[Footnote: Courtesy of Lippincott's Magazine.Copyright, 1892, by J. B. Lippincott Company.]
First let me explain how I came to be sitting in so unsavoury a place as Gorson's “fifteen cent oyster and chop house” that night. Most newspaper men—the rank and file—receive remuneration by the week. Those not given over to domesticity, those who enjoy that alluring regularity identical with liberty, fare sumptuously, as a rule, on “pay-day.” Thereafter the quantity and quality of the good things of life that they enjoy diminish daily until the next pay-day.
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:
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.
[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!”
“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.”
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.”