Chapter 12

Bridges spent the night in a station-house, recovering from the effects of a fall, which the police attributed to drunkenness. Assuming that he had received his blows from some masculine relative or admirer of the girl, he gave a false account of the bruises when the next night he asked the manager for a few nights of rest and enabled his understudy to obtain a chance long coveted.

The leading juvenile manifestly thought best not to attempt a renewal of a flirtation with a young woman who had so formidable a protector; and the girl herself, whatever became of her, addressed him no more epistles of adoration, or of any sort whatever.

Yorick got from the stage manager permission to change his dressing-room. Thereafter he and Bridges maintained a mutual coolness, until one day the leading juvenile, warmed by cocktails, melted, and addressed the old man familiarly by his nickname.

“Old fellow,” said Bridges, over a café table, “when I come to play Hamlet, I'll send for you to act Poor Yorick. You'd do it well. You're always best, you know, in parts that don't require you to come on the stage at all.”

The old man smiled grimly and then shrugged his shoulders at this pleasantry. When he died the other day, he left a curious will, in which, after naming several insignificant legacies, he bequeathed his skull “to a so-called actor, one Charles Bridges, to be used by him in the graveyard scene when he shall have become able to play Hamlet,--if the skull be not disintegrated by that time.”

XXIII. -- COINCIDENCE

Max took us down into a German place into the bowels of the earth. It was a bit of Berlin transplanted to Philadelphia and thriving beneath a Teutonic eating-house. Imagine a great cellar, with stone floor, ornamented ceiling, massive rectangular pillars of brown wood, substantial tables, heavy mediaeval chairs, crossbeams bearing pictures of peasant girls and lettered with sentiments of good cheer in German, and walls covered with beer-mugs of every size and device.

Scores of men sat talking at the tables, smoking, devouring sandwiches, upturning their mugs of beer over the capacious receptacles provided by nature.

The mediaeval chairs appealed to the romanticism that lies beneath Breffny's satirical exterior; and when Max called our attention to the fact that the mugs of beer came through apertures from caves beneath the street, we were content.

For the hour, the problem of human happiness was solved for us three by three foaming mugs, three sandwiches, and tobacco.

Here communed we three, blown from various winds, to this local Bohemia: Max, native of the free German City of Frankfort, operatic manager in Rio Janeiro, musician in New York, Denver resident by adoption, Philadelphia newspaperman by preference; Breffny, born in a Spanish village, reared in Continental countries, professedly an Irishman, but more than half-Latin in temperament and appearance, a cyclopedia for the benefit of his friends, and myself.

The talk ran to the imposture recently attempted by young Mr. Herdling, who claimed that the dead body found at Tarrytown was that of his wife.

“A very touching fake,” said Max.

“Yes; thanks to the skill of the reporters who wrote up his story,” cried Breffny.

“We visited many morgues in search of her, Louise and I,” said I, quoting the most effective passage of the narrative.

“I did know of one case of a husband starting off at random to find his runaway wife,” observed Breffny.

“As there's yet an hour to midnight, we have time for one of your stories.”

“I can tell this in five minutes. All I know of the story is the beginning. No one ever heard of the end. It was like this:

“When I lived in Glasgow, I knew a young fellow there who was timekeeper in a shipyard. He was a very quiet, pleasant boy, so bashful that I used to wonder how he had ever summoned the courage to propose to the pretty Scotch girl who was his wife. As I got to know more of the pair, I divined the secret. Although poor, he was of good Glasgow parentage, while the wife had been a country girl so eager to get to the city that she had courted him while he was on a visit to the village in which she had lived. She had merely used him as a means for finding the life for which she had longed.

“How much he really loved her was never suspected until he came home one evening and found that she had run away with the youngest son of one of the proprietors of the shipyard.

“He learned within a week that they had sailed for America. He packed a valise, took the money that he had saved, and started out.

“'But where are you going to look for them?' I asked him.

“'To America,' he said, turning toward me, his face drawn and gaunt with the grief that he had survived.

“'But America is a vast country.'

“'I will hunt till I find her.'

“'And when you find her--you will not kill her, surely!'

“'I will try to get her to come back to me.'

“He took passage in the steerage, and I do not know what happened to him after that.”

Each of us hid his emotions in his beer-mug. Then Max ordered fresh mugs, and said that Breffny's story recalled a somewhat similar thing that he had witnessed in Denver.

“When I was a reporter out there, I was standing one evening in front of a hotel. A crowd collected to see the body of a guest brought out and placed upon an ambulance.

“'Where are you taking him, and what is it?' I asked the driver.

“'To the lazaretto. Smallpox.'”

For a moment, while he was being lifted into the ambulance, the victim's face was visible. A loud cry was heard in the crowd. It came from a ragged, wild-looking man, whose unkempt beard made him look much older than I afterward found him to be. As the ambulance hurried off, he ran after it, shouting:

“'I must see that man! Stop! I must ask him something!'

“But he tripped upon a horse-car track, and when he had staggered to his feet, the ambulance was out of sight.

“I ran into the hotel and asked the clerk about the lazaretto patient. He was a young European--an Englishman--they thought, who had arrived from the East two days ago, and whose condition had just been discovered.

“Coming out, I went to the tramp who had cried out at the sight of the ill man. I found him seated on the curbstone, weeping like a child. I asked him why he wished to see the smallpox victim, and said that I could get him admission to the lazaretto, if he would tell me what he knew, and wouldn't let any other reporter have the story.

“He jumped up eagerly.

“'It's this,' he said. 'That man ran away with my wife, and I've hunted them over sea and land. This is the first sight I've had of him.'

“'Then,' I said, 'if you mean to harm him, I'm afraid I can't bring you to him.'

“'Him!' said the ragged man, disdainfully. 'I don't want to hurt him. I only want to find out where she is. I swear I wouldn't harm either of them.'

“I accompanied him to the city physician, with whom he had a long talk. That official finally promised to take him to the lazaretto. The doctor led the man to the side of the iron bed where the smallpox patient lay. The latter started like a frightened child at sight of his pursuer.

“'Remember,' said the doctor to the sick man, 'you have scarcely a chance for life. You would do well to tell the truth.'

“'Only tell me where she is,' pleaded the husband, 'and I'll forgive you all.'

“The sick man gasped:

“'I left her in Philadelphia--at the station. She had smallpox. It was from her I got it. I was a coward--a cur. I left her to save myself. The money I had brought from home was nearly all gone. Ask her to forgive me.'

“He was dead that evening. The husband was then upon an east-bound freight-train. The newspaper telegraphed to Philadelphia, but nothing could be found out about the woman. I've often wondered what became of the man.”

The loud hubbub of conversation,--nearly all in German,--the shouts of the waiters, the noise of their footfalls upon the stone floor, the sound of mugs being placed upon tables and of Max draining his “stein” of beer, bridged the hiatus between the ending of Max's narrative and the beginning of my own:

“Your story reminds me of one to which the city editor assigned me on one of my 'late nights.' I took a cab and went to the station-house. The case had been reported by a policeman at Ninth and Locust Streets, who had called for a patrol-wagon. From him I got the story. He had seen the thing happen.

“He was walking down Locust at half-past twelve that night, and was opposite the Midnight Mission, when his attention was attracted to the only two persons who were at that moment on the other side of the street. One was a man of the appearance of a vagabond, coming from Ninth Street. The other was a woman, who had come from Tenth Street, and who seemed to walk with great difficulty, as if ready to sink at every step from weakness.

“The woman dropped her head as she neared the man. The man peered into her face, in the manner of one who had acquired the habit of examining the countenances of passers-by.

“The two met under the gas-lamp that is so conspicuous a night feature of the north side of Locust Street, between Ninth and Tenth.

“The woman gave no attention to the man. So exhausted was she that she leaned helplessly against the fence. The man ran forward, shrieking like a lunatic.

“'Jeannie!'

“The woman lifted her eyes in a dull kind of amazement and whispered:

“'Donald!'

“She fell back, but he caught her in his arms and kissed her lips a dozen times, with a half-savage gladness, crying and laughing hysterically, as women do.

“When the policeman had reached the pair, the woman had seen the last of this world.

“Afterward we found that she had been discharged from the municipal hospital, where she had been in the smallpox ward two weeks before; and we surmised that she had virtually had nothing to eat since then.

“At the station-house the man explained that the woman was his runaway wife. He had started in search of her two years before, with no other clue as to her whereabouts than the knowledge that she had sailed for America with a man named Ferriss--”

“What?” cried Max. “Was the name Archibald Ferriss? That was the name of the man who died in the Denver lazaretto--”

But Max was stopped by Breffny, who almost shouted in excitement:

“And the name of the son of McKeown & Ferriss, of Glasgow, in whose shipyard was employed as timekeeper the Donald Wilson--”

“Donald Wilson was the name of the man who met his wife that night in front of the Midnight Mission,” said I, in further confirmation.

It was remarkable. One of the three chapters of this tragic story had entered into the experience of each of us three who sat there emptying stone mugs. Now, for the first time, was the story complete to each of us.

“But what became of the man?” asked Breffny.

“When the police lieutenant spoke of having her body interred in Potter's Field, the husband spoke up indignantly. He brought forth two gold pieces, saying:

“'I have the money for her grave. I saved this through all my wanderings, because I thought that when I should find her she might be homeless and hungry and in need.'

“So he had her buried respectably in the suburbs somewhere, and I was too busy at that time to follow up his subsequent movements. It is enough for the story that he found his wife.”

XXIV. -- NEWGAG THE COMEDIAN

It was not his real name or his stage name, but it was the one under which he was best known by those who best knew him. It had been thrown at him in a café one night by a newspaper man after the performance, and had clung to him. Its significance lay in the fact that his “gags”--supposedly comic things said by presumably comic men in nominal opera or burlesque--invariably were old. The man who bestowed the title upon him thought it a fine bit of irony.

Newgag received it without expressed resentment, but without mirth, and he bore its repetition patiently as seasons went by. He was accustomed to enduring calmly the jests, the indignities that were elicited by his peculiar appearance, his doleful expression, his slow and bungling speech and movement, his diffident manner.

He was one of the forbearing men, the many who are doomed to continual suffering of a kind that their sensitiveness and timidity make it the more difficult for them to bear.

Undying ambition burned beneath his undemonstrative surface; dauntless courage lay under his lack of ability.

He was an extremely spare man, of extraordinary height, and the bend of his shoulders gave to his small head a comical thrust forward. His black hair was without curl, and it would tolerate no other arrangement than being combed back straight. It was allowed to grow downward until it scraped the back of Newgag's collar, a device for concealing the meagreness of his neck.

He had a smooth, pale face, slanting from ears to nose like a wedge, and the dimness of the blue eyes added to its introspective cast. He blushed, as a rule, when he met new acquaintances or was addressed suddenly. He had a gloomy look and a hesitating way of speech. An amusing spectacle was his mechanical-looking smile, which, when he became conscious of it, passed through several stages expressive of embarrassment until his normal mournful aspect was reached.

As he usually appeared in a sack coat when off the stage, the length of his legs was divertingly emphasized. After the fashion of great actors of a bygone generation, he wore a soft black felt hat, dinged in the crown from front to rear.

He had entered “the profession” from the amateur stage, by way of the comic opera chorus, and to that chance was due his being located in the comic opera wing of the great histrionic edifice. He had originally preferred tragedy, but the first consideration was the getting upon the stage by any means. Having industriously worked his way out of the chorus, he had been reconciled by habit to his environment, and had come to aspire to eminence therein. He had reached the standing of a secondary comedian,--that is to say, a man playing secondary comic rôles in the pieces for which he is cast. He was useful in such companies as were directly or indirectly controlled by their leading comedians, for there never could be any fears of his outshining those autocratic personages. Only in his wildest hopes did he ever look upon the centre of the stage as a spot possible for him to attain.

His means of evoking laughter upon the stage were laborious on his part and mystifying to the thoughtful observer. He took noticeable means to change from his real self. It mattered not what was the nature of the part he filled, he invariably assumed an unnatural, rasping voice; he stretched his mouth to its utmost reach and lowered the extremities of his lips; he turned his toes inward (naturally his feet described an abnormal angle) and bowed his arms. Brought up in the school which teaches that to make others laugh one must never smile one's self, he wore a grotesquely lugubrious and changeless countenance. Such was Newgag in his every impersonation. When he thought he was funniest, he appeared to be in most pain and was most depressing.

“My methods are legitimate,” he would say, when he had enlisted one's attention and apparent admiration across a table bearing beer-bottles and sandwiches. “The people want horse-play nowadays. But when I've got to descend to that sort of thing, I'll go to the variety stage or circus ring at once--or quit.”

“That's a happy thought, old man,” said a comedian of the younger school, one night, when Newgag had uttered his wonted speech. “Why don't you quit?”

Such a speech sufficed to rob Newgag of his self-possession and to reduce him to silence. He could not cope with easy, offhand, impromptu jesters. In truth, no one tried more than Newgag to excel in “horse-play,” but his temperament or his training did not equip him for excelling in it; he defended the monotony, emptiness, and toilsomeness of his humour on the ground that it was “legitimate.”

One night Newgag drank two glasses of beer in rapid succession and looked at me with a touching countenance.

“Old boy,” he said, in his homely drawl, “I'm discouraged! I begin to think I'm not in it!”

“Why, what's wrong?”

“Well, I've dropped to the fact that, after all these years in the business, I can't make them laugh.”

I was just about to say, “So you've just awakened to that?” but pity and politeness deterred me. Every one else had known it, all these years. Newgag, to be sure, should naturally have been, as he was, the last to discover it.

Newgag thus went one step further than any comedian I have ever known. Having detected his inability to amuse audiences, he confessed it.

People who know actors and read this will already have said that it is a fiction, and that Newgag's admission is false to life. Not so; I am writing not about comedians in general, but about Newgag.

That he had come to so exceptional a concession marked the depth of his despair. I tried to cheer him.

“Nonsense, my boy! They give you bad parts. Go out of comic opera. Try tragedy.”

I had spoken innocently and sincerely, but Newgag thought I was jesting. Instead of his usual attempt at lofty callousness, however, he smiled that dismal, marionette-like smile of his. That gave me an idea, of which I said nothing at the time.

Several months afterward, a manager, who is a friend of mine, was suddenly plunged in distress because of the serious illness of an actor who was to fill a part in a new American comedy that the manager was to produce on the next night.

“What on earth shall I do?” he asked.

“Play the part yourself, as Hoyt does in such an emergency--or get Newgag.”

“Who's Newgag?”

“He's a friend of mine, out of a position. I met him to-day very much frayed.”

“Bring him to me.”

Newgag was overwhelmed when I told him of the opportunity.

“I never acted in straight comedy,” he said. “I can't do it. I might as well try to play Juliet.”

“He wants you only to speak the lines, that's all. You're a quick study, you know. Come on!”

I had almost to drag the man to the manager. He allowed himself, in a semistupefied condition, to be engaged. He took the part, sat up all night in his boarding-house and learned it, went to rehearsal almost letter-perfect in the morning, and nervously prepared to face the ordeal of the evening.

At six o'clock, he wished to go to the manager and give up the part.

“I can never do it,” he wailed to me. “I haven't had time to form a conception of it and to get up byplay. You see, it's an eccentric character part,--a man from the country whom everybody takes for a fool, but who shows up strong at the last. I can't--”

“Oh, don't act it. You're only engaged in the emergency, you know. Simply go on and say your lines and come off.”

“That's all I can do,” he said, with a dubious shake of the head. “If only I'd had time to study it!”

American plays had taken foothold, and this premier of a new one by an author of two previous successes drew a “typical first night audience.” Newgag, having abandoned all idea of making a hit, or of acting the part any further than the mere delivery of the speeches went, was no longer inordinately nervous. When he first entered he was a trifle frightened, and his unavoidable lack of prepared stage business made him awkward and embarrassed for a time. The awkwardness remained, but the embarrassment eventually passed away. He spoke in his natural voice and retained his actual manner. When the action required him to laugh, he did so, exhibiting his characteristic perfunctory smile.

He received a special call before the curtain after the third act. He had no thought that it was meant for him until the stage manager pushed him out from the wings. He came back looking distressed.

“Are they guying me?” he asked the stage manager.

The papers agreed the next day that one of the hits of the performance was made by Newgag “in an odd part which he had conceived in a strikingly original way, and impersonated with wonderful finish and subtle drollery.”

“What does it mean?” he gasped.

I enlightened him.

“My boy, you simply played yourself. Did it never occur to you that in your own person you're unconsciously one of the drollest men I ever saw?”

“But I didn't act!”

“You didn't. And take my advice--don't!”

And he doesn't. Upon the reputation of his success in that comedy he arranged with another manager to appear in a play especially written for him. He is a prosperous star now. Whatever his play or part he always presents the same personality on the stage and he has made that personality dear to many theatre-goers. He does not appear too frequently or too long in any one place; hence he is warmly welcomed wherever and whenever he returns. He is classed among leading actors, and the ordinary person does not stop sufficiently long to observe that he is no actor at all.

“This isn't exactly art,” he said to me, the other night, with a tinge of self-rebuke. “But it's success.”

And the history of Newgag is the history of many.

XXV. -- AN OPERATIC EVENING

I

_A Desperate Youth_

The second act of “William Tell” had ended at the Grand Opera House. The incandescent lights of ceiling and proscenium flashed up, showering radiance upon the vast surface of summer costumes and gay faces in the auditorium. The audience, relieved of the stress of attention, became audible in a great composite of chatter. A host streamed along the aisles into the wide lobbies, and thence its larger part jostled through the front doors to the brilliantly illuminated vestibule. Many passed on into the wide sidewalk, where the electric light poured its rays upon countless promenaders whose footfalls incessantly beat upon the aural sense. Scores of bicyclists of both sexes sped over the asphalt up and down, some now and then deviating to make way for a lumbering yellow 'bus or a hurrying carriage.

Men and women, young people composing the majority, strolled to and fro in the roomy lobby that environs the auditorium on all sides save that of the stage. A group of enthusiasts stood between the rear door of the box-office and the wide entrance to the long middle aisle.

“How magnificently Guille held that last note!”

“What good taste and artistic sense Madame Kronold has!”

“Del Puente hasn't been in better voice in years.”

“But you know, Mademoiselle Islar is decidedly a lyric soprano.”

These were some of the scraps of the conversation of that group. A lithe, athletic-looking man of thirty stood mechanically listening to them, as he stroked his black moustache. He was in summer attire, evidently disdaining conventionalities, preferring comfort.

Suddenly losing interest in the conversation in his vicinity, he started toward the Montgomery Avenue side of the lobby, with the apparent intention of breathing some outside air at one of the wide-barred exits, where children stood looking in from the sidewalk, and catching what glimpses they could of the audience through the doorways in the glass partition bounding the auditorium.

He by chance cast his glance up the unused staircase leading to the balcony from the northern part of the lobby. He saw upon the third step a young woman in a dark flannel outing-dress, her face concealed by a veil. She seemed to be watching some one among those who stood or moved near the Montgomery Avenue exits, which had wire barriers.

“By Jove!” he said, within himself, “surely I know that figure! But I thought she had gone to the Catskills, and I never supposed her capable of wearing negligee clothes at the theatre. There can be no mistaking that wrist, though, or that turn of the shoulders.”

He stepped softly to her side and lightly touched one of the admired shoulders.

She turned quickly and suppressed an exclamation ere it was half-uttered.

“Why, Harry--Doctor Haslam, I mean! How did you know it was I?”