Life on the Stage Part 31

Who that "she" was whose aid he would have asked in my behalf I do not know, can never know; but it always gives me an almost childish pleasure to imagine it was the sweet, strong woman who was his wife. At all events, Mr. Gould that night furnished me with a pleasant memory, and that is a thing to be thankful for.

The first time I saw Mr. Fisk in the green-room he was surrounded by a smiling, animated party, and as he advanced a step, expectantly, I disappeared. I have been told that he laughed at his own disappointment and the suddenness of some claim upon my attention. The second time, I was in the room when he entered, and at my swift departure he reddened visibly, and, after a moment, said: "If you were not all such good friends of mine, I should think someone had been making a bugaboo of me to scare that young woman."

"Oh," laughed one of the men, "she's from the West and is a bit wild yet."

"Well," he replied, "it doesn't matter where she's from, New York's got her now and means to keep her. I'd like to offer her a word of welcome and congratulation, but she won't give a chap any margin," and he resumed his conversation.

The third time, he was alone in the room, and as I backed hastily out he followed me. I ran--so did he--but as that was too ridiculous I stopped at his call and, turning, faced him. He removed his hat and hurriedly said: "I beg your pardon for forcing myself upon your attention, Miss Morris, but any man with a grain of self-respect would demand an explanation of such treatment as I have received from you. Come now, you are a brave girl, an honest girl--tell me, please, why you avoid me as if I were the plague. Why, good Lord! your eyes are all but jumping out of your head! Are you afraid even to be seen listening to me?" Suddenly he stopped, his own words had given him an idea. His eyes snapped angrily.

"Well, I'll be blessed!" he exclaimed; then he came closer. He took my hand and asked: "Miss Morris, have you been putting these slights on me by order?"

I was confused, I was frightened; I remembered the anger Mr. Gould's presence had aroused, and this was an actual breech of orders. I stammered: "I--oh, I just happened to be busy, you know."

I glanced anxiously about me; he replied: "Yes, you were very busy to-night, sitting in the green-room doing nothing--yet you ran as if I were a leper. Tell me, little woman--don't be afraid--have you been obeying an order?"

"If you please--if you please!" was all I could say.

He looked steadily at me, lifted my hand to his lips, and said, with a compa.s.sionate sigh: "Bread and b.u.t.ter comes high in New York, doesn't it, child? There, I won't worry you any longer, but Brother Daly and I will hold a little love-feast over this matter." And with a laugh he returned to the green-room, where I could hear him singing "Lucy Long" to himself.

A fortnight later, finding him again surrounded by the company, he laughingly called out to me: "Don't run away, the embargo is raised. It won't cost you a cent to shake hands and be friendly!" And as I seated myself in the place he made beside him, he added, low: "And no advantage taken of it outside the theatre."

He used so many queer, old-fas.h.i.+oned words, such as "chipper,"

"tuckered," "I swan!" "mean tyke," etc., that I once said to him: "I'm afraid you have washed your face in a pail by the pump ere this, Mr.

Fisk?"

He laughed, and responded: "I'm afraid I used to be sent back to do it better, when I had first to break the ice to get to the water in the pail, Miss Guesswell!"

And then he gave a funny imitation of a boy was.h.i.+ng his face in icy water, by wetting his fingers and drawing a circle about each eye and his mouth. He called his wife Lucy. Heaven knows whether it really was her name, but he always referred to her as Lucy. He was very fond of her, in spite of appearances, and proud of her, too. He said to me once: "She is no hair-lifting beauty, my Lucy, just a plump, wholesome, big-hearted, commonplace woman, such as a man meets once in a lifetime, say, and then gathers her into the first church he comes to, and seals her to himself. For you see these commonplace women, like common-sense, are apt to become valuable as time goes on!"

When anyone praised some wife, he would look up and say: "Wife--whose wife? What wife? Bring your wives along, I ain't afraid to measure my Lucy with 'em. For, look here, you mustn't judge Lucy by her James!"

A divorce case was before the courts, and it was much discussed everywhere. The wife had been jealous and suspicious, and blond hairs (she was very dark herself) and strange hair-pins held a ludicrous prominence in the evidence. "Ah!" said Fisk, "that's not the kind of a wife I have! Never, _never_ does Lucy surprise me with a visit, G.o.d bless her! No, she always telegraphs me when she's coming, and I--I clear up and have a warm welcome for her, and then she's pleased, and that pleases me, and we both enjoy our visit. Hang'd if we don't! And just to show you what a hero--yes, a _hero_--she is, and, talking of hair-pins, let me tell you now. You know those confounded crooked ones, with three infernal crinkles in the middle to keep them from falling out of the hair? Those English chorus-girls wear them, I'm told. Well, one day Lucy comes to see me. Oh, she had sent word as usual, and everything was cleared up (I supposed) as usual, and George, my man, was laying out some clothes for me, when Lucy, smoothing her hand over the sofa-cus.h.i.+on, picks up and holds to the light an infernal crinkled hair-pin. George turned white and looked pleadingly at me. I saw myself in court fighting a divorce like the devil; and then, after an awful, perspiring silence, my Lucy says--she that has worn straight pins all her life: 'James, that is a lazy and careless woman that cares for your rooms. It's three weeks to-day since I left for home, and here is one of my hair-pins lying on the sofa ever since!'

"If she had put it in her hair I should have thought her really deceived in the matter, but when she dropped it in the fire, I knew she was just a plain hero! I walked over and knelt down and said: 'Thank you, Lucy,'

while I pretended to tie her shoe. George was so upset that he dropped the studs twice over he was trying to put into a s.h.i.+rt-front. Oh, I tell you my Lucy can't be beat!"

The time he won the name of "Jubilee Jim," when the whole country was laughing over his triumphant visit to Boston with his regiment, he made this unsmiling explanation of the matter:

"You see, the Ninth and I were both tickled over the invitation to visit Boston, and as there were so many of us I paid the expenses myself.

Being proud of the regiment and anxious it should be acquainted with all real American inst.i.tutions, I arranged for it to stay over Sunday, for there were dozens of the boys who had never even seen a slice of real Boston brown-bread or a crock-baked bean--and a Boston Sunday breakfast was to be the educational feature of the visit. Everything was lovely, until the Ninth suddenly felt a desire to pray, as well as to eat, and I'll be switched on to a side-track if the minister of that big church didn't begin to kick like a steer, and finally refuse to let us pray in his shop. Now, if there's anything that will make a man hot as blazes in a minute, it's choking him off when he wants to pray. Some sharply pointed and peppery words were exchanged on the subject. I suppose our numbers rather muddled up his schedule, but if he'd said so quietly I could have straightened out his heavenly time-table so that there would have been no collision between trains of prayer. But no, instead of that, he slams the doors of his church in our visiting faces, and, in act at least, tells us to go to--what's that polite word now that means h--? What--what do you call it _sheol_? Shucks! that word won't become popular--hasn't got any snap to it! Well, the boys were mighty blue, they thought the visit was off. But I got 'em into the armory, and I said, what amounted to this, I says: 'This visit ain't off; Boston is right as a trivet, and wants us! We ain't bucking against the city, but against that sanctified stingyike who don't want anyone in heaven but his own gang; but you see here, when the Ninth Regiment wants to pray, I'm d----d if it don't do it. Who cares for that church, anyway, where you'd be crowded like sardines and have your corns crushed to agony!

We'll go to Boston, boys, and we'll praise the Lord on the Common, if they'll let us, and if they won't, we'll march out to the suburbs and have a perfect jubilee of prayer!' And what do you think," he cried, grinning like a mischievous boy, as he twisted the long, waxed ends of his mustache to needle-like points, "what do you think--we prayed out of doors, with all female Boston and her attendants looking on and saying _amen_; and, oh, by George! I sent a man to see, and 'stingyike's'

church was nearly empty! Ha! ha! I tell you what it is, when a New York soldier wants to pray, he prays, or something gives!" After that he was Jubilee Jim.

His growing stoutness annoyed him greatly, yet he was the first to poke fun at what he called his "unmilitary figure." One evening I said: "Mr.

Fisk, I'm afraid you have cast too much bread upon the waters; it's said to be very fattening food when it returns?"

"Well, I swan!" he answered, "I'll never give another widow a pa.s.s over any road of mine--whether she's black, mixed, or gra.s.s, for that's about all the breadcasting I do."

This was not true, for he was very kind-hearted and generous, especially to working people who were in trouble. His "black widow" was one in full mourning, his "mixed widow" was the poor soul who had only a cheap black bonnet or a scanty veil topping her ordinary colored clothing to express her widowed state, while the "gra.s.ses" were, in his own words: "All those women who were not married--but ought to be."

Whenever he gave a diamond or an India shawl to a French opera-bouffe singer the world heard of it, and the value grew and grew daily, and that publicity gratified his strange distorted vanity, but the lines of widows, sometimes with hungry little flocks hanging at their skirts, that he pa.s.sed over roads, the discharged men he "sneaked" (his own word) back into positions again, because of their suffering brood, he kept silent about.

He never got angry at the papers, no matter what absurdity they printed about him. At the time of the riot some paper declared he had left his men and had climbed a high board fence in order to escape from danger. In referring to the article at the theatre one evening, he said, in reproachful tones: "Now wasn't that a truly stupid lie?" He rose, and placing his hands where his waist should have been, he went on mournfully: "Look at me! I look like a sprinter, don't I? If you just could see me getting into that uniform--no offence, ladies, I don't mean no harm. Oh, Lord, who has a small grammar about them? Well, when I'm in the clothes, it takes two men's best efforts, while I hold my breath, to clasp my belt--and they say I climbed that high fence! Say, I'd give five thousand dollars down on the nail if I had the waist to do that act with!"

He was not only a natural comedian, but he had an instinct for the dramatic in real life, and he was quick to grasp his opportunity at the burning of Chicago. _His_ relief train must be rushed through first--_he_ must beg personally; and then--and then, oh, happy thought! all the city knew the value he placed upon the beautiful jet black stallion he rode in the Park. Out, then, he and his stall-mate came--splendid, fiery, satin-coated aristocrats! And taking their places before a great express wagon, went prancing and curvetting their way from door to door, Mr. Fisk stopping wherever a beckoning hand appeared at a window. And bundles of clothing, boxes of provisions, anything, everything that people would give, he gathered up with wild haste, and brief, warm thanks, and rushed to the express offices for proper sorting and packing. Of course that personal service was not really necessary. A modest man would not have done it, but he was spectacular. His act pleased the people, too, and really many were moved to give by it. Their fancy was caught by the picture of the be-diamonded Jubilee Jim placing himself and his valuable horses at the service of the terror-stricken, homeless Chicagoans.

Though he was himself the b.u.t.t of most of his jokes, he often expressed his opinions in terms as conclusive and quite as funny as those of his world-famous reply to the sanctimonious fence-committee, who, claiming that the laying of his railroad had destroyed the greater part of the old fence about a country graveyard, demanded that he should replace it with a new one. Scarcely were the words out of their lips than, swift as a flash, came the characteristic answer: "What under heaven do you want a fence round a graveyard for? The poor chaps that are in there can't get out, and, I'll take my Bible oath, those that are out don't want to get in! Fence around a graveyard! I guess not; I know a dozen better ways of spending money than that!"

I heard much of his generosity on benefit nights, but personally I never tested it. Before my benefit night arrived, Mr. Edward Stokes had caught Mr. Fisk on a walled-in staircase, as in a trap, and had shot him down, and then, in that time of terror and excitement, Jubilee Jim proved that whatever else he had been called--man of sin, fraud, trickster, clown--he was _not_ a coward! With wonderful self-control he asked, as the clothing was being cut from his stricken body: "Is this the end of me; am I going to die, doctor?"

And when the man addressed made an evasive and soothing answer, that his hopeless eyes contradicted, James Fisk testily continued: "I want to know the truth!" Then, more gently: "I'm not afraid to die, doctor, but _I am_ afraid of leaving things all at sixes and sevens! This is the end of me, isn't it? Well, do what you can, and, George, send for ---- and for ---- [his lawyers], and I will do what I can. When can Lucy get here?"

And so he quickly and calmly made all possible use of his ebbing strength--of the flying moments--disproving at least one charge, that of cowardice. He was dying, and crowds were waiting about the hotel where he lay, hungry for any morsel of news from the victim's bedside. That was the situation as I went to the theatre. I dressed and went through one act, then, as I came upon the stage in the second act, I faced Mr. Fisk's private box. I glanced casually at it, and stopped stock-still, the words dying on my lips. A s.h.i.+ver ran over me--someone had entered the box since the first act and had lowered the heavy red curtains and drawn them close together.

No one could fail to understand. The flood of light, the waves of music reached to the edge of the box only--within were silence, darkness! The laughing owner would enter there no more, forever!

With swelling throat I stood looking up. Another actor entered, saw the direction of my eyes, followed it, and next moment tears were on his cheeks. Then people in the house, noticing our distress, glanced in that same direction, and here and there a man rose and slipped out. Here and there a handkerchief was pressed to a face, for without a word being spoken all knew, by the blank, closed box, that Mr. Fisk was dead.

I never knew a more trying evening for actors, for all knew him well--liked him and grieved for him. I was the only mere acquaintance, yet I was deeply moved and found it hard to act as usual before that mute, blank box--hard as though the body of its one-time owner lay within.

So he made his exit--dramatic to the last. A strange character--shrewd, sharp, vain, ostentatious, loving his diamonds, velvet coats, white gloves. The monumental silver water-pitchers in his private boxes were too foul to drink from generally, but then the public could see the ma.s.s of silver. A bit of a mountebank, beyond a question, but with a temper so sunny and a heart so generous that in spite of all his faults Jubilee Jim had a host of friends.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIXTH

A Search for Tears--I Am Punished in "Saratoga" for the Success of "Man and Wife"--I Win Mr. Daly's Confidence--We Become Friends.

The people who have known happiness without the alloying _if_ or _but_ are few and far between. "Yes, of course we are happy--but," "I should be perfectly and completely happy--_if_," you hear people saying every day; and so in my case, having been admitted into fellows.h.i.+p with the men and women of the company, who were a gracious and charming crowd, and receiving hearty approval each night from the great Public, by whose favor I and mine existed, I was grateful and would have been quite happy--_but_ for a brand-new difficulty that suddenly loomed up, large, and wide, and solid before me.

Never in my life had I been in a play of a longer run than one week.

Imagine, then, my misery when I found this play, that was already old to me at the end of the first week, was likely to go on for a long time to come. It was not mere _ennui_ over the repet.i.tion of the same lines, night after night, that troubled me, it was something far more serious. I had made my hit with the public by moving the people's feelings to the point of tears; but to do that I had first to move my own heart, for, try as I would, no amount of careful acting had the desired effect. _I_ had to shed tears or _they_ would not. Now that is not an easy thing to do to order, in cold blood. While the play is new one's nerves are strained almost to the breaking point--one is over-sensitive and the feelings are easily moved; then the pathetic words I am speaking touch my heart, tears rush to my eyes, tears are heard in my voice, and other hearts respond swiftly; _but_ when you have calmed down, when you have repeated the lines so often that they no longer mean anything to you, what are you to do then?

Really and truly there were days when I was nearly out of my mind with terror lest I should not be able to cry that night; for those tears of mine had a commercial value as well as an artistic, and Mr. Daly was swift to reproach me if the handkerchief display in front was not as great as usual. This sounds absurd perhaps to a reader, but heaven knows it was tragic enough to me. I used to agonize all day over the question of tears for the night, and I have seen the time when even my own imaginary tomb failed to move me.

One night, when my eyes were dry as bones, and my voice as hard as stone, and Mr. Daly was glaring whitely at me from the entrance, I had suddenly a sort of vision of that dethroned actress whom, back in Cleveland, I had seen uncrowned. I saw her quivering face, her stricken eyes, and a sudden rush of tears blinded me. Later, Mr. Daly said: "What a tricky little wretch you are. I thought you were going to throw that scene away, without a single tear to-night. I suppose you were doing it to aggravate me, though?"

Goodness knows I was grateful enough myself for the tears when they did come, and I got an idea from that experience that has served me all the years since. Everything else--love, hate, dignity, pa.s.sion, vulgarity, delicacy, duplicity, all, everything can be a.s.sumed to order; but, for myself, tears are not mechanical, they will not come at will. The heart must be moved, and if the part has lost its power then I must turn to some outside incident that _has_ power. It may be from a book, it may be from real life--no matter, if only its recalling starts tears to weary eyes.

Thus in "Alixe" it was not for my lost lover I oftenest wept such racing tears, but for poor old _Tennessee's partner_ as he buried his worthless dead, with his honest old heart breaking before your eyes. While in "Camille" many and many a night her tears fell fast over the memory of a certain mother's face as she told me of the moment when, returning from the burial of her only child, the first snowflakes began to whirl through the still, cold air, and she went mad with the anguish of leaving the little tender body there in the cold and dark, and flung herself from the moving carriage and ran, screaming, back to the small rough pile of earth to shelter it with her own living body.

So there is my receipt for sudden tears. I being--thank heaven--a cheerful body, and given to frequent laughter, may laugh in peace up to the last moment, if I have only stowed away some heart-breaking incident that I can recall at the proper moment. It seems like taking a mean advantage of a tender heart, I know--what Bret Harte would call "playing it low down" on it; but what else could I do? I leave it to you. What could _you_ do to make yourself cry seven times a week, for nine or ten months a year?

Then there was another great change in the new life. I was used to rehearsing every day, and, lo! when once a play was on here, there followed weeks, perhaps months, when there were no rehearsals. Mercy! I could never afford to waste all that time; but what could I do? "One _and_ two _and_ three _and_," I could not afford; but, oh, _if_ I could take some French lessons, _what_ a help they would be to me in the proper p.r.o.nunciation of names upon the stage. But I did not want lessons from some ignorant person, or someone who had a strange dialect. I have all my life had such a horror of _unlearning_ things. I knew a real French teacher would charge me a real "for-true" price, and my heart was doubtful--but see how fate was good to me. There was in Tenth Street a little daughter of a well-known French professor--he taught in a certain college. The daughter was eager to teach. The father said: "Who will trust so young a girl to instruct them? If you only had a first and second pupil, you would be self-supporting. French teachers are in great demand, but where shall you find that first pupil--tell me that, _ma fille_. No matter how small your charge, the question will be, where have you taught? No one will wish to be the first pupil."

But, fine old French gentleman as he was, he was mistaken nevertheless, for I was willing, nay, eager, to be that first pupil, and she found my name of so much value to her in obtaining a full cla.s.s that she became absolutely savage in her fell determination to make me speak her beloved language correctly. In spite of her eighteen years she looked full fourteen, and her dignity was a fearful thing to contemplate, until she had a chocolate-cream in one cheek and a dimple in the other, then somehow the dignity broke in the middle and the lesson progressed through much laughter.

She was not beautiful, but pretty and charming to such an extent that, within the year, she became Madame, carried her own chocolates, and was absolutely vicious over irregular verbs. Dear little woman--I remember her gratefully, and also remember that, later on, I paid just six times as much per lesson to an elaborate person, well-rouged, who taught me nothing, lest she might offend me in the act. I know this to be true, because one day I deliberately misp.r.o.nounced and let tenses run wild, to see if she would have the honesty or courage to correct me; but she looked a trifle surprised, rearranged her bangles, and let it all pa.s.s. I then resigned my position as pupil, that she might give her very questionable a.s.sistance as teacher to some other scholar, shorter of temper, and more sensitive to rebuke or correction than I was.