the gallery, the tears, the waiting at the stage door, were explained
now. Ere we reached the stage door, the actress herself appeared in the
corridor, on the arm of her maid. She was laughing, rather coarsely. We
stepped aside to let her pass out into the night.
“So the manager said he'd give me $50 more on the road,” she was saying,
“and I said he would have to make it $75 more--gracious! what's this?”
She had stumbled over something just outside the threshold of the stage
door. Her companion stooped, while the actress jumped aside and looked
down at the large black object with both fright and curiosity.
“It's a man,” said the maid; “drunk, or asleep, or dead. He looks
frozen. He's a tramp, I guess; hurry away! We'll tell the policeman on
the corner.”
The actress passed on, with a final look of half-aversion, half-pity, at
the prostrate body. The comedian and I were both by that body within two
seconds.
“Frozen or starved, sure!” said the comedian. “Poor beggar! Look at his
straw hat. Observe his death-clutch on the cane.”
From down the alley came two sounds: one was a policeman's approaching
footsteps; the other, of a woman's laughter. What, to be sure, was the
dead or drunken body of an unknown vagabond to her?
And it seems strange that I, who never exchanged speech with either the
woman or the man, was the only one in the world who might recognize in
the momentary contact of the living with the dead, a dramatic situation.
XXII. -- “POOR YORICK”
[Footnote: Courtesy of _Lippincott's Magazine_. Copyright, 1892, by J.B.
Lippincott Company.]
The name by which he was indicated on the playbills was Overfield. His
real name was buried in the far past. By several members of the company
to which he belonged he was often called “Poor Yorick.”
I asked the leading juvenile of the company--young Bridges, who was
supposed to attract women to the theatre, and for whose glorification
“The Lady of Lyons” was sometimes revived at matinées--how the old man
had acquired the nickname.
“I gave it to him myself last season,” replied Bridges, loftily. “Can't
you guess why? You remember the graveyard scene in 'Hamlet.' The skull
of Yorick, you know, had lain in the earth three and twenty years.
Yorick had been dead that long. Well, the old man had been dead for
about the same length of time,--professionally dead, I mean. See?”
It was true that, so far as being known by the world went, the old man
was as good, or as bad, as dead. He no longer played other than quite
unimportant parts.
It was said by some one that he was the poorest actor and the noblest
man in the country; a statement commended by Jennison, an Englishman who
usually played villains, to this, that his were the worst art and best
heart in the profession.
Poor Yorick was a thin man, with a smooth, gentle face, lamblike blue
eyes, and curling gray locks that receded gracefully from his forehead.
He had just an individualizing amount of the pomposity characteristic
of many old-time actors. He was not known to have any living kin. He
permitted himself one weakness, a liking for whiskey, an indulgence
which was never noticed to have brought appreciable harm upon him.
Once I asked him when he had made his début. He answered, “When Joe
Jefferson was still young and before Billie Crane was heard of.”
“In what rôle?”
“As four soldiers,” he replied.
“How could that be?”
He explained that he had first appeared as a super in a military drama,
marching as a soldier. The procession, in order to create an illusion
of length, had passed across the stage and back, the return being made
behind the scenes four times continuously in the same direction.
The old man took uncomplainingly to the name applied to him by Bridges.
He must have known what it implied, for surely he could not have
mistaken himself for “a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent
fancy.” His non-resentment was but an evidence of his good nature, for
he was aware that it was not a very general custom of actors to give
each other nicknames, and that his case was an exception.
When he was playing the insignificant part of the old family servant of
a New York banker, in the most successful comedy of that season, he came
to know Bridges better than ever before. Poor Yorick had little more
to do in the play than to come on and turn up some light, arrange some
papers on a desk, go off, and afterward return and lower the light.
Bridges was doing the rôle of the bank clerk in love with the banker's
daughter. Yorick and Bridges, through some set of circumstances or
other, were sharers of the same dressing-room.
Upon a certain Wednesday, and after a matinée, the two were in their
dressing-room, hastily washing up their faces and putting on their
street clothes. Said the old man:
“Did you notice the pretty little girl in the upper box? She reminds me
of--” here his voice fell and took on suddenly a tone of sadness--“of
some one I knew once, long ago.”
Bridges, drying his face with a towel before the big mirror, did not
observe the old man's change of voice, nor did he heed the last part of
the sentence.
“Notice her?” he answered, with a touch of triumphant vanity in his
manner of speech. “I should say I did. She was there on my account.
I'm going to make a date with her for supper after the performance
to-night.”
Old Overfield, sitting on a trunk, stared at Bridges in surprise.
“Do you know her?” he asked.
“No,” replied the leading juvenile. “That is, I have never met her, but
she's been writing me mash notes lately, asking for a meeting. In the
last one she said she could get away from her house this evening, as her
father's out of town and her mother is going over to Philadelphia this
afternoon. So she invited me to have supper with her to-night, and was
good enough to say she'd occupy that box this afternoon, so I could see
what she was like. Didn't you observe her embarrassment when I came on
the stage? I paid no attention to her first letter. But, having seen
her, you bet I'll answer the last one right away. Don't you wish you
were me, old fellow?”
The old fellow stood up and looked at Bridges severely.
“Yes, I do wish I were you,--just long enough to see that you don't
answer that girl's letter. Surely you don't mean to!”
“Hello! What have you got to do with it? Do you know the young woman?”
“No, I don't. But I can easily guess all about her. She's some romantic
little girl, still pure and good, afflicted with one of those idiotic
infatuations for an actor, which is sure to bring trouble to her if
you don't behave like a white man. You want to show her the idiocy of
writing those letters, by ignoring them. You know that actors who care
to do themselves and the profession credit make it a rule never to
answer a letter from a girl like that, unless to give her a word of
advice. Come, my boy, don't disgrace yourself and profession. Don't
spoil the life of a pretty but foolish girl who, if you do the right
thing, will soon repent her silliness, and make some square young fellow
a good wife.”
Bridges had continued to dress himself during this long speech, assuming
a show of contemptuous indignation as it progressed. When Overfield,
astonished at his own eloquence, had subsided, the young man replied, in
a quiet but rather insolent tone:
“Look here, old man, don't try to work the Polonius racket on me. I
don't like advice, and I'm going to meet that girl, see? She arranged
the whole thing herself; she's to be at a certain spot at eleven-thirty
P.M. with a cab. All I've got to do is to signify my assent in a single
line, which I'm going to write and send by messenger as soon as I get
out of here. Of course, if the girl was a friend of yours, it would be
different, but she isn't, and if you want to remain on good terms with
me, you won't put in your oar. Now that's all settled.”
“Is it? Well, young man, I don't want to remain on good terms with
anybody I can't respect. I can't respect a man who would take advantage
of a love-struck girl's ignorance of life. If you meet her, you will
simply be obtaining favours on false pretences, anyhow, for you know
you're not really half the fascinating, romantic, clever youth that you
seem when you're on the stage speaking another man's thoughts. That girl
is probably good, and she looks like some one I used to know. If I can
save her, I will, by thunder!”
“Really, old man, you're quite worked up. If you could act half that
well on the stage, you'd be doing lead, instead of dusting furniture
while the audience gets settled in its seats.”
Old Yorick stood for a moment speechless, stung by the insult. Then he
took up his hat, excitedly, and left the dressing-room without a word.
Some of the other members of the company wondered at the angry, flushed
look on his face when he hurried through the corridor to the stage door.
A few minutes later he was seen walking down the street, apparently much
heated in mind. When he reached a certain café he went in, sat down, and
called for whiskey. He remained alone in deep thought, mechanically
and unconsciously answering the salutations bestowed upon him by two or
three acquaintances who strolled in. Suddenly he nodded thrice, as if
denoting the acquiescence of his judgment in some plan of action
formed by his inventive faculty. He rose quickly, paid his bill at the
cashier's desk, and moved rapidly across the street to the ---- Hotel.
Passing in through a broad entrance, he turned aside to a writing-room,
where, without removing his soft hat, he sat down at a desk.
He was soon immersed in the composition of a letter, which caused him
many contractions of the brow, many lapses during which he abstractedly
stared at vacancy, many fresh beginnings, and the whole of the two hours
allowed him before the evening's performance for dinner.
When he had finished the letter, he carefully read it, and made a few
corrections. Then he folded it up, put it in an envelope, and placed
it unsealed in his inside coat pocket. He arose with an expression of
resolution about his eyes that was quite new there.
Ascertaining by the clock in the thronged main corridor that the time
was ten minutes after seven, the old man rushed into the café, where he
devoured hastily a chicken croquette, and swallowed a cup of coffee
and a glass of whiskey before starting to the theatre. He was in his
dressing-room and in his shirt-sleeves, touching up his eyebrows, when
Bridges arrived. A cool greeting passed between the two.
“You sent the note?” asked the old man.
“What note?” gruffly queried Bridges, taking off his coat.
“To that girl.”
“Most certainly.”
A curious look, unobserved by Bridges, shot from Poor Yorick's eyes. It
seemed to say, “Wait, things may happen that you're not looking for.”
At about the time when Bridges and Yorick were dressing for the
performance, a newspaper reporter, wishing to make a few notes of an
interview that had been accorded him by a politician staying in the
hotel at which the old man had written his long letter, went into the
writing-room and made use of the desk where the actor had sat earlier in
the evening. Several sheets of blank paper were scattered over it. One
of them contained almost a page of writing. Yorick had negligently left
it there. It was a beginning made by him before he had succeeded in
obtaining a satisfactory wording for his thoughts. This rejected opening
read:
“My DEAR, FOOLISH YOUNG LADY:--Something has happened which prevents Mr.
Bridges from keeping the appointment with you, and you're much better
off on that account, for nothing but unhappiness can come to you if you
allow yourself to be carried out of your senses by your infatuation for
a man who has neither the brains nor the manliness which he seems to
have when playing parts that call for the mere simulation of these
gifts. Never make an appointment with a man you do not know, especially
a young and vain actor who has once got the worst of it in a divorce
suit. You'll be thankful some day for this advice, for I know what I
speak of. I was once, years ago, just such an actor. The woman got
into all sorts of trouble because she wrote me such letters as you have
written Bridges, and brought to an early end a life that might have been
very happy and youthful. Looked like you, and it is a memory of what she
lost and suffered that makes me wish to save you. My dear young ----”
There were yet two lines to spare at the foot of the page. The newspaper
man, interested by the fragment, thrust it into his pocket.
When Poor Yorick had finished his final scene in the comedy at the
----Theatre that night, he made haste to dress and to leave the
playhouse. But he loitered near the stage entrance, keeping in the
shadow on the other side of the alley, out of the range of the light
from the incandescent globe over the door.
Bridges was slightly surprised, on returning to his dressing-room, to
find that Yorick had already gone. But he attributed this to the ill
feeling that had arisen on account of the intended meeting with the girl
of the letters and the box.
The leading juvenile attired himself for the conquest carefully but
rapidly. When he was ready he surveyed his reflection complacently in
the long mirror, assuming the slightly languid look that he intended to
maintain during the first half-hour of the supper. He retained the dress
suit which he wore in the second and third act of the play, and which
he rarely displayed outside of the theatre. He flattered himself that
he was quite irresistible, and wondered whether she would take him to
Delmonico's or to some quiet little place. He indulged, too, in some
vague speculation as to what the supper might result in. The girl was
evidently of a rich family, but her people would doubtless never hear of
her making a match with him, that divorce affair being in recent memory.
A marriage was probably out of the question. However, the girl was a
beauty and this meeting was at least worth the trouble. So he donned his
coat and hat and swaggered out of the theatre. He had no sooner turned
from the alley upon which the stage door opened than Yorick, unnoticed
by him, darted out in pursuit. Ten minutes' walking brought the leading
juvenile near the spot where he was to be awaited by the girl in the
cab. Yorick, whose only means of ascertaining the place of meeting was
to follow Bridges, kept as near the young actor as was compatible
with safety from discovery by the latter. Bridges, strutting along
unconscious of Yorick's presence a few yards behind, had half-traversed
the deserted block of tall brown stone residences, when he saw a cab
standing at the corner ahead of him. He quickened his pace in such a
way as to warn the old man that the eventful moment was at hand. The cab
stood under an electric light before an ivy-grown church.
Yorick, with noiseless steps, accelerated his gait. Bridges, as he
neared the cab, deflected his course toward the curbstone and threw his
head back impressively. This little action, interpreted rightly by the
pursuer, was the old man's cue. Yorick suddenly rushed forward with
surprising agility.
Before Bridges could be seen by the occupant of the cab for which he was
making, he was dazed by a blow on the side of the head, just beneath
the ear, and knocked off his feet by a sound thump on the same spot. He
reeled, clutched at the air, and fell heavily upon the sidewalk. There
he lay stunned and silent.
Yorick, not waiting to see what became of the man whom he had felled,
dashed forward to the cab. Opening the door, he caught a momentary
vision of a white, round face, with big, scared eyes, above a
palpitating mass of soft silk and fur, and against a black background.
He thrust toward her the letter, which he had quickly drawn from his
pocket, and whispered, huskily:
“Mr. Bridges couldn't come. Here's a note.”
Then he slammed the cab door, and called out in a commanding tone:
“Drive on there! Quick!”
The cabman, who had evidently received directions in advance from the
girl, jerked his reins, and the cab moved forward, turned, and rattled
away, the horse at a brisk trot.
Yorick speedily left the scene. At the next corner he met a policeman,
to whom he said:
“There's a man lying on the sidewalk back there by the church. I don't
know whether he's drunk or not.”
He was off before the officer could detain him.
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: