“THE MITCHELLS.”
During the time I was waiting for another engagement I wandered to a
large Western city, and took board in a respectable private family.
There were three unmarried daughters in this household, the youngest of
whom could not, I think, have been less than twenty-six years old.
Notwithstanding the disparity of our ages, my memory is very much at
fault if I was not in love with all three of these ladies at once.
Nothing else, at least, could account to me now for the regularity with
which I conducted this mature trio to theatres and concerts. From their
readiness to go four and five evenings a week, I am also led to conclude
that they individually and collectively encouraged my suit.
What names these three weird sisters bore, and how they looked, are
matters which have long since escaped me; but the alacrity with which
they would go to ice-cream saloons in the afternoon, or to places of
amusement in the evening, at my expense, made such an impression on my
purse at the time that I have not forgotten it, as you see, to this day.
I know not in what this state of affairs would have ended, had it not
been for a professional engagement tendered me in the midst of my
prodigality. Before leaving that city, I have a faint remembrance of
having formed one of a band of two or three who undertook to furnish the
amusement for a “Grand Gift Enterprise.”
Finally I found myself, after some minor adventures, at Cincinnati,
where the once notorious Mike Mitchell left the Campbell’s Minstrels and
took me with him into a company which he organized there, under the
title of “The Mitchells.” We played some time at the largest hall in
Cincinnati, boarding the while at the Gibson House.
At this hotel I became acquainted with a chubby, handsome boy, about as
tall as I was, who excited my admiration in an extraordinary manner. He
would go to the theatre or some place of amusement every evening, and
nevertheless get up at four or five o’clock every morning. I burned
with a desire to wrestle with that boy.
This occurred to me as the only way to gratify my curiosity and
establish a droll theory I had that any lad who could do with so little
sleep must be a young giant. At last I inveigled him into my room, and
the greater part of my remaining days in Cincinnati were spent in that
cheerful and invigorating style of contest, to the no little damage of
the furniture and our clothes, and of the nerves of a rheumatic old
bachelor who occupied the apartment just under us.
There could have been nothing of the giant in the boy, after all, since
we were so evenly matched. And, somehow, my belief in his wonderful
sleeplessness was sadly dissipated. Whether he subsequently told me
himself, or I found out by personal observation, I have forgotten; but I
learned at last to account for his power of early rising in a way only
less remarkable than the physical endurance of which I had thought him
capable.
This young gentleman, it seems, was in the habit of going to sleep in
his seat at the theatre, just after the overture by the orchestra. What
struck me as particularly astonishing was that he always had the
faculty of waking up when the dancing and comic songs came in, and
especially when the broadsword and other combats took place. A tragedian
never died to slow music in his presence but the young gentleman’s
critical eye, refreshed and sharpened by recent repose, was upon him.
In a word, whatsoever the act or scene in which it occurred, my young
friend was always “in at the death.” And he seemed to know by instinct,
without consulting a ponderous gold watch which he carried, when it was
time for the play to end.
Thus, it will be seen, he went away from the theatre with his night’s
rest already half complete, and was able to arise at four or five the
next morning and deliver to any chance comer throughout the day a
reliable opinion on the best points made the evening previous by Jamison
or Murdoch--the actors of those times--in the great scene wherein
Macduff “lays on”; or this young gentleman could tell you, perhaps, the
number of times the blades struck fire in the mighty broadsword battle,
sustained single-handed against fearful odds, by Mrs. Wilkinson in the
“French Spy.”
In the course of time our company started on its travels through the
neighboring States, and when we returned to Cincinnati, my young friend
and fellow-wrestler was gone; moved away with his parents from the
hotel, I was told, and to another city.
Now what has made this reminiscence especially interesting, at least to
me, was my next meeting with the subject of it, years and years
afterward; because that was one of the strange occurrences which are,
after all, about as frequent in an adventurous life as they are in
fiction.
At a little inn in the shadow of the Odenwald, not far from the Rhine, I
had the pleasure of taking him the next time by the hand. We have since
passed many a day together on the Iser and Seine and Tiber, and we have
slept many a night in the most uninviting of _auberges_ and
_Gasthäuser_; and not there, I am proud to say or in his hospitable
mansion on Michigan Avenue, or, late at night, in the office of the
great newspaper which he helps to edit, have I ever, in his generous
manhood, discovered any sleeping on his post, or sleeplessness off from
it.
There were in “The Mitchells” more discordant elements than I recollect
to have known in any other troupe in the fortunes of which I ever had a
part. I think there were too many leading comedians and musical stars
among us for anything so sober and dull as a good understanding to exist
at all times.
Some one, you know, must play second parts and second violin; and that
necessity was a smothered volcano in our midst. Stale jokes, unuttered,
sit heavily on your comedian’s memory; they must be refreshed or renewed
by the laughter of an audience; and eclipsed musical brilliancy, when
turned in upon itself, illumines a very disagreeable void, and generally
results in heart-burnings.
I have a lingering impression that I myself, in this company, sighed
regretfully for my old place as tambourinist and end-man. There were
three other tambourinists and end-men who, like myself, had been
professionally cut short in a comic career, to make way for a person
whose jokes, in our opinion, were not half so good as ours, and for
whose acrobatics with the complicated tambourine itself we were united,
as three men and one boy, in our sublime contempt.
We had as musical director a very young Italian, who had led the
orchestra of the Grand Opera at Havana, and he managed to lead our
musicians into the most unconscionable difficulties and
misunderstandings. I cannot conceive how in the world he did it, but he
had them continually by the ears.
At one rehearsal there was such a jealous _mêlée_ that a veteran
violinist, an irascible old German, was forced to leave his wig behind
him on the stage and retreat precipitately, with no more hair on his
head than there is on a hairdressers block. Indeed, as his smooth
occiput disappeared through the dressing-room door, it resembled nothing
so much as a back view of one of those familiar ornaments of a
wig-maker’s window.
The business manager of this company was a character that has puzzled me
a great deal,--a human riddle that I solve a new way every time I
attempt it. The last solution, too, is always sure to be just contrary
to the one immediately preceding.
The name of this moustached Sphinx was “Governor” Dorr, or that, at
least, was the name he went under. How he got, or what right he had to,
either his title or surname I do not know. He had gambled for thousands
in California, and been an adventurer in every land. He knew
Shakespeare, seemingly, by heart. His common conversation was full of
the turgid phrase and movement of melodrama. His presence anywhere was a
constant sensation.
There was a strange mixture of treachery and generous good-fellowship in
the expression of his face. When younger, before a long course of
dissipation had left its marks upon him, he must have been very
handsome. He was yet tall and tolerably erect, and the excessive measure
of the liquor he had consumed showed itself, not so much in his face as
in that peculiar bend to the knees, when walking, which the acute
observer will always find the surest test of the confirmed Bacchanalian.
There is a kind of life that never gets into books,--a species of
villany that floats ethereally just above the atmosphere of the courts.
The newspaper reporter does not quite grasp it, and so it remains
without its literature. Of a quarter-century or more of this
indescribable sort of life Governor Dorr had skimmed the cream, as I
may say.
All that was worldly he knew, from the infinitesimal series of negative
physical pleasures to the most abstruse calculus of positive crime. The
idea of a virtuous home, of children, and of scenes that are so common
in every-day life was to him, I am sure, a memory of remote years. He
saw all these things from the outside, and lived, even in his most
lavish prosperity, in the very worst of homelessness. Yet I have seen
him manifest simplicity as honest as a child’s, and a tenderness in
which there could be no counterfeit.
I think I have never known a man on whom a striking scene in nature had
so powerful an effect. He would look upon a beautiful or wild landscape
for hours at a time. There could have been no affectation in this, for
he rarely expressed his admiration audibly; and when he did, it was in
some brief exclamation that was forcible or original.
I shall always remember the evening when we sat upon the quarter-deck of
a steamboat at a backwoods landing, on one of the great Western rivers,
where for some reason we were detained. We were sitting alone, I think.
It was nearly midnight, and there was scarcely a cloud in the heavens or
a ripple in the water. The moon was shining grandly, duplicating in
shadow the thick forests for miles along the stream. The Governor had
been looking in silence at the magnificent scene for as much as a
half-hour when I took occasion to remark that I thought I would go to my
state-room.
The words were scarcely uttered when he startled me by jumping suddenly
to his feet and exclaiming, his voice all a-quiver: “Great God! a man
does not see three such nights as this in a lifetime; how can you--how
can they sleep? I shall not go to bed till the moon does!”
And as I left him, he sat down again with the determined yet injured
look of one who had been insulted through nature.
The Governor liked to pass for a great literary character, and I believe
he succeeded in his ambition among his peculiar associates. By a lucky
chance I have found, between the leaves of an old diary which I kept
spasmodically at that time, a specimen of his production. It is an
elaborate “Life of Michael Mitchell, the Comedian and Dancer.” I cut it
out of a Cincinnati paper,--the Commercial, if I am not mistaken; and I
am not sure that I did not once admire it almost as much as did the
Governor himself.
I see now, by the light of greater technical knowledge in such matters,
that this rare bit of biography was printed bodily as an advertisement.
It has, after the manner of special patent-medicine notices,
“Communicated” just over it, in brackets. I observe, too, that it has at
the left-hand bottom corner these cabalistic signs: “d1t.” I am glad,
nevertheless, to be able to give an extract or so.
The opening sentence has, as will be seen, a striking though inadvertent
allusion to one of the games with which the old gambler was doubtless
much more familiar than he could have been with the hazardous Latin.
“The subject of this sketch,” writes the biographer, “was born in
Ireland, on the 20th of November, Anno Domino 1831.”
A more extended extract, taken at random,--say from his account of
Mitchell’s first triumph,--will be all that is needed as a specimen of
the Governor’s average literary manner. It is better still, however, as
an autobiographical reminiscence of the biographer himself, or, perhaps
I should say, as a photograph of his own picturesque mind. You will
observe how his style reeks of the drama and yellow-covered memories.
That was the exact manner of his ordinary conversation.
It cannot be that he has weathered the years which have intervened since
he made this contribution to literature; but it will always have this
peculiarity for me, that I shall never read it without seeing the old
adventurer, living and swaggering before me, the same insolvable riddle
in human nature. Here is the paragraph:--
* * * * *
“We next find Mike in the difficult situation of vocalist and
bone-player; he becomes a troubadour the 10th of March, 1842, a day
sacred to men of genius (for on that day Tyrone Power, that excellent
wit and comedian, left the shores of this country on the ill-fated
President, never to return). On that identical day there was bustle and
excitement in the castle of the Mitchells, No. 222 Greenwich Street, New
York City. Young Michael was to be caparisoned and enter the lists
‘armed cap-a-pie,’ as a knight or troubadour of olden time (_vide_
James). The eventful eve of that eventful day arrived precisely at
nightfall, at the moment that ‘Old Trinity’ proclaimed with brazen notes
the hour of 7 P.M. There issued from the outer gate of the Mitchells’
guarded palace a youth armed with four bones. The night looked lowering
as dark Fate itself, no portents were in the sky, no Corsican Brothers
illusions; but something made our hero tremble,--it was the uncertainty
of the future. Sustaining himself with a glass of root-beer, he made his
way through the obscurity of the gas-light to a dilapidated house, No.
450 Broadway, gave the countersign or word of the night (Daniel Tucker,
Esq.), the door flew open at the magical sound, and Michael entered. At
first sight of the interior of that magnificent arena our hero’s cheek
slightly paled, and well it might. ‘The Chamber of Horrors of Madame
Tassarend’ could not move the redoubtable Michael now, for he has grown
bold in his profession. But on that night, armed only with youth and
‘bones,’ surrounded by a live rattlesnake, a six-legged horse, three
ladies in wax, the counterpart of three of flesh that had ‘shuffled off
this mortal coil’ by the hands of midnight murders [_sic_],--six little
orphan boys armed all with bones, and looking precious hungry, and
seated on six little chairs, a seventh chair vacant for Mike himself,
like that of Banquo’s,--six junk-bottles with six tallow-candles
therein, throwing their furtive, flickering, melancholy light upon these
cadaverous and superannuated ‘Tarmon’ musicians, playing upon bass-drum,
cracked fife, and hurdy-gurdy. No wonder that poor Mike’s blood rushed
to his heart, and that he trembled in his boots; the sight would have
intimidated stronger and older artists. The trio commenced their
overture,--the music, that beautiful air, ‘The Light of Other Days’
(poor fellows! the light of their days had surely faded,--they were
blind), and as they proceeded with their soul-stirring drum and
ear-piercing fife, Mike recovered his self-possession. The martial music
over, and the Germans having retired to the shades of a lager-beer
saloon, Michael’s turn came next. Taking the vacant chair and seating
himself thereon, he drew his American castanets (the younger brother of
the banjo) from his pocket (he had but one at that time), and threw
himself in an attitude to _sustain_ himself for the coming fray; it came
at last,--the rattle, the crash of seven juvenile bone-players in the
difficult overture to the opera of Daniel Tucker. It was awful,--it
ended, and the applause shook the old tenement to its foundation.”
* * * * *
Of Mitchell himself I can recollect little more than that he was a
jovial, easy sort of fellow personally, and that he was, as his scenic
biographer would have said, “a first-rate Ethiopian artist.” Scandal had
it that this same biographer, who was, it must be remembered, his
business manager and partner, did risk the earnings of Mr. Mitchell’s
minstrels in hazardous back-rooms, and thus precipitated a catastrophe
which the want of harmony among the members would sooner or later have
brought upon the troupe.
In the absence of positive knowledge on the subject, I would not like to
say how true or false this rumor was. This much only I will vouch for:
we were advertised to perform in some city of Southern Ohio, and, going
down to the depot with our big and little boxes, green-baize bags and
fiddle-cases, we were startled with the announcement that there was no
money in the treasury to pay our way out of Cincinnati.
I remember that the veteran German violinist, scratching his
wig,--which I need hardly say he had lived to recover,--and squeezing
his violin under his arm, remarked, when he heard this piece of news,
“Well, den de gombany ish bust!”
And, in point of fact, that veteran violinist was right.
* * * * *
I was afterward one of the volunteers at the grand complimentary benefit
given to Mitchell at Cincinnati, with the proceeds of which he was sent
out to California to join his friends Birch and Backus.
Mitchell, poor fellow, like Lynch and Sliter and so many of my old
associates in the cork-opera, has passed away, let us hope to a quieter
stage, beyond the double-dealing of managers and the contumely of
publicans.
An old showman is, in truth, a being _sui generis_. You rarely meet one
who will not tell you he has been twenty-two years in the show business.
He always talks in hyperbole, uses adjectives for adverbs, and arranges
all the minor incidents of his life, as well as his conversation, in the
most dramatic forms. He is often a better friend to others than to
himself; he is not naturally worse than the majority of men, but has
more temptation. A good negro-minstrel would, in any other profession,
be an Admirable Crichton in respect to morals.
While acknowledging with pride that I met in this calling some who
deserved even such praise, it is due to the truth to state also that I
have known many and many a poor fellow who was, in the language of
Addison,--
“Reduced, like Hannibal, to seek relief
From court to court, and wander up and down,
A vagabond in Afric.