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While I tried to put on a smiling front that night at supper after the performance, Pavlova soon penetrated my poker-faced veneer. She leaned across the table, took my hand.

"What's wrong, Hurokchik?" she asked.

"Nothing," I shrugged, with as much gallantry as I could muster.

She continued to regard me seriously for a moment. Then:

Pavlova's human qualities were, perhaps, never more in evidence than at those times when, between tours and new productions, she rested "at home," at lovely Ivy House, in that northern London suburb, Golder's Green, not far from where there now rests all that was mortal of her: East Wall 3711.

Here in the rambling unpretentiousness of Ivy House, among her treasures, surrounded by her pets, she was completely herself. Here such parties as she gave took place. They were small parties, and the "chosen" who were invited were old friends and colleagues. Although the parties were small in size, the food was abundant and superlative. On her American tours she had discovered that peculiarly American institution, the cafeteria. After rehearsals, she would often pop into one with the entire company. Eyes a-twinkle, she would wait until all the company had chosen their various dishes, then select her own; after depositing her heavily laden tray at her own table, she would pass among the tables where the company was seated and sample something from every dish. Pavlova adored good food. She saw to it that good food was served at Ivy House and, for one so slight of figure, consumed it in amazing abundance.

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."

She paused, then added mischievously:

"Let us make an appointment. I am leaving for Paris in a day or two.... Perhaps I shall take you along with me...."

In all the dance, Pavlova was my first love. It was from her I received my strongest and most lasting impressions. She proved and realized my dreams. To the Western World, and particularly to America, she brought a new and stimulating form of art expression. She introduced standards, if not ideas, that have had an almost revolutionary effect.

Anna Pavlova had everything, both as an artist and as a human being.

Although my association with her was marked by a series of explosions and an overall atmosphere of tragi-comedy, it is a source of pride to me that I was able to number among my dance connections that neglected American genius, Isadora Duncan.

It was Anna Pavlova who spurred my enthusiasm to bring Isadora to her own country, in 1922, a fact accomplished only with considerable difficulty, as those who have read my earlier volume of memoirs will recollect.

Despite the fact they had little in common, Pavlova had a tremendous respect for this tall American dancer, who abhorred ballet.

Genius is a dangerous word. Often it is bandied about carelessly and, sometimes, indiscriminately. In the case of this long-limbed girl from California it could not be applied more accurately or more precisely, for she was a genius as a person as well as an artist. She brought to Europe and to her own America, as well, a new aesthetic.

One of four children of a rebellious mother who divorced the father she did not love, Isadora's childhood was spent in a quasi-Bohemian atmosphere in her native San Francisco, where her mother eked out a dubious living by giving music lessons. Isadora was the youngest of the four. Brother Augustin took to the theatre; Brother Raymond to long hair, sandals, Greek robes, and asceticism; Sister Elizabeth eventually took over Isadora's Berlin School.

What started Isadora on the road of the dance may never be known; although it is a well established fact that she danced as a child in San Francisco, and early in her career traveled across the United States, dancing her way, more or less, to New York. I am reasonably certain that her dancing of that period bore little or no relation to that of her later period. Her early works were, for the most part, innocuous little pieces done to snippets of music by Romantic composers. Her triumphs were in monumental works by Beethoven, Wagner, C?sar Franck.

Her battle was for "freedom": freedom in the dance; freedom in wearing apparel; freedom for women; freedom for the body; freedom for the human spirit. In the dance, ballet was to her a distortion of the human form. Personally, I suspect the truth was that the strict discipline of ballet was something to which Isadora could not submit. Inspiration was her guiding force. She wore Greek draperies when she danced; her feet were bare. Yet there are photographs of Isadora, taken in the later 'nineties, showing her wearing ballet slippers, and a costume in which considerable lace is to be seen. It was Europe, I feel, that "freed" her dance.

Isadora's was a European triumph. In turn she conquered Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Greece. She was hailed and f?ted. There was no place in the American theatre for Isadora's simplicity and utter artlessness. It was in Budapest that the tide turned for her, thanks particularly to an able manager, one Alexander Gross. While I never knew Mr. Gross, I believe he fulfilled the true manager's purpose and function. Gross made an audience for a great artist, an audience where one did not exist before, until, eventually, all Europe was her audience.

I have said that inspiration was Isadora's guide. She did, of course, have theories of dance; but these theories were, for the most part, expressed in vague and general, rather than in precise and particular, terms. They can be summed up in a sentence. She believed that dance was life: therefore, the expression of some inner impulse, or urge, or inspiration. The source of this impulse she believed was centered in the solar plexus. She also believed she was of tremendous importance. Her own ideas of her own importance were, in my opinion, sometimes inflated.

To her eternal credit it must be noted that she battled against sugary music, against trivial themes, against artificiality of all sorts. When her "inspiration" did not proceed directly from the solar plexus, she found it in nature--in the waves of the sea and their rhythms, in the simple process of the opening of a flower.

These frank and simple and desirable objectives, if they had been all, would not have excited the tremendous opposition that was hers throughout her lifetime. Nor did this opposition, I believe, spring solely from her unconventional ideas on love and sex. Isadora insisted on becoming a citizen of the world, a champion of the world's less fortunate, the underprivileged. In doing so she cleared the air of a lot of nonsense and a lot of nineteenth century prudery which was by way of being carried over into the twentieth.

In Europe, in each and every country she visited, she arrayed herself on the side of the angels, i.e., the revolutionaries. The same is true in her own country. She shocked her wealthy patrons with demonstrations of her own particular brand of democracy.

There was an occasion, during one of her appearances at the Metropolitan Opera House, when she walked with that especial Isadorian grace to the footlights and gave the audience, with special reference to the boxholders, the benefits of the following speech:

"Beethoven and Schubert," she said, "were children of the people all their lives. They were poor men and their great work was inspired by and belongs to humanity. The people need great drama, music, dancing. We went over to the East Side and gave a performance for nothing. What happened? The people sat there transfixed, with tears rolling down their cheeks. That is how they cared for it. Funds of life and poetry and art are waiting to spring from the people of the East Side.... Build for them a great amphitheatre, the only democratic form of theatre, where everyone has an equal view, no boxes; no balconies.... Why don't you give art to the people who really need it? Great music should no longer be kept for the delight of a handful of cultured people. It should be given free to the masses. It is as necessary for them as air and bread. Give it to them, for it is the spiritual wine of humanity."

Isadora's European successes led to the establishment of schools of her own, where her theories could be expounded and developed. The first of these was in Berlin, and as her pupils, her "children," developed, she appeared with them. When she first went to Russia, the controversy she stirred up has become a matter of ballet history; and it is a matter of record that she influenced that father of the "romantic revolution" in ballet, Michel Fokine.

Russia figured extensively in Isadora's life, for she gave seasons there, first in 1905, and again in 1907 and 1912. Then, revolutionary that she was, she returned to the Soviet in 1921, established a school there and, in 1922, married the "hooligan" poet, Sergei Essenin. Throughout her life, Isadora had denounced marriage as an institution, disavowed it, fought it, bore three children outside it, on the ground that it existed only for the enslavement of woman.

There had been three Duncan seasons in America before I brought her, in 1922, for what proved to be her final visit to her native country. The earlier American series were in 1908, when she danced with Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony Orchestra, at the Metropolitan Opera House, prior to a tour; in 1911, when she again danced with Damrosch; again in 1916, when she returned to California, early the next year, after a twenty-two years' absence. She also visited New York, briefly, in 1915, impulsively renting a studio at Fourth Avenue and Twenty-third Street, with the idea of establishing a school. It was during this brief visit that she made history of a kind by suddenly improvising a dance to the French national anthem at the Metropolitan Opera House.

The story of Isadora's intervening years is marked by light and shadow. Hers was a life that could not long retain happiness within its grasp. Snatches of happiness were hers in her brief association with England's greatly talented stage designer, that misunderstood genius of the theatre, Gordon Craig, the son of Ellen Terry, by whom Isadora had a child; and yet another child by the lover who was known only as Lohengrin.

Her passionate love of children was touching. Never was it better exemplified than by her several schools, her devotion to the girls and her concern for them. Most of all was it apparent in her selflessness in her attitude towards her own two children. It is not difficult to imagine the depth of the tragedy for her when a car in which they were riding on their way to Versailles toppled into the Seine, and the children were drowned. A third child, her dream of comfort and consolation, died at birth.

It was in an attempt to forget this last tragedy that she brought her school to New York. That same Otto Kahn, who had made Pavlova's first visit to America possible, came to her rescue and footed the bills for a four weeks' season at the old Century Theatre, which stood in lower Central Park West, where Brother Augustin held forth with Greek drama and biblical verse, and Isadora and the "children" danced. The public remained away. There was a press appeal for funds with which to liquidate a ,000 indebtedness and to provide funds with which to get Isadora and the "children" to Italy. Another distinguished art patron, the late Frank Vanderlip, and others came to the rescue with cash and note endorsements. Thus, once again, Isadora put her native America behind her in disgust. Her parting shot at the country of her birth was a blast at Americans living and battening in luxury on their war profits while Europe bled.

Her 1916-1917 visit to her home shores was no more auspicious than the others. She danced, as I have said, at the Metropolitan Opera House. Lover Lohengrin gave her a magnificent party following the performance, a soir?e that ended in an expensive and scandalous deb?cle. Isadora sold her jewels piece by piece, and succeeded in establishing her school at Long Beach. Quickly the money disappeared, and Gordon Selfridge, the London equivalent of Marshall Field, paid her passage to London. The "children," now grown up into the "Isadorables," remained behind to make themselves American careers.

It was after Isadora's departure for London, in 1917, that I undertook to help the six "children" to attain their desires. They were a half-dozen of the loveliest children imaginable.

For their American debut as an independent group, we first engaged George Copeland, specialist in the works of contemporary French and Spanish composers, and an artist of the first rank, and later, Beryl Rubinstein, American composer and teacher, and until his recent death director of the Cleveland Institute, as accompanists.

Smart New York had adopted the "Isadorables." The fashionable magazines had taken them up and had spread Dr. Arnold Genthe's photographs of Anna, Lysel, Gretl, Th?r?se, Erica, and Irma over their pages. Frank Crowninshield championed them. During a hot June they sold out a half-dozen performances in Carnegie Hall, which takes some doing at any time of the year. Following a successful tour, I presented them at the Metropolitan Opera House, this time with an orchestra.

The girls, charming, delightful, fresh, were a direct product of Isadora, for which she used herself as model. Theirs was a reproduction of Isadora's art. One of them functions actively today, Maria Th?r?sa, giving out a fine, strong, sturdy reflection of Isadora's training and ideas. Basically, as an individualist, Isadora was a solo artist. She made no great effort to build up group dances into a series of linked dances that result in some form of dance drama. Such mass dances as she arranged were in imitation of the Greek chorus. Broken down into simple elements, they were nothing more than lines of girls, all of whom repeated the same simple movements. Her own creative gifts, which were magnificent, found their expression in her solo dances, and it is in this respect Maria Th?r?sa splendidly carries on.

Her last conversation with me in Paris was of the "children." This time she was referring to the pupils at her school in Russia. As I listened, I could only feel that these "children" were to her but symbols of her own two children wastefully drowned in the Seine. She wanted me to bring her Russian "children" to America--a visit, as it were, of her own spirit to her native land which had refused to accept her.

I promised.

In 1928, I was able to fulfill that promise by bringing fifteen of them, chosen by Irma of the "Isadorables," for a tour. Irma came with them, presided over them; brought them back for a second tour. Irma now lives quietly in the Connecticut countryside.

A twisting scarf, caught in the wheels of the car in which she was riding, ended the earthly career of a misunderstood American genius. Was the end deliberate? I only know she longed to die, she with the passionate love for life.

A tremendous freedom-loving American, she may, I feel, be called the first American dancer, in the sense that she brought a new style and a new manner, away from the accepted form of ballet. I, for one, believe that Isadora did more than any one else I know for the dance in America, and received less gratitude and recognition for her contribution.

Now that she is dead, I feel for her exactly as I always felt. Though we do not love our friends for one particular quality but as a whole, there is usually an element which, while the friend is still with us, especially appeals to us, and the memory of which we most cherish when he or she is absent for a while or for ever. For me that element in Isadora was and is the extreme gentleness hidden in her heart of hearts. Those who knew her only as a combative spirit in the world of the dance may be astonished at that statement. Yet I hold that gentleness to have been absolutely fundamental in her character and that not a few of her troubles were attributable to continuing and exasperating outrage of it.

There was a superficial side of her that may seem to contradict that gentleness. She had exasperating eccentricities, stupid affectations. Her childishness and capriciousness, her downright wilfulness could drive me nearly to distraction. She could, and often did waste infinite hours of my time, and her own and others' money. She lacked discipline in herself, her life, her work. She could have been less arbitrary in many things, including her condemnation of ballet. On the other hand, she had a quality of communication rare indeed in the theatre. Her faults were, as I have said, superficialities. At base she was a genuinely gentle person.

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