CHAPTER TWENTY-SIXTH

Mr. Lawrence Barrett the Brilliant and his Brother Joseph the Unfortunate.

There were few stars with whom I took greater pleasure in acting than with Mr. Lawrence Barrett. I sometimes wonder if even now this profession really knows what great reason it has to be proud of him. He was a man respected by all, admired by many, and if loved but by few, theirs was a love so profound and so tender it amply sufficed.

We are a censorious people, and just as our greatest virtue is generosity in giving, so our greatest fault is the eagerness with which we seek out the mote in our neighbor's eye, without feeling the slightest desire for the removal of the beam in our own eye. Thus one finds that the first and clearest memory actors have of Mr. Barrett is of his irascible temper and a certain air of superiority, not of his erudition, of the high position he won socially as well as artistically, of the almost Titanic struggle of his young manhood with adverse circumstances.

Nor does that imply the slightest malice on their part. Actors, as a family trait, have a touch of childishness about them which they come by honestly enough. We all know the farther we get from infancy the weaker the imagination grows. Now it is imagination that makes the man an actor, so it is not wonderful if with the powerful creative fancy of childhood he should also retain a touch of its petulance and self-consciousness. Thus to many actors Mr. Barrett's greatness is lost sight of in the memory of some dogmatic utterance or sharp reproval that wounded self-love.

It would seem like presumption for me to offer any word of praise for the artistic work of his later years; the world remembers it; the world knows, too, how high he climbed, how secure was his position; but twice I have heard the stories of his earlier years--some from the lips of his brave wife, once from the lips of that beloved brother Joe, who was yet his dread and sorrow--and at each telling my throat ached at the pain of it, while my nerves thrilled with admiration for such endurance, such splendid determination.

A paradox is, I believe, something seemingly absurd, yet true in fact. In that case I was not so very far wrong, in spite of general laughter, when, after my first rehearsal with him, I termed Mr. Barrett a man of cold enthusiasm. "But," one cried to me, "you stupid--that's a paradox! don't you see your words contradict each other?"

"Well," I answered, with shame-faced obstinacy, "perhaps they do, but they are not contradicted by _him_. You all call him icy-cold, and _I_ know he is truly enthusiastic over the possibilities of this play, so that makes what I call cold enthusiasm, however par-a-paradoxy (?) _it_ sounds."

And now, after all the years, I can approve that childish judgment. He was a man whose intellectual enthusiasm was backed by a cold determination that would never let him say "die" while he had breath in his body and a stage to rehearse on.

I have a miserable memory for names, and often in the middle of a remark the name I intended to mention will pass from my remembrance utterly; so, all my life, I have had the very bad habit of trying to make my hearers understand whom I meant by imitating or mentioning some trait peculiar to the nameless one, and I generally succeeded.

As, for instance, when I wished to tell whom I had seen taking away a certain book, I said: "It was Mr.--er--er, oh, you know, Mr.--er, why this man," and I pulled in my head like a turtle and hitched up my shoulders to my ears, and the anxious owner cried: "Oh, Thompson has it, has he?" Thompson having, so far as _we_ could see, no neck at all--my pantomime suggested his name.

Everyone can recall the enormous brow of Mr. Barrett, and how beneath his great, burning eyes his cheeks hollowed suddenly in, thinning down to his sensitive mouth. I was on the stage in New Orleans, the first morning of my engagement there (I was under Mr. Daly's management, but he had loaned me for a fortnight), and I started out with: "Mr. Daly said to please ask Mr.----," away went the name--goodness gracious, should I forget my own name next!

The stage manager suggested: "Mr. Rogers."

"No, oh, no! I mean Mr.--er--er," and I trailed off helplessly.

"Mr. Seymour?" offered a lady.

"No, no! that's not it!" I cried; "why, goodness mercy me! you all know whom I mean--the--the actor with the _hungry eyes_?"

"Oh, Barrett!" they shouted, all save one voice, that with a mighty laugh cried out: "That's my brother Larry, God bless him! no one could miss that description, for sure he looks as hungry to-day as ever he did when he felt hungry to his heart's core!"

And so it was that I first met poor Joe Barrett, who worshipped the brother whose sore torment he was. For this great, broad-shouldered, ruddy-faced fellow with the boyish laugh had ever in his veins the craving for liquor--that awful inherited appetite that can nullify prayer and break down the most fixed determination.

"Ah!" he cried to me, "no one, no one can ever know how good Larry has been to me, for while he is fighting and struggling to rise, every little while some lapse of mine drags him back a bit. Yet he never casts me off--never disowns me. He has had to discharge me for the sake of discipline here, but he has re-engaged me. He has sent me away, but he has taken me back again. I promise, and fail to keep my promise. I fall, and he picks me up. Through the cursed papers I have dragged my brother through the mud, but the sweet Saviour could hardly forgive me more fully than Larry does, for, look you, he never forgets that I am the son of my father, who was accursed before me, while he is the son of our poor mother--blessed be her name! It isn't that I don't try. I keep straight until the agony of longing begins to turn into a mad desire to do bodily harm to someone--anyone, and then, fearing worse, I drink my fill, and the papers find me out, and are not content to tell of the disgraceful condition of Joseph Barrett, but must add, always, 'the brother of the prominent actor, Mr. Lawrence Barrett.' Poor Larry! poor little delicate chap that he used to be, with his big, brainy head--too heavy for his weak neck and frail body to carry."

And then he told me of their sorrowful life, their poverty. The often-idle father and his dislike for the delicate boy, whose only moment of happiness was when the weary mother, the poor supper over, sat for a little to breathe and rest, and held his heavy head upon her loving breast, while Joe sang his songs or told all the happenings of the day.

That happy Joe, who had no pride and was quite as satisfied without a seat to his small trousers as with one! Then he told me how hard it was for Lawrence to learn; how he had to grind and grind at the simplest lesson, but once having acquired it, it was his for life.

"Why, even now," said he, "in confidence I'm telling you, my brother is studying like a little child at French, and it does seem that he cannot learn it. He works so desperately over it, a doctor has warned him he must choose between French and his many 'parts' or break down from overwork. But he _will_ go on hammering at his _parlez-vous_ until he learns them or dies trying."

"If you were to live with your brother, might not that help to keep you strong?" I asked.

"Now, my dear little woman," he smiled, "Larry is human, in some respects, if he is almost God-like toward me. Remember he has a young family now, and though his wife is as good as gold and always patient with me, I am not the kind of example a man would care to place before his little ones, and as Lawrence is devoured with ambition for them and their future, he rightly guards them from too close contact with the drag and curse of his own life, in whom he, and he alone, can see the sturdy tow-headed brother of the old boyish days, who saved him from many and many a kick and thump his delicate body could ill have borne."

Joe told me of his dead wife--Viola Crocker that was--the niece of Mrs. Bowers and Mrs. Conway; of their happiness and their misery. Describing himself as having been "in heaven or in hell--without any betwixts and betweens." His devotion to me was very great. He was "hard-up" for money, as the men express it, but he would manage to bring me a single rose or one bunch of grapes or a half-dozen mushrooms or some such small offering every day; and learning of his bitter mortification because he could not hire a carriage to take me out to see the curious old French cemetery, I made him supremely happy by expressing a desire to ride in one of those funny bob-tailed, mule-drawn street-cars--the result being a trip by my mother, Mr. Barrett, and myself to the famous cemetery.

I don't know that I ever heard anyone sing Irish and Scottish ballads more tenderly, more pathetically than did Joe Barrett, and as my mother was very fond of old songs, he used to sit and sing one after another for her. That day there was no one in the crawling little car but we three, and presently he began to sing. But, oh, what was it that he sang? Irish, unmistakably--a lament, rising toward its close into the _keen_ of some clan. It wrung the very heart.

"Don't!" I exclaimed. My mother's face was turned away, my throat ached, even Joe's eyes had filled. "What is it?" I asked.

"I don't know its name," he answered, "I have always put it on programmes as 'A Lament.' I learned it from an Irish emigrant-lad, who was from the North, and who was dying fast from consumption and home-hunger. Is not that wail chilling? As he gave the song it seemed like a message from the dying."

At the end of our stroll among the flowers and trees and past those strange stone structures that look so like serious-minded bake-ovens, having to wait for a car, we sat on a stone bench, and in that quiet city of the dead Joe's voice rose, tenderly reverent, in that simple air that was yet an anguish of longing, followed by a wail for the dead.

My mother wept silently. I said, softly: "It's a plaint and a farewell," and Joe brought his eyes back from the great cross, blackly silhouetted against the flaming sky, and slowly said: "Beloved among women, it is a message--a message from the dying or the dead, believe that."

And a time came when--well, when _almost_ I did believe that.

Later on, when Mr. Barrett stood second only to Mr. Booth in his profession, well established, well off, well dressed, polished and refined of manner, aye, and genial, too, to those he liked, I came by accident upon a most gracious act of his and, following it up, found him deep in a conspiracy to deceive a stricken woman into receiving the aid her piteous determination to stand alone made impossible to offer openly. I looked at the generous, prosperous, intellectual, intensely active gentleman, surrounded by clever wife and the pretty, thoroughly educated daughters, who were chaperoned in all their walks to and from park or music-lesson or shopping-trip, and I wondered at the distance little "Larry," with the heavy head and frail body, had traveled, and bowed respectfully to such magnificent energy.

Even then there arose a cry from the profession that Mr. Barrett was dictatorial, that he assumed airs of superiority. Mr. Barrett was wrapped up, soul and body, in the proper production of the play in hand. He was keenly observant and he was sensitive. When an actor had his mind fixed upon a smoke or a glass of beer, and cared not one continental dollar whether the play failed or succeeded, so long as he got his "twenty dollars per--," Mr. Barrett knew it, and became "dictatorial" in his effort to force the man into doing his work properly. I worked with him, both as a nobody and as somebody, and I know that an honest effort to comprehend and carry out his wishes was recognized and appreciated.

As for his airs of superiority--well, the fact is he was superior to many. He was intellectual and he was a student to the day of his death. When work at the theatre was over he turned to study. He never was well acquainted with Tom and Dick, nor yet with Harry. His back fitted a lamp-post badly. He would not have known how "to jolly the crowd." He was not a full, voluminous, and ready story-teller for the boys, who called him cold and hard. God knows he had needed the coldness and the so-called hardness, or how could he have endured the privations of the long journey from his weary mother's side to this position of honor.

Cold, hard, dictatorial, superior? Well, there is a weak lean-on-somebody sort of woman, who will love any man who will feed and shelter her--she doesn't count. But when a clear-minded, business-like, clever woman, a wife for many years, loves her husband with the tenderest sentiment and devotion, I'm ready to wager something that it was _tenderness_ and _devotion_ in the husband that first aroused like sentiments in the wife.

Mrs. Barrett was shrewd, far-seeing, business-like--a devoted and watchful mother, but her love for her husband had still the freshness, the delicate sentiment of young wifehood. When she thought fit, she bullied him shamefully; when she thought fitter, she "guyed" him unmercifully. Think of that! And it was delightful to see the great, solemn-eyed personification of dignity smilingly accepting her buffets.

But, oh, to hear that wife tell of the sorrows and trials they had faced together, of their absurd makeshifts, of their small triumphs over poverty, of Lawrence's steady advance in his profession, of that beautiful day when they moved into a little house all by themselves, when he became, as he laughingly boasted, "a householder, not a forlorn, down-trodden boarder!"

Their family, besides themselves, then consisted of one little girl and Lawrence's beloved old mother, and he had a room to study in in peace, and the two women talked and planned endlessly about curtains and furniture, and--oh, well, about some more very small garments that would, God willing, be needed before a very great while. And one day Lawrence looked about his little table, and said: "It's too good, it can't last, it can't!" and the women kissed him and laughed at him; yet all the time he was right, it did not last. An awful bolt seemed to fall from the blue sky. It was one of those pitiful disasters that sometimes come upon the very old--particularly to those who have endured much, suffered much, as had the elder Mrs. Barrett in the past.

I wept as I heard the story of the devoted son's dry-eyed agony, of the awful fears his condition aroused in the minds of those close to him, and then suddenly she, the wife, had been stricken down, and her danger and that of the tiny babe had brought him to his old self again.

He worked on then for some months, grateful for the sparing of his dear ones, when quite suddenly and painlessly the stricken old mother passed from sleep to life everlasting. Then when Joseph was to be summoned--Joe who worshipped the mother's footprint in the dust--he was not to be found. He had fallen again into disgrace, had been discharged, had disappeared, no one knew whither.

"Oh, dear Father!" cried Mrs. Barrett, "what did not Lawrence suffer for Joe! knowing what his agony would be when he knew all--but we could do no more. The funeral took place. White as marble, Lawrence sent us all home, and himself waited till the last clod of earth was piled upon the grave; then waited till the men had gone, waited to kneel and pray a moment before leaving the old mother there alone. And as he knelt he noted how nearly dark it was, and thought he must not linger long or the gates would be locked upon him. As he rose from his knees, he was startled to see, through the dusk, a tall form coming toward him. It would dodge behind a monument, and after a moment's pause would come a little nearer. Suddenly the drooping, lurching figure became familiar to him. With a groan he hid himself behind a tombstone and waited--waited until suspicion became certainty, and he knew that the bent, weary funeral guest was his brother, Joe!

"He held his peace until the wanderer found his way along the darkening path to that pathetic stretch of freshly broken earth, where, with an exceeding bitter cry, he flung his arms above his head and fell all his length along the grave that held the sweetest and the holiest thing God had ever given him, an honest, loving mother, and clutched the damp clods in his burning hands, and gasped out: 'Oh, mother! I have hungered and I have tramped with the curse upon me, too; I have hungered and tramped so far, so far, hoping just to be in time to see your dear face once more, and now they've shut you away from me, from the bad boy you never turned your patient eyes away from! Oh, mother! whatever can I do without you, all alone! all alone!'

"At that child-like cry from the broken man, prostrate on the grave, Lawrence Barrett's heart turned to water, and kneeling down he lifted to his breast the tear-blurred, drink-blemished face of his brother, and kissed him as his mother might have done. Thus they prayed together for the repose of the soul of their beloved, and then, with his arm about the wanderer, to steady his failing steps, Lawrence led him to his little home, and, as they entered, he turned and said: 'Joe, can't you take back those words, "all alone," can't you?' and Joe nodded his head, and throwing his arms about his brother's neck, answered: 'Never alone, while my little brother Larry lives and forgives!'"