Tales From Bohemia by Robert Neilson Stephens

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Pay-day with us was Friday. This was Thursday night. I having gone to
unusual lengths of good cheer in the early part of that week, had now
fallen low, and was duly thankful for what I could get--even at Gorson's.

As my glance wandered over my table, over the beer-bottles and the oysters,
beyond the crowd of ravenous and vulgar eaters and hurrying waiters, to the
street door, some one opened that door from the outside and entered. An odd
looking personage this some one.

A person very tall and conspicuously thin. These peculiarities were
accentuated by the dilapidated frock coat that reached to his knees, and
thus concealed the greater portion of his gray summer trousers, which
"bagged" exceedingly and were picturesquely frayed at the bottom edges, as
I could see when he came nearer to me. He wore a faded straw hat, which
looked forlorn, as the month was January. His face, despite its angularity
of outline and its wanness, had that expression of complacency which often
relieves from pathos the countenances of harmlessly demented people. His
hair was gray, but his somewhat formidable looking moustache was still
dark. He carried an unadorned walking-stick and under his left arm was what
a journalistic eye immediately recognized as manuscript. From the man's
aspect of extreme poverty, I deduced that his manuscripts were never
accepted.

As he passed the cashier's desk, he stopped, lowered his body, not by
stooping in the usual way, but by bending his knees, and with a quick sweep
of his eyes by way of informing himself whether or not he was observed, he
picked up a cigar stump that some one had dropped there.

Then he walked with a rather shambling but self-important gait to the table
next mine, carefully placed his manuscript upon a chair, and sat down upon
it. He was soon lost in a prolonged contemplation of the limited bill of
fare posted on the wall, a study which resulted in his ordering, through a
hustling, pugnacious-looking waiter, a bowl of oatmeal.

A bowl of oatmeal is the least expensive item on the bill of fare at
Gorson's. When I hear a man ordering oatmeal in a cheap eating-house, my
heart aches for him. I had just the money and the intention to procure
another bottle of beer and another box of cigarettes. The sum required to
obtain these necessaries of life is exactly the price of a bowl of oatmeal
and a steak at Gorson's. So I hastily arose to go, and on my way out I had
a brief conversation with the bellicose-appearing waiter, which resulted in
my unknown friend's being overwhelmed with amazement later when the waiter
brought him a warm steak with his oatmeal and said that some one else had
already paid his bill. I did not wait to witness this result, for the man
looked one of the sort to put forth a show of indignation at being made an
object of charity.

An hour later I saw him walking with an air of consequence up Broadway,
smoking what was probably the bit of cigar he had picked up in the
restaurant. He still carried his manuscript, which was wrapped in a soiled
blue paper. As I was hurrying up-town on an assignment for the newspaper,
I could not observe his movements further than to see that when he reached
Fourteenth Street he made for one of the benches in Union Square.

It was by the size, shape, and blue cover that I recognized that manuscript
two days later upon the desk of the editor of the Sunday supplementary
pages of the paper, as I was submitting to that personage a "special" I had
written upon the fertile theme, "Producing a Burlesque."

"May I ask what that stuff is wrapped in blue?"

"Certainly. A crank in the last stages of alcoholism and mental depression
brought it in yesterday. It's an idiotic jumble about Beautiful Women of
History, part in prose and part in doggerel."

"Of course you'll reject it?"

"Naturally. I'll ease his mind by telling him the subject lacks
contemporaneousness. Have a cigarette? By the way, have you any special
interest in the rubbish?"

"No; I only think I've seen it before somewhere. What's the writer's name
and address?"

"It's to be called for. He didn't leave any address. From that fact and his
appearance, I infer that he doesn't have any permanent abode. Here's his
name,--Ernest Ruddle. Not half as much individuality in the name as in the
man. I remember him because he had a straw hat on."

The burlesque production which had served as material for my Sunday article
saw the light for the first time on the following Monday night. There being
no other theatrical novelty in New York that night, the town--represented
by the critics and the sporting and self-styled Bohemian elements--was
there. The performance was to have a popular comedian as the central
figure, and was to serve, also, to reintroduce a once favourite comic-opera
prima donna, who had been abroad for some years. This stage queen had once
beheld the town at her feet. She had abdicated her throne in the height
of her glory, having made the greatest success of her career on a certain
Monday night, and having disappeared from New York on Tuesday, shortly
afterward materializing in Paris.

There was abundant curiosity awaiting the appearance of Louise Moran, as
the playbills called her. It was whispered, to be sure, by some who had
seen her in burlesque in London, after her flight from America, that she
had grown a bit passée; but this was refuted by the interviewers who had
met her on her return and had duly chronicled that she looked "as rosy
and youthful as ever." Brokers, gilded youth, all that curious lot of
masculinity classified under the general head of "men about town," crowded
into the theatre that night, and when, after being heralded at length by
the chorus, the returned prima donna appeared, in shining drab tights, she
had a long and noisy reception.

My friendly acquaintance with the leading comedian and the stage manager
had served to obtain for me an unusual privilege,--that of witnessing the
first night's performance from the wings. As I looked out across the stage
and the footlights, and saw the sea of faces in the yellowish haze, a
familiar visage held my eye. It was in the front row of the top gallery,
and was projected far over the railing, putting its owner in some risk of
decapitation. An intent look on the pale countenance at once distinguished
it from the terrace of uninteresting, monotonous faces that rose back of
it. The face was that of my man of the restaurant and of the blue-covered
manuscript.

I stood, somewhat in the way of the light man, where my eye could command
most of the stage, and a brief section of the auditorium, from parquet to
roof. The star of the evening, having rattled off, with much sang-froid and
a London intonation, a few lines of thinly humourous dialogue, came toward
the footlights to sing. While the conductor of the orchestra poised his
baton and cast an apprehensive look at her, she began:

"I'm one of the swells
Whose accent tells
That we've done the Contenong."

When she had sung only to this point, people in the audience were
exchanging significant smiles. There was no doubt of it; Louise Moran's
voice had lost its beauty. The years and joys of life abroad had done
their work. We now knew why she had given up comic opera and had gone into
burlesque. The house was so taken by surprise that at the end of her second
stanza, where applause should have come, none came. There was no occasion
for her to draw upon her supply of "encore verses."

Unprepared for the chilling silence that followed her song, she bestowed
upon the audience a look of mingled astonishment, pain, and resentment. But
she recovered self-possession promptly and delivered the few spoken lines
preceding her exit gaily enough. Her face clouded as soon as she was off
the stage. She abused her maid in her dressing-room and sent the comedian's
"dresser" out for some troches. The state of her mind was not improved by
the sound of a hail-storm-like sound that came from the direction of the
stage shortly after,--the applause at the leading comedian's entrance.

As the newspapers said the next day, the only honours of that performance
were with the comedian. The star of Louise Moran had set. Not only was her
singing-voice a ruin, but the actress had grown coarse in visage. The once
willowy outlines of her figure had rounded vulgarly. On the face, audacity
had taken place of piquancy. Even the dark gray eyes, which somehow seemed
black across the footlights, had lost some lustre.

Why had the once lovely creature come back from Europe to disturb the
memories of her other radiant self, and to turn those dainty photographs of
her earlier person into lies?

Every man in the house was thinking this question at the end of the first
act.

She had another solo to sing in the second act. It was while she was
attempting this that my glance strayed to the man in the gallery. His face
this time surprised me.

It wore a look of ineffable sympathy and sorrow. Surely tears were falling
from the sad eyes.

This pity touched me. It was so solitary. The feeling of the rest of the
audience was plainly one of resentful derision at being disappointed.

After the performance I waited for the comedian. He was called before the
curtain and a speech was extorted from him. There were but a few faint
cries for the actress, to which she did not respond. She had summoned the
manager to her dressing-room. While she hastily assumed her wraps for the
street, she was excitedly complaining of the musical director "for not
knowing his business," the comedian for "interfering" in her scenes, the
composer for writing the music too high, and the librettist for supplying
such "beastly rubbish" in the way of dialogue.

"Very well; I'll call a rehearsal to-morrow at ten," the conciliatory
manager replied. "You talk to Myers" (the musical director) "yourself about
it. And you can introduce those two songs you speak of. Myers will fix the
other music to suit your voice."

"And you start Elliott to write over the libretto at once," she commanded,
"and see that that song and dance clown" (the comedian) "never comes on the
stage when I'm on, if it can be helped, or I won't go on at all. That's
settled!"

The comedian and I left the stage door together. The actress's cab was
waiting at the opposite side of the dark alley-like street upon which the
stage door opened. This street or court, stretching its gloomy way from a
main street, is a place of tall warehouses, rear walls, and bad paving.
The electric light at its point of junction with the main street does not
penetrate half-way to the stage entrance, and the blackness thereabout is
diluted with the rays of the lonely, indifferent gas-lamp that projects
above the old wooden door. Farther on, an old-fashioned street-lamp marks
the place where the alley turns to wind about until it eventually reaches
another main street.

This dark region, the feeble lamp above the stage door, the shadows
opposite, have a peculiar charm, especially at night. One would not think
that within that door is a short corridor leading to the mystic realm which
the people "in front" idealize into a wonderful inaccessible country,
the playworld. Back here, especially on a rainy night and before the
playworld's inhabitants begin to sally forth to partake of terrestrial beer
and sandwiches, one seems millions of miles away from the crowds of men and
women in the theatre and from the illumined street in front.

The ordinary world, when passing this strange place, peers in curiously
from the main street. Sometimes folks wait at the corner of the street
to see the stage people come out. If the piece is a burlesque or a comic
opera, much life moves in the darkness back here. Light comes from the
up-stairs windows of the theatre, the dressing rooms of the subordinate
players being up there. Snatches of song from feminine throats, mere trills
sometimes, isolated fragments of melody, break into the silence. These are
always numerous during the half-hour after the performance and before the
actors have left the theatre. Chorus girls in ulsters emerge in troops,
usually by twos, from the door beneath the light, and it is constantly
opening and shutting. In the gloom opposite the door hover a few bold
youths, suddenly become timid, smoking cigarettes and trying to look like
men of the world. As the comedian and I came forth, one of these young men
struck a match to light a cigarette. The momentary flash attracted my eye,
and I saw in the farthest shadow, with his gaze upon the stage door, my man
of the restaurant, and the manuscript, and the gallery. If possible,
he looked more haggard than before, and, as it was cold, he shivered
perceptibly.

"Whom can he be waiting for, I wonder?" I said, aloud.

The comedian, thinking that I alluded to the cabman, half-asleep upon his
seat, replied, as he turned up the collar of his overcoat:

"Oh, he's waiting for Miss Moran. She didn't always go home from the
theatre in a cab. She acquired the habit abroad, I suppose. How she's
changed. I knew her in other days."

"Really? I didn't know that. Tell me about her."

"It's a common story. She's the result of a mercenary mother's schemes.
She's not as old as people think, you know. Her career has been
eventful, which makes it seem long. But I was in the cast, playing a
small part in the first play she ever appeared in, and that was only
twelve years ago. She was about twenty-one then. She waited on customers
in her mother's little stationery store, until one day she eloped with a
poor young fellow whom she loved, in order to escape a rich old man whom
her mother had selected for a son-in-law. She could have endured poverty
well enough, if the mother hadn't done the 'I--forgive--and--Heaven--
bless--you--my--children' act, after which she succeeded in making the
girl quarrel with her husband continually. She was a schemer, that
mother. A theatrical manager, whom she knew, was introduced to the girl,
who was more beautiful then than ever afterward. The mother managed to
have the girl's husband discharged from the bank where he was employed
on the same day that the manager made the girl an offer to go on the
stage. The boy naturally wanted to keep his wife with him, but the
mother told him he was a fool.

"'I'll travel with her,' she said, 'and you stay here and get another
situation.' The wife, intoxicated at the prospects of stage triumphs,
urged, and the boy gave in.

"A year or so after that, the girl had drifted completely out of the
husband's life, as they say in society plays, the mother managed to bring
about the estrangement so promptly.

"The husband stayed at home and got work in a railroad office or somewhere,
so as to earn money with which to drink himself to death--I say, let's
go in here and eat. If we go to the club, I'll be bored to death with
congratulations."

We turned into a lighted vestibule and mounted the stairs to a modest
little café over a Broadway saloon. There, over the cigars and Pilsner
presently the comedian continued the story:

"When the husband learned that to his charming mother-in-law's machinations
he owed the loss of his position and his wife, he bided his time, like
a sensible fellow, and one day he called upon the old lady at her flat.
Without a word, he proceeded to pull out much of her hair and otherwise
to disfigure her permanently, which, as she was a vain woman, made her
miserable the rest of her days. Then he disappeared, and has not been heard
of since. It seems strange the thing never got into the newspapers. By
the way, you won't print this story, my boy, until she or I leave the
profession."

"Why not? Are you the only man who knows it?"

"No; it was general gossip in the profession at that time."

"How did you get it so straight?"

"She told me. I knew her well in those days. Oh, use the story if you like,
only don't credit it to me. She's very mad because I made a hit to-night
and she didn't."

"But what was the name of her husband?"

"Poor devil!--his name was--what was it, anyhow? By Jove, I can't think
of it! It'll come back to me, though, and I'll let you know later. He had
literary aspirations, by the way. She used to laugh at the poetry he had
written about her. Poor boy!"

The next night, radical changes having been effected in the burlesque, the
prima donna made a more creditable showing. I happened to be at the stage
door again when she came out with her maid after the performance, as I had
under my guidance one of the newspaper's artists, who had been making some
sketches of life behind the scenes. She was in a gayer mood than that in
which she had been on the previous night.

As she was entering the cab, I heard a muffled exclamation, which came from
the shadow opposite the stage door. Dimly in that shadow could be seen a
form with arms outstretched toward the woman, as in an involuntary gesture.
The cab rolled away. The form emerged from the darkness and wearily strode
by. It was that of my manuscript man. He had the same straw hat, stick, and
frock coat.

"That queer old chap must be really in love with her," I thought, smiling.
Such things often happen. I knew a gallery god--but that will keep.
Evidently here was an amusing case, not without its aspect of pathos.

Being in that vicinity on the following night, I strolled up to the stage
door, merely to see whether the straw hat would be there again. There it
was, patiently waiting, scourged by the most ferocious of January winds.

Doubtless the man came here every night to catch a glimpse of his divinity.
He was quite unobtrusive, and I was probably the only one who noticed his
constant attendance. I learned at the newspaper office that he had called
for the rejected manuscript bearing his name,--Ernest Ruddle. Then for a
time I neither saw nor thought of him.

One night, in the last of January,--the coldest of that savage winter,--I
happened again to be in the corridor leading to the stage door, having come
from within the theatre in advance of my friend the comedian, with whom
I was to have supper at the Actors' Athletic Club. The actress's cab was
waiting. The dark little portion of the world back there was deserted.

Along the corridor, through which the sound of chorus girls' laughter
came, strolled the comedian, his cigar already lighted and behind it his
cheerful, hearty, smooth-shaven visage appearing ruddy from the recent
washing off of "make-up."

"Hello!" he began, thrusting his hand into his overcoat pockets. "By
the way, while I think of it, I just passed Miss Moran coming from the
dressing-room, and suddenly that name came back to me, the name of her
husband. It was a peculiar name,--Ernest Ruddle."

Ernest Ruddle! the name on the manuscript! The man of the restaurant and
the gallery, the tears, the waiting at the stage door, were explained
now. Ere we reached the stage door, the actress herself appeared in the
corridor, on the arm of her maid. She was laughing, rather coarsely. We
stepped aside to let her pass out into the night.

"So the manager said he'd give me $50 more on the road," she was saying,
"and I said he would have to make it $75 more--gracious! what's this?"

She had stumbled over something just outside the threshold of the stage
door. Her companion stooped, while the actress jumped aside and looked down
at the large black object with both fright and curiosity.

"It's a man," said the maid; "drunk, or asleep, or dead. He looks frozen.
He's a tramp, I guess; hurry away! We'll tell the policeman on the corner."

The actress passed on, with a final look of half-aversion, half-pity, at
the prostrate body. The comedian and I were both by that body within two
seconds.

"Frozen or starved, sure!" said the comedian. "Poor beggar! Look at his
straw hat. Observe his death-clutch on the cane."

From down the alley came two sounds: one was a policeman's approaching
footsteps; the other, of a woman's laughter. What, to be sure, was the dead
or drunken body of an unknown vagabond to her?

And it seems strange that I, who never exchanged speech with either the
woman or the man, was the only one in the world who might recognize in the
momentary contact of the living with the dead, a dramatic situation.

XXII

"POOR YORICK" [Footnote: Courtesy of _Lippincott's Magazine_. Copyright,
1892, by J.B. Lippincott Company.]

The name by which he was indicated on the playbills was Overfield. His real
name was buried in the far past. By several members of the company to which
he belonged he was often called "Poor Yorick."

I asked the leading juvenile of the company--young Bridges, who was
supposed to attract women to the theatre, and for whose glorification "The
Lady of Lyons" was sometimes revived at matinées--how the old man had
acquired the nickname.

"I gave it to him myself last season," replied Bridges, loftily. "Can't
you guess why? You remember the graveyard scene in 'Hamlet.' The skull of
Yorick, you know, had lain in the earth three and twenty years. Yorick had
been dead that long. Well, the old man had been dead for about the same
length of time,--professionally dead, I mean. See?"

It was true that, so far as being known by the world went, the old man
was as good, or as bad, as dead. He no longer played other than quite
unimportant parts.

It was said by some one that he was the poorest actor and the noblest
man in the country; a statement commended by Jennison, an Englishman who
usually played villains, to this, that his were the worst art and best
heart in the profession.

Poor Yorick was a thin man, with a smooth, gentle face, lamblike blue eyes,
and curling gray locks that receded gracefully from his forehead. He had
just an individualizing amount of the pomposity characteristic of many
old-time actors. He was not known to have any living kin. He permitted
himself one weakness, a liking for whiskey, an indulgence which was never
noticed to have brought appreciable harm upon him.

Once I asked him when he had made his début. He answered, "When Joe
Jefferson was still young and before Billie Crane was heard of."

"In what rôle?"

"As four soldiers," he replied.

"How could that be?"

He explained that he had first appeared as a super in a military drama,
marching as a soldier. The procession, in order to create an illusion of
length, had passed across the stage and back, the return being made behind
the scenes four times continuously in the same direction.

The old man took uncomplainingly to the name applied to him by Bridges.
He must have known what it implied, for surely he could not have mistaken
himself for "a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy." His
non-resentment was but an evidence of his good nature, for he was aware
that it was not a very general custom of actors to give each other
nicknames, and that his case was an exception.

When he was playing the insignificant part of the old family servant of a
New York banker, in the most successful comedy of that season, he came to
know Bridges better than ever before. Poor Yorick had little more to do in
the play than to come on and turn up some light, arrange some papers on a
desk, go off, and afterward return and lower the light. Bridges was doing
the rôle of the bank clerk in love with the banker's daughter. Yorick and
Bridges, through some set of circumstances or other, were sharers of the
same dressing-room.

Upon a certain Wednesday, and after a matinée, the two were in their
dressing-room, hastily washing up their faces and putting on their street
clothes. Said the old man:

"Did you notice the pretty little girl in the upper box? She reminds me
of--" here his voice fell and took on suddenly a tone of sadness--"of some
one I knew once, long ago."

Bridges, drying his face with a towel before the big mirror, did not
observe the old man's change of voice, nor did he heed the last part of the
sentence.

"Notice her?" he answered, with a touch of triumphant vanity in his manner
of speech. "I should say I did. She was there on my account. I'm going to
make a date with her for supper after the performance to-night."

Old Overfield, sitting on a trunk, stared at Bridges in surprise.

"Do you know her?" he asked.

"No," replied the leading juvenile. "That is, I have never met her, but
she's been writing me mash notes lately, asking for a meeting. In the
last one she said she could get away from her house this evening, as her
father's out of town and her mother is going over to Philadelphia this
afternoon. So she invited me to have supper with her to-night, and was good
enough to say she'd occupy that box this afternoon, so I could see what she
was like. Didn't you observe her embarrassment when I came on the stage? I
paid no attention to her first letter. But, having seen her, you bet I'll
answer the last one right away. Don't you wish you were me, old fellow?"

The old fellow stood up and looked at Bridges severely.

"Yes, I do wish I were you,--just long enough to see that you don't answer
that girl's letter. Surely you don't mean to!"

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