Chapter 9

Barnes stood uneasily by the desk. "I--I don't know, Tony," he answered. "To tell yuh the truth, I'd be a little bit scared to try it. Yuh see, I--well, if you wasn't an old friend of mine, I couldn't say it--but, confidentially, Tony, I--I've kind o' lost my grip. I'm a--a back number, Tony. I'm afraid o' them kids; they're too wise. My old act wouldn't go." He waited, awkwardly; then, as if he hoped he were wrong, he asked: "Would it?"

Sanderson snapped his grim eyes. "What're yuh tryin' to put it on fer, at all, then--if yuh think it won't take with a gang of kids at a free doin's?" Then his tone softened. "Look here, Harry. It'll only be ten or twenty minutes. Go ahead. You'll get through all right. You ain't as much of a dead one as you think you are."

Barnes straightened up. It was all right for him to make a slight confession, but Sanderson had wounded his professional vanity. "A dead one!" he exclaimed. "Certainly not. Harry Barnes a dead one! After a thirty years' career in the companies of the best----"

The agent shoved a card in his hand and cut him off short. "Go around there and tell 'em to put you down for a monologue." And Harry went, with dignity and misgivings.

His misgivings were all the more increased when he saw the list of promised performers: La Belle Marie, the famous little toe dancer in her attractive transformations; the Brothers Zincatello, Risley experts at the Hippodrome; Julian Jokes, "in his inimitable Hebrew monologue"; the Seven Sebastians, the world's most marvelous Herculean acrobatic performers; Mlle. Joujou, the popular singing comedienne, Prima Donna and Star, direct from her unusual and most distinguished triumph at the Palace Theater, London; and a dozen more of the younger and more popular people of the stage, all adorned, with adjectives and hyperbole. Down at the bottom of the list with a trembling pencil he wrote: "Harry Barnes, Singing and Talking." Then he shook hands with the secretary of the organization and walked back to his boarding-house in a mild fever of excitement.

In his room he went eagerly about his work. He rehearsed again and again his meager little bag of tricks, his funny Irishman, his Chinaman--no, the Chinaman came first, because he used the queue afterward to wrap around his chin and simulate Irish "galloways"--his Dutch comedian monologue about married life, his old-time songs and dances. He furbished up some old "patter" and injected new anecdotes. And this he kept up morning and evening until the notable Sunday came.

He was so nervous, this old actor of a thousand parts, that he could eat no supper that night. He almost trotted to the gymnasium in his excitement, and, though his pockets bulged with grease paint, mustaches, wigs, and other paraphernalia, he forgot almost half of his material. At the door he had to push his way through a wriggling, impish mass of small boys who blocked the steps and the sidewalk. Inside the hall, young faces packed the place to the window-sills. To the old man the newsboys seemed as so many antagonistic bits of the younger generation, the generation which evidently would have none of him, which relegated him carelessly to the warehouse for old scenery and old settings.

He stood in dismay behind an extemporized "wing" and peered out at the restless little bodies. He fancied already that he could see grins on their sophisticated faces, ridicule in their eyes; he remembered once hearing a gallery god shout "Twenty-three!" in the middle of an actor's monologue, and what had then seemed humorous precocity now seemed hard, bitter cruelty. He fumbled at his make-up in his pockets, shuffled uneasily, and waited.

It was almost time to begin. Where were the other actors who had promised to come? The boys out front were whistling, kicking their feet upon the floor, clapping their hands, and shouting to one another. A distracted official raced here and there among other officials, asking some sort of exasperated question. Barnes could not hear what it was; but telepathically he felt that there was a hitch in the program.

At last, after waiting a quarter of an hour, the manager stepped forward and said:

"Boys, we had arranged a fine program for you to-night----"

"Good fer you!" yelled a voice.

The speaker held up his hand. "But it seems that actors are better _promisers_ than they are _actors_." He smiled at his own joke, but the audience gave one long "Aw-w-w!"

"However," he continued, "we are all here now and we intend to do the best we can. If we make up our mind to, we can have a bully good time just the same. We have with us at least one kind gentleman who appreciates what a celebration like this means to the boys." ... Barnes heard and saw things as if through a fog. The arms of the speaker were gyrating and a voice shouted in the ear of the old actor: "What's your name?"

"Harry Barnes," he said, moistening his lips. Nobody had shown up except him, he kept thinking over and over to himself: nobody except him. He had the thankless job of "opening the show."

"... Harry Barnes," echoed the speaker at the end of some sort of practical talk concerning the newsboys' organization and its management. "Mister Harry Barnes"--he squinted at the program--"in singing and talking."

He turned and smiled at the old man, and to Barnes the smile seemed diabolical. Somebody clapped him on the back. There was a hurricane of whistles and shouts, and before he knew it he was in the middle of the rostrum.

Mechanically he had made his old comic entrance, tripping his right toe over his left heel, and turning to shake his fist at an imaginary enemy. The boys, determined to be pleased, giggled appreciatively.

"How--how are you, boys?" Barnes asked, seriously.

The audience snickered with delight. He was such a funny-looking old man!

"I hope you'll like my work," he went on, desperately, "or else we might as well go home. I guess I'm the whole show, for a little while, at least, as the feller said when he fell out o' the balloon." The house roared with approval.

"Go wan, Barnesy," shouted a young pair of lungs in the front row.

He straightened up, turned his back for a moment, stuck a queer set of mustaches on his upper lip, faced the crowd again, and began: "I was walkin' down the street the other day when my friend J. Pierpoint Morgan stepped up to me an' says, 'Barney, my boy'"....

The show had begun. Harry Barnes, singing and talking, had opened his carefully rehearsed bag of tricks.

There is some peculiar psychology about humor. If people make up their minds that they are going to laugh and that a performance is bound to be funny, nothing on earth can keep them from enjoying themselves. The most serious remark will be greeted with howls of approval; the most ancient joke takes on a novel and present sprightliness. In the slang of the stage, Barnes' line of patter took.

Four hundred boys simpered, smirked, grinned, giggled, tittered, chuckled, and guffawed. A wine of merriment flushed the crowd and mounted to the old mummer's brain and heart. He skipped and danced and sang; he went through all the drollery and tomfoolery, all the old comic business he could recall.

The children nudged each other, dug their fists into each other, and cheered: "Oh, you Barnesy!" "Kill it, Kid!" "Whatcha know about dat!" "Sand it down, Barnesy!" The old-timer was doing the famous lock-step jig he had done with Pat Rooney in "Patrice" fifteen or twenty years before. It was so old that it was new. Encore followed encore. The perspiration cascaded through his pores; he grinned and winked and frisked and capered. They would not let him stop. At the end of twenty-five minutes he bowed himself off the stage, and still they called him back. When he gave them, for the "call," the Little Johnny Dugan pantomime from "The Rainmakers," the East Side children, born since the day of such things, were suffocated with delight.

What did Dugan do to him? --They say he was untrue to him. Did Dugan owe him money? --No; he stole McCarthy's wife! Who? Little Johnny Dugan?

sang Barnes with a quizzical flirt of his head; and lungs that were wont to fill the city streets with news could not even gasp for laughter.

The secretary of the organization followed with a speech about future entertainments; another official read a letter from a prominent financier promising the boys a swimming-pool and a half dozen summer excursions.

"Somebody bang de box!" suggested a voice, after a pause.

Nobody could--except Barnes; and he volunteered. The whole affair was now like one big family circle, each one secure in the amity of the other, and when the old man sat down at the cracked piano, he sang as if he were singing to himself, easily and without restraint. A quiet held the house, and even the children were touched; for Harry Barnes was quavering through the simple lines of "Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot." After that he gave them the Lullaby Song from "Erminie," and somehow it did not at all appear incongruous that a careworn mimic of fifty should be singing to careworn workingmen of ten, down on the Bowery, in a gymnasium, a verse about pretty little eyelids and sleeping darlings. The world, fortunately, is not always with us; and the song ended in a silent applause.

For two hours the entertainment went on, speeches and official plans interspersed with the antics of Barnes.

Was there anything he could not do? He mimicked birds and animals; he imitated a wheezy phonograph playing "When We Were a Couple of Kids"; he recited "The Raven" and "Paul Revere's Ride"; he gave a cutting from Dickens and one from Sheridan Knowles; he showed how Joe Jefferson played Rip Van Winkle, how Sol Smith Russell did "A Poor Relation."

And all through his soul and body, as he watched his haphazard audience follow him in his moods and changes, ran the quiet magic of Art Satisfied. It is a noble braggart madness, this glorification of a cheap art by an old actor.

"Barnes, my boy," he said to himself, with a glow of rapid blood, "you have not lost them yet! See them laugh with you! Feel them cry! What does it matter if you eat watery oatmeal and live in a skylight room; are you not an artist, a resonant instrument of poetry and music and mirth, a true actor of the best parts? You are; and these are matters of the undying soul. A boarding-house is a vulgar, temporal thing. You were right to come here to-night, and do this thing without pay, for Art's sake. You uphold the honor of a calling which is founded upon Art. And, oh, most of all, you have not lost your power, you have not outlived your time! Sanderson intimated that you were a dead one--very well, to-morrow you shall triumphantly cut the acquaintance of Sanderson! To have lived until this evening before the youth of this land; to have caught the right intonation, the proper gesture; to have swept through the hearts of your hearers like a vibration of music--this is to have transcended, this is to have justified yourself! And justified yourself to whom? To Sanderson? To the world? No! You have justified Harry Barnes to Harry Barnes! You carry this human throng over the footlights and into your soul with a Chinaman's queue and a putty nose. Your Art is still that fine, secure Art which you have carried in your memory as you traversed dingy stairways on Fourteenth Street. Barnes, you live, you act, you accomplish! Bravo!"

He shook hands abstractedly all around when the affair came to a close. He remembered bundling his make-up and trinkets into a piece of newspaper and tucking it under his arm. A pleased face presented itself at one time before his eyes and a voice said, confidentially, "Mr. Barnes, I congratulate you; and the dramatic critic of the _Star_ was here to-night."

He found himself at last out in the cool darkness of the street, and he had to stop a moment to think which way his boarding-house lay. Then he walked home, to save carfare. All the way up the silent streets his brain sang with triumph. His blood jumped in gladness; he could hardly keep from running. He declaimed aloud bits of Shakespeare, tag ends of poems; he snapped his fingers and flung out his arms in sheer excess of enthusiasm. He smiled, threw back his head, even made faces at the passersby. He boomed into a solo from an opera, and kicked his foot at a cigar stub on the sidewalk. And had anybody wished to observe when he reached his house, the spectacle would have presented itself of a caricature, funny-paper barn-stormer tramping merrily up the rattling stairs and humming, "The flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la, have nothing to do with the case."

All the next day he did not leave his room, save at meal times; for he wished to be alone and hug his exultation. To the four flat walls he repeated snatches of the things he had done the night before; up and down the rag carpet he smirked and grimaced and laughed and jigged. He sang the songs that had "taken" so well. He went through certain gestures and then deliberately exaggerated them, in a high good-humor. He was as young again as on the day when he had signed his first contract. He puffed out his chest, looked at himself in the glass with mock seriousness, and then, when the pent-up good feeling burst out in his merry eye, he winked it gleefully and said: "Oh, you divvil, you! You old blatherskiting divvil!"

At half-past four he went down to the corner and bought a copy of the _Star_, the late edition which had the dramatic news in it.

There it was! He felt like jumping up in the air and whooping the length of the street. On the editorial page it was. His name was in the headlines! Beneath, in the article itself, almost every other word seemed to be Barnes. It praised him here, it admired him there, it thanked him, it congratulated him, it asserted that he had saved the night for four hundred newsboys. He was so anxious to read it through and to read it fast that he skipped from paragraph to paragraph. There was over a column of it! He hurried back up to the room; and then regretted that he had not stopped to buy more copies of the paper. He locked the door and spread the paper out on the little center-table. His heart and breath almost stopped as he read the good words slowly through. When he had finished, he threw the paper aside and bounded into the middle of the room.

"Press agent, hey?" he laughed. "Press agent! I guess yes! A small matter of a column and a quarter; that's all. _Only_ a column and a quarter about Harry Barnes! Wonder what Sanderson will think about that? Wonder if he won't get me something to do? Oh, no; I guess not. A column and a quarter!"

He sat down again and smoothed out the paper before him. This time he began noticing little niceties of the critic's phrasing ... "entertaining, not to say pathetic rendition," etc., etc.... "_Not_ to say?" Funny; look at it a moment, and it seems to mean it wasn't pathetic. But here it said: "Infectious and heart-tickling old-time Irish humor" ... "excellent characterization of Uriah Heep" ... and so on.

After a few minutes he ceased reading and sat, picking at the edge of the paper, staring into the blankness of the little room. He stayed thus immovable for a long, long time, and then slowly the tears slipped across his cheeks, down on the forgotten "notice," his throat ached with a tender sobbing, and he bowed his head into the newspaper.

He was thinking of the children; he had made them laugh and cry. And this was the thrill, once more, of the singer's heart.

ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS

In consequence of the threatening situation which the President's reactionary policy had precipitated, the belief grew stronger and stronger in the Northern country that the predominance of the Republican party was--and would be for a few years, at least--necessary for the safety and the honor of the Republic; and steps taken to insure that predominance, even such as would have in less critical times evoked strong criticism, were now looked upon with seductive leniency of judgment. Mr. Stockton of New Jersey was unseated in the Senate upon grounds which would hardly pass muster in ordinary times, to make room for a Republican successor, and even Mr. Fessenden approved the transaction. Advantage was taken in the same body of the sickness or casual absence of some Democratic senator to rush through a vote when a two-thirds majority was required to kill a veto; and other proceedings were resorted to at a pinch which were hardly compatible with the famous "courtesy of the Senate." But there was more thorough and lasting work to be done to prepare for the full restoration of the States lately in rebellion. The Republican majority was by no means of one mind as to the constitutional status of the communities that had been in insurrection against the National Government. I have already spoken of the theory of State-suicide advanced by Mr. Stevens and a comparatively small school of extremists. The theory most popular with most of the Republicans, which was finally formulated by the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, was that the rebel States had not been out of the Union, but had lost their working status inside of the Union, and had to be restored to their regular constitutional relations to the Union by action of Congress, upon such conditions as Congress might deem proper.

To meet the dangers which so far had become visible on the horizon, the Joint Committee on Reconstruction devised the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which was long and laboriously debated in both Houses. In the form in which it was finally adopted it declared (1) that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of the United States and of the States in which they reside, and that no State shall make or enforce any law abridging the privileges or immunities of citizens, nor deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person the equal protection of the laws; (2) that if in any State the right to vote at any election for the choice of national or State officers is denied or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation in Congress or the electoral college shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State; (3) that no person who had taken part in the rebellion, having previously, as a national or State officer, military or civil, sworn to support the Constitution of the United States, shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or any State, unless relieved of that disability by a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress; (4) that the validity of the public debt of the United States shall not be questioned, nor shall any debt or obligation contracted in aid of rebellion, or any claim for emancipated slaves be paid.

_The Fourteenth Amendment_

Thus the Fourteenth Amendment stopped short of the extension of the suffrage to negroes--a subject which many Republicans were still afraid to touch directly. But by implication it punished the States denying that extension by reducing the basis of representation; it excluded from office, unless relieved of the disability by a two-thirds vote of Congress, the most influential class of those who had taken an active part in the rebellion; and it safeguarded the public debt. With only one of its provisions serious fault could be found;--not with that which guaranteed to the freedmen the essential civil rights of free men, nor with that which excluded the freedmen from the basis of representation--so long as they were not permitted to vote. Only the advocates of negro suffrage might logically have objected to this clause; inasmuch as it by implication recognized the right of a State to exclude the colored people from the suffrage if the State paid a certain penalty for such exclusion. Neither could the clause safeguarding the public debt and prohibiting the payment of debts incurred in aid of the rebellion be objected to. The really exceptionable provision was that which excluded so large a class of Southern men from public office, and just that class with which a friendly understanding was most desirable. The provision that their disqualification could be removed by a two-thirds vote in each House of Congress mended the mischief thus done a little, but not enough for the public good.

It was not expressly enacted, but it was generally understood, that those of the States lately in rebellion, which ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, would thereby qualify themselves for full restoration in the Union. Tennessee, where a faction of the Union party hostile to President Johnson had gained the ascendency, did so, and was accordingly fully restored by the admission to their seats in Congress of its Senators and Representatives. The full restoration of the other late rebel States would probably have been expedited in the same way, had they followed the example of Tennessee. But President Johnson, as became publicly known in one or two instances, obstinately dissuaded them from doing so, and the fight went on. He also vetoed a second Freedmen's Bureau bill in which some of the provisions he had objected to in his veto of the first were remedied. But things had now come to such a pass between Congress and the President that his veto messages were hardly considered worth listening to, but were promptly overruled almost without debate by two-thirds votes in each House.

_A Campaign to Destroy a President_

Under such circumstances the Congressional election of 1866 came on. The people were to pronounce judgment between the President and Congress. The great quarrel had created excitement so intense as to affect men's balance of mind. About the time of the assembling of Congress Mr. Preston King of New York (the same rotund gentleman with whom, in the National Convention of 1860, I conducted Mr. Ashmun to the chair), who had been a Senator of the United States and had been appointed Collector of Customs by President Johnson, committed suicide by jumping into the North River from a ferry-boat. He had been a Republican of the radical type, and when he took the office he supposed the President to be of the same mind; but Mr. Johnson's course distressed him so much that he became melancholy; his brain gave way, and he sought relief in death. Another suicide which greatly startled the country a few months later, that of Senator Lane of Kansas, was attributed to a similar cause. "Jim" Lane had been one of the most famous free-State fighters in Kansas Territory. Since then he was ranked among the extreme anti-slavery men and as a Senator he was counted upon as a firm opponent of President Johnson's policy. To the astonishment of everybody he voted against the Civil Rights bill. This somewhat mysterious change of front, which nobody seemed able satisfactorily to explain, cost him his confidential intercourse with his former associates in the Senate, and brought upon him stinging manifestations of disapproval from his constituents. He was reported to have expressed profound repentance of what he had done and finally made away with himself as one lost to hope. He was still in the full vigor of manhood--only fifty-one years old--when he sought the grave.