About the first of September my fellow-traveller and myself arrived at
a country town, where a small company of actors, on their return from a
summer’s campaign in the British Provinces, were giving a series of
dramatic exhibitions. A moderately sized hall of the tavern had been
converted into a theatre. The performances that evening were, The Heir
at Law, and No Song, no Supper, with the recitation of Alexander’s
Feast between the play and farce. The house was thin and dull. But the
next day there appeared to be brighter prospects, the playbills
announcing at every corner, on the town-pump, and—awful sacrilege!—on
the very door of the meeting-house, an Unprecedented Attraction! After
setting forth the ordinary entertainments of a theatre, the public were
informed, in the hugest type that the printing-office could supply,
that the manager had been fortunate enough to accomplish an engagement
with the celebrated Story-Teller. He would make his first appearance
that evening, and recite his famous tale of Mr. Higginbotham’s
Catastrophe, which had been received with rapturous applause by
audiences in all the principal cities. This outrageous flourish of
trumpets, be it known, was wholly unauthorized by me, who had merely
made an engagement for a single evening, without assuming any more
celebrity than the little I possessed. As for the tale, it could hardly
have been applauded by rapturous audiences, being as yet an unfilled
plot; nor even when I stepped upon the stage was it decided whether Mr.
Higginbotham should live or die.
In two or three places, underneath the flaming bills which announced
the Story-Teller, was pasted a small slip of paper, giving notice, in
tremulous characters, of a religious meeting to be held at the
school-house, where, with divine permission, Eliakim Abbott would
address sinners on the welfare of their immortal souls.
In the evening, after the commencement of the tragedy of Douglas, I
took a ramble through the town to quicken my ideas by active motion. My
spirits were good, with a certain glow of mind which I had already
learned to depend upon as the sure prognostic of success. Passing a
small and solitary school-house, where a light was burning dimly and a
few people were entering the door, I went in with them, and saw my
friend Eliakim at the desk. He had collected about fifteen hearers,
mostly females. Just as I entered he was beginning to pray in accents
so low and interrupted that he seemed to doubt the reception of his
efforts both with God and man. There was room for distrust in regard to
the latter. At the conclusion of the prayer several of the little
audience went out, leaving him to begin his discourse under such
discouraging circumstances, added to his natural and agonizing
diffidence. Knowing that my presence on these occasions increased his
embarrassment, I had stationed myself in a dusky place near the door,
and now stole softly out.
On my return to the tavern the tragedy was already concluded; and,
being a feeble one in itself and indifferently performed, it left so
much the better chance for the Story-Teller. The bar was thronged with
customers, the toddy-stick keeping a continual tattoo; while in the
hall there was a broad, deep, buzzing sound, with an occasional peal of
impatient thunder,—all symptoms of all overflowing house and an eager
audience. I drank a glass of wine-and-water, and stood at the side
scene conversing with a young person of doubtful sex. If a gentleman,
how could he have performed the singing girl the night before in No
Song, no Supper? Or, if a lady, why did she enact Young Norval, and now
wear a green coat and white pantaloons in the character of Little
Pickle? In either case the dress was pretty and the wearer bewitching;
so that, at the proper moment, I stepped forward with a gay heart and a
hold one; while the orchestra played a tune that had resounded at many
a country ball, and the curtain, as it rose, discovered something like
a country bar-room. Such a scene was well enough adapted to such a
tale.
The orchestra of our little theatre consisted of two fiddles and a
clarinet; but, if the whole harmony of the Tremont had been there, it
might have swelled in vain beneath the tumult of applause that greeted
me. The good people of the town, knowing that the world contained
innumerable persons of celebrity undreamed of by them, took it for
granted that I was one, and that their roar of welcome was but a feeble
echo of those which had thundered around me in lofty theatres. Such an
enthusiastic uproar was never heard. Each person seemed a Briarcus
clapping a hundred hands, besides keeping his feet and several cudgels
in play with stamping and thumping on the floor; while the ladies
flourished their white cambric handkerchiefs, intermixed with yellow
and red bandanna, like the flags of different nations. After such a
salutation, the celebrated Story-Teller felt almost ashamed to produce
so humble an affair as Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe.
This story was originally more dramatic than as there presented, and
afforded good scope for mimicry and buffoonery, neither of which, to my
shame, did I spare. I never knew the “magic of a name” till I used that
of Mr. Higginbotham. Often as I repeated it, there were louder bursts
of merriment than those which responded to what, in my opinion, were
more legitimate strokes of humor. The success of the piece was
incalculably heightened by a stiff cue of horsehair, which Little
Pickle, in the spirit of that mischief-loving character, had fastened
to my collar, where, unknown to me, it kept making the queerest
gestures of its own in correspondence with all mine. The audience,
supposing that some enormous joke was appended to this long tail
behind, were ineffably delighted, and gave way to such a tumult of
approbation that, just as the story closed, the benches broke beneath
them and left one whole row of my admirers on the floor. Even in that
predicament they continued their applause. In after times, when I had
grown a bitter moralizer, I took this scene for an example how much of
fame is humbug; how much the meed of what our better nature blushes at;
how much an accident; how much bestowed on mistaken principles; and how
small and poor the remnant. From pit and boxes there was now a
universal call for the Story-Teller.
That celebrated personage came not when they did call to him. As I left
the stage, the landlord, being also the postmaster, had given me a
letter with the postmark of my native village, and directed to my
assumed name in the stiff old handwriting of Parson Thumpcushion.
Doubtless he had heard of the rising renown of the Story-Teller, and
conjectured at once that such a nondescript luminary could be no other
than his lost ward. His epistle, though I never read it, affected me
most painfully. I seemed to see the Puritanic figure of my guardian
standing among the fripperies of the theatre and pointing to the
players,—the fantastic and effeminate men, the painted women, the giddy
girl in boy’s clothes, merrier than modest,—pointing to these with
solemn ridicule, and eying me with stern rebuke. His image was a type
of the austere duty, and they of the vanities of life.
I hastened with the letter to my chamber and held it unopened in my
hand, while the applause of my buffoonery yet sounded through the
theatre. Another train of thought came over me. The stern old man
appeared again, but now with the gentleness of sorrow, softening his
authority with love as a father might, and even bending his venerable
head, as if to say that my errors had an apology in his own mistaken
discipline. I strode twice across the chamber, then held the letter in
the flame of the candle, and beheld it consume unread. It is fixed in
my mind, and was so at the time, that he had addressed me in a style of
paternal wisdom, and love, and reconciliation which I could not have
resisted had I but risked the trial. The thought still haunts me that
then I made my irrevocable choice between good and evil fate.
Meanwhile, as this occurrence had disturbed my mind and indisposed me
to the present exercise of my profession, I left the town, in spite of
a laudatory critique in the newspaper, and untempted by the liberal
offers of the manager. As we walked onward, following the same road, on
two such different errands, Eliakim groaned in spirit, and labored with
tears to convince me of the guilt and madness of my life.