries. When I found an action or a pose which looked as if it might amount to something they would say: “Hold that. Try it again.” Finally I reached a point where each movement of the body was expressed in the folds of silk, in a play of colours in the draperies that could be mathematically and systematically calculated.

The length and size of my silk skirt would constrain me to repeat the same motion several times as a means of giving this motion its special and distinctive aim. I obtained a spiral effect by holding my arms aloft while I kept whirling, to right and then to left, and I continued this movement until the spiral design was established. Head, hands and feet followed the evolutions of the body and the robe. It is very difficult, however, to describe this part of my dance. You have to see it and feel it. It is too complicated for realisation in words.

Another dancer will obtain more delicate effects, with more graceful motions, but they will not be the same. To be the same they must be created in the same spirit. One thing original, though up to a certain point it is not so good as an imitation, is in reality worth much more.

I studied each of my characteristic motions, and at last had twelve of them. I classed them as Dances No. 1, No. 2, and so on. The first was to be given under a blue light, the second under red light, the third under a yellow light. For illumination of my dances I intended to have a lantern with coloured glass in front of the lens. I wanted to dance the last one in total darkness with a single ray of yellow light crossing the stage.

When I had finished studying my dances, I went in search of a manager. I was acquainted with them all. During my career as singer and actress I had served all of them more or less frequently.

I was, however, hardly prepared for the reception which they gave me. The first one laughed me in the face as he said:

“You a dancer! Well, that’s too good! When I want you for a theatrical part I’ll look you up with pleasure; but as for dancing, good heavens! When I engage a dancer she will have to be a star. The only ones I know are Sylvia Gray and Lettie Lind in London. You cannot outclass them, take my word for it. Good-evening.”

He had lost all respect for my perspicacity and he made fun of the idea of my being a dancer.

Mrs. Hoffmann had come with me, and was waiting in the lobby, where I rejoined her. She noted at once how pale and nervous I was. When we left the theatre it was night. We walked in silence through dark streets. Neither spoke. Some months later, however, my friend told me that all that evening I never stopped emitting little groans like those of a wounded animal. She saw that I was cut to the very quick.

Next day I had to continue my search, for necessity was spurring me on.

Mrs. Hoffmann offered me the privilege of coming to live with her and her daughter—an offer which I accepted gratefully, not having the faintest idea when and how I could ever repay her.

Some time later I had to give in; since I was known as an actress, nothing could hurt me more than to try to become a dancer.

One manager went so far as to tell me that two years of absence from New York had caused the public completely to forget me, and that, in trying to recall myself to their memory, I should seem to be inflicting ancient history on them. As I had then just passed my twentieth birthday I was extremely irritated by that insinuation, and I thought: “Would it then be necessary for me painfully to build up a reputation and to look old to prove that I was young to-day?”

Unable to restrain my feelings any longer, I told the manager what I thought.

“Hell,” he replied, “it isn’t age that counts. It’s the time the public has known you, and you have become too well known as an actress to come back here as a dancer.”

Everywhere I encountered the same answer, and finally I became desperate. I was aware that I had discovered something unique, but I was far from imagining, even in a daydream, that I had hold of a principle capable of revolutionising a branch of æsthetics.

I am astounded when I see the relations that form and colour assume. The scientific admixture of chemically composed colours, heretofore unknown, fills me with admiration, and I stand before them like a miner who has discovered a vein of gold, and who completely forgets himself as he contemplates the wealth of the world before him.

But to return to my troubles.

A manager who, some time before, had done his best to engage me as a singer, and who had absolutely refused to consider me as a dancer, gave a careless consent, thanks to the intervention of a common friend, to an interview at which I was to show him my dances.

I took my robe, which made a neat little bundle, and I set out for the theatre.

Mrs. Hoffmann’s daughter accompanied me. We went in by the stage entrance. A single gas jet lighted the empty stage. In the house, which was equally dark, the manager, seated in one of the orchestra chairs, looked at us with an air of boredom, almost of contempt. There was no dressing-room for my change of clothing, not even a piano to accompany me. But the opportunity was a precious one, all the same. Without delay I put on my costume, there on the stage and over my dress. Then I hummed an air and started in to dance very gently in the obscurity. The manager came nearer and nearer, and finally ascended the platform.

His eyes glistened.

I continued to dance, disappearing in the darkness at the rear of the stage, then returning toward the gas jet. Finally I lifted a part of my robe over my shoulders, made a kind of cloud which enveloped me completely and then fell, a wavering mass of fluffy silk, at the manager’s feet. After that I arose and waited in keenest anxiety to hear what he would say.

He said nothing. Visions of success were crowding upon each other in his brain.

Finally he broke his silence and gave my dance the name of “The Serpentine Dance.”

“There is the name that will go with it,” he said, “and I have just the music that you need for that dance. Come to my private office. I am going to play it for you.”

Then for the first time I heard an air which later became very popular, “Au Loin du Bal.”

A new company was rehearsing “Uncle Celestin” at the theatre. This company was to go on the road for several weeks before playing in New York. My new manager offered me, for this tour, an engagement at fifty dollars a week. I accepted, making it a condition that I should be featured on the placards, in order to regain in a measure the prestige I had lost.

A few days after I joined the company and made my first appearance at a distance from New York. For six weeks I appeared before country audiences, feverishly counting the hours until I should at last have my chance in the big city.

During this tour, contrary to the conditions I had imposed, I was not featured. The posters did not even announce me, and yet my dance, which was given during an interval and without coloured lights, was successful from the first.

A month and a half later in Brooklyn its success was phenomenal. The week following I made my debut in New York, at what was one of the prettiest theatres in town.

There I was able for the first time to realise my dances just as I had conceived them; with darkness in the house and coloured lights on the stage. The house was packed and the audience positively enthusiastic. I danced my first, my second, my third. When I had finished the whole house was standing up.

Among the spectators was one of my oldest friends, Marshall P. Wilder, the little American humourist. He recognised me and called my name in such a way that everybody could hear it, for they had neglected to put it on the programme! When the audience discovered that the new dancer was its old favourite comedian, the little soubrette of a former day, it gave her an ovation such as, I suppose, never another human being has received.

They called out, “Three cheers for the butterfly! Three cheers for the orchid, the cloud, the butterfly! Three cheers!” And the enthusiasm passed all bounds. The applause resounded in my ears like the ringing of bells. I was overcome with joy and gratitude.

Next morning I arose early to read the papers. Every New York newspaper devoted from a column to a page to “Loie Fuller’s Wonderful Creation.” Numerous illustrations of my dances accompanied the articles.

I buried my face in my pillow and shed every tear that, for a long time, had lurked in my discouraged soul. For how many months had I waited for this good luck!

In one of these articles a critic wrote “Loie Fuller had risen from her ashes.” Next day the whole city was plastered with lithographs, reproduced from one of my photographs, representing me larger than life, with letters a foot high announcing: “The Serpentine Dance! The Serpentine Dance!” But there was one circumstance came near giving me heart failure. My name was nowhere mentioned.

I went to the theatre and reminded the manager that I had accepted the modest salary he offered on condition that I should be featured. I hardly understood when he remarked drily that he could not do more for me.

I asked him then whether he supposed that I was going to continue dancing under such conditions.

“Nothing can compel you to do so,” answered the manager. “In any case, I have taken my precautions in case you do not care to keep on.”

I left the theatre in desperation, not knowing what to do. My head swam. I went home and consulted my friends.

They advised me to go and see another manager, and, if I secured an engagement, simply to drop the other theatre.

I went to the —— Theatre, but on the way I began to cry, and I was in tears when I arrived there. I asked to see the manager, and told him my story.

He offered me one hundred and fifty dollars a week. I was to make my first appearance at once, and sign a contract dating from the next day.

On reaching home I asked if nothing had come for me from the other theatre.

Nothing had come.

That evening my friends went to the theatre, where they saw a poster announcing, for the following evening, the initial appearance in the “Serpentine” of Miss —— ——. When they told me that piece of news I understood that my six weeks on the road had been profitably employed by my manager and one of the chorus girls to meet just this situation, and I understood, too, why my name was not mentioned on the first posters.

They had stolen my dance.

I felt myself overcome, dead—more dead, as it seemed to me, than I shall be at the moment when my last hour comes. My very life depended on this success, and now others were going to reap the benefit. I cannot describe my despair. I was incapable of words, of gestures. I was dumb and paralysed.

Next day, when I went to sign my new contract, the manager received me rather coldly. He was willing to sign only if I would give him the privilege of cancelling at his own discretion. He felt that my imitator at the Casino, announced for the same day, would diminish greatly the interest that would be felt in what he ironically called my “discovery.”

I was obliged to accept the conditions which he imposed, but I experienced all the while an access of rage and grief as I saw in what a barefaced manner they had stolen my invention.

Heartbroken, with my courage oozing, I made my appearance at the Madison Square Theatre and, to my astonishment, to my immense satisfaction, I saw that the theatre had to turn people away. And it was that way as long as my engagement lasted.

As for the other theatre, after three weeks of featuring my imitator, it was obliged to close its doors to rehearse a new opera.