Tales from Bohemia Part 27

Ascertaining by the clock in the thronged main corridor that the time was ten minutes after seven, the old man rushed into the cafe, where he devoured hastily a chicken croquette, and swallowed a cup of coffee and a gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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, un.o.bserved 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, a.s.suming 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 ma.s.s 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. a.s.suming 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 c.o.c.ktails, melted, and addressed the old man familiarly by his nickname.

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

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

XXIII. -- COINCIDENCE

Max took us down into a German place into the bowels of the earth. It was a bit of Berlin transplanted to Philadelphia and thriving beneath a Teutonic eating-house. Imagine a great cellar, with stone floor, ornamented ceiling, ma.s.sive 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 pa.s.sage 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.'