Tales from Bohemia Part 29

It was not his real name or his stage name, but it was the one under which he was best known by those who best knew him. It had been thrown at him in a cafe one night by a newspaper man after the performance, and had clung to him. Its significance lay in the fact that his "gags"--supposedly comic things said by presumably comic men in nominal opera or burlesque--invariably were old. The man who bestowed the t.i.tle upon him thought it a fine bit of irony.

Newgag received it without expressed resentment, but without mirth, and he bore its repet.i.tion patiently as seasons went by. He was accustomed to enduring calmly the jests, the indignities that were elicited by his peculiar appearance, his doleful expression, his slow and bungling speech and movement, his diffident manner.

He was one of the forbearing men, the many who are doomed to continual suffering of a kind that their sensitiveness and timidity make it the more difficult for them to bear.

Undying ambition burned beneath his undemonstrative surface; dauntless courage lay under his lack of ability.

He was an extremely spare man, of extraordinary height, and the bend of his shoulders gave to his small head a comical thrust forward. His black hair was without curl, and it would tolerate no other arrangement than being combed back straight. It was allowed to grow downward until it sc.r.a.ped the back of Newgag's collar, a device for concealing the meagreness of his neck.

He had a smooth, pale face, slanting from ears to nose like a wedge, and the dimness of the blue eyes added to its introspective cast. He blushed, as a rule, when he met new acquaintances or was addressed suddenly. He had a gloomy look and a hesitating way of speech. An amusing spectacle was his mechanical-looking smile, which, when he became conscious of it, pa.s.sed through several stages expressive of embarra.s.sment until his normal mournful aspect was reached.

As he usually appeared in a sack coat when off the stage, the length of his legs was divertingly emphasized. After the fashion of great actors of a bygone generation, he wore a soft black felt hat, dinged in the crown from front to rear.

He had entered "the profession" from the amateur stage, by way of the comic opera chorus, and to that chance was due his being located in the comic opera wing of the great histrionic edifice. He had originally preferred tragedy, but the first consideration was the getting upon the stage by any means. Having industriously worked his way out of the chorus, he had been reconciled by habit to his environment, and had come to aspire to eminence therein. He had reached the standing of a secondary comedian,--that is to say, a man playing secondary comic roles in the pieces for which he is cast. He was useful in such companies as were directly or indirectly controlled by their leading comedians, for there never could be any fears of his outshining those autocratic personages. Only in his wildest hopes did he ever look upon the centre of the stage as a spot possible for him to attain.

His means of evoking laughter upon the stage were laborious on his part and mystifying to the thoughtful observer. He took noticeable means to change from his real self. It mattered not what was the nature of the part he filled, he invariably a.s.sumed an unnatural, rasping voice; he stretched his mouth to its utmost reach and lowered the extremities of his lips; he turned his toes inward (naturally his feet described an abnormal angle) and bowed his arms. Brought up in the school which teaches that to make others laugh one must never smile one's self, he wore a grotesquely lugubrious and changeless countenance. Such was Newgag in his every impersonation. When he thought he was funniest, he appeared to be in most pain and was most depressing.

"My methods are legitimate," he would say, when he had enlisted one's attention and apparent admiration across a table bearing beer-bottles and sandwiches. "The people want horse-play nowadays. But when I've got to descend to that sort of thing, I'll go to the variety stage or circus ring at once--or quit."

"That's a happy thought, old man," said a comedian of the younger school, one night, when Newgag had uttered his wonted speech. "Why don't you quit?"

Such a speech sufficed to rob Newgag of his self-possession and to reduce him to silence. He could not cope with easy, offhand, impromptu jesters. In truth, no one tried more than Newgag to excel in "horse-play," but his temperament or his training did not equip him for excelling in it; he defended the monotony, emptiness, and toilsomeness of his humour on the ground that it was "legitimate."

One night Newgag drank two gla.s.ses of beer in rapid succession and looked at me with a touching countenance.

"Old boy," he said, in his homely drawl, "I'm discouraged! I begin to think I'm not in it!"

"Why, what's wrong?"

"Well, I've dropped to the fact that, after all these years in the business, I can't make them laugh."

I was just about to say, "So you've just awakened to that?" but pity and politeness deterred me. Every one else had known it, all these years.

Newgag, to be sure, should naturally have been, as he was, the last to discover it.

Newgag thus went one step further than any comedian I have ever known.

Having detected his inability to amuse audiences, he confessed it.

People who know actors and read this will already have said that it is a fiction, and that Newgag's admission is false to life. Not so; I am writing not about comedians in general, but about Newgag.

That he had come to so exceptional a concession marked the depth of his despair. I tried to cheer him.

"Nonsense, my boy! They give you bad parts. Go out of comic opera. Try tragedy."

I had spoken innocently and sincerely, but Newgag thought I was jesting.

Instead of his usual attempt at lofty callousness, however, he smiled that dismal, marionette-like smile of his. That gave me an idea, of which I said nothing at the time.

Several months afterward, a manager, who is a friend of mine, was suddenly plunged in distress because of the serious illness of an actor who was to fill a part in a new American comedy that the manager was to produce on the next night.

"What on earth shall I do?" he asked.

"Play the part yourself, as Hoyt does in such an emergency--or get Newgag."

"Who's Newgag?"

"He's a friend of mine, out of a position. I met him to-day very much frayed."

"Bring him to me."

Newgag was overwhelmed when I told him of the opportunity.

"I never acted in straight comedy," he said. "I can't do it. I might as well try to play Juliet."

"He wants you only to speak the lines, that's all. You're a quick study, you know. Come on!"

I had almost to drag the man to the manager. He allowed himself, in a semistupefied condition, to be engaged. He took the part, sat up all night in his boarding-house and learned it, went to rehearsal almost letter-perfect in the morning, and nervously prepared to face the ordeal of the evening.

At six o'clock, he wished to go to the manager and give up the part.

"I can never do it," he wailed to me. "I haven't had time to form a conception of it and to get up byplay. You see, it's an eccentric character part,--a man from the country whom everybody takes for a fool, but who shows up strong at the last. I can't--"

"Oh, don't act it. You're only engaged in the emergency, you know.

Simply go on and say your lines and come off."

"That's all I can do," he said, with a dubious shake of the head. "If only I'd had time to study it!"

American plays had taken foothold, and this premier of a new one by an author of two previous successes drew a "typical first night audience."

Newgag, having abandoned all idea of making a hit, or of acting the part any further than the mere delivery of the speeches went, was no longer inordinately nervous. When he first entered he was a trifle frightened, and his unavoidable lack of prepared stage business made him awkward and embarra.s.sed for a time. The awkwardness remained, but the embarra.s.sment eventually pa.s.sed away. He spoke in his natural voice and retained his actual manner. When the action required him to laugh, he did so, exhibiting his characteristic perfunctory smile.

He received a special call before the curtain after the third act. He had no thought that it was meant for him until the stage manager pushed him out from the wings. He came back looking distressed.

"Are they guying me?" he asked the stage manager.

The papers agreed the next day that one of the hits of the performance was made by Newgag "in an odd part which he had conceived in a strikingly original way, and impersonated with wonderful finish and subtle drollery."

"What does it mean?" he gasped.

I enlightened him.

"My boy, you simply played yourself. Did it never occur to you that in your own person you're unconsciously one of the drollest men I ever saw?"

"But I didn't act!"

"You didn't. And take my advice--don't!"

And he doesn't. Upon the reputation of his success in that comedy he arranged with another manager to appear in a play especially written for him. He is a prosperous star now. Whatever his play or part he always presents the same personality on the stage and he has made that personality dear to many theatre-goers. He does not appear too frequently or too long in any one place; hence he is warmly welcomed wherever and whenever he returns. He is cla.s.sed among leading actors, and the ordinary person does not stop sufficiently long to observe that he is no actor at all.

"This isn't exactly art," he said to me, the other night, with a tinge of self-rebuke. "But it's success."