His friends continued to joke him. One man urged him to come down. The
professionals told him he'd better not try it if he was afraid--at which
the others laughed, and that settled it, for the big man _was_ afraid;
but he was stubborn, too, and, rising on his toes, he threw his right
arm forward and started. He caught the bar safely with his right hand,
swept down like a great pendulum, and at the lowest point of the swing
was ripped away from the bar with the jerk of his two hundred pounds,
and went skating along the length of the net on his face until he was a
sorry-looking big man with the scratch of the meshes. Not one athlete in
twenty, they say, without special training, could hold that bar after
such a drop.
Zorella cited a case in point where a first-class acrobat was offered a
much larger salary by a rival circus to become the partner of an expert
on the high bars. "This man was crazy to accept," said Zorella, "and
everything was practically settled. The two did their act together on
the low bars in great shape. Then they tried it on the high bars, and
the new man stuck right at the go-off. Queerest thing you ever saw. He
had to start on the end bar with a giant swing,--that gives 'em their
send, you know,--then do a backward single to the middle bar, then a
shoot on to the last bar, and from there drop with somersaults down to
the net. All this was easy for him on the low bars, but when he got up
high--well, he hadn't the nerve to let go of the first bar after the
giant swing. He kept going round and round, and just stuck there. Seemed
as if his hands were nailed fast to that bar. We talked to him, and
reasoned with him, and he tried over and over again, but it was no use.
He could drop from the last bar, he could shoot from the middle bar, but
to save his life he couldn't let go of the first bar. I don't know
whether he was afraid, or what; but he couldn't do it, and the end of it
was, he had to give up the offer, although it nearly broke his heart."
And even acrobats accustomed to working at heights feel uneasy in the
early spring when they begin practising for a new season. The old tricks
have always in a measure to be learned over again, and they work
gradually from simple things to harder ones--a straight leap, then one
somersault, then two. And foot by foot the pedestal is lifted until the
body overcomes its shrinking. Even so I saw Zorella one day scratched
and bruised from many failures in the trick where Weitzel catches him by
the ankles. Here, after the long swing, he must shoot ahead feet first
as if for a backward somersault, and then, changing suddenly, do a turn
and a half forward, and dive past Weitzel with body whirling so as to
bring his legs over just right for the catch. And every time they missed
of course he fell, and risked striking the net on his forehead, which
is the most dangerous thing an acrobat can do. To save his neck he must
squirm around, as a cat turns, and land on his back; which is not so
easy in the fraction of a second, especially if you happen to be dazed
by a glancing blow of the catcher-man's arm.
II
ABOUT DOUBLE AND TRIPLE SOMERSAULTS AND THE DANGER OF LOSING HEART
IN talking with my circus friends I was surprised to learn that a
trapeze performer in perfect practice, say in mid-season, may suddenly,
without knowing why, begin to hesitate or blunder in a certain trick
that he has done without a slip for years. This happened to Danny Ryan
in the fall of 1900, when he found himself growing more and more
uncertain of his difficult pirouette leap, a feat invented by himself in
1896, and never done by another performer. Danny did it first when he
used to play the clown with the spring-board leapers who do graceful
somersaults over elephants and horses. With them would come Danny, made
up as a fat man, and do a backward somersault and a full twister at the
same time, the effect being a queer corkscrew turn that made the people
laugh. They little suspected that this awkward-looking leap was one of
the most difficult feats in the air ever attempted, or that it had cost
Ryan weeks of patient practice and many a hard knock before he mastered
it.
And then one day, after doing it hundreds of times with absolute ease,
he did it badly, then he did it worse, then he fell, and finally began
to be afraid of it and left it out of the act. Acrobats shake their
heads when you ask for an explanation of a thing like that. They don't
know the explanation, but they dread the thing.
"When a man feels that way about a trick, he's got to quit it for a
while," said Ryan, "or he'll get hurt. 'Most all the accidents happen
where a performer forces himself against something inside him that says
stop. Sometimes an acrobat has to give up his work entirely. Now,
there's Dunham,--you've heard of him,--the greatest performer in the
world on high bars. They'll give him any salary he wants to ask.
Graceful? Well, you ought to see him let go from his giant swing and do
a back somersault clean over the middle bar and catch the third! And now
they say he's gone out of the business. Somebody told me it was
religion. Don't you believe it. He's had a feeling--it's something like
fear, but it _isn't_ fear--that he's worked on high bars long enough."
"He's had bad luck with his partners, too," remarked Weitzel. "Couple of
'em missed the turn somehow and got killed. Say, that takes a man's
nerve as much as anything, to have his partner hurt. I don't wonder
Dunham wants to quit."
"Tell you where it's hard on an acrobat," put in Zorella--"that's where
he _can't_ quit on account of his family--where he needs the money. I
remember a young fellow joined the show out west to leap over elephants.
He got along well enough over two elephants, but when it came to three,
why, we could all see he was shaky. Some of the boys told him he'd
better stop, but he said he'd try to learn, and he was such a nice,
modest fellow and worked so hard that everybody wished him luck. But it
wasn't any use. One day he tackled a double over three elephants, and
came down all in sections, with his right foot on the mattress and his
left foot on the ground. That was his last leap, poor fellow, for the
ankle bones snapped as his left foot struck, and a few hours later he
lay in the dressing-room tent, pretty white, with the doctors over him.
I'll never forget the way he looked up at us when we came in. He was
game all right, but his eyes were awful pathetic. 'Well, boys' said he,
'here I am. I did the best I could.' Turned out he'd done it for a sick
wife and a little baby. Pretty tough, wasn't it?"
Speaking of leaps over elephants brings to my mind an afternoon when I
watched a circus rehearsal in the open air. That is a thing better worth
seeing, to my mind, than the regular performance; the acrobats and
riders in their every-day clothes are more like ordinary men and women,
and their feats seem the more difficult for occasional slips and
failures.
Here, for instance, are a mother and daughter, in shirt-waists, watching
the trick monkey ride a pony, when suddenly a whistle sounds, and off
goes the mother to drive three plunging horses in a chariot-race, while
the daughter hurries to her part in an equestrian quadrille. And now
these children playing near the drilling elephants trot into the ring
and do wonderful things on bicycles. And yonder sleepy-looking man is a
lion-tamer; and those three are the famous Potters, aerial leapers; and
this thick-set fellow in his shirt-sleeves is Artressi, the best jumper
in the circus. He's going to practise now; see, they are putting up the
spring-board and the long downward run that leads to it. These other men
are jumpers, too, but Artressi is the star; he draws the big salary.
[Illustration: "FOUR ELEPHANTS WAS ENOUGH FOR ANY MAN TO LEAP OVER."]
Now they start and spring off rather clumsily, one after another, in
straight leaps to the mattress. They won't work into good form for some
days yet. Here they come again, a little faster, and two of them try
singles. Here comes Artressi. Ah! a double forward, and prettily taken.
The crowd applauds. Now a tall man tries a double. Gradually the
practice gets hotter until every man is doing his best. There will be
stiff joints here in the morning, but never mind!
In a resting-spell I sat down by Artressi and talked with him about
leaping. It was hard, he said, going off a spring-board into empty air.
Didn't know how it was, but he could always do better with something to
leap over, say elephants or horses. He could judge the mattress easier;
wasn't so apt to miss it. What was his biggest leap? Well, four
elephants and three camels was about his best, with a pyramid of men on
top. He'd cleared that twice a day for weeks some years ago, but he
wouldn't do it now. No, sir; four elephants was enough for any man to
leap over if he had a wife and child. That made a flight of thirty feet,
anyhow, from the spring-board to the ground. Oh, yes, he turned two
somersaults on the way--forward somersaults. It wasn't possible for
anybody to clear four elephants and turn backward somersaults.
I asked Artressi (his real name is Artress) about a leap with three
somersaults, and found him positive that such a feat will never become
part of a regular circus program. A man can turn the three somersaults
all right, but he loses control of himself, and doesn't know whether he
is coming down right or wrong. In fact, he is sure to come down wrong if
he does it often. Then he mentioned the one case where he himself had
made a leap with three somersaults. It was down in Kentucky, at the home
of his boyhood. Years had passed since he had seen the town, and in that
time he had risen from nothing to a blaze of circus glory. He had become
the "Great Artressi" instead of little Joe Artress, and now he was to
appear before the people who knew him.
It was perhaps the most exciting moment of his life, and as he came
down the run toward the spring-board he nerved himself to so fine an
effort that instead of doing two somersaults over the horses and
elephants, as he intended, he did three, and, by a miracle of fortune,
landed safely. That was his first and last triple; he wasn't taking
chances of a broken neck or a twisted spine, which had been the end of
more than one ambitious leaper. No, sir; he would stick to doubles,
where a man knows exactly what he's doing.
In talking with acrobats, I came upon an interesting phenomenon that
seems almost like a violation of the laws of gravitation. It appears
that the movements of a performer on the bars or trapeze are affected in
a marked degree by the slope of the ground underneath. In other words,
although bars and trapeze may rest on supports that are perfectly level,
yet the swing of an acrobat's body will be accelerated over a downward
slope or retarded over an upward slope. So true is this that the trapeze
performer swinging over an upward slope will often require all his
strength to reach a given point, while over a downward slope he must
hold back, lest he reach it too easily and suffer a collision.
Nevertheless, the swing in both cases is precisely the same, with
rigging and bars fixed to a true level.
On this point there have been endless arguments, and many persons have
contended that acrobats must imagine all this, since the upward or
downward slope of the ground under a trapeze can in no way affect the
movement of that trapeze. I fancy the wisdom of such people is like that
of the professors who proved some years ago that it is a physical
impossibility for a ball-player to "pitch a curve." There is no doubt
that trapeze performers are obliged to take serious account of the
ground's slope in their daily work, to note carefully the amount of
slope and the direction of slope, and to take their precautions
accordingly. If they did not they would fail in their feats. Those are
the facts to which all acrobats bear witness, let scientists explain
them as they may.
"Suppose the ground slopes to one side or the other under your trapeze,"
I asked Ryan, one day. "How does that affect you?"
"It draws you down the slope, and makes your bar swing that way."
"What do you do about it?"
"Sometimes I pull the bar over a little in starting, so as to balance
the pull of the hill; but that's uncertain. It's better to fix the
rigging so that the bar is a little higher on the downhill side."
Ryan said that a straight-ahead downhill slope is the worst for a man,
because he is apt to hold back too hard, being afraid of bumping into
his partner, and so he doesn't get send enough, and falls short of his
mark.
"But all slopes are bad for us," he said, "and we try hard to get our
things put up over level ground."
This is but one instance of the jealous care shown by acrobats for their
bars and rigging. These things belong not to the circus, but to the
individual performers, who put every brace and knot to the severest
test. For the high bars a particular kind of hickory is used with a core
of steel inside. Every mesh of the net must resist a certain strain. The
bars themselves must be neither too dry nor too moist. The light must
come in a certain way, and a dozen other things. Many an accident has
come through the failure of some little thing.
This much is certain, that acrobats often suffer without serious injury
falls that would put an end to ordinary men. Like bareback riders, they
_know how to fall_, this art consisting chiefly in "tucking up" into a
ball and hardening the muscles so that the shock is eased. Also they
have by practice acquired the power of deciding instantly how to make
the body protect itself in an emergency.
"Now," said Ryan, "I'll give you a case where two of us did some quick
thinking, and it helped a lot. We were with a circus in Australia,
making a night run. It was somewhere in New South Wales, and every man
was asleep in his bunk. First thing we knew, bang, rip, tear! a drowsy
engineer had smashed into us and taken the rear truck of our sleeper
clean off, and there were the floor timbers of our car bumping along
over the ties. We had the last car.
"Our engineer never slowed up, and our floor was going into
kindling-wood fast. It was as dark as pitch, and nobody said a word.
Fred Reynolds and I--Reynolds was a clown acrobat--had lower berths
right at the end, next to the negro porter, and I don't say we escaped
because we were acrobats, but--well, this is what we did. Fred gave one
mighty leap, just like going over elephants, and cleared the whole trail
of wreckage that was pounding along behind the car and landed safe on
the track. It was a crazy thing to do, in my opinion, but it worked. I
made a spring for the chandelier, and hung there until the train
stopped. And afterward I found my trousers back on the road-bed with the
legs cut clean off, and I guess my own legs would have gone the same way
if they'd been there. What did the porter do? Oh, he did nothing,
and--and he was killed."
III
IN WHICH THE AUTHOR TRIES HIS HAND WITH PROFESSIONAL TRAPEZE PERFORMERS
ON this particular morning--it was a damp day in February--I had been
watching the Potter family, familiar on circus posters in tights and
spangles, at their practice of aerial leaps, when Henry Potter, who is
husband, father, and brother of the others, and chief of the act,
suggested that if I wanted a vivid idea of what it was to work on the
flying trapeze I might come up and take his place on the cradle and let
Tom chuck the "kid" across to me and see if I could catch him.
The "kid" was Roy Potter (sometimes Royetta, when presented in feminine
trappings), a slender lad of seventeen, who had just been doing doubles
and twisters and half turns, leaping with shoot and graceful curve from
brother to brother up there in mid-air under the rafters of this
moldering old skating-rink.
"Go ahead," he urged; "it's easy enough. All you've got to do is hang by
your knees, and it can't hurt the boy, for he'll drop in the net if you
miss him. Besides, we'll put the 'mechanic' on him."
The "mechanic" is an arrangement of waist straps and trailing
pulley-ropes that guard a gymnast while he is learning some new feat.
Doubtless, I should have declined this amiable offer had I taken time to
consider, for there was no particular appropriateness in a man who knew
nothing about the trapeze, except such rudiments as boys of twelve get
in their own back yards, taking part offhand in a leaping performance
thirty feet above ground with "the phenomenal and fearless Potters"--I
quote the circus signs--"greatest of all great acrobatic aerials." Yet
he put it so plausibly--I certainly _would_ get a better idea of the
thing--and he made it out so simple--anybody can hang by his knees--that
I said all right; I would go up on the cradle and catch the "kid."
This cradle is composed of two steel bars, about a foot apart, that are
held rigid by tackle and wire braces. You climb to it (after emptying
your pockets) by a swinging ladder, none too secure, and, seated here,
look down as from the dome of a circus tent. On a line with you are
other cradles, where your partners are coolly preparing to do things.
You glance across at them anxiously, then down at the net, which seems a
long way beneath.
"Better put some rosin on your hands," sings out Potter from the ground,
where he is arranging the "mechanic" lines.
"It's in that little bag on the wire," calls the boy from his perch.
"Rub it along your wrists, too; we'll ketch better."
H'm! We will, eh? I do as I am told, and realize that even the trifling
movement to get this rosin-bag involves a certain peril.
"Now lean back," comes the word; "catch one bar in the crotch of your
knees and brace your feet under the other. That's right. Hang 'way down.
Stretch your arms out, and when I say, 'Now,' pull up and reach for the
'kid'--you'll see him coming."
Sure enough, although the blood was in my head, I could see over there
Tom Potter's red shirt and the boy's blue one as they poised for the
swing. Then Tom's body dropped back, and he swept the lad at full arm's
length, through a half circle, and let him go head first, cutting the
air, straight at me.
"Now," cried Harry, and I reached out as best I could, only to see the
boy, a second later, floundering in the net below me. And they all were
laughing. In trying to reach one way I had actually reached the other,
and withdrawn my arms instead of extending them, which made me
understand better than an hour of words that a man hanging head down at
a height finds his muscles as hard to control as a penman writing with
his left hand for the first time. He cannot even see straight until his
eyes learn to gage distances and the relation of things presented upside
down.
With some pains and an awkward clutching at the braces I got myself back
into a sitting position, while Roy climbed again good-naturedly to his
starting-cradle. A trapeze performer must have infinite patience.
Again we tried the trick, and this time, as I hung expectant, I felt my
wrists clutched tight, and there was the agile leaper swinging back,
pendulum fashion, from my arms, then forward, then back, while the bar
strained under my knees.
"Now, throw him!" called Harry. "Stiffen out and chuck him back to Tom.
Now!"
Alas! I made a bungle of it. I could not give him send enough, and the
boy, falling short of Tom's arms, dangled from the "mechanic" lines
half-way down to the net. It was quite plain that more than good
intentions are needed to chuck young gentlemen through flights of
eighteen feet. I was feeling decidedly queer by this time--a sort of
half-way-over-the-Channel faintness, and could imagine what it must be
to work up here, right at the peak of a "big-top" tent, under the
scorch of an August sun, with the stifle of a great audience coming up
from below. I expressed a readiness to descend.
"Try a drop into the net," suggested Tom Potter. "See, hang by your
hands, like this. Keep your legs together and lift 'em out stiff.
Then--"
Down he went, and landed easily on his shoulders.
"Better put the 'mechanic' on him," said Harry, and presently young Roy
was beside me on the cradle, securing me to the drop-lines with a double
hitch.
"You want to be sure to lift yer legs," he remarked. "I knew a feller
that struck the net straight on his feet and broke his knees."
"Don't you worry," said Harry; "if you don't fall right, I'll hold you
with the 'mechanic.'"
Of course, when a man has started at this sort of thing he must see it
through, so I hung obediently by my hands, lifted my legs, and--
"Now," cried Harry, and instantly, before I had time to think or note
sensations, I was on my back in the net. And I understood what a
terrible problem it is for a gymnast, falling with such swiftness, to
turn two or three somersaults in the air and land with the body at just
the angle of safety, for a shade too much one way may mean a broken leg,
and a shade too much the other way an injured spine.
For some time after my aerial experience I sat around rather limp and
white, giving but indifferent attention to the breaking in of young
Clarence Potter, baby of the family, now in his first fortnight's
practising. He certainly showed a game spirit, this little fellow. When
his father said, "Jump," he jumped, and when the call came for a forward
somersault across and a half turn he went at it like a veteran, though
his wrists must have burned with red chafes where they caught him. Of
course he had the 'mechanic' on all the time.
"We have to handle him very careful," said his father, "he's so limber.
It wouldn't take much to break his back. But he'll harden up soon.
People have an idea that gymnasts are supple-jointed. That's all
nonsense. A gymnast won't bend as much as an ordinary business man.
There are too many bunches of muscles all over him that keep him stiff.
See, feel along here." He prodded my hand into his back and sides. "Not
big muscles, mind, but lots of small ones. Say, it's a fine thing to
have your body trained. I don't believe there's a healthier-- Hey,
there! Keep those legs together. Easy now. Good boy!" The little fellow
had made a pretty turn and drop to the net, and was striding along its
meshes, beaming at the praise.
"He'll make a gymnast," said Potter, "because he's got a head on him,
and can fix his mind on what he's doing. Oh, it takes more than body to
make a great acrobat. It takes brains, for one thing, and heart. I
believe I'll be able to train that boy so he can do a triple. I mean
_do_ it, not get through it in a Lord-help-me way. Most people say a
triple can't be done for a regular act because it's too uncertain and
too dangerous. But they used to say that of a double. It's all a matter
of taking time enough in the practice. That's the thing, practice. Why,
look at us. We don't open for months yet, but we're up here every
morning all through the winter getting our act down so fine, and the
time so perfect, that when summer comes we can't fail."
"How do you mean, getting the time perfect?"
"Why, in trapeze work everything depends on judging time. Just now when
you were hanging from the cradle you couldn't see much, could you? Well,
we can't, either. We have to know when to do things by feeling the time
they take. Say it's a long double swing, where the men cross and change
bars. Each man grabs or lets go at the second or part of a second when
the watch inside him says it's time to grab or let go. That's the only
watch he has, and it's the only one he needs."
"And he dives by the sense of time?"
"That's right."
"And does triple somersaults by the sense of time?"
"Certainly he does. He can't see. What could _you_ see, falling and
whirling? A gymnast has no different eyes from any other man. He's got
to _feel_ how long he must keep on turning. And it's good-by gymnast if
his feeling is a quarter of a second out of the way."
"Do you mean that literally?"
Mr. Potter smiled. "I'll give you a case, and you can judge for
yourself. There was a fellow named Johnnie Howard in the Barnum show. He
was doing trapeze work with the famous Dunham family, and was very
ambitious to equal Dunham in all his feats, which was a large contract,
for Dunham is about the finest gymnast in the world. What a pretty
triple he can do, clean down from the top of the tent, and land right
every time!