THE LAST OF THE “BOOKER TROUPE.”
In the course of time the “Booker Troupe” was disbanded, and Ephraim, as
well as ourselves, was, in green-room parlance, out of an engagement. I
never saw him or Lynch afterward. Mr. Edwin Deaves, as I have intimated,
is an industrious maker of wood-cuts and painter of transparencies and
theatrical illusions in San Francisco. He was the gentlemanly “middle
man” and barytone of this company. I never met him professionally after
our disbanding. He went to California, I believe, with the late Samuel
Wells, in the same troupe with Messrs. Birch and Backus.
Deaves was a very handsome man in the old days of our association. His
jet-black hair never required a wig at that time, except when he desired
to personate some terrible _impresario_ in burlesque opera. Then he
would invest himself in one of buffalo-robe, and would roar with such
unexampled fierceness that our tin horns would ring again with the mere
echoes of his powerful voice.
He was a man of great versatility. I would not like to say exactly what
he could not do, from the invention of a patent soap to the plotting of
a new pantomime. The words and music of some of the most widely known of
the old negro melodies are of his composition.
But as I saw him last with his large family around him, at San
Francisco, it was evident that, if he should ever go back from his
present contented, peaceful life into the checkered uncertainties of
cork opera, he would have to wear a wig, unless he confined himself
exclusively to “old man’s parts.” His hair has long since faded, and he
would, I fear, have also to use a tin horn himself, to produce the
startling echoes of his whilom unaided voice.
* * * * *
With Mr. Kneeland, the violinist and musical director of the “Booker
Troupe,” I travelled subsequently in two other companies. As I shall
have no occasion to mention him again, I will say here that he was a
quiet, modest sort of fellow, who had a remarkable talent for sleeping.
That man could sleep at any time and in any place. If he happened to be
forgotten in the hurry of changing conveyances,--which was not
infrequently the case,--he was sure to be left snoring in some
waiting-room, or crouched down among the cushions in some railway coach,
with his violin-box for a pillow.
He alone always played for my jigs and hornpipes; and as I used to get a
side view of him on the stage, with his eyes shut and his heel beating
the measure of the ecstasy which at such moments travelled, for
instance, “The rocky road to Dublin,” away up into the cirrus heaven of
the octaves, I was more than once impressed with the annoying belief
that he was asleep, or soon would be, and that I should have to complete
my grand _finale_ of wings and shuffles to the uncertain fugue of his
snoring.
Whether he ever did fall asleep or not on the stage I cannot tell for
sure; but, asleep or awake, he always managed to keep better time than I
did.
He practised De Bériot’s “Seventh Air” for six months almost constantly
in his room, never to my knowledge venturing to play it in public. Now
his room was generally the next one to mine, and I have often wished,
after three or four steady hours of De Bériot, that Mr. Kneeland would
fall asleep; yet by a strange fatality he never did, unless there was
some likelihood of his being left behind.
Nevertheless, Kneeland was, by all odds, the best-natured and the most
substantial man of the “Booker Troupe.” He is now, I hear, the thrifty
and honest possessor of a goodly farm in Wisconsin, where he lives with
his wife and children. Of late years, it is only when the crops are poor
or the monotony of rural pursuits leaves him open to the temptation,
that he abandons his plough, like another sturdy Cincinnatus, to give
his services to the public. Then for a brief summer he will, it is said,
sally forth to lead the brass and string band of some circus or
menagerie to the conquest of bucolic or urban ears, and fractional
currency.
After a whole season of ovations, in which captive elephants and camels
and lions, or superb band-wagons and “grand entries” and bare-back
equestrians, have moved to the time of his music, the honest Kneeland
goes back to his cows and sheep and domestic hearth, and is happy.
* * * * *
Johnny Booker still lives. I meet him every few years in the most
out-of-the-way and unexpected places. He confines himself now, I
believe, exclusively to the circus or menagerie business. One or the
other branch of this style of tent-life seems, by the way, to be the
ultimate refuge of your old showman,--the last stage of his worldly
transmigrations.
Some seasons I will come across Mr. Booker in the very heart of this
continent, convulsing a rural community with the sparkling manner in
which he will answer, as clown, to the conventional, “This way, Mr.
Merryman; ask the young lady what she will have now.” At other seasons
and on the remotest rim of our territorial possessions, I will be
astonished to recognize him in the magniloquent ring-master who inflicts
the lashes upon the painted clown, and who acts the part of the Greek
chorus, explaining the jokes of that amusing fellow in the choicest
Doric of our language.
I have even known him to deliver a moral and instructive lecture on the
nature and habits of the elephant, in a “grand combination” menagerie.
Indeed, it was his custom, every afternoon and evening, to discourse on
this branch of natural history when I last met my old friend and
instructor in minstrelsy. He took great interest in his elephant, and
especially in a living hippopotamus, which was the ruling attraction of
his establishment,--just as he had once, I am bound in gratitude to say,
taken great interest in me.
My place as his pupil was just then usurped by a small Irish lad, whom
he pointed out to me, in an expansive feminine wig of flaxen curls and
in puerile tights and tunic, with a most formidable gold-foil battle-axe
in one hand, and the American flag in the other; personating, as Mr.
Booker assured me, a water-nymph, on the silver-scaled but somewhat
shaky chariot of Neptune.
This imposing car of the sea-god, I need scarcely add, formed part of
the procession as it entered town, headed by the elephant, the living
hippopotamus, and a brass-band seemingly on the point of death, so red
and distended was the face of each strangling musician, and so nearly
did each appear to have “poured through the mellow horn his pensive
soul.”
The procession was still passing the balcony of the hotel on which we
were standing, when Mr. Booker confided to me very gravely that his
present pupil did not give him satisfaction. “He will never be a
performer,” said the thoughtful veteran; “I don’t know what I _can_ make
of that boy, for,” pursued Mr. Booker, with his mind evidently more upon
his pupil than upon me,--“for I don’t think he is even fit to write
books.”
My former manager at this moment became so suddenly absorbed in the
contemplation of a large spot on the very masculine tunic of his charge,
the water-nymph, that he did not notice how frank he had been with me.
It is due, however, to the magnanimity of Mr. Booker to say, that,
whatever may be his private opinion of literature and of my change of
profession, we are, and I hope always shall be, the most devoted of
friends.
Whenever we meet he is sure to startle me with a new batch of
reminiscences of our old-time companionship. What puzzles me most is
that, as he advances in years, his accounts of my youthful exploits
grow more extended and apocryphal. He has long since in these narratives
got out of the horizon of my memory. I would not for the world accuse my
old instructor of a want of candor, but I must say I think he has
confounded me with other and later of his pupils.
It would be as useless as ill-mannered to contradict him, for he has
told these stories so often that he believes them implicitly himself.
Any unbiassed mind, moreover, will find excuse for the treachery of his
memory in the devious and exciting course of his subsequent life, as
corypheus of the saw-dusty ring, and especially as the zoologist of the
living hippopotamus, and as the moral lecturer upon the manners and
customs of the elephant.
I shall, however, in closing this account of the “Booker Troupe,” give a
couple of condensed samples which will, I think, of themselves explain
why I indulge in no more of Mr. Booker’s stories about myself. I give
them as a simple act of justice to my old comrades. Having related my
reminiscences of them with great freedom, it is no more than fair that
one of them, at least, should be heard against me.
While admitting that a boy of thirteen may not have all the discretion
in the world, still I herewith enter the solemn protest of my memory
against the facts of the following statements.
Mr. Booker says that in the course of our travels we came to a city
where I had relatives, and that I took occasion, as the best means of
impressing them with my prosperity and independence, to appear in a
different suit of clothes as often as I visited them, which was two or
three times a day.
He furthermore relates with appalling circumstantiality, that at a
select “hop” after our performances in some quiet little city, my
attention was attracted by a very pretty young lady who seemed to be the
belle of the evening. With the interested swagger of a young blood of
thirteen years, I asked who that “fine girl” was. I was told that she
was a certain Miss So-and-so, whom for the sake of Mr. Booker’s story,
we will call Miss Brown; and that she was of a very respectable family
in that city.
Now it happened in the course of our wanderings that, from motives of
curiosity, charity, and advertisement combined, we always visited the
state-prisons which chanced to be in our route, and sang and played to
the prisoners, generally while they were assembled at dinner. And I may
add here, by way of parenthesis, that never elsewhere have I witnessed
so wonderful an illustration of the power of music as greeted us on such
occasions. Hundreds would change from laughter to tears, and from tears
to laughter again, as the song or strain was merry or sad. Two or three
weeks before the time of Mr. Booker’s story we had, he says, visited one
of these prisons, and we had all become very much interested in the case
of a handsome young fellow who had just been brought there for some
crime committed while under the influence of liquor.
As soon as I heard the young lady’s name, I remembered all about this
unfortunate young fellow; and, especially, that he bore the same surname
and came originally from that very town, although he had been convicted
in another State. I found by inquiry that she, the handsome young lady,
and life of the whole company, was the sister of the criminal. It was
very plain that she had not yet heard of her brother’s misfortune.
Then, according to Mr. Booker’s account, I obtained an introduction to
her; and, boy-like, in the honest but inconsiderate delight of being the
first to bear her news which she, doubtless, would want to hear, I
said,--“Miss Brown, Miss Brown, your brother’s in the penitentiary!”
The young lady swooned, of course, and was borne home by her friends.
Mr. Booker always adds, at this place, that I ought to have been taken
out and thrashed,--an opinion in which I should agree heartily if I did
not doubt the truth of the whole story.