PETITE JEANNE’S DARK HOUR
Petite Jeanne reached the theatre. She was quite alone. She entered at
the stage door unnoticed. A chill numbed her being as the shadowy hallway
leading to the dressing rooms engulfed her.
The past ten days, as she reviewed them now, seemed a bad dream.
Rehearsals had been carried to the last degree of rigor. The director had
been tireless and exacting. On her return the physician had pronounced
her physically perfect; yet, at this moment her knees seemed ready to
cave in beneath her.
“The first night!” she whispered to herself. How often, in the last few
days, she had heard those words. Experienced actors who had known many
“first nights” and many failures as well, spoke them in whispers.
Inexperienced youngsters shouted them. As for Jeanne, no one had heard
these words fall from her lips.
“So much depends upon to-night,” she told herself. “Success or failure.
And who does not wish to succeed grandly?”
The curtain was down, the stage deserted, as she paused in the wings
before going to her dressing room, where Tico, curled up in a warm
corner, awaited her.
Many times she had stared up into the dark rows of empty seats as she did
her dance. In her mind’s eye she could see them even now. But now, too,
she caught the rustle of programs. The seats were filling, filling with
Americans—to her the great unknown. In wild panic she fled to her
dressing room.
The place was bare, barn-like. Only Tico greeted her. It was cruel that
Florence could not be here now.
“But she will come,” she assured herself, as a feeling of great hope
surged through her being. “They will be there in the audience, she and
the gypsy woman. I will see them. They will give me much courage.”
As she changed to her stage costume, a great peace stole over her. But
this was not for long.
The sound of the orchestra’s opening number sent fresh chills up her
spine. What was she to do? How could she find fresh courage for this
hour? No answer came.
The curtain went up. Then, amid such a hush as she had never before
experienced, she tremblingly took her place on the stage. The scene was a
French gypsy camp, for the play told of gypsy life during the World War.
Fortunately her part in the first act, also in the second, was small. She
sat unobtrusively beside the bear in her corner, or moved silently to the
side of the ancient gypsy fortune teller.
The story of the gypsies during that war is a fascinating one. Their
young men volunteered. They died as bravely as any other true Frenchmen.
The older ones, the women and children, wandered here, there, everywhere,
enduring the suffering and privation that had fallen upon the land.
In the story of this play, at its beginning, like Cinderella, Petite
Jeanne, a diminutive figure, was held in the background. Marie Condelli,
a fascinating dark-eyed gypsy girl, dressed in many bright silk skirts,
took the front of the stage. It was she for whom feasts were arranged,
she with whom a great American officer fell madly in love on the very day
before his heroic death on the battlefield, she who was the very darling
of gypsy camp and war camp alike.
One night, so the play ran in its second act, the two girls, the
dark-eyed one and Petite Jeanne, sat at the feet of the fortune teller
when that aged person spread her arms wide as she cried:
“I see a vision. It is a battlefield. Many are dying. A great officer is
wounded. He falls. He is a father. She, his child, comes to him. It is a
girl, a young woman. She bends over him. I see her face. Now I do not see
it. But yes. It is Marie. No, it is little Jeanne. No! No! It is one.
Which is it? My God, the vision is gone!” She falls to the earth in a
spasm. When she comes to herself, the two girls implore her to tell them
the truth. Had she seen one? Had it been the other? For both Marie and
Petite Jeanne had been brought up like orphans in the gypsy camp. It had
been rumored that one of these was stolen as a babe from a great French
family. But which? No one knew.
Such is the story of that drama up to the great third act in which Petite
Jeanne was to emerge from her obscurity and play an important role.
One fact we have not mentioned. Early in this play, it is revealed that
Petite Jeanne’s gypsy lover has gone to war, and is believed to have been
killed.
All during the first act, and again through the second, Jeanne’s eyes
strayed to one spot, to the seats that had been allotted to Florence and
any friend she might care to bring. Always the seats were unoccupied. At
each fresh disappointment her despair deepened.
“Will they not come?” she asked herself over and over. “They must! They
_must_!”