There are 500,000 strangers in Boston, all of them shouting, blowing whistles, shooting, or making some sound to convince the world that they are “happy.”
It is almost impossible to walk on the streets and today no motors are allowed within the city limits. Concentration is difficult. Just now, they are shooting beneath my window. Yesterday “Sonia” came over to rehearse our scenes. We found it impossible. Americans are at their very worst in such a mood, it seems to me.
These are the notices that Georgina cut from the papers. If they are bad it is not surprising, as we were far from our best, last night.
She did not read notices of herself, during an engagement; they made her self-conscious, she said.
The Boston notices were by no means “bad.” They spoke of the hard conditions under which the play was produced, the paid-for empty seats, the perfect cast selected for Chekhov’s picture of human futility. “A delicately beautiful dramatic tapestry,” the Globe called it, “its colors subdued and blended, as only master craftsmen can blend.... The company is superb, and the acting well-nigh perfect.” And the Transcript, with a full-length three-column picture of her, paid a just tribute to the play and its production. Lillian’s part it spoke of as “elusive, wraith-like, symbol of the unattainable. At the end, like a spirit of a passing dream, she drifts away, to leave them to their old problems and their solitude.”
But for a week, the attendance was very bad. Then the visiting military was gone, and the house filled. It would have been filled for a month longer, if they could have stayed. But Chicago was waiting.
Lillian was always reading some book on the road. This time she was re-reading “Wuthering Heights.”
What a beautiful piece of work is Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights.” It sweeps across the page like the winds on the moor that she knew so well. From fury to tenderness, with such understanding; how many lives had she lived before, to know so much!
She firmly believed in mental and spiritual growth through reincarnation. She was convinced that she had lived before—that now and again, she caught glimpses of a former life. Personally, I was by no means sure that mere human beings had known a previous existence, but I was certain that Lillian had. Not a previous existence, but the same existence, of which the present gave hardly more than a glimpse.