certain. You see, my memory ain't any longer than a toad's tail. Still,
I allowed I hadn't ought to disremember anything as big as a house--now
had I?" and he laughed pleasantly. "And I thought that was you, too,
setting up there on the porch," he went on, cheerfully. "And I'm glad it
is, because I wanted to see you again to ask after the lady's health.
Did she have her sleep out that evening? And how is she getting on now?"
I thanked him again for his considerate action the first time we had
met, as well as for his kindly inquiries now, and I was glad to give him
good news of our patient. Then I recognized the duties of hospitality,
and I asked my visitor if he would not "take something."
"No, thank you," he returned--"that is, if there ain't no offence. Fact
is, I've quit. I don't look on the wine when it is red now, for it
biteth like an adder and it stingeth like a serpent, and I don't want
any more snakes in mine. I've had enough of them, I have. Croton extra
dry is good enough for me now, I guess; and I ain't no use now for a
happy family of blue mice and green rats and yellow monkeys. I've had
whole menageries of them, too, in my time--regular Greatest Show on
Earth, you know, and me with a season ticket. But it's like all these
continuous performances, you get tired of it pretty soon--leastways, I
did, and so I quit, and I don't touch a drop now."
"Sworn off?" I suggested, as I made room for him on the cushion by my
side.
"Oh no," he said, simply, as he sat down; "I hadn't no need to swear
off. I just quit; that's all there was to it."
"Some men do not find it so very easy to give up drinking," I remarked.
"That's so, too," he answered, "and I didn't either, for a fact. But I
just had to do it, that's all. You see, I'd given drinking a fair show,
and I'd found it didn't pay. Well, I don't like no trade where you're
bound to lose in the long-run--seems a pretty poor way to do business,
don't it? So I quit."
This seemed to call for a commonplace from me, and I was equal to the
occasion. "It's easier to get into the way of taking a drop now and then
than it is to get out of it."
"I got into it easy enough, I know that," he returned, smiling genially.
"It was when I was in the army. After a man has been laying out in the
swamp for a week or so, a little rum ain't such a bad thing to have in
the house."
Then it was that for the first time I noticed the bronze button in his
coat.
"So you were in the army?" I said, with the ever-rising envy felt by so
many of my generation who lived through the long years of the Civil War
mere boys, too young to take part in the struggle.
"I was a drummer-boy at Gettysburg," he answered; "and it warn't mighty
easy for me, either."
"How so?" I asked.
"Well, it was this way," he explained. "Father, he was a Maine man, and
he was a sea-captain. And when mother died, after a spell father he up
and married again. Now that second wife of father's she didn't like me;
and I didn't like her either, not overmuch. I guess there warn't no
love lost between us. She liked to make a voyage with father now and
then, and so did I. We was both with him on a voyage he made about the
time the war broke out. We cleared for Cowes and a market, and along in
the summer of '62 we was in the Mediterranean. It was towards the end of
that summer we come into Genoa, and there we got a chance at the papers,
all filled chock-full of battles. And it didn't seem as though things
was going any too well over here, either, and so I felt I'd like to come
home and lend a hand in putting down the rebellion. You see, I was past
fourteen then, and I was tall for my age--'most as tall as I am now, I
guess. I was doing a man's work on the ship, and I didn't see why I
couldn't do a man's work in helping Uncle Sam, seeing he seemed to be
having a hard time of it. And I don't mind telling you, too, that she
had been making me have considerable of a hard time of it, too; and
there warn't no way of contenting her, she was so all-fired pernicketty.
There was another ship in the harbor near us, and the captain was a sort
of a kind of a cousin of mother's, and so I shipped with him and we come
straight home from Genoa to Portsmouth. And when I wanted to enlist they
wouldn't have me, saying I was too young, which was all foolishness. So
I went for a drummer-boy, and I was in the Army of the Potomac from
Gettysburg to Appomattox."
"You were only a boy even when the war was over," I commented.
"Well, I was seventeen, and I felt old enough to be seventy," he
returned, as a smile wrinkled his lean features. "At any rate, I was old
enough to get married the year after Lee surrendered, and my daughter
was born the year after that--she'd be nearly thirty now if she was
living to-day."
"Did you stay in one of the bands of the regulars after the war?" I
asked, wondering how the sailor-lad who had become a drummer-boy had
finally developed into a solo orchestra.
"No," he answered. "Not but what I did think of it some. But after being
at sea so long and in the army, camping here and there and always moving
on, I was restless, and I didn't want to settle down nowhere for long.
So I went into the show business. I'd always been fond of music, and I
could play on 'most anything, from a fine-tooth comb to a church-organ
with all the stops you please. So I went out with the side-show of a
circus, playing on the tumbleronicon."
"The tumbleronicon?" I repeated, in doubt.
"It's a tray with a lot of wineglasses on it and goblets and tumblers,
partly filled with water, you know, so as to give different notes. Why,
I've had one tumbleronicon of seven octaves that I used to play the
'Anvil Chorus' on, and always got a double encore for it. I believe it's
what they used to call the 'musical glasses'--but tumbleronicon is what
it's called now in the profession."
I admitted that I had heard of the musical glasses.
"It was while I was playing the tumbleronicon in that side-show that I
met the lady I married," he went on. "She was a Circassian girl then.
Most Circassian girls are Irish, you know, but she wasn't. She was from
the White Mountains. Well, I made up to her from the start, and when the
circus went into winter-quarters we had a lot of money saved up and we
got married. My wife hadn't a bad ear for music, so that winter we
worked up a double act, and in the spring we went on the road as Swiss
Bellringers. We dressed up just as I had seen the I-talians dress in
Naples."
Again I asked for an explanation.
"Oh, you must have seen that act?" he urged, "though it has somehow gone
out of style lately. It's to have a fine set of bells, three or four
octaves, laying out on a table before you, and then you play tunes on
them, just as you do on the tumbleronicon. There's some tunes go better
on the bells than on anything else--'Yankee Doodle' and 'Pop Goes the
Weasel.' It's quick tunes like them that folks like to have you pick out
on the bells. Why, Mrs. Briggs and I used to do a patriotic medley,
ending up with 'Rally Round the Flag,' that just made the soldiers'
widows cry. If we could only have gone on, we'd have been sure of our
everlasting fortunes. But Mrs. Briggs went and lost her health after our
daughter was born the next summer. We kept thinking all the time she'd
get better soon, and so I took an engagement here in New York, at
Barnum's old museum in Broadway, to play the drum in the orchestra. You
remember Barnum's old museum, don't you?"
I was able to say that I did remember Barnum's old museum in Broadway.
"I didn't really like it there; for the animals were smelly, you know,
and the work was very confining, what with two and three performances a
day. But I had to stay here in New York somehow, for my wife wa'n't able
to get away. The long and short of it is, she was sick a-bed nigh on to
thirty years--not suffering really all the time, of course, but puny and
ailing, and getting no comfort from her food. There was times I thought
she never would get well or anything. But two years ago she up and died
suddenly, just when I'd most got used to her being sick. Women's
dreadful uncertain, ain't they?"
I had to confess that the course of the female of our species was more
or less incalculable.
"My daughter, she died the year before her mother; and she'd never been
sick a day in her life--took after me, she did," Professor Briggs went
on. "She and her husband used to do Yankee Girl and Irish Boy duets in
the vaudevilles, as they call them now."
I remarked that variety show, the old name for entertainments of that
type, seemed to me more appropriate.
"That's what I think myself," he returned, "and that's what I'm always
telling them. But they say vaudeville is more up to date--and that's
what they want now, everything up to date. Now I think there's lots of
the old-fashioned things that's heaps better than some of these
new-fangled things they're so proud of. Take a three-ringed circus, for
instance--what good is a three-ringed circus to anybody, except the boss
of it? The public has only two eyes apiece, that's all--and even a man
who squints can't see more than two rings at once, can he? And three
rings don't give a real artist a show; they discourage him by
distracting folk's attention away from him. How is he to do his best if
he can't never be certain sure that the public is looking at him?"
Here again I was able to express my full agreement with the professor.
"I'd never do in a three-ring show, no matter what they was to give me,"
he continued. "And I've got an act nearly ready now that there's lots of
these shows will be wanting just as soon as they hear of it. I"--here he
interrupted himself and looked up and down the street, as though to make
sure that there were no concealed listeners lying in wait to overhear
what he was about to say--"I don't mind telling you about it, if you'd
like to know."
I declared that I was much interested, and that I desired above all
things to learn all about this new act of his.
"Well," he began, "I think I told you awhile ago that my granddaughter's
all the family I got left now? She's nearly eight years old, and as
cunning a little thing as ever you see anywhere--and healthy, too, like
her mother. She favors me, just as her mother did. And she takes to
music naturally--can't keep her hands off my instruments when I put them
down--plays 'Jerusalem the Golden' on the pipes now so it would draw
tears from a graven image. And she sings too--just as if she couldn't
help it. She's a voice like an angel--oh, she'll be a primy donny one of
these days. And it was her singing gave me the idea of this new act of
mine. It's _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ arranged just for her and me. I do Uncle
Tom and play the fiddle, and she doubles Little Eva and Topsy with a
lightning change. As Little Eva, of course, she'll sing a hymn--'Wait
Till the Clouds Roll By,' or the 'Sweet By-and-By,' or something of that
sort; and as Topsy she'll do a banjo solo first, and then for the encore
she'll do a song and dance, while I play the fiddle for her. It's a
great scheme, isn't it? It's bound to be a go!"
I expressed the opinion that it seemed to me a most attractive
suggestion.
"But I've made up my mind," he went on, "not to bring her out at all
until I can get the right opening. I don't care about terms first off,
because when we make our hit we can get our own terms quick enough. But
there's everything in opening right. So I shall wait till fall, or maybe
even till New Year's, before I begin to worry about it. And in the
meantime my own act in the street goes. The Solo Orchestra is safe for
pretty good money all summer. You didn't hear me the other evening, and
I'm sorry--but there's no doubt it's a go. I don't suppose it's as
legitimate as the tumbleronicon, maybe, or as the Swiss bells--I don't
know for sure. But it isn't bad, either; and in summer, wherever there's
children around, it's a certain winner. Sometimes when I do the 'Turkish
Patrol,' or things like that, there's a hundred or more all round me."
"From the way the little ones looked at me the other evening, when I
asked you to move on," I said, "it was obvious enough that they were
very anxious to hear you. And I regret that I was forced to deprive
myself also of the pleasure."
He rose to his feet slowly, his loose-jointed frame seeming to unfold
itself link by link.
"I tell you what I'll do," he responded, cordially; "isn't your lady
getting better?"
I was able to say that our invalid was improving steadily.
"Well, then," he suggested, "what do you say to my coming round here
some evening next week? I'll give a concert for her and you, and any of
your friends you like to invite? And you can tell her there isn't any of
the new songs or waltzes or marches or selections from operas she wants
I can't do. She's only got to give it a name and the Solo Orchestra will
play it."
Of course I accepted this proffered entertainment; and with that
Professor Briggs took his leave, bidding me farewell with a slightly
conscious air as though he were accustomed to have the eyes of a
multitude centred upon him.
And one evening, in the middle of the week, the Solo Orchestra appeared
on the sidewalk in front of our house and gave a concert for our special
benefit.
Our invalid had so far regained her strength that she was able to sit at
the window to watch the performance of Professor Briggs. But her
attention was soon distracted from the Solo Orchestra itself to the
swarm of children which encompassed him about, and which took the
sharpest interest in his strange performance.
"Just look at that lovely little girl on the stoop opposite, sitting all
alone by herself, as though she didn't know any of the others," cried
our convalescent. "She's the most elfinlike little beauty I've ever
seen. And she is as _blasee_ about this Solo Orchestra of yours as
though it was _Tannhaeuser_ we were listening to, and she was the owner
of a box at the Metropolitan."
When the concert came to an end at last, as the brief twilight was
waning, when the Solo Orchestra had played the "Anvil Chorus" as a final
encore after the "Turkish Patrol," when Professor Theophilus Briggs,
after taking up the collection himself, had shaken hands with me when I
went down to convey to him our thanks, when it was so plainly evident
that the performance was over at last that even the children accepted
the inevitable and began to scatter--then the self-possessed little girl
on the opposite side of the way rose to her feet with dignity. When the
tall musician, with the bells jingling in his peaked hat, crossed the
street, she took his hand as though he belonged to her. As he walked
away she trotted along by his side, smiling up at him.
"I see now," I said; "that must be his granddaughter, the future
impersonator of the great dual character, Little Eva and Topsy."
(1896.)
THE REHEARSAL OF THE NEW PLAY
When Wilson Carpenter came to the junction of the two great
thoroughfares he stood still for a moment and looked at his watch, not
wishing to arrive at the rehearsal too early. He found that it was then
almost eight o'clock, and he began at once to pick his way across the
car-tracks that were here twisted in every direction. A cloud of steam
swirled down as a train on the elevated railroad clattered along over
his head; the Cyclops eye of a cable-car glared at him as it came
rushing down-town; from the steeple of a church on the corner, around
which the mellow harvest-moon peered down on the noisy streets, there
came the melodious call to the evening service; over the entrance to a
variety show a block above a gaudy cluster of electric lights
illuminated the posters which proclaimed for that evening a Grand Sacred
Concert, at which Queenie Dougherty, the Irish Empress, would sing her
new song, "He's an Illigant Man in a Scrap, My Boys." As the young
dramatist sped along he noted that people were still straggling by twos
and threes into the house of worship and into the place of
entertainment; and he could not but contrast swiftly this Sunday
evening in a great city with the Sunday evenings of his boyhood in the
little village of his birth.
He wondered what his quiet parents would think of him now were they
alive, and did they know that he was then going to the final rehearsal
of a play of which he was half author. It was not his first piece, for
he had been lucky enough the winter before to win a prize offered by an
enterprising newspaper for the best one-act comedy; but it was the first
play of his to be produced at an important New York house. When he came
to the closed but brilliantly lighted entrance of this theatre, he stood
still again to read with keen pleasure the three-sheet posters on each
side of the doorway. These parti-colored advertisements announced the
first appearance at that theatre of the young American actress, Miss
Daisy Fostelle, in a new American comedy, "Touch and Go," written
expressly for her by Harry Brackett and Wilson Carpenter, and produced
under the immediate direction of Z. Kilburn.
When the author of the new American comedy had read this poster twice,
he took out his watch again and saw that it was just eight. He threw
away his cigarette and walked swiftly around the corner. Entering a
small door, he went down a long, ill-lighted passage. At the end of this
was a small square hall, which might almost be called the landing-stage
of a flight of stairs leading to the dressing-rooms above and to the
property-room below. This hall was cut off from the stage by a large
swinging-door.
As Carpenter entered the room this door swung open and a nervous young
man rushed in. Catching sight of the dramatist, he checked his speed,
held out his hand, and smiled wearily, saying, "That's you, is it? I'm
so glad you've come!"
"The rehearsal hasn't begun, has it?" Carpenter asked, eagerly.
"Star isn't here yet," answered the actor, "and she's never in a hurry,
you know. She takes her own time always, Daisy does. I know all her
little tricks. I've told you already that I never would have accepted
this engagement at all if I hadn't been out since January. I don't see
myself in this part of yours. I'll do my best with it, of course, and it
isn't such a bad part, maybe; but I don't see myself in it."
Carpenter tapped the other on the back heartily and cried: "Don't you be
afraid, Dresser; you will be all right! Why, I shouldn't wonder if you
made the hit of the whole piece!"
And with that he started to open the door that led to the stage.
But Dresser made a sudden appeal: "Don't go away just as I've found you.
I've been wanting to see you all day. I've got to have your advice, and
it's important."
"Well?" the dramatist responded.
"Well," repeated the young actor, "you know that bit of mine in the
third act, where I have the scene with Jimmy Stark? He has to say to
me, 'I think my wife's mind is breaking,' and I say, 'Are you afraid she
is going to give you a piece of it?' Now, how would you read that?"
After the author had explained to the actor what seemed to him the
obvious distribution of the emphasis in this speech, he was able to
escape and at last to make his way upon the stage.
The scene of the first act of "Touch and Go" was set, and the stage
itself was brilliantly lighted, while the auditorium was in absolute
darkness. It was at least a minute before Carpenter was able to discern
the circle of the balcony, shrouded in the linen draperies that
protected its velvet and its gilding from the dust. Here and there in
the orchestra chairs were little knots of three or four persons, perhaps
twenty or thirty in all. The proscenium boxes yawned blackly. Although
it was a warm evening in the early fall, the house struck Carpenter as
chill and forbidding. He peered into the darkness to discover the face
he was longing to see again.
Two men were talking earnestly, seated at a table in the centre of the
stage near the footlights. One of these was a short man, with grizzled
hair and a masterful manner. This was Sherrington, the stage-manager who
had been engaged to produce the play. The other was Harry Brackett,
Carpenter's collaborator in its authorship.
Just as the new-comer had made out in the dark house the group he was
seeking and had bowed to the two ladies comprising it, Harry Brackett
caught sight of him.
"Well, Will," he cried, "the Stellar Attraction is late, as usual--and
we've got lots of work before us to-night, too. Sherrington isn't at all
satisfied with the way they do either of the big scenes in the second
act; and we've got to look out and keep them all up to their work if we
want this to be anything more than a mere 'artistic success.'"
"'Artistic success!'" said Sherrington, emphatically; "why, there's
money in this thing of yours--big money, too, if we can get all the
laughs out of those two scenes of Daisy's in the second act. But it will
take good work to get out all the laughs there ought to be,
legitimately--and we've got to do it! Every laugh is worth a dollar and
a half; that's what I say."
"The two scenes in the second act?" inquired Carpenter. "The one with
Stark and the one with Miss Marvin, you mean?"
"The one with Marvin will be all right, I think," said the
stage-manager.
"I'm not so sure of that," Harry Brackett interjected; "you insisted on
her being engaged, Will, but she is very inexperienced, and I don't know
how she'll get through that long scene."
"Miss Marvin is very clever," Carpenter declared, eager to defend the
girl he was in love with; "and she will look the part to perfection!"
"Looking is all very well," Brackett responded, "but it is acting she
will have to do in that scene in the second act."
"And she will do it too," asserted the stage-manager. "You see, she's
got her mother here to-night, and there isn't a sharper old stager
anywhere than Kate Shannon Loraine."
"That's so," Harry Brackett admitted; "I suppose Loraine can show her
daughter how to get out of that scene all there is in it."
"Shannon'll see the whole play to-night," said Sherrington, "and she'll
be able to give Marvin lots of pointers to-morrow. The little girl will
be all right; it's Daisy I'm more afraid of in that scene. It ought to
be played high comedy, 'Lady Teazle,' way up in G--and high comedy isn't
altogether in Daisy's line."
"That can't be helped now," Brackett replied; "and if the Stellar
Attraction can't reach that scene it's the Stellar Attraction's own
fault, isn't it? You remember, Will, how she kept telling us all the
time we were writing the play that she wanted as high-toned a part as we
could give her. We gave it to her, and now she's just got to stretch up
to it, if she can."
"I am not afraid of that scene," Carpenter declared, "for I've always
doubted whether she could really do high comedy, and that scene is
written so that it will go almost as well if it's played broadly. You
know there are two ways of doing Lady Teazle."
"There are no two ways about Daisy's being a great favorite," said the
stage-manager. "She's accepted, and that's enough. After all, I don't
suppose it matters much how she takes that scene; high or broad, the
public will accept her. The part fits her like a glove, and all we've
got to do is to keep everybody up to concert-pitch and get all the
laughs we can. You took my advice and cut that talky scene in the third
act, and now the whole act will go off like hot cakes--see if it don't.
I tell you what it is, I'll teach you two boys how to write a real farce
before I've done with you!"
Harry Brackett was standing almost behind Sherrington as the
stage-manager made this speech. He winked at Carpenter.
"Yes," he said, a moment later, "I think it is a pretty good piece of
the kind, and I hope it will fetch them. At any rate, I don't believe
even our worst enemies will praise it for its 'literary merit.'"
Carpenter laughed a little bitterly. "No," he assented, "we've got it
into shape now, and I doubt if anybody insults us by saying that 'Touch
and Go' is 'well written.'"
"Do you remember our joke while we were working on it last winter,
Will?" asked Harry Brackett. Then turning to Sherrington he explained:
"We used to say that the managers wouldn't 'touch' it, so the people
couldn't 'go.'"
"It's harder to touch the manager than it is to make the public go,"
added Carpenter. "I believe that any fool can write a play, but that
only a man of great genius ever succeeds in getting his play produced."
A handsome young woman with snapping black eyes walked on the stage
briskly.
"Here's the Stellar Attraction at last," said Harry Brackett; "now we
can get down to business."
"Am I late?" the handsome young woman asked, as she came forward.
"Everybody waiting for me?"
"You are just twenty minutes late, my dear," said the stage-manager,
looking at his watch, "and we are all waiting for you."
"That's all right, then," she replied, laughing lightly; "we've got all
night before us, haven't we?"