Tales From Bohemia by Robert Neilson Stephens

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"Hello! What have you got to do with it? Do you know the young woman?"

"No, I don't. But I can easily guess all about her. She's some romantic
little girl, still pure and good, afflicted with one of those idiotic
infatuations for an actor, which is sure to bring trouble to her if you
don't behave like a white man. You want to show her the idiocy of writing
those letters, by ignoring them. You know that actors who care to do
themselves and the profession credit make it a rule never to answer a
letter from a girl like that, unless to give her a word of advice. Come,
my boy, don't disgrace yourself and profession. Don't spoil the life of a
pretty but foolish girl who, if you do the right thing, will soon repent
her silliness, and make some square young fellow a good wife."

Bridges had continued to dress himself during this long speech, assuming
a show of contemptuous indignation as it progressed. When Overfield,
astonished at his own eloquence, had subsided, the young man replied, in a
quiet but rather insolent tone:

"Look here, old man, don't try to work the Polonius racket on me. I don't
like advice, and I'm going to meet that girl, see? She arranged the whole
thing herself; she's to be at a certain spot at eleven-thirty P.M. with a
cab. All I've got to do is to signify my assent in a single line, which
I'm going to write and send by messenger as soon as I get out of here. Of
course, if the girl was a friend of yours, it would be different, but she
isn't, and if you want to remain on good terms with me, you won't put in
your oar. Now that's all settled."

"Is it? Well, young man, I don't want to remain on good terms with anybody
I can't respect. I can't respect a man who would take advantage of a
love-struck girl's ignorance of life. If you meet her, you will simply
be obtaining favours on false pretences, anyhow, for you know you're not
really half the fascinating, romantic, clever youth that you seem when
you're on the stage speaking another man's thoughts. That girl is probably
good, and she looks like some one I used to know. If I can save her, I
will, by thunder!"

"Really, old man, you're quite worked up. If you could act half that well
on the stage, you'd be doing lead, instead of dusting furniture while the
audience gets settled in its seats."

Old Yorick stood for a moment speechless, stung by the insult. Then he took
up his hat, excitedly, and left the dressing-room without a word.

Some of the other members of the company wondered at the angry, flushed
look on his face when he hurried through the corridor to the stage door.
A few minutes later he was seen walking down the street, apparently much
heated in mind. When he reached a certain café he went in, sat down, and
called for whiskey. He remained alone in deep thought, mechanically and
unconsciously answering the salutations bestowed upon him by two or three
acquaintances who strolled in. Suddenly he nodded thrice, as if denoting
the acquiescence of his judgment in some plan of action formed by his
inventive faculty. He rose quickly, paid his bill at the cashier's desk,
and moved rapidly across the street to the ---- Hotel. Passing in through a
broad entrance, he turned aside to a writing-room, where, without removing
his soft hat, he sat down at a desk.

He was soon immersed in the composition of a letter, which caused him many
contractions of the brow, many lapses during which he abstractedly stared
at vacancy, many fresh beginnings, and the whole of the two hours allowed
him before the evening's performance for dinner.

When he had finished the letter, he carefully read it, and made a few
corrections. Then he folded it up, put it in an envelope, and placed
it unsealed in his inside coat pocket. He arose with an expression of
resolution about his eyes that was quite new there.

Ascertaining by the clock in the thronged main corridor that the time
was ten minutes after seven, the old man rushed into the café, where he
devoured hastily a chicken croquette, and swallowed a cup of coffee and
a glass of whiskey before starting to the theatre. He was in his
dressing-room and in his shirt-sleeves, touching up his eyebrows, when
Bridges arrived. A cool greeting passed between the two.

"You sent the note?" asked the old man.

"What note?" gruffly queried Bridges, taking off his coat.

"To that girl."

"Most certainly."

A curious look, unobserved by Bridges, shot from Poor Yorick's eyes. It
seemed to say, "Wait, things may happen that you're not looking for."

At about the time when Bridges and Yorick were dressing for the
performance, a newspaper reporter, wishing to make a few notes of an
interview that had been accorded him by a politician staying in the
hotel at which the old man had written his long letter, went into the
writing-room and made use of the desk where the actor had sat earlier in
the evening. Several sheets of blank paper were scattered over it. One of
them contained almost a page of writing. Yorick had negligently left it
there. It was a beginning made by him before he had succeeded in obtaining
a satisfactory wording for his thoughts. This rejected opening read:

"My DEAR, FOOLISH YOUNG LADY:--Something has happened which prevents Mr.
Bridges from keeping the appointment with you, and you're much better off
on that account, for nothing but unhappiness can come to you if you allow
yourself to be carried out of your senses by your infatuation for a man
who has neither the brains nor the manliness which he seems to have when
playing parts that call for the mere simulation of these gifts. Never make
an appointment with a man you do not know, especially a young and vain
actor who has once got the worst of it in a divorce suit. You'll be
thankful some day for this advice, for I know what I speak of. I was once,
years ago, just such an actor. The woman got into all sorts of trouble
because she wrote me such letters as you have written Bridges, and brought
to an early end a life that might have been very happy and youthful. Looked
like you, and it is a memory of what she lost and suffered that makes me
wish to save you. My dear young ----"

There were yet two lines to spare at the foot of the page. The newspaper
man, interested by the fragment, thrust it into his pocket.

When Poor Yorick had finished his final scene in the comedy at the ----
Theatre that night, he made haste to dress and to leave the playhouse. But
he loitered near the stage entrance, keeping in the shadow on the other
side of the alley, out of the range of the light from the incandescent
globe over the door.

Bridges was slightly surprised, on returning to his dressing-room, to find
that Yorick had already gone. But he attributed this to the ill feeling
that had arisen on account of the intended meeting with the girl of the
letters and the box.

The leading juvenile attired himself for the conquest carefully but
rapidly. When he was ready he surveyed his reflection complacently in
the long mirror, assuming the slightly languid look that he intended to
maintain during the first half-hour of the supper. He retained the dress
suit which he wore in the second and third act of the play, and which he
rarely displayed outside of the theatre. He flattered himself that he was
quite irresistible, and wondered whether she would take him to Delmonico's
or to some quiet little place. He indulged, too, in some vague speculation
as to what the supper might result in. The girl was evidently of a rich
family, but her people would doubtless never hear of her making a match
with him, that divorce affair being in recent memory. A marriage was
probably out of the question. However, the girl was a beauty and this
meeting was at least worth the trouble. So he donned his coat and hat and
swaggered out of the theatre. He had no sooner turned from the alley upon
which the stage door opened than Yorick, unnoticed by him, darted out in
pursuit. Ten minutes' walking brought the leading juvenile near the spot
where he was to be awaited by the girl in the cab. Yorick, whose only means
of ascertaining the place of meeting was to follow Bridges, kept as near
the young actor as was compatible with safety from discovery by the latter.
Bridges, strutting along unconscious of Yorick's presence a few yards
behind, had half-traversed the deserted block of tall brown stone
residences, when he saw a cab standing at the corner ahead of him. He
quickened his pace in such a way as to warn the old man that the eventful
moment was at hand. The cab stood under an electric light before an
ivy-grown church.

Yorick, with noiseless steps, accelerated his gait. Bridges, as he neared
the cab, deflected his course toward the curbstone and threw his head back
impressively. This little action, interpreted rightly by the pursuer, was
the old man's cue. Yorick suddenly rushed forward with surprising agility.

Before Bridges could be seen by the occupant of the cab for which he was
making, he was dazed by a blow on the side of the head, just beneath the
ear, and knocked off his feet by a sound thump on the same spot. He reeled,
clutched at the air, and fell heavily upon the sidewalk. There he lay
stunned and silent.

Yorick, not waiting to see what became of the man whom he had felled,
dashed forward to the cab. Opening the door, he caught a momentary vision
of a white, round face, with big, scared eyes, above a palpitating mass of
soft silk and fur, and against a black background. He thrust toward her the
letter, which he had quickly drawn from his pocket, and whispered, huskily:

"Mr. Bridges couldn't come. Here's a note."

Then he slammed the cab door, and called out in a commanding tone:

"Drive on there! Quick!"

The cabman, who had evidently received directions in advance from the girl,
jerked his reins, and the cab moved forward, turned, and rattled away, the
horse at a brisk trot.

Yorick speedily left the scene. At the next corner he met a policeman, to
whom he said:

"There's a man lying on the sidewalk back there by the church. I don't know
whether he's drunk or not."

He was off before the officer could detain him.

Bridges spent the night in a station-house, recovering from the effects of
a fall, which the police attributed to drunkenness. Assuming that he had
received his blows from some masculine relative or admirer of the girl,
he gave a false account of the bruises when the next night he asked the
manager for a few nights of rest and enabled his understudy to obtain a
chance long coveted.

The leading juvenile manifestly thought best not to attempt a renewal of a
flirtation with a young woman who had so formidable a protector; and the
girl herself, whatever became of her, addressed him no more epistles of
adoration, or of any sort whatever.

Yorick got from the stage manager permission to change his dressing-room.
Thereafter he and Bridges maintained a mutual coolness, until one day the
leading juvenile, warmed by cocktails, melted, and addressed the old man
familiarly by his nickname.

"Old fellow," said Bridges, over a café table, "when I come to play Hamlet,
I'll send for you to act Poor Yorick. You'd do it well. You're always best,
you know, in parts that don't require you to come on the stage at all."

The old man smiled grimly and then shrugged his shoulders at this
pleasantry. When he died the other day, he left a curious will, in which,
after naming several insignificant legacies, he bequeathed his skull "to a
so-called actor, one Charles Bridges, to be used by him in the graveyard
scene when he shall have become able to play Hamlet,--if the skull be not
disintegrated by that time."

XXIII

COINCIDENCE

Max took us down into a German place into the bowels of the earth. It was a
bit of Berlin transplanted to Philadelphia and thriving beneath a Teutonic
eating-house. Imagine a great cellar, with stone floor, ornamented ceiling,
massive rectangular pillars of brown wood, substantial tables, heavy
mediaeval chairs, crossbeams bearing pictures of peasant girls and lettered
with sentiments of good cheer in German, and walls covered with beer-mugs
of every size and device.

Scores of men sat talking at the tables, smoking, devouring sandwiches,
upturning their mugs of beer over the capacious receptacles provided by
nature.

The mediaeval chairs appealed to the romanticism that lies beneath
Breffny's satirical exterior; and when Max called our attention to the fact
that the mugs of beer came through apertures from caves beneath the street,
we were content.

For the hour, the problem of human happiness was solved for us three by
three foaming mugs, three sandwiches, and tobacco.

Here communed we three, blown from various winds, to this local Bohemia:
Max, native of the free German City of Frankfort, operatic manager in Rio
Janeiro, musician in New York, Denver resident by adoption, Philadelphia
newspaperman by preference; Breffny, born in a Spanish village, reared in
Continental countries, professedly an Irishman, but more than half-Latin in
temperament and appearance, a cyclopedia for the benefit of his friends,
and myself.

The talk ran to the imposture recently attempted by young Mr. Herdling, who
claimed that the dead body found at Tarrytown was that of his wife.

"A very touching fake," said Max.

"Yes; thanks to the skill of the reporters who wrote up his story," cried
Breffny.

"We visited many morgues in search of her, Louise and I," said I, quoting
the most effective passage of the narrative.

"I did know of one case of a husband starting off at random to find his
runaway wife," observed Breffny.

"As there's yet an hour to midnight, we have time for one of your stories."

"I can tell this in five minutes. All I know of the story is the beginning.
No one ever heard of the end. It was like this:

"When I lived in Glasgow, I knew a young fellow there who was timekeeper in
a shipyard. He was a very quiet, pleasant boy, so bashful that I used to
wonder how he had ever summoned the courage to propose to the pretty Scotch
girl who was his wife. As I got to know more of the pair, I divined the
secret. Although poor, he was of good Glasgow parentage, while the wife had
been a country girl so eager to get to the city that she had courted him
while he was on a visit to the village in which she had lived. She had
merely used him as a means for finding the life for which she had longed.

"How much he really loved her was never suspected until he came home one
evening and found that she had run away with the youngest son of one of the
proprietors of the shipyard.

"He learned within a week that they had sailed for America. He packed a
valise, took the money that he had saved, and started out.

"'But where are you going to look for them?' I asked him.

"'To America,' he said, turning toward me, his face drawn and gaunt with
the grief that he had survived.

"'But America is a vast country.'

"'I will hunt till I find her.'

"'And when you find her--you will not kill her, surely!'

"'I will try to get her to come back to me.'

"He took passage in the steerage, and I do not know what happened to him
after that."

Each of us hid his emotions in his beer-mug. Then Max ordered fresh mugs,
and said that Breffny's story recalled a somewhat similar thing that he had
witnessed in Denver.

"When I was a reporter out there, I was standing one evening in front of a
hotel. A crowd collected to see the body of a guest brought out and placed
upon an ambulance.

"'Where are you taking him, and what is it?' I asked the driver.

"'To the lazaretto. Smallpox.'"

For a moment, while he was being lifted into the ambulance, the victim's
face was visible. A loud cry was heard in the crowd. It came from a ragged,
wild-looking man, whose unkempt beard made him look much older than I
afterward found him to be. As the ambulance hurried off, he ran after it,
shouting:

"'I must see that man! Stop! I must ask him something!'

"But he tripped upon a horse-car track, and when he had staggered to his
feet, the ambulance was out of sight.

"I ran into the hotel and asked the clerk about the lazaretto patient. He
was a young European--an Englishman--they thought, who had arrived from the
East two days ago, and whose condition had just been discovered.

"Coming out, I went to the tramp who had cried out at the sight of the ill
man. I found him seated on the curbstone, weeping like a child. I asked him
why he wished to see the smallpox victim, and said that I could get him
admission to the lazaretto, if he would tell me what he knew, and wouldn't
let any other reporter have the story.

"He jumped up eagerly.

"'It's this,' he said. 'That man ran away with my wife, and I've hunted
them over sea and land. This is the first sight I've had of him.'

"'Then,' I said, 'if you mean to harm him, I'm afraid I can't bring you to
him.'

"'Him!' said the ragged man, disdainfully. 'I don't want to hurt him. I
only want to find out where she is. I swear I wouldn't harm either of
them.'

"I accompanied him to the city physician, with whom he had a long talk.
That official finally promised to take him to the lazaretto. The doctor led
the man to the side of the iron bed where the smallpox patient lay. The
latter started like a frightened child at sight of his pursuer.

"'Remember,' said the doctor to the sick man, 'you have scarcely a chance
for life. You would do well to tell the truth.'

"'Only tell me where she is,' pleaded the husband, 'and I'll forgive you
all.'

"The sick man gasped:

"'I left her in Philadelphia--at the station. She had smallpox. It was from
her I got it. I was a coward--a cur. I left her to save myself. The money I
had brought from home was nearly all gone. Ask her to forgive me.'

"He was dead that evening. The husband was then upon an east-bound
freight-train. The newspaper telegraphed to Philadelphia, but nothing could
be found out about the woman. I've often wondered what became of the man."

The loud hubbub of conversation,--nearly all in German,--the shouts of the
waiters, the noise of their footfalls upon the stone floor, the sound of
mugs being placed upon tables and of Max draining his "stein" of beer,
bridged the hiatus between the ending of Max's narrative and the beginning
of my own:

"Your story reminds me of one to which the city editor assigned me on one
of my 'late nights.' I took a cab and went to the station-house. The case
had been reported by a policeman at Ninth and Locust Streets, who had
called for a patrol-wagon. From him I got the story. He had seen the thing
happen.

"He was walking down Locust at half-past twelve that night, and was
opposite the Midnight Mission, when his attention was attracted to the only
two persons who were at that moment on the other side of the street. One
was a man of the appearance of a vagabond, coming from Ninth Street. The
other was a woman, who had come from Tenth Street, and who seemed to walk
with great difficulty, as if ready to sink at every step from weakness.

"The woman dropped her head as she neared the man. The man peered into her
face, in the manner of one who had acquired the habit of examining the
countenances of passers-by.

"The two met under the gas-lamp that is so conspicuous a night feature of
the north side of Locust Street, between Ninth and Tenth.

"The woman gave no attention to the man. So exhausted was she that she
leaned helplessly against the fence. The man ran forward, shrieking like a
lunatic.

"'Jeannie!'

"The woman lifted her eyes in a dull kind of amazement and whispered:

"'Donald!'

"She fell back, but he caught her in his arms and kissed her lips a dozen
times, with a half-savage gladness, crying and laughing hysterically, as
women do.

"When the policeman had reached the pair, the woman had seen the last of
this world.

"Afterward we found that she had been discharged from the municipal
hospital, where she had been in the smallpox ward two weeks before; and we
surmised that she had virtually had nothing to eat since then.

"At the station-house the man explained that the woman was his runaway
wife. He had started in search of her two years before, with no other clue
as to her whereabouts than the knowledge that she had sailed for America
with a man named Ferriss--"

"What?" cried Max. "Was the name Archibald Ferriss? That was the name of
the man who died in the Denver lazaretto--"

But Max was stopped by Breffny, who almost shouted in excitement:

"And the name of the son of McKeown & Ferriss, of Glasgow, in whose
shipyard was employed as timekeeper the Donald Wilson--"

"Donald Wilson was the name of the man who met his wife that night in front
of the Midnight Mission," said I, in further confirmation.

It was remarkable. One of the three chapters of this tragic story had
entered into the experience of each of us three who sat there emptying
stone mugs. Now, for the first time, was the story complete to each of us.

"But what became of the man?" asked Breffny.

"When the police lieutenant spoke of having her body interred in Potter's
Field, the husband spoke up indignantly. He brought forth two gold pieces,
saying:

"'I have the money for her grave. I saved this through all my wanderings,
because I thought that when I should find her she might be homeless and
hungry and in need.'

"So he had her buried respectably in the suburbs somewhere, and I was too
busy at that time to follow up his subsequent movements. It is enough for
the story that he found his wife."

XXIV

NEWGAG THE COMEDIAN

It was not his real name or his stage name, but it was the one under which
he was best known by those who best knew him. It had been thrown at him in
a café one night by a newspaper man after the performance, and had clung
to him. Its significance lay in the fact that his "gags"--supposedly
comic things said by presumably comic men in nominal opera or
burlesque--invariably were old. The man who bestowed the title upon him
thought it a fine bit of irony.

Newgag received it without expressed resentment, but without mirth, and
he bore its repetition patiently as seasons went by. He was accustomed
to enduring calmly the jests, the indignities that were elicited by his
peculiar appearance, his doleful expression, his slow and bungling speech
and movement, his diffident manner.

He was one of the forbearing men, the many who are doomed to continual
suffering of a kind that their sensitiveness and timidity make it the more
difficult for them to bear.

Undying ambition burned beneath his undemonstrative surface; dauntless
courage lay under his lack of ability.

He was an extremely spare man, of extraordinary height, and the bend of his
shoulders gave to his small head a comical thrust forward. His black hair
was without curl, and it would tolerate no other arrangement than being
combed back straight. It was allowed to grow downward until it scraped the
back of Newgag's collar, a device for concealing the meagreness of his
neck.

He had a smooth, pale face, slanting from ears to nose like a wedge, and
the dimness of the blue eyes added to its introspective cast. He blushed,
as a rule, when he met new acquaintances or was addressed suddenly. He had
a gloomy look and a hesitating way of speech. An amusing spectacle was his
mechanical-looking smile, which, when he became conscious of it, passed
through several stages expressive of embarrassment until his normal
mournful aspect was reached.

As he usually appeared in a sack coat when off the stage, the length of his
legs was divertingly emphasized. After the fashion of great actors of a
bygone generation, he wore a soft black felt hat, dinged in the crown from
front to rear.

He had entered "the profession" from the amateur stage, by way of the comic
opera chorus, and to that chance was due his being located in the comic
opera wing of the great histrionic edifice. He had originally preferred
tragedy, but the first consideration was the getting upon the stage by any
means. Having industriously worked his way out of the chorus, he had been
reconciled by habit to his environment, and had come to aspire to eminence
therein. He had reached the standing of a secondary comedian,--that is to
say, a man playing secondary comic rôles in the pieces for which he is
cast. He was useful in such companies as were directly or indirectly
controlled by their leading comedians, for there never could be any fears
of his outshining those autocratic personages. Only in his wildest hopes
did he ever look upon the centre of the stage as a spot possible for him to
attain.

His means of evoking laughter upon the stage were laborious on his part and
mystifying to the thoughtful observer. He took noticeable means to change
from his real self. It mattered not what was the nature of the part he
filled, he invariably assumed an unnatural, rasping voice; he stretched
his mouth to its utmost reach and lowered the extremities of his lips; he
turned his toes inward (naturally his feet described an abnormal angle) and
bowed his arms. Brought up in the school which teaches that to make others
laugh one must never smile one's self, he wore a grotesquely lugubrious and
changeless countenance. Such was Newgag in his every impersonation. When
he thought he was funniest, he appeared to be in most pain and was most
depressing.

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