Mummers in Mufti/Chapter 28

HE history of the world is a history of migrations, and to those already on the pages of time must now be added the tour of the "Eleanor" company which began again in the first week of January. Its formal record would probably read very much like that of the ten thousand Greeks in its dull monotony—"Hence they marched out two hundred miles to Buffalo where they played three nights and a matinée"—but its actual intimate story would more resemble "The Flight of a Tartar Tribe." It gave all that same impression of hurry and scamper. A map of that tour of the "Eleanor" company should, in fact, have been hung on the wall of some routeing [sic] manager's office, covered with little red and black pins, as an awful example of how such a thing should never be done. In a checkered path all over New England and northern New York and once dipping down into Pennsylvania and Ohio, its trail showed a series of leaps, crisscrosses, return engagements, huge "jumps," and retracings of steps which would have driven any normal road manager into bankruptcy; but there was no other way for it. Starting out on an uncertain date, in the middle of the season, and under entirely independent auspices, the company had to snap an open date where it could, sometimes not knowing on Saturday night where it would play on the second week following. The huge, pompous, and expensive "Eleanor" company traveled at times like a "Tom show" or a Gipsy circus, the marvel and outlaw of that theatrical winter, an unexplained comet shooting across the theatrical sky. It played one-night stands at ruinous cost. It laid over once from Wednesday to Monday. It played in towns that never before had seen a first-class attraction. It played in theaters so small that if every seat in the house had been taken, the receipts would not have covered even the day's expenses. At the "farthest west" of the tour in Ohio, Bellsmith, one night, asked Israels:

"Well, how do we stand for the first six weeks?"

To which Israels in reply shook his head, "Mr. Bellsmith, I don't dare to tell you."

Of course all hope of earning a profit had been entirely abandoned. That hope had been abandoned long before the company left Leicester, for Bellsmith had discovered that making over a musical comedy was very much like making over a house. A little paint here, a few bricks there, would seem, at first sight, to promise a complete renovation; but, once the new paint and new bricks are in place, all the rest of the structure begins to look shoddy.

For one thing, Bellsmith in the interest of his own music had tripled the regular orchestra which he "carried," laying no dependence at all on the orchestras of the "houses" that were visited. A "house" orchestra in a small city can be counted on only for comets, but he had insisted on trumpets. The "duchess motif," as he had written it, required, for a theater orchestra, an inordinate amount of wood winds, with the result that he had been required correspondingly to build up his strings. When the tour finally ended in Boston, he was "carrying" twenty-four men besides the conductor and filling out with four more. Two double-bass players, far out of the average, had been required for "The Bull Fiddle Overture." One of them had been taken outright from a symphony orchestra.

The case was, in fact, best expressed on another occasion by Israels. Standing, in Bangor, Maine, in the rear of the house, with the local manager, the latter listened a moment to the full, rich tone of the overture and watched the phalanx of bows rising and falling. He too shook his head.

"Mr. Israels, how in the world do you do it?"

"We don't," replied Mr. Israels.

At the very worst point of the tour Bellsmith telegraphed to Dr. MacVickar:

To which the doctor wired in reply: But yet, although they made no money, nevertheless the time came when they ceased to lose a great deal. House managers in larger cities began to hear of them and wanted them. They went to Columbus especially to give a "feature" during the week of a large convention. There came a time when Israels dared to ask for a guarantee, for all the money "brought into the house" up to a certain figure. At another time he came to Bellsmith in grim amusement.

"Mr. Bellsmith, another week like the last and I think we 'll almost make expenses."

"In that case," said BelLsmith, "I think I' ll telegraph to New York for a basset horn. I've always wanted a basset horn in that orchestra. It sounds just like Mrs. Trip when she's trying to talk like Ellen Terry. A good player could burlesque her, note for note."

The effect of all this on the rank and file of the company was curiously hilarious. Never having the slightest hope of making money, they were never depressed in the least by the prospect of losing any. As the weeks wore on, the spirit of the tour became very much that of a college glee-club. With Bellsmith himself, the members of the company became more intimate. From a mass of persons all strangely alike and all vaguely unpleasant, there began to rise into his ken distinct and amusing personalities. The echoes of these came to Dr. MacVickar, to whom Bellsmith wrote at odd moments, whenever the mood happened to strike him, notes written on a suit-case on the train, notes scrawled with thin ink on bureau tops of scanty hotels, more often notes merely jotted down in the wings on the margins of the programs of various houses at which they were playing. On one such program Bellsmith underlined the name of one girl and mailed it with the annotation:

No, it was not true, distinctly not. On another occasion Bellsmith's fountain-pen (there can be no keener epitome of the change that had come over Bellsmith than the fact that he now carried a fountain-pen) drew a circle around another name on the program.

Before the program was mailed, however, he added a a postcript [sic]: In one of the more leisurely letters which he wrote from a bureau top, Bellsmith had this to say about his experiences:

This point Bellsmith also liked to argue out with Surdam, from whom, in fact, he was gaining almost the professional point of view.

One morning, in the black leather seats of a smoking-car in northern New York, they were going over the words of some of the songs, for the "Eleanor" show had not even now advanced beyond the necessity for more alteration and if the music of the original production had been perfunctory the words of the songs had been distinctly worse than that.

It was rather a sore point with Israels and Charlie Barnes, that of those songs, for although only four of them were now used in the show, Fritz Melcher, the original "lyric" writer, must, under the terms of the contract, be mailed a check for three dollars out of every hundred dollars that came in at the window of the box-office and Charlie Barnes was very closely in touch with that window.

With a pile of songs on their laps, Bellsmith and Surdam were rapidly killing the words of still another "lyric" which, although dead, must still be paid for.

Suddenly Bellsmith pushed the whole pile away from him.

"Do you mean to say?" he demanded of Surdam, "that Harcourt & Gay really advanced that man ten thousand dollars for writing that tosh?"

Israels had come down the aisle of the car and now sat opposite them, smoking a big cigar.

"Who's that you 're talking about?" he demanded. "Fritz Melcher?"

Bellsmith nodded, and Israels, leaning over, began tapping his knee.

"Let me tell you something," he said. "I know for a fact that Fritz Melcher has laid up a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in Liberty bonds in the last three years. If Harcourt & Gay had n't paid him that retainer, he could have gone right out and got it from any producer in New York."

Bellsmith looked down at the lines of the song.

"But what I can't understand," he insisted, "is why they have to pay any one for this sort of thing. Why could n't the office boy do it? Why could n't one moderately intelligent man be hired at fifty dollars a week to write the lyrics for all the shows in the world? They 're all the same."

He leaned back and extemporized:

"Absolute piffle!" snorted Bellsmith. "Any one could sit still and do it for hours. It's just da-da-da. Why do they have to pay for it at all?"

"Well," smiled Surdam, summing up the whole profession of authorship, "I suppose it takes somebody even to write 'da-da-da.'"

And finally, rounding out, once and for all, his program impressions of life on the road, Bellsmith made this general note to the doctor:

"Ah!" thought the doctor, "I wondered when—"

And, sure enough, on the week before Easter he received a telegram: