Careers of Danger and Daring Part 21

Alas! I made a bungle of it. I could not give him send enough, and the boy, falling short of Tom's arms, dangled from the "mechanic" lines half-way down to the net. It was quite plain that more than good intentions are needed to chuck young gentlemen through flights of eighteen feet. I was feeling decidedly queer by this time--a sort of half-way-over-the-Channel faintness, and could imagine what it must be to work up here, right at the peak of a "big-top" tent, under the scorch of an August sun, with the stifle of a great audience coming up from below. I expressed a readiness to descend.

"Try a drop into the net," suggested Tom Potter. "See, hang by your hands, like this. Keep your legs together and lift 'em out stiff.

Then--"

Down he went, and landed easily on his shoulders.

"Better put the 'mechanic' on him," said Harry, and presently young Roy was beside me on the cradle, securing me to the drop-lines with a double hitch.

"You want to be sure to lift yer legs," he remarked. "I knew a feller that struck the net straight on his feet and broke his knees."

"Don't you worry," said Harry; "if you don't fall right, I'll hold you with the 'mechanic.'"

Of course, when a man has started at this sort of thing he must see it through, so I hung obediently by my hands, lifted my legs, and--

"Now," cried Harry, and instantly, before I had time to think or note sensations, I was on my back in the net. And I understood what a terrible problem it is for a gymnast, falling with such swiftness, to turn two or three somersaults in the air and land with the body at just the angle of safety, for a shade too much one way may mean a broken leg, and a shade too much the other way an injured spine.

For some time after my aerial experience I sat around rather limp and white, giving but indifferent attention to the breaking in of young Clarence Potter, baby of the family, now in his first fortnight's practising. He certainly showed a game spirit, this little fellow. When his father said, "Jump," he jumped, and when the call came for a forward somersault across and a half turn he went at it like a veteran, though his wrists must have burned with red chafes where they caught him. Of course he had the 'mechanic' on all the time.

"We have to handle him very careful," said his father, "he's so limber.

It wouldn't take much to break his back. But he'll harden up soon.

People have an idea that gymnasts are supple-jointed. That's all nonsense. A gymnast won't bend as much as an ordinary business man.

There are too many bunches of muscles all over him that keep him stiff.

See, feel along here." He prodded my hand into his back and sides. "Not big muscles, mind, but lots of small ones. Say, it's a fine thing to have your body trained. I don't believe there's a healthier-- Hey, there! Keep those legs together. Easy now. Good boy!" The little fellow had made a pretty turn and drop to the net, and was striding along its meshes, beaming at the praise.

"He'll make a gymnast," said Potter, "because he's got a head on him, and can fix his mind on what he's doing. Oh, it takes more than body to make a great acrobat. It takes brains, for one thing, and heart. I believe I'll be able to train that boy so he can do a triple. I mean _do_ it, not get through it in a Lord-help-me way. Most people say a triple can't be done for a regular act because it's too uncertain and too dangerous. But they used to say that of a double. It's all a matter of taking time enough in the practice. That's the thing, practice. Why, look at us. We don't open for months yet, but we're up here every morning all through the winter getting our act down so fine, and the time so perfect, that when summer comes we can't fail."

"How do you mean, getting the time perfect?"

"Why, in trapeze work everything depends on judging time. Just now when you were hanging from the cradle you couldn't see much, could you? Well, we can't, either. We have to know when to do things by feeling the time they take. Say it's a long double swing, where the men cross and change bars. Each man grabs or lets go at the second or part of a second when the watch inside him says it's time to grab or let go. That's the only watch he has, and it's the only one he needs."

"And he dives by the sense of time?"

"That's right."

"And does triple somersaults by the sense of time?"

"Certainly he does. He can't see. What could _you_ see, falling and whirling? A gymnast has no different eyes from any other man. He's got to _feel_ how long he must keep on turning. And it's good-by gymnast if his feeling is a quarter of a second out of the way."

"Do you mean that literally?"

Mr. Potter smiled. "I'll give you a case, and you can judge for yourself. There was a fellow named Johnnie Howard in the Barnum show. He was doing trapeze work with the famous Dunham family, and was very ambitious to equal Dunham in all his feats, which was a large contract, for Dunham is about the finest gymnast in the world. What a pretty triple he can do, clean down from the top of the tent, and land right every time!

"Well, Howard he kept trying triples, and sometimes he got 'em about right and sometimes he didn't. Dunham told him he'd better stick to doubles until he'd had more practice, but Howard wouldn't have it, and he kept right on. Prob'ly he thought Dunham was jealous of him. Anyhow, he tried a triple one night at Chicago, in the Coliseum, and that was the last triple he ever did try. He misjudged his time by a quarter of a turn--that is, he turned three somersaults and a quarter instead of just three--and struck the net so that he twisted his spinal column, and he died a few weeks later. That last quarter of a turn killed him, and it probably didn't take over a tenth of a second."

Here was something to think about. Precision of movement to tenths of a second, with no guidance but a man's own intuition of time, and a life depending on it!

"Can a man regulate the speed of his turning while he is in the air?"

"Certainly he can. That's the first thing you learn. If you want to turn faster you tuck up your knees and bend your head so the chin almost touches your breast. If you want to turn slower you stretch out your legs and straighten up your head. The main thing is your head. Whichever way you point that your body will follow. In our act we do a long drop from the top of the tent, where you shoot straight down, head first, for fifty or sixty feet and never move a muscle until you are two feet over the net. Then you duck your head everlastingly quick and land on your shoulders."

I asked Mr. Potter how long a drop would be possible for a gymnast. He thought a hundred feet might be done by a man of unusual nerve, but he pointed out that the peril increases enormously with every twenty feet you add, say to a drop of forty feet. When you have dropped sixty feet you are falling thirty-five miles an hour; when you have dropped eighty feet you are falling nearly sixty miles an hour. And so on. It seemed incredible that a man shooting down, head first, at such velocity would wait before turning until only two feet separated him from the net.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CIRCUS PROFESSIONALS PRACTISING A FEAT OF BALANCING.]

"It can't be," said I, "that in one of these straight drops a gymnast is guided only by his sense of time?"

Potter hesitated a moment. "You mean that he uses his eyes to know when to turn? I guess he does a little, although it is mostly sense of time."

"You wouldn't get a man to do it blindfolded?" I suggested.

"Not a straight drop, no; but a drop with somersaults, yes."

"What, two somersaults down to the net, blindfolded?"

"Yes, sir, that would be easy. I tell you a man's eyes don't help him when he's turning in the air. Why, Tom and I would throw that boy of mine (Royetta) across from one to the other, he turning doubles, just the same whether he was blindfolded or not. It wouldn't make any difference.

"I'll tell you another thing," he continued, "that may surprise you.

It's possible for a fine gymnast to swing from a bar, say sixty feet above the net, turn a back somersault--what we call a cast somersault--then shoot straight down head first for thirty feet and then tuck up and turn a forward somersault, landing on his shoulders. I couldn't do it myself ever since I got hurt down in Mexico, but Tom Hanlon could. I mention this to show what control a man can get over his body in the air. He can make it turn one way, then go straight, and then turn the other way."

After proper expression of wonder at this statement, I asked Mr. Potter if something might not go wrong with this wonderful automatic time machine that a gymnast carries within himself. Of course there might, he said, and that is why there is such need of practice. Let a man neglect his trapeze for a couple of months, and he would be almost like a beginner. And even the best gymnasts, he admitted, men in the pink of training, are liable to sudden and unaccountable disturbances of mind or heart that make them for the moment unequal to their most familiar feats.

"I'll tell you what accounts for the death of most gymnasts," he went on. "It's changing their minds while they're in the air. That's what we call it, but it's only a name. n.o.body knows just what happens when a gymnast changes his mind--I mean what happens inside him. What happens outside is that he's usually killed.

"Now there was Billy Batch.e.l.ler. He was a fine leaper, and could do his two somersaults over four elephants or eight horses with the prettiest lift you ever saw. He could do it easy. But one day--we were showing out west with the Reynolds circus--as he came down the leaping-run he struck the board wrong, somehow, and in the turn he changed his mind; instead of doing a double he did one and a half and shot over the last horse straight for the ground, head first. One second more and he was a dead man; he would have broken his neck sure, but I saw him coming and caught him so with my right arm, took all the skin off under his chin, and left the print of my hand on his breast for weeks. But it saved him. And the queer thing was he never could explain it--none of them ever can; he just changed his mind. So did Ladell, who used to do doubles from high bars down to a pedestal. He made his leap one night, just as usual--it was at Toronto, in 1896, I think--and as he turned he changed his mind, and I forget how he landed, but it killed him all right."

"Did you ever have an experience of this kind yourself?" I asked.

"Not exactly," he answered, "and I'm thankful I haven't, but I came near it once in Chicago. It was the night after Howard got hurt, and I guess fear--just plain, every-day fear--was at the bottom of my feeling. My wife and I were doing an act sixty feet above the ground, and without a net. I would hang by my hands from a couple of loops at the top of the Coliseum, and she would hang, head down, from my feet, her ankles locked across mine, just a natural locking of the feet, with no fastenings and only ordinary performing shoes.

"When I had her that way, a man below would pull a drag-rope and get us swinging higher and higher, until finally we would come right up to a horizontal. I tell you it was a hair-raising thing to see, but until this night I had never thought much about the danger. I thought of it now, though, as I remembered Howard's fall, and I got so nervous for my wife that I felt sure something terrible was going to happen. I was just about in the state where a man starts his act and can't go through with it, where he changes his mind. And you'll be surprised to hear what gave me heart to go on."

"What was it?"

"It was the music, sir; and ever since that night I've understood why some generals send their soldiers into battle with bands playing. As we stood by the dressing-room entrance waiting to go on, it seemed as if I couldn't do it, but when I heard the crash of that circus band calling us, and came out into the glare of light and heard the applause, just roars of it, why, I forgot everything except the pride of my business, and up we went, net or no net, and we never did our toe swing better than that night. Just the same, I'd had my warning, and I soon got another act instead of that one; and--" He hesitated. "Well, sir, to-day I wouldn't take my wife up and do that toe swing the way we used to, not for a million dollars. And yet she's crazy to do it."

IV

SOME REMARKABLE FALLS AND NARROW ESCAPES OF FAMOUS ATHLETES

AS we finished our talk, Mr. Potter asked me to call some evening at their rooms, on Tenth Street, and see a family of trapeze performers in private life. I was glad to accept this invitation, and looked in upon them a day or two later. Like the other figures in these studies of thrilling lives, they presented a modest, simple picture in their home circle. There is nothing in the externals of lion-tamers, steeple-climbers, divers, balloonists, or gymnasts to betray their unusual calling. Nor is there any heroic sign in eye or voice or bearing. They are plain, unpretentious folk, for the most part, who do these things and say little about them.

In one room were Tom and Royetta playing checkers, while Clarence, the "kid," weary, no doubt, from the morning's practice, lay on a bed storing up resistance against the next day's shoots and twisters. In a room adjoining were Mr. Potter himself and Mrs. Potter enjoying the call of a lady acrobat, one of the famed Livingstons, trick bicyclists.

As soon as was fitting, I put the old question to Mr. Potter, the question that always interests me, how it happened that he became a gymnast, and he went back to his Western boyhood and the early longings that possessed him to be a performer in the air. Plainly he was born with the gymnast instinct, and he ran away from home to follow his heart's desire. Then he told us how at seventeen he was traveling with a ten-cent show, doing a single trapeze act in the ring and an out-of-door free exhibition of tight-rope walking from canvas top to ground. Once he went at a difficult feat so eagerly--he was always his own teacher--that he fell clean off a trapeze sixty feet above ground, and by some kind providence that watches over boys escaped serious injury.