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Greek boys marching in order al in Greek tunics, the kaiserin's horse shied, and her highness was thrown.

Isadora was the vogue.

She arrived in St. Petersburg in time to see the

night funeral of the marchers shot down in front of the Winter Palace in 1905. It hurt her. She was an

American like Walt Whitman; the murdering rulers

of the world were not her people; the marchers were her people; artists were not on the side of the

machineguns; she was an American in a Greek tunic;

she was for the people.

In St. Petersburg, stil under the spel of the

eighteenthcentury bal et of the court of the Sunking, her dancing was considered dangerous by the au-thorities. In Germany she founded a school with the help of her sister Elizabeth who did the organizing, and she had a baby by Gordon Craig. She went to America in triumph as she'd always

planned and harried the home philistines with a tour; her fol owers were al the time getting pinched for

-157-wearing Greek tanics; she found no freedom for Art in America.

Back in' Paris it was the top of the world; Art

meant Isadora. At the funeral of the Prince de Polig-nac she met the mythical mil ionaire (sewingmachine king) who was to be her backer and to finance her

school. She went off with him in his yacht (whatever Isadora did was Art) to dance in the Temple at Paestum

only for him,

but it rained and the musicians al got drenched.

So they al got drunk instead.

Art was the mil ionaire life. Art was whatever

Isadora did. She was carrying the mil ionaire's child to the great scandal of the oldlady clubwomen and

spinster artlovers when she danced on her second

American tour;

she took to drinking too much and stepping to the

footlights and bawling out the boxholders.

Isadora was at the height of glory and scandal and

power and wealth, her school going, her mil ionaire was about to build her a theater in Paris, the Duncans were the priests of a cult, (Art was whatever Isadora did), when the car that was bringing her two children

home from the other side of Paris stal ed on a bridge across the Seine. Forgetting that he'd left the car in gear the chauffeur got out to crank the motor. The car started, knocked down the chauffeur, plunged off the bridge into the Seine.

The children and their nurse were drowned.

-158-The rest of her life moved desperately on

in the clatter of scandalized tongues, among the

kidding faces of reporters, the threatening of bailiffs, the expostulations of hotelmanagers bringing overdue bil s.

Isadora drank too much, she couldn't keep her

hands off goodlooking young men, she dyed her hair

various shades of brightred, she never took the trouble to make up her face properly, was careless about her dress, couldn't bother to keep her figure in shape, never could keep track of her money

but a great sense of health

fil ed the hal

when the pearshaped figure with the beautiful

great arms tramped forward slowly from the back of

the stage.

She was afraid of nothing; she was a great dancer.

In her own city of San Francisco the politicians

wouldn't let her dance in the Greek Theater they'd

built under her influence. Wherever she went she gave offense to the philistines. When the war broke out she danced the Marseillaise, but it didn't seem quite re-spectable' and she gave offense by refusing to give up Wagner or to show the proper respectable feelings

of satisfaction at the butchery.

On her South American tour

she picked up men everywhere,

a Spanish painter, a couple of prizefighters, a

stoker on the boat, a Brazilian poet,

brawled in tangohal s, bawled out the Argentines

for niggers from the footlights, lushly triumphed in Montevideo and Brazil; but if she had money she

-159-couldn't help scandalously spending it on tangodancers, handouts, afterthetheater suppers, the generous gesture, no, al on my bil . The managers gypped her. She was afraid of nothing, never ashamed in the public eye of the clatter of scandalized tongues, the headlines in the afternoon