in the cash drawer, ere Field stood before him once more, pleading _in forma pauperis_ for “another X.” He was asked what had become of the ten he had just received.
“Just my luck, Fred,” Field replied. “As I was leaving the office whom should I meet but one of my old printer boys, dead broke. The X was all I had, and he told me he had to have it, and he had to.” It is needless to say that Field got the second advance and succeeded in dodging all impecunious “old boys” on the way home.
I have said that Denver at that time was the centre of all the railway interests of Colorado and the far West. Being also the capital, it was the place where legislators and railway agents wrestled with problems of regulating tariffs and granting privileges to what may be called their mutual benefit. It was from his experience in Denver that Field learned that two-thirds of the business of a western legislature consisted in causing legislative hold-ups, of which the transportation companies were the victims, and the most vociferously impeccable statesmen the chief beneficiaries. The secret service funds of the railway companies doing business in Colorado paid out a hundred dollars for protection from notorious sandbagging bills and resolutions to every dollar they spent for special favors in grants and franchises.
This by way of preface to a story in which Eugene Field and a railway official, who, as I write, holds a high position in the transportation world, figure. This official was at that time the superintendent of the Southwestern Division of the Pullman system, with head-quarters at St. Louis. In those days every session of the Colorado legislature saw its anti-Pullman rate reduction bill, which Wickersham, as I shall call him, because that is not his name, was commissioned to checkmate, strangle, or make away with in committee by the aid of annual passes, champagne, and the mysterious potency of the national bank-note. As was remarked by E.D. Cowen, to whose notes I am indebted for refreshing my memory of Field’s tales, Wickersham never failed in generalship, principally because he was bold in his methods and picturesquely lavish with his munitions of war. The Pullman Company did not then enjoy the royalty and defensive alliance which now protects it against rate legislation throughout the West, and so Wickersham was kept continually on the go, making alliances and friendships among legislators and journalists against the days of reckoning.
Field, as the managing editor of the Tribune, was a special favorite with Wickersham, as he was of every professional and commercial visitor having an axe to grind at the capital of the state. Pullman’s representative had the wit to appreciate Field, both for his personal qualities and the assistance he could render through the columns of the newspaper. Field reciprocated the personal friendship, but, so far as the Tribune was concerned, took a grim satisfaction in giving Wickersham to understand that though he could use its freedom he could not abuse it or count upon its aid beyond what was strictly legitimate. Field’s stereotyped introduction of Wickersham–one calculated to put him on a pleasant business footing with every practical politician, was “He’s a good fellow and a thoroughbred.” So his coming was invariably celebrated by a general round-up of all the good fellows in Denver, and his departure left the aching heads and parched recollections that from the days of Noah have distinguished the morning after.
After one of Wickersham’s calls, Field determined that the sobriety and severe morality of Denver were being scandalized by these periodical visitations, and he issued orders to the Tribune staff that when next the “good fellow and thoroughbred” appeared on the scene he should be given a wide berth, or, as Field put it, should be left to “play a lone hand in his game.” So when Wickersham next swung around the legislative circle to Denver, not a man about the editorial rooms would go out with him, listen to his stories, accept a cigar at his hands, or associate with him in any of the ways that had been their cheerful wont. The coldness and loneliness of the situation excited Wickersham’s thirst for revenge and also for what is known as the wine of Kentucky. Having succeeded in getting up a full head of steam, he started out for an explanation or a counter demonstration. Arriving at the Tribune office, when the desks were vacated at the evening dinner-hour, he interpreted it as a further affront and challenge, which he proceeded to answer by destroying every last scrap of copy in sight for the morrow’s paper. He then converted himself into a small cyclone, and went through every desk, strewed their litter on the floor, broke all the pens and pencils, and, in the language of an eye-witness, “ended by toning the picture of editorial desolation with the violet contents of all the ink bottles he could find.”
Then he retired in hilarious satisfaction from the scene of devastation he had made. Consternation reigned in that office until Field returned, when he quickly dispelled the gloom with a promise of revenge, and set the staff at work to patch up the ruin the envious Wickersham had made. But they were not permitted to do this in peace, for their enemy, returning in the dark of night, bombarded the windows of the editorial rooms with the staves of old ash-barrels he had found conveniently by.
While Wickersham was engaged in this second assault, with windows smashing to right of them and to left of them, with glass falling all around them, and the staves of old ash-barrels playing a devil’s tattoo about them, the devoted band of editors, reporters, and copy-readers worked nobly on. They had confidence in their leader that their hour would come. Their first duty was to get out the paper. After that they looked for the deluge.
When Wickersham had expended his last stave and fiercest epithet on the shattered windows he retired in bad order to his apartments at the St. James Hotel.
Now began Field’s revenge, planned with due deliberation and executed with malicious thoroughness. He first sent for “‘Possum Jim,” an aged and very serious colored man, who worshipped “Mistah Fiel'” because of the sympathy Eugene never withheld from the dark-skinned children of the race. “‘Possum Jim” spent most of his existence on the same street corner, waiting for a job, which invariably had to come to him. His outfit consisted of an express wagon strung together with telegraph wire, and a nondescript four-footed creature that once bore the similitude of a horse. Whenever Field had an odd job to be done about his household he would go out of his way to let “old ‘Possum Jim” earn the quarter–partly to do an act of kindness to “Jim,” but chiefly to tease Mrs. Field by the appearance of the broken-down equipage lingering in front of their dwelling.
Just before the Tribune went to press, a sergeant of police called on Field in response to a summons by telephone. After a whispered conference he left, with a broad smile struggling under his curling mustache. In company with a number of his staff Field next made the round of the all-night haunts and gathered to his aid as fine a collection of bohemian “thoroughbreds” as ever made the revels of Mardi Gras look like a Sunday-school convention. He installed them at the resort of a Kentucky gentleman named Jones, opposite the St. James. As one who was there reports, “The amber milk of the Blue-grass cow flowed in plenty.” Bidding his associates await his return, Field, armed with a single bottle, crossed the street to the hotel in search of the enemy.
For half, an hour they waited, in growing fear that Wickersham had retired for the night, with orders the night clerk dared not disobey, that he was not to be disturbed, even if the hotel was on fire. Just as expectation had grown heavy-eyed, Field appeared crossing the street with Wickersham on his arm, very happy, more of a good fellow than ever and more than ever ready for red-eyed anarchy of any sort.
“After a swift hour”–I quote from one who was there and whose account tallies with Field’s own–“and as the morning opened out Field insisted on breaking for sunlight and fresh air. Wickersham was always a leader, even in the matter of making a noise. He sang; everyone else applauded. He shrieked and shouted; all approved. Windows went up across the way in the hotel, and night-capped heads protruded to investigate. The frantic din of the electric-bells could be heard. The clerk appeared to protest.” What attention might have been paid to his protest will never be known, for just then “‘Possum Jim’s” gothic steed and rattletrap cart rounded the corner.
“I say, old man,” shouted Field, “we want your rig for an hour; what’s it worth?”
Jim played his part slyly, and the bargain was finally struck for $2.50, the owner to present no claim for possible damages. Wickersham was so delighted with the shrewdness of the deal that he insisted on paying the bill. The horse, which could scarcely stand on his four corners, was quickly unharnessed and hitched to a telegraph pole, and before he realized what the madcaps were about, Wickersham was himself harnessed into the shafts. The novelty of his position suited his mood. He pranced and snorted, and pawed the ground and whinnied, and played horse in fine fettle until the word go. Field, with a companion beside him, held the reins and cracked the whip. The others helped the thoroughbred in harness the best they could by pushing.
In this manner, and all yelling like Comanche Indians, twice they made the circuit of the block. All the guests in front of the big hotel were leaning out of the windows, when the police sergeant popped in sight with a squad of four men. Field, who had been duly apprised of their approach, gave the signal, and the crowd, making good their retreat to Jones’s, abandoned Wickersham to his fate. He was quickly, but roughly, disentangled from the intricacies of “‘Possum Jim’s” rope-yarn harness. The more he protested and expostulated, the more inexorable became the five big custodians of the outraged peace, until the last word of remonstrance and explanation died upon his well-nigh breathless lips. Then he tried cajoling and “connudling” and those silent, persuasive arts so often efficacious in legislative lobbies; but there were too many witnesses to his crime, and bribes were not in order.
When at last Wickersham, from sheer despair and physical exhaustion, sank limp in the arms of his captors, the sergeant, on the pretext of seeking the aiders and abettors in the riot, half carried, half led the prisoner into Jones’s resort.
A quarter of an hour later the police squad made its exit by the back door, and less than an hour afterward Wickersham’s special was bearing him southward toward Texas.
But Field’s revenge was not fully sated yet. He caused a $2 Pullman rate-bill, making a sixty per cent. reduction, to be prepared in the Tribune office, and secured its introduction in the legislature by the chairman of the House committee on railways. The news was immediately flashed East, and Wickersham came posting back to Denver with the worst case of monopoly fright he had ever experienced. The day after his arrival the Tribune had something to say in every department of his nefarious mission, and every reference to him bristled with biting irony and downright accusation. Never was a “good fellow and a thoroughbred” so mercilessly scarified.
For the remaining six weeks of the session Wickersham did not leave Denver, nor did he dare look at the Tribune until after breakfast. Every member of the legislature received a Pullman annual. Champagne flowed, not by the bottle, but by the dray-load. Wickersham begged for quarter, but his appeals fell like music on ears that heard but heeded not. Nor did he find out that the whole affair was a put-up job until the bill was finally lost in the Senate committee.
One of the familiar stories of Field’s rollicking life in Denver was at the expense of Oscar Wilde, then on his widely advertised visit to America. As the reader may remember, this was when the aesthetic craze and the burlesques inseparable from it were at their height. Anticipating Wilde’s appearance in Denver by one day, and making shrewdly worded announcements through the Tribune in keeping with his project, Field secured the finest landau in town and was driven through the streets in a caricature verisimilitude of the poet of the sunflower and the flowing hair.
The impersonation of Wilde a la Bunthorne in Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera, “Patience,” was well calculated to deceive all who were not in the secret. Field’s talent as a farceur and a mimic enabled him to assume and carry out the expression of bored listlessness which was the popular idea of the leader of aesthetes. Nobody in the curious, whooping, yelling crowd assembled along the well-advertised route suspected the delusion, and after an hour’s parade Field succeeded in making his exit from public gaze without betraying his identity.
When Wilde turned up the next day he was not a little mystified to learn that he had created a sensation driving around Denver in the raiments of Bunthorne, while in reality travelling over the prairie in a palace-car. It was Field himself who relieved his curiosity with a highly amusing narrative of the experience of the joker lounging in the seat of honor in the landau.
Wilde, it is related, saw nothing funny in the affair, nor was he provoked at it. His only comment was, “What a splendid advertisement for my lecture.”
It was while in Denver that Field had numerous and flattering offers to leave journalism for the stage, and more than once he was sorely tempted to make the experiment. In the natural qualifications for the theatrical profession he was most richly endowed. In the arts of mimicry he had no superior. He had the adaptable face of a comedian, was a matchless raconteur, and a fine vocalist. At a banquet or in a parlor he was an entertainer of truly fascinating parts. During his life in St. Louis and Kansas City his inclination had led him to seek the society of the green-room, and in Denver his position enlarged the circle of his acquaintance with the theatrical profession, until it embraced almost every prominent actor and actress in America, and was subsequently extended to include the more celebrated artists of England. Among his favorites was Madame Bernhardt, whose several visits to the United States afforded him an opportunity for some of the most entertaining sketches that ever delighted his Chicago readers. None of these contained more pith in little than that brief paragraph with which he opened his column one day, to the effect that “An empty cab drove up to the stage-door of the Columbia Theatre last night, from which Madame Bernhardt alighted.”
Among the celebrities who visited Denver while Field was in what he would have called his perihelion was Miss Kate Field, with whose name he took all the liberties of a brother, although there was no blood relationship between them thicker than the leaves of a genealogical compendium. He took especial pains to circulate the report through all the West that Miss Field had brought a sitz-bath with her to alleviate the dust and hardships of travel in the “Woolly West,” where, as he represented, she thought running water was a luxury and stationary bath-tubs were unknown. But he atoned for this by one of the daintiest pleasantries that ever occurred to his playful mind. When Miss Field was preparing for her lecture tour in Mormon land she started an inquisitive correspondence with her namesake, whose Tribune Primer was then spreading his fame through the exchanges. The two soon discovered that they were cousins, no matter how many times removed, but near enough to inspire Field to entrust a letter to Uncle Sam’s mail addressed thus:
_A maiden fair of untold age
Seeks to adorn our Western stage;
How foolish of her, yet how nice
To write me, asking my advice!
New York’s the city where you’ll find This prodigy of female kind;
Hotel Victoria’s the place
Where you’ll see her smiling face. I pray thee, postman, bear away
This missive to her, sans delay.
These lines enclosed are writ by me– A Field am I, a Field is she.
Two very fertile fields I ween,
In constant bloom, yet never green, She is my cousin; happy fate
That gave me such a Cousin Kate._
From Denver to New York this pretty conceit carried the epistle just as safely and directly as if it had borne the most prosaic superscription the postal authorities could exact, and I venture to say that it was handled with a smiling solicitude never bestowed on the humdrum epistles that travel neither faster nor surer for being marked “important and immediate.” This was before Field had formed the habit of illuminating everything he wrote with colored inks, or the missive to his Cousin Kate would have expressed his variegated fancies in all the colors of the rainbow, especially red.
In a short sketch, entitled “Eugene Field in Denver,” Wolfe Londoner speaks of his friend as a “bright ray of laughing sunshine across this shadowy vale, a mine of sentiment and charity, an avalanche of fun and happiness,” but one who “never in all the run of his merry, joyous career was known to wake up with a cent.” Why?
Here is the explanation given by Mr. Londoner, who was familiar with every phase of Eugene Field’s life in Denver:
“The course of one short day was ever long enough to drain his open purse, and his boon companions were as welcome to its contents, while it could stand the strain, as its careless, happy owner. The bright side of life attracted his laughing fancy, and with stern and unalterable determination he studiously avoided all seriousness and shadow. There was no room in his happy composition for aught of sorrow or sadness, and a quick and merry wit always extricated him from every embarrassing position or perplexing dilemma.”
Mr. Londoner rightly says that an inert Eugene Field was an impossibility, and at that time he was only supremely happy when busily engaged in playing some practical joke on his ever-suspecting but never sufficiently wary friends. Of course Mr. Londoner himself was victimized, and more than once. During one campaign, as chairman of the Republican County Central Committee, Mr. Londoner was delegated to work up enthusiasm among the colored voters of Denver, and in an unguarded moment he took Field into his confidence and boasted of his flattering progress. The next morning the following advertisement, displayed with all the prominence of glaring scare-heads, appeared:
WANTED!!
EVERY COLORED MAN IN THE CITY.
To call at Wolfe Londoner’s Store.
A Car load of Georgia Watermelons Just received For a special distribution Among his Colored Friends.
_Call Early and get Your Melon!!!_
It is needless to say that when Mr. Londoner’s store opened in the morning an ever-increasing cloud of dusky humanity, with teeth that glistened with the juice of anticipation, gathered about the entrance. Business in the store was at a standstill and travel on the street was blocked. No explanation could appease the rising anger of that dark multitude. It was melons, or a riot. Melons, or that unheard-of thing–a colored landslide to the democracy. Mr. Londoner was at his wits’ ends. There were no melons in the market, and none expected. Just as Londoner was preparing to abandon his store to the wrath of the justly incensed melon-maniacs, a car-load of magnificent melons dropped into one of the freight sidings, and Londoner and the Republican party were saved. Nobody ever knew how or whence that pink-hearted manna came. The price was exorbitant, but that did not matter. Londoner paid it with the air of a man who had ordered melons and was indignant that the railway company had disappointed him in not delivering them the day before. There was not a crack in the solid black Republican column on election day.
But Field was not through with Mr. Londoner yet. The colored brethren had to hold their ratification meeting to endorse the Republican nominations, and more especially to render thanks for the creation of watermelons, and to the man who paid for them, out of season. Of course Mr. Londoner was invited to attend, and when it came his turn to address the meeting the chairman, a colored deacon of the church where “‘Possum Jim” worshipped, by the name of Williams, introduced him as follows:
“I now take great pleasure in introducing to you our friend and brother, the Honorable Mistah Wolfe Londoner, who has always been our true friend and brother, who always advises us to do the right thing, and stands ready, at all times, to help us in the good fight. Although he has a white skin, his heart is as black as any of ours. Brothers, the Honorable Wolfe Londoner.”
There was no mistaking the authorship of this felicitous introduction.
Field was never tired of repeating another story at the expense of Mr. Londoner, in connection with the visit of Charles A. Dana to Denver. The arrival of “Mr. Dana of the New York Sun” was made the occasion for one of those receptions by the Press Club which made up in heartiness what they lacked in conventional ceremony. Mr. Londoner was the president of the club, and it not only fell to his lot to deliver the address of welcome to guests of the club, but to look after their comfort and welfare while they remained in the city, and often to provide them with the wherewithal to leave it. On Mr. Dana’s presentation he was called on for some remarks, to which Mr. Londoner listened with the air of a man who had heard the same tale from lips less entitled to deliver a message of counsel and warning to a group of newspaper writers. When his guest had finished his remarks, Mr. Londoner, according to Field’s story, walked over to Mr. Dana and asked him how much he wanted.
Mr. Dana looked at him with a puzzled air, and asked: “How much what? What do you mean?”
“Why, money,” Mr. Londoner is said to have replied. “Every newspaper man who ever came to this club was introduced the same as you were, made a speech the same as you did, and then came to me to borrow money to get out of town with. Now, how much do you want?”
According to Field, he never saw a man so greatly relieved as Mr. Londoner was when Mr. Dana assured him that his hotel bill was paid and he had enough money sewed into his waistcoat to carry him back to New York, where he had a job waiting for him.
On one occasion Field accompanied the Denver Press Club on a pleasure trip to Manitou, a summer resort that nestles in a canon at the base of Mount Rosa. Before the party was comfortably settled in the hotel, Field was approached by a poor woman who had lost her husband, and who poured into his ear a sad tale of indigence and sorrow. He became immediately interested, and at once set about devising means for her relief. As his purse was as lean as her own and his companions were not overburdened with the means to get back to Denver, he announced a grand musical and dramatic entertainment, to be given in the parlors of the hotel that evening, for the benefit of a deserving charity. Every guest in the hotel was invited, and the members of the Press Club spread the notices among the citizens of the village. When asked who would be the performers, Field answered, with the utmost nonchalance, that the Lord would provide the entertainment if Manitou would furnish the audience. The evening came, and the parlors were crowded with guests and villagers, but no performers. After waiting until expectancy and curiosity had almost toppled over from tiptoe to disgust and indignation, Field stepped to the piano with preternatural gravity and attacked it with all the grand airs of a foreign virtuoso. Critics would have denied that Field was a pianist, and, technically considered, they would have been right. But his fingers had a fondness for the ivory keys, and they responded to his touch with the sweet melody of the forest to the wind. He carried all the favorite airs of all the operas he had ever heard in his fingers’ ends. He knew the popular songs of the day by heart, and, where memory failed, could improvise. He had a voice for the soft and deep chords of negro melodies I have never heard surpassed, and with all, he had a command of comedy and pathos which, up to this time, was little known beyond the circle in Denver over which he reigned as the Lord of Misrule. That night in Manitou those who were present reported that, from the moment he sat down at the piano until the last note of the good-night song died away, he held that impromptu audience fascinated by his impromptu performance. By turns he sang, played, recited poetry, mimicked actors and well-known Colorado characters, told anecdotes, and altogether gave such a single-handed entertainment that the spectators did not know whether to be more astonished at its variety or delighted with its genius. The result was a generous collection, which went far to relieve the distress of the woman who had touched Field’s sympathy.
Let it not be understood that nothing more serious than some hilarious escapade or sardonic bit of humor ever crossed the life of Eugene Field in Denver. His innate hatred of humbug and sham made the Denver Tribune a terror to all public characters who considered that suddenly acquired wealth gave them a free hand to flaunt ostentatious vulgarity on all public occasions.
CHAPTER XI
COMING TO CHICAGO
What I have written thus far of Eugene Field has been based upon what the lawyers call hearsay or documentary evidence. It has for the most part been directly heard or confirmed from his own lips. In the early days of our acquaintance the stories of his life in Denver were rife through every newspaper office and green-room in the United States. No one who had spent any time in Colorado came East without bringing a fresh budget of tales of the pranks and pasquinades of Eugene Field, of the Denver Tribune. The clipping vogue of his Primer series had given him a newspaper reputation wide as the continent. He was far more quoted, however, for what he said and did than for anything he wrote. Had his career ended in 1883, before he came to Chicago, there would have been little or nothing left of literary value to keep his memory alive, beyond the regretful mention in the obituary columns of the western press.
And it came near ending, like the candle exposed to the gusts of March, or a bubble that has danced and glistened its brief moment in the sun. The boy who was too delicate for continued application to books in Amherst, who had outgrown his strength so that his entrance at Williams was postponed a year, whose backwardness at his books through three colleges had been excused on the plea of ill-health, had been living a pace too fast for a never strong and always rebellious stomach. He was not intemperate in eating or drinking. It was not excess in the first that ruined his digestion, nor intemperance in the other that caused him to become a total abstainer from all kinds of intoxicating beverages. He simply became a dyspeptic through a weird devotion to the pieces and pastries “like Mary French used to make,” and he became a teetotaler because the doctors mistook the cause of his digestive distress.
The one thing of which Eugene Field was intemperate in Denver was of himself. He gave to that delicate machinery we call the body no rest. It was winter when he did not see the sun rise several times a week, and the hours he stole from daylight for sleep were too few and infrequent to make up for the nights he turned into day for work and frolic. Thus it came about that in the summer of 1883 Eugene Field had reached the end of his physical tether, and some change of scene was necessary to save what was left of an impaired constitution.
From what has been said, it is easy to understand how Field’s abilities were diverted into a new and deeper channel in 1883. “Stricken by dyspepsia,” writes Mr. Cowen, “so severely that he fell into a state of chronic depression and alarm, he eagerly accepted the timely offer of Melville E. Stone, then surrounding himself with the best talent he could procure in the West, of a virtually independent desk on the Chicago Morning News. There he quickly regained health, although he never recovered from his ailment.”
How Mr. Stone came to be the “Fairy Godmother” to Field at this turning-point in his life may be briefly related, and partly in Mr. Stone’s own words. He and Victor F. Lawson had made a surprising success in establishing the Chicago Daily News, in December, 1875, the first one-cent evening paper in Chicago. It is related that in the early days of their enterprise they had to import the copper coins for the use of their patrons–the nickle being up to that time the smallest coin in use in the West, as the dime, or “short bit,” was until a more recent date on the Pacific coast. The Daily News was more distinguished for its enterprise in gathering news and getting it out on the street before the comparative blanket sheets of the early eighties than for its editorial views or literary features.
In January, 1881, Messrs. Lawson & Stone conceived the idea of printing a morning edition of their daily, to be called the Morning News. As it was to be sold for two cents, it was their purpose to make it better worth the price by a more exacting standard in the manner of presenting its news and by the employment of special writers for its editorial page. Just then, however, the crop of unemployed writers of demonstrated ability or reputation was unusually short, and the foundation of the Chicago Herald in May of the same year, by half a dozen energetic journalists of local note, did not tend to overstock the market with the talent sought for by Messrs. Lawson & Stone. It was the rivalry between the Morning News (afterwards the Record) and the Herald, that sent Mr. Stone so far afield as Denver for a man to assist him in realizing the idea cherished by him and his associate. An interesting story could be told of that rivalry, which has just ended by the consolidation of the two papers (March, 1901) into the Chicago Record-Herald, but only so much of it as affects the life and movements of Eugene Field concerns us here.
In the early summer of 1883 Mr. Stone, who had been watching with appreciative newspaper sense the popularity of the Tribune Primer skits, cast an acquisitive net in the direction of Denver. He had known Field in St. Louis, and describes their first meeting thus: “I entered the office of the Dispatch to see Stillson Hutchins, the then proprietor of that paper. It was in the forenoon, the busy hour for an afternoon newspaper. A number of people were there, but as to the proprietor, clerks, and customers, none was engaged in any business, for, perched on the front counter, telling in a strangely resonant voice a very funny story, sat Eugene Field. He was a striking figure, tall, gaunt, almost bald (though little more than twenty years of age), smooth shaven, and with a remarkable face, which lent itself to every variety of emotion. In five minutes after our introduction I knew him. There was no reserve about him. He was of the free, whole-souled western type–that type which invites your confidence in return for absolute and unstinted frankness.”
Instead of broaching his purpose by letter, Mr. Stone slipped off to Denver for a personal interview with his intended victim, and, as I have already intimated, he arrived just in the nick of time to find Field ready for any move that would take him away from the killing kindness and exhilarating atmosphere of the Colorado capital. “The engagement,” says Mr. Stone, “was in itself characteristic. Field wanted to join me. He was tired of Denver and mistrustful of the limitations upon him there. But if he was to make a change, he must be assured that it was to be for his permanent good. He was a newspaper man not from choice, but because in that field he could earn his daily bread. Behind all he was conscious of great capability–not vain or by any means self-sufficient, but certain that by study and endeavor he could take high rank in the literary world and could win a place of lasting distinction. So he stipulated that he should be given a column of his own, that he might stand or fall by the excellence of his own work. Salary was less an object than opportunity.”
Mr. Stone gave the necessary assurances, both as to salary–by no means princely–and opportunity as large as Field had the genius to fill. As quickly as he could, Field closed up his Denver connections and prepared for the last move in his newspaper life. How he survived the round of farewell luncheons, dinners, and midnight suppers given for and by him was a source of mingled pride and amusement to the chief sufferer. It was with feelings of genuine regret that he turned his back on Denver and gave up the jovial and congenial association with the Tribune and its staff. Although its chief editorial writer, O.H. Rothacker, had a national reputation, Field was the star of the company that gave to the Tribune its unique reputation among the journals of the West, and all classes of citizens felt that something picturesquely characteristic of the liberty and good-fellowship of their bustling town was being taken from them. Field’s departure meant the closing of the hobble-de-hoy period in the life of Denver as well as in his own. His life there had been exactly suited to his temperament, to the times, and to the environment. It is doubtful if it would have been possible to repeat such an experience in Denver five years later, and it is certain that in five years Field had developed whole leagues of character beyond its repetition.
It was in August, 1883, that Eugene Field, with his family and all his personal effects, except his father’s library, moved to Chicago. That library was destined to remain safely stored in St. Louis for many years before he felt financially able to afford it shelter and quarters commensurate with its intrinsic value and wealth of associations. So far in his newspaper work Field had little time and less inclination to learn from books. All stories of his being a close and omnivorous student of books, previous to his coming to Chicago, are not consistent with the facts. He was learning all about humanity by constant attrition with mankind. He was taking in knowledge of the human passions and emotions at first hand and getting very little assistance through pouring over the printed observations of others. He was not a classical scholar in the sense of having acquired any mastery of or familiarity with the great Latin or Greek writers. Language, all languages, was a study that was easy to him, and he acquired facility in translating any foreign tongue, living or dead, with remarkable readiness by the aid of a dictionary and a nimble wit. Student in St. Louis, Kansas City, or Denver he was not, any more than at Williams, Galesburg, or Columbia. But I have no doubt that when Eugene Field left Denver he had a fixed intention, as suggested in the words of Mr. Stone, by study and endeavor to take high rank in the literary world and to “win a place of lasting distinction.”
When he came to Chicago his family consisted of Mrs. Field and their four children, all, happily for him, in vigorous health, and, so far as the children were concerned, endowed with appetites and a digestion the envy and despair of their father. “Trotty,” the eldest, was by this time a girl of eight, Melvin a stout sober youth of six, “Pinny” (Eugene, Jr.) a shrewd little rascal of four, and “Daisy” (Fred), his mother’s boy, a large-eyed, sturdy youngster of nearly three masterful summers. The family was quickly settled in a small but convenient flat on Chicago Avenue, three blocks from the Lake, and a little more than a mile’s walk from the office, a distance that never tempted Field to exercise his legs except on one occasion, when it afforded him a chance to astonish the natives of North Chicago. It occurred to him one bleak day in December that it was time the people knew there was a stranger in town. So he arrayed himself in a long linen duster, buttoned up from knees to collar, put an old straw hat on his head, and taking a shabby book under one arm and a palm-leaf fan in his hand, he marched all the way down Clark Street, past the City Hall, to the office. Everywhere along the route he was greeted with jeers or pitying words, as his appearance excited the mirth or commiseration of the passers-by. When he reached the entrance to the Daily News office he was followed by a motley crowd of noisy urchins whom he dismissed with a grimace and the cabalistic gesture with which Nicholas Koorn perplexed and repulsed Antony Van Corlear from the battlement of the fortress of Rensellaerstein. Then closing the door in their astonished faces, he mounted the two flights of stairs to the editorial rooms, where he recounted, with the glee of the boy he was in such things, the success of his joke.
Trotty was his favorite child, probably because she was the only girl, and he was very fond of little girls. Even then she favored her father in complexion and features more than any of the boys, having the same large innocent-looking blue eyes. But even she had to serve his disposition to extract humor from every situation. Before Field had been in Chicago two months he realized that he had made a serious miscalculation in impressing Mr. Stone with the thought that salary was less an object to him than opportunity. Opportunity had not sufficed to meet Field’s bills in Denver, and the promised salary, that seemed temptingly sufficient at the distance of a thousand miles, proved distressingly inadequate to feed and clothe three lusty boys and one growing girl in the bracing atmosphere of Chicago. So it was not surprising that when Trotty asked her father to give her an appropriate text to recite in Sunday-school, he schooled her to rise and declaim with great effect:
“The Lord will provide, my father can’t!”
The means Field took to bring the insufficiency of his salary to the attention of Mr. Stone were as ingenious as they were frequent. I don’t think he would have appreciated an increase of salary that came without some exercise of his wayward fancy for making mirth out of any embarrassing financial condition.
It is more than probable that Eugene Field chose Chicago for the place of his permanent abode after deliberately weighing the advantages and limitations of its situation with reference to his literary career. He felt that it was as far east as he could make his home without coming within the influence of those social and literary conventions that have squeezed so much of genuine American flavor out of our literature. He had received many tempting offers from New York newspapers before coming to Chicago, and after our acquaintance I do not believe a year went by that Field did not decline an engagement, personally tendered by Mr. Dana, to go to the New York Sun, at a salary nearly double that he was receiving here. But, as he told Julian Ralph on one occasion, he would not live in, or write for, the East. For, as he put it, there was more liberty and fewer literary “fellers” out West, and a man had more chance to be judged on his merits and “grow up with the country.”
The Chicago to which Eugene Field came in 1883 was a city of something over six hundred thousand inhabitants, and pulsing with active political and commercial life. It had been rebuilt, physically, after the fire with money borrowed from the East, and was almost too busy paying interest and principal to have much time to read books, much less make them, except in the wholly manufacturing sense. It had already become a great publishing centre, but not of the books that engage the critical intelligence of the public. The feverish devotion of its citizens to business during the day-time drove them to bed at an unseasonably early hour, or to places of amusement, from which they went so straight home after the performances that there was not a single fashionable restaurant in the city catering to supper parties after the play. Whether this condition, making theatre-going less expensive here than in other large cities, conduced to the result or not, it was a fact that in the early eighties Chicago was the best paying city on the continent for theatrical companies of all degrees of merit. The losses which the best artists and plays almost invariably reported of New York engagements were frequently recouped in Chicago.
Chicago never took kindly to grand opera, and probably for the same reason that it patronized the drama. It sought entertainment and amusement, and grand opera is a serious business. As Field said of himself, Chicago liked music “limited”; and its liking was generally limited to light or comic opera and the entertainments of the Apollo Club, until Theodore Thomas, with admirable perseverance, aided by the pocket-books of public-spirited citizens rather than by enthusiastic music-lovers, succeeded in cultivating the study and love of music up to a standard above that of any other American city, with the possible exception of Boston.
I have referred to the theatrical and musical conditions in Chicago in 1883, because it was in them that Eugene Field found his most congenial atmosphere and associations when he came hither that year. These were the chief reminders of the life he had left behind when he turned his back on Denver, and I need scarcely say that they continued to afford him the keenest pleasure and the most unalloyed recreation to the end.
Architecturally, Chicago was no more beautiful and far less impressive than it is now. It could not boast half a dozen buildings, public or private, worthy of a second glance. Its tallest skyscraper stopped at nine stories, and that towered a good two stories over its nearest rival. The bridges across the river connecting the three divisions of the city were turned slowly and laboriously by hand, and the joke was current that a Chicagoan of those days could never hear a bell ring without starting on a run to avoid being bridged. The cable-car was an experiment on one line, and all the other street-cars were operated with horses and stopped operation at 12.20 A.M., as Field often learned to his infinite disgust, for he hated walking worse than he did horses or horse-cars. In many ways Chicago reminded Field of Denver, and in no respect more than in its primitive ways, its assumed airs of importance, and its township politics. Despite its forty odd years of incorporated life, Chicago, the third city of the United States, was still a village, and Field insisted on regarding it as such.
Transplanted from the higher altitude at the foot of the Rockies to the level of Lake Michigan, I think nothing about Chicago struck him more forcibly than the harshness of its variable summer climate. Scarcely a week went by that his column did not contain some reference in paragraph or verse to its fickle alarming changes. He had not enough warm blood back of that large gray face to rejoice when the mercury dropped in an hour, as it often did, from 88 or 90 degrees to 56 or 60 degrees. Such changes, which came with the whirl of the weather vane, as the wind shifted from its long sweep over the prairies, all aquiver with the heat, to a strong blow over hundreds of miles of water whose temperature in dog days never rose above 60 degrees, provoked from him verses such as these, written in the respective months they celebrate in the year 1884:
_CHICAGO IN JULY
The white-capp’d waves of Michigan break On the beach where the jacksnipes croon– The breeze sweeps in from the purple lake And tempers the heat of noon:
In yonder bush, where the berries grow, The Peewee tunefully sings,
While hither and thither the people go, Attending to matters and things.
There is cool for all in the busy town– For the girls in their sealskin sacques– For the dainty dudes idling up and down, With overcoats on their backs;
And the horse-cars lurch and the people run And the bell at the bridgeway rings–
But never perspires a single one,
Attending to matters and things.
What though the shivering mercury wanes– What though the air be chill?
The beauteous Chloe never complains As she roams by the purpling rill;
And the torn-tit coos to its gentle mate, As Chloe industriously swings
With Daphnis, her beau, on the old front gate, Attending to matters and things.
When the moon comes up, and her cold, pale light Coquettes with the freezing streams,
What care these twain for the wintry night, Since Chloe is wrapt in dreams,
And Daphnis utters no plaint of woe O’er his fair jack full on kings,
But smiles that fortune should bless him so, Attending to matters and things.
CHICAGO IN AUGUST
When Cynthia’s father homeward brought An India mull for her to wear,
How were her handsome features fraught With radiant smiles beyond compare!
And to her bosom Cynthia strained
Her pa with many a fond caress–
And ere another week had waned
That mull was made into a dress.
And Cynthia blooming like a rose
Which any swain might joy to cull, Cried “How I’ll paralyze the beaux
When I put on my India mull!”
Now let the heat of August day
Be what it may–I’ll not complain– I’ll wear the mull, and put away
This old and faded-out delaine!
Despite her prayers the heated spell Descended not on mead and wold–
Instead of turning hot as–well,
The weather turned severely cold, The Lake dashed up its icy spray
And breathed its chill o’er all the plain– Cynthia stays at home all day
And wears the faded-out delaine!
So is Chicago at this time–
She stands where icy billows roll– She wears her beauteous head sublime,
While cooling zephyrs thrill her soul. But were she tempted to complain,
Methinks she’d bid the zephyrs lull, That she might doff her old delaine
And don her charming India mull!_
But there was another feature of Chicago that from the day of his arrival to the day of his departure to that land where dust troubleth not and soot and filth are unknown, filled his New England soul and nostrils with ineffable disgust. He never became reconciled to a condition in which the motto _in hoc signo vinces_ on a bar of soap had no power to inspire a ray of hope. He had not been here a month before his muse began to wield the “knotted lash of sarcasm” above the strenuous but dirty back of Chicago after this fashion:
_Brown, a Chicago youth, did woo
A beauteous Detroit belle,
And for a month–or, maybe, two–
He wooed the lovely lady well.
But, oh! one day–one fatal day–
As mused the belle with naught to do, A local paper came her way
And, drat the luck! she read it through.
She read of alleys black with mire– A river with a putrid breath–
Streets reeking with malarial ire– Inviting foul disease and death.
Then, with a livid snort she called
Her trembling lover to her side– “How dare you, wretched youth,” she bawled, “Ask me to be your blushing bride?
Go back unto your filthy town,
And never by my side be seen,
Nor hope to make me Mrs. Brown,
Until you’ve got your city clean!”_
Eugene Field made his first appearance in the column of the Morning News August 15th, 1883, in the most modest way, with a scant column of paragraphs such as he had contributed to the Denver Tribune, headed “Current Gossip” instead of “Odds and Ends.” The heading was only a makeshift until a more distinctive one could be chosen in its stead. On August 31st, 1883, the title “Sharps and Flats” was hoisted to the top of Field’s column, and there it remained over everything he wrote for more than a dozen years.
There have been many versions of how Field came to hit upon this title, so appropriate to what appeared under it. The most ingenious of these was that evolved by John B. Livingstone in “An Appreciation” of Eugene Field, published in the Interior shortly after his death. In what, on the whole, is probably the best analysis of Field’s genius and work extant, Mr. Livingstone goes on to say:
“What Virgil was to Tennyson, Horace was to Field in one aspect at least of the Venusian’s character. He could say of his affection for the protege of Maecenas, as the laureate said of his for the ‘poet of the happy Tityrus,’ ‘I that loved thee since my day began.’ It has been suggested that he owed to a clever farce-comedy of the early eighties the caption of the widely-read column of journalistic epigram and persiflage, which he filled with machine-like regularity and the versatility of the brightest French journalism for ten years. I prefer to think that he took it, or his cue for it, from a line of Dr. Phillips Francis’s translation of the eighth of the first book of Horatian Satires:
_Not to be tedious or repeat
How Flats and Sharps in concert meet._
“Field’s knowledge of Horace and of his translators was complete, probably not equalled by that of any other member of his craft. He made a specialty of the study, a hobby of it. And it is more likely, as it is more gratifying, to believe that he caught his famous caption (Sharps and Flats) from a paraphrase of his favorite classic poet than from the play bill of a modern and ephemeral farce.”
Unfortunately for this pretty bit of speculation, which Field would have enjoyed as another evidence of his skill in imposing upon the elect of criticism, it has no foundation in fact, and its premises of Field’s intimate knowledge and devotion to Horace anticipates the period of his Horatian “hobby,” as Mr. Livingstone so well styles it, by at least five years. It was not until the winter of 1888-89 that paraphrases of Horace began to stud his column with the first-fruits of his tardy wandering and philandering with Dr. Frank W. Reilly through the groves and meadows of the Sabine farm. But that is another story.
According to M.E. Stone, the title of the column which Field established when he came to the Chicago Morning News was borrowed from the name of a play, “Sharps and Flats,” written by Clay M. Greene and myself, and played with considerable success throughout the United States by Messrs. Robson and Crane.
[Illustration: Robson. Crane.–Crane. Robson. ROBSON AND CRANE IN THE PLAY “SHARPS AND FLATS”]
It may be set down here as well as elsewhere, and still quoting Mr. Stone, that not only did Field write nearly every line that ever appeared in the “Sharps and Flats” column, but that practically everything that he ever wrote, after 1883, appeared at one time or another in that column.
To which it may be added that it has been the custom of those writing of Eugene Field to surround and endow him throughout his career with the acquirement of scholarship, and pecuniary independence, which he never possessed before the last six years of his life.
Practically all Field’s scholarship and mental equipment, so far as they were obtained from books, were acquired after he came to Chicago, and he was never lifted above the ragged edge of impecuniosity until he began to receive royalties from the popular edition of “A Little Book of Western Verse” and “A Little Book of Profitable Tales.” His domestic life was spent in flats or rented houses until less than five months before his death. The photographs taken a few months before his death of Eugene Field’s home and the beautiful library in which he wrote are ghastly travesties on the nomadic character of his domestic arrangements for many years before June, 1895–dreams for which he longed, but only lived to realize for four brief months. All the best Field wrote previous to 1890–and it includes the best he ever wrote, except “The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac”–was written in a room to which many a box stall is palatial, and his sole library was a dilapidated edition of Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations,” Cruden’s “Concordance of the Bible,” and a well-thumbed copy of the King James version of the Bible. He detested the revised version. The genius of this man at this time did not depend on scholarship or surroundings, but on the companionship of his fellows and the unconventionality of his home life.
CHAPTER XII
PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS
It was in the month of September, after Field’s coming to the Morning News, that a managerial convulsion in the office of the Chicago Herald threw the majority of its editorial corps and special writers across Fifth Avenue into the employ of Messrs. Lawson & Stone. They were at first distributed between the morning and evening editions of the News, my first work being for the latter, to which I contributed editorial paragraphs for one week, when Mr. Stone concluded to make me his chief editorial writer on the Morning News. This brought me into immediate personal and professional relations with Field. Our rooms adjoined, being separated by a board partition that did not reach to the ceiling and over which for four years I was constantly bombarded with missives and missiles from my ever-restless neighbor. Among the other recruits from the Herald at that time was John F. Ballantyne, who, from being the managing editor of that paper, was transferred to the position of chief executive of the Morning News under Mr. Stone. One of the first duties of his position was to read Field’s copy very closely, to guard against the publication of such bitter innuendoes and scandalous personalities as had kept the Denver Tribune in constant hot water between warlike descents upon the editor and costly appeals to the courts. Mr. Stone wanted all the racy wit that had distinguished Field’s contributions to the Tribune without the attendant crop of libel suits, and he relied on Ballantyne’s Scotch caution to put a query mark against every paragraph that squinted at a breach of propriety or a breach of the peace, or that invited a libel suit. There was no power of final rejection in Ballantyne’s blue pencil. That was left for Mr. Stone’s own decision. It was well that it was so, for Mr. Ballantyne’s appreciation of humor was so rigid that, had it been the arbiter as to which of Field’s paragraphs should be printed, I greatly fear me there would often have been a dearth of gayety in the “Sharps and Flats.” The relations in which Ballantyne and I found ourselves to Field can best be told in the language of Mr. Cowen, whose own intimate relations with Field antedated ours and continued to the end:
“Coming immediately under the influence of John Ballantyne and Slason Thompson, respectively managing editor and chief editorial writer of the News–the one possessed of Scotch gravity and the other of fine literary taste and discrimination–the character of Field’s work quickly modified, and his free and easy, irregular habits succumbed to studious application and methodical labors. Ballantyne used the blue pencil tenderly, first attacking Field’s trick fabrications and suppressing the levity which found vent in preceding years in such pictures of domestic felicity as:
_Baby and I the weary night
Are taking a walk for his delight, I drowsily stumble o’er stool and chair And clasp the babe with grim despair,
For he’s got the colic
And paregoric
Don’t seem to ease my squalling heir.
Baby and I in the morning gray
Are griping and squalling and walking away– The fire’s gone out and I nearly freeze– There’s a smell of peppermint on the breeze. Then Mamma wakes
And the baby takes
And says, “Now cook the breakfast please.”_
“The every-day practical joker and entertaining mimic of Denver recoiled in Chicago from the reputation of a Merry Andrew, the prospect of gaining which he disrelished and feared. He preferred to invent paragraphic pleasantries for the world at large and indulge his personal humor in the office, at home, or with personal friends. Gayety was his element. He lived, loved, inspired, and translated it, in the doing which latter he wrote, without strain or embarrassment, reams of prose satire, _contes risques_, and Hudibrastic verse.”
It is a singular illustration of the irony and mutations of life that one of the early paragraphs Field wrote for the “Sharps and Flats” column was inspired by what was supposed to be a fatal assault on his friend by a notorious political ruffian in Leadville. The paragraph, which appeared on September 12th, 1883, is interesting as a specimen of Field’s style at that period, and as showing in what esteem he held Cowen, with whom he had been associated on the Denver Tribune and whose name recurs in these pages from time to time:
Edward D. Cowen, the city editor of the Leadville Herald, who was murderously assaulted night before last by a desperado named Joy, was one of the brightest newspaper men in the West. He came originally from Massachusetts, and has relatives living in the southern part of Illinois. He was about thirty years of age. He went to Leadville about three months ago to work on ex-Senator Tabor’s paper, the Herald, and was doing excellently well. He was a protege, to a certain extent, of Mrs. Tabor No. 2. She admired his brilliancy, and volunteered to help him in any possible way. It was speaking of him that she said: “My life will henceforth be devoted to assisting worthy young men. In life we must prepare for death, and how can we better prepare for death than by helping our fellow-creatures? Alas!” she added with a sad, sad sigh, “alas! death is, after all, what we live for.” Young Cowen had all the social graces men and women admire; he was bright in intellect, great in heart, and hearty of manner. The loss of no young man we know of would be more deplored than his demise.
Cowen never wholly recovered from the effects of his encounter with Joy, but he survived to joke with Field over the past tense in which this paragraph is couched, and to afford me valuable assistance in completing this character-study of our friend.
I have already referred to the “box stall” in which Field sawed his daily wood, as he was accustomed to call his work. As the day of thinking that any old pine table, with a candle box for a chair, crowded off in any sort of a dingy garret, was good enough for the writers who contributed “copy” for a newspaper, has been succeeded by an era of quarter-sawed oak desks, swivel chairs, electric light, and soap and water in editorial quarters throughout the country, let me attempt to describe the original editorial rooms of the Daily News less than twenty years ago. The various departments of the paper occupied what had been three four-story, twenty-five-foot buildings. The floors of no two of these buildings above the first story were on the same level. They had evidently been originally built for lodging houses. The presses and storerooms for the rolls of paper filled the cellars. The business office occupied one store, which was flanked on either side by stores that would have been more respectable had they been rented as saloons, which they were not, because of the conscientious scruples of Messrs. Lawson & Stone. Parts of two of the buildings were still rented as lodgings. Up one flight of stairs of the centre building, in the front, Mr. Stone had his office, which was approached through what had been a hall bedroom. His room was furnished with black walnut, and a gloomy and oppressive air of mystery. Mr. Stone had the genius and the appearance of a chief inquisitor. He was as alert, daring, and enterprising an editor as the West has ever produced.
The rear of this twenty-five-foot building was given up to the library and to George E. Plumbe, the editor for many years of the Daily News Almanac and Political Register. The library consisted of files of nearly all the Chicago dailies, of Congressional Records and reports, the leading almanacs, the “Statesman’s Year Book,” several editions of “Men of the Times,” half a dozen encyclopaedias, the Imperial and Webster’s dictionaries, a few other text books, and about two inches of genuine Chicago soot which incrusted everything. The theory advanced by Field’s friend, William F. Poole, then of the Public Library and later of the Newberry Library, that dust is the best preservative of books, rendered it necessary that the only washstand accessible to the Morning News should be located in the library. None of us ever came out of that library as we went in–the one clean roller a day forbade it. Nothing but the conscientious desire to embellish our “copy” with enough facts and references to make a showing of erudition ever induced Field or any of the active members of the editorial staff to borrow the library key from Ballantyne to break in upon the soporific labors of Mr. Plumbe. Here the editorial conferences, which Field has illustrated, were held.
[Illustration: DAILY NEWS EDITORIAL COUNCIL OF WAR. “Now, boys, which point shall we move on?” _From a drawing by Eugene Field._]
Before quitting the library, which has since grown, in new quarters, to be one of the most comprehensive newspaper libraries in the country, I cannot forbear printing one of Field’s choice bits at the expense of the occupants of this floor of the Daily News office. It has no title, but is supposed to be a soliloquy of Mr. Stone’s:
_I wish my men were more like Plumbe And not so much like me–
I hate to see the paper hum
When it should stupid be.
For when a lot of wit and rhyme
Appears upon our pages,
I know too well my men in time
Will ask a raise in wages.
I love to sit around and chin
With folk of doubtful fame,
But oh, it seems a dreadful sin
When others do the same;
For others gad to get the news
To use in their profession,
But anything I get I use
For purpose of suppression._
Field’s poetical license here does injustice to Mr. Stone, whose inquisitions generally concerned matters of public or political concern and whose practice of the editorial art of suppression was never exercised with any other motive than the public good or the sound discretion of the editor, who knew that the libel suits most to be feared were those where the truth about some scalawag was printed without having the affidavits in the vault and a double hitch on the witnesses.
Up another long, narrow, dark stairway was the office of Mr. Ballantyne, the managing editor. He occupied what had been a rear hall bedroom, 7 x 10 feet. He was six feet two tall, and if he had not been of an orderly nature, there would not have been room in that back closet, with its one window and flat-topped desk, for his feet and the retriever, Snip–the only dog Field ever thoroughly detested. Ballantyne’s room was evidently arranged to prevent any private conferences with the managing editor. It boasted a second chair, but when the visitor accepted the rare invitation to be seated, his knees prevented the closing of the door. The remainder of this floor of the centre building and the whole of the same floor of the next building south were taken up by the composing room. A door had been cut in the wall of the building to the north, just by Mr. Ballantyne’s room, through which, and down three steps, was the space devoted to the editorial and reportorial staff of the Morning News. The front end of this space was partitioned off into three rooms, 7 x 12 feet each. Field claimed one of these boxes, the dramatic critic and solitary artist of the establishment one, and Morgan Bates, the exchange editor, and I were sandwiched in between them. The rest of the floor was given up to the city staff. The telegraph editor had a space railed off for his accommodation in the composing room. If a fire had broken out in the central building in those days, along about ten P.M., the subsequent proceedings of Eugene Field and of others then employed on the Morning News would probably not have been of further interest, except to the coroner.
Of the three rooms mentioned, Field’s was the only one having any pretensions to decoration. Its floor and portions of the wall were stained and grained a rich brown with the juice of the tobacco plant. In one corner Field had a cupboard-shaped pigeon-file, alphabetically arranged, for the clippings he daily made–almost all relating some bit of personal gossip about people in the public eye. Scattered about the floor were dumb-bells, Indian clubs, and other gymnastic apparatus which Field never touched and which the janitor had orders not to disturb in their disorder. Above Field’s desk for some time hung a sheet of tin, which he used as a call bell or to drown the noise of the office boy poking the big globe stove which was the primitive, but generally effective, way of heating the whole floor in winter. That it was not always effective, even after steam was introduced, may be inferred from the following importunate note written by Field to Collins Shackelford, the cashier, on one occasion when the former had been frozen almost numb:
DEAR MR. SHACKELFORD: There has been no steam in the third-floor editorial rooms this afternoon. Somebody must be responsible for this brutal neglect, which is of so frequent occurrence that forbearance has ceased to be a virtue. I appeal to you in the hope that you will be able to correct the outrage. Does it not seem an injustice that the writers of this paper should be put at the mercy of sub-cellar hands, who are continually demonstrating their incompetency for the work which they are supposed to do and for which they are paid?
Yours truly,
EUGENE FIELD.
January 11, 1887.
To those familiar with the internal economy of newspaper offices it will be no news to learn that death by freezing in the editorial rooms would be regarded as a matter of small moment compared to a temperature in the press room that chilled the printing ink in the fountains to the slow consistency of molasses in January.
To return to the furnishing of the room in which Field did the greater part of his work for the Morning News. Originally it did not boast a desk. A pine table with two drawers was considered good enough for the most brilliant paragrapher in the United States, and, for all he cared, so it was. He had no special use for a desk, for at that time he carried his library in his head and wrote on his lap. I am happy in being able to present in corroboration of this a study of Eugene Field at work, drawn from life by his friend, J.L. Sclanders, then artist for the News, and also the copy of a blue print photograph, on the back of which Field wrote, “And they call this art!”
[Illustration: FIELD AT WORK.
_The Caricature from a Drawing by Sclanders._]
In explanation of these pictures, both true to life when made, it should be said that, except when there was no steam on, Field almost invariably wrote in his shirt-sleeves, generally with his waistcoat unbuttoned and his collar off, and always with his feet crossed across the corner of the desk or table. One of the first things he did on coming to the office was to take off his shoes and put on a pair of slippers with no counters around the heels, so that they slapped along the floor as he walked and hung from his toes as he wrote.
Why Field always rolled up the bottoms of his trousers on coming into the office and turned them down when he went out, I do not remember to have known. Probably it was partly on account of his contradictory nature, and partly to save the trousers from dragging, for the unloosening of his “vest” was always attended by the unbuttoning of his suspenders to permit of his sitting with greater ease upon the curve of his spine. But why he should have rolled his trousers half way up to the knee passes my comprehension, as the reason has passed from my memory, if I ever knew it.
For a long time a rusty old carpenter’s saw hung on the wall of his “boudoir.” Beside it were some burglars’ implements, and subsequently a convict’s suit hanging to a peg excited the wonder of the curious and the sarcasm of the ribald.
The table in Field’s room, besides serving as a resting place for his feet, was covered with the exchanges which were passed along to him after they had passed under the scrutiny and shears of the exchange editor. When Field had gone through them with his rusty scissors they were only fit for the floor, where he strewed them with a riotous hand.
If the reader has followed thus far he has a tolerably fair notion of the unpropitious and eccentric surroundings amid which Field worked immediately after coming to Chicago. Out of this strange environment came as variegated a column of satire, wit, and personal persiflage as ever attracted and fascinated the readers of a daily newspaper.
And now of the man himself as I first saw him. He was at that time in his thirty-third year, my junior by a year. If Eugene Field had ever stood up to his full height he would have measured slightly over six feet. But he never did and was content to shamble through life, appearing two inches shorter than he really was. Shamble is perhaps hardly the word to use. But neither glide nor shuffle fits his gait any more accurately. It was simply a walk with the least possible waste of energy. It fitted Dr. Holmes’s definition of walking as forward motion to prevent falling. And yet Field never gave you the impression that he was about to topple over. His legs always acted as if they were weary and would like to lean their master up against something. As to what that something might be, he would probably have answered, “Pie.”
Field’s arms were long, ending in well-shaped hands, which were remarkably deft and would have been attractive had he not at some time spoiled the fingers by the nail-biting habit. His shoulders were broad and square, and not nearly as much rounded as might have been expected from his position in writing. It was not the stoop of his shoulders that detracted from his height, but a certain settling together, if I may so say, of the couplings of his backbone. He was large-boned throughout, but without the muscles that should have gone with such a frame. He would probably have described himself as tall, big, gangling. He had no personal taste or pride in clothing, and never to my knowledge came across a tailor who took enough interest in his clothes to give him the benefit of a good fit or to persuade him to choose a becoming color. For this reason he looked best-dressed in a dress suit, which he never wore when there was any possibility of avoiding it. His favorite coat was a sack, cut straight, and made from some cloth in which the various shades of yellow, green, and brown struggled for mastery.
But it was of little consequence how Field’s body was clothed. He wore a 7 3-8 hat and there was a head and face under it that compelled a second glance and repaid scrutiny in any company. The photographs of Field are numerous, and some of them preserve a fair impression of his remarkable physiognomy. None of the paintings of him that I have seen do him justice, and the etchings are not much of an improvement on the paintings. The best photographs only fail because they cannot retain the peculiar deathlike pallor of the skin and the clear, innocent china blue of the large eyes. These eyes were deep set under two arching brows, and yet were so large that their deep setting was not at first apparent. Field’s nose was a good size and well shaped, with an unusual curve of the nostrils strangely complementary to the curve of the arch above the eyes. There was a mole on one cheek, which Field always insisted on turning to the camera and which the photographer very generally insisted on retouching out in the finishing. Field was wont to say that no photograph of him was genuine unless that mole was “blown in on the negative.” The photographs all give him a good chin, in which there was merely the suggestion of that cleft which he held marred the strength of George William Curtis’s lower jaw.
The feature of his face, if such it can be called, where all portraits failed, was the hair. It was so fine that there would not have been much of it had it been thick, and as it was quite thin there was only a shadow between it and baldness. Even its color was elusive–a cross between brown and dove color. Only those who knew Field before he came to Chicago have any impression as to the color of the thatch upon that head which never during our acquaintance stooped to a slouch hat. This typical head gear of the West had no attraction for him. The formal black or brown derby for winter and the seasonable straw hat for summer seemed necessary to tone down the frivolity of his neckties, which were chosen with a cowboy’s gaudy taste. To the day of his death Field delighted to present neckties, generally of the made-up variety, to his friends, which, it is needless to say, they never failed to accept and seldom wore. Often in the afternoon as it neared two o’clock he would stick his head above the partition between our rooms and say, “Come along, Nompy” (his familiar address for the writer). “Come along and I’ll buy you a new necktie.”
“The dickens take your neckties!” or something like it, would be my reply.
Whereupon, with the philosophy of which he never wearied, Field would rejoin, “Very well, if you won’t let me buy you a necktie, you must buy me a lunch,” and off we would march to Henrici’s coffee-house around the corner on Madison Street, generally gathering Ballantyne and Snip in our train as we passed the kennel of the managing editor of what was to be the newspaper with the largest morning circulation in Chicago.
CHAPTER XIII
RELATIONS WITH STAGE FOLK
Reference has been made to Field’s predilection for the theatrical profession and to his fondness for the companionship of those who had attained prominence in it. During his stay in Denver he had established friendly, and in some instances intimate, relations with the star actors who included that city in the circuit of their yearly pilgrimages. The story of how he ingratiated himself into the good graces of Christine Nilsson, at the expense of a rival newspaper, may be of interest before taking a final farewell of the episodes connected with his life in Colorado. When Madame Nilsson was journeying overland in her special drawing-room car with Henry Abbey, Marcus Meyer, and Charles Mathews, Field wrote to Omaha, anticipating their arrival there, to make inquiry as to how the party employed the dull hours of travel so as to interest the erratic prima donna. It was his intention to prepare a newspaper sketch of the trip.
The reply was barren of incident, save a casual allusion to certain sittings at the American game of poker, in which the Swedish songstress had the advantage of the policy or the luck of her companions. Out of this inch of cloth Field manufactured something better than the proverbial ell of very interesting gossip. The reconstructed item reached San Francisco as soon as Madame Nilsson, and was copied from the Tribune into the coast papers on the eve of her opening concert. Now, the madame thought that the American world looked askance at a woman who gambled, and when the article was kindly brought to her attention she flew into one of those rages which, report has said, were the real tragedies of her life. When returning overland to Denver, Abbey telegraphed ahead to Field, and he, with Cowen, went up to Cheyenne to meet the party. On entering the drawing-room car the visitors were hurried into Abbey’s compartment with an air of bewildering mystery, and were there informed in whispers that Madame Nilsson was furious against the Tribune and would never forgive anybody attached to it.
“Oh, I’ll arrange that,” said Field. “Don’t announce us, but let us call on the madame and be introduced.”
After some further parley this was done, and this is how he was greeted.
“Meestair Field–zee–T-r-ee-bune,” Madame Nilsson exclaimed hotly. “I prefair not zee acquaintance of your joor-nal.”
“Excuse me, madam,” persisted Field, blandly and with grave earnestness, “I think from what Mr. Abbey has told us that you are bent on doing the Tribune and its staff a great injustice. It was not the Tribune that published the poker story that caused you so much just annoyance. It was our rival, the Republican, a very disreputable newspaper, which is edited by persons without the least instinct of gentlemen and with no consideration for the feelings of a lady of your refined sensibilities.”
At this Madame Nilsson thawed visibly, and promptly appealed to Abbey, Mathews, and Mayer to learn if she had been misinformed. They, of course, fell in with Field’s story, and upon being assured that she was in error the madame’s anger relaxed, and she was soon holding her sides from laughter at Field’s drolleries. The result was that the innocent Republican staff could not get within speaking distance of Madame Nilsson during her stay in Denver. The second night of her visit being Christmas eve, the madame held her Christmas tree in the Windsor Hotel, with Field acting the role of Santa Claus and the Tribune staff playing the parts of good little boys, while their envious rivals of the Republican were not invited to share in the crumbs that fell from that Christmas supper-table.
“I have been a great theatre-goer,” says Field in his “Auto-Analysis.” And it may be doubted if any writer of our time repaid the stage as generously for the pleasure he received from those who walked its boards before and behind the footlights. No better analysis of his relations to the profession has been made than that from the pen of his friend Cowen:
“At the very outset of his newspaper career,” says he, “Field’s inclinations led him to the society of the green-room. Of western critics and reviewers he was the first favorite among dramatic people. Helpful, kind, and enthusiastic, he was rarely severe and never captious. Though in no sense an analyst, he was an amusing reviewer and a great advertiser. Once he conceived an attachment for an actor or actress, his generous mind set about bringing such fortunate person more conspicuously into public notice. Emma Abbott’s baby, which she never had, and of whose invented existence he wrote at least a bookful of startling and funny adventures; Francis Wilson’s legs; Sol Smith Russell’s Yankee yarns; Billy Crane’s droll stories; Modjeska’s spicy witticisms–these and other jocular pufferies, quoted and read everywhere with relish for years–were among his hobby-horse performances begun at that time (1881) and continued long after he had settled down in the must and rust of bibliomania.”
For a long time not a week went by that Field did not invent some marvellous tale respecting Emma Abbott, once the most popular light-opera prima donna of the American stage–every yarn calculated to widen the circle of her popularity. Upon an absolutely fictitious autobiography of Miss Abbott he once exhausted the fertility of his fancy in the form of a review,[1] which went the rounds of the press and which, on her death, contributed many a sober paragraph to the newspaper reviews of her life.
[1] Vide Appendix.
To the fame of another opera singer of those days he contributed, by paragraphs of an entirely different flavor from those that extolled the Puritan virtues and domestic felicities of Miss Abbott (Mrs. Wetherell), as may be judged from the following “Love Plaint,” written shortly after he came to Chicago:
_The tiny birdlings in the tree
Their tuneful tales of love relate– Alas, no lover comes to me–
I flock alone, without a mate.
Mine eyes are hot with bitter tears, My soul disconsolately yearns–
But, ah, no wooing knight appears– In vain my quenchless passion burns.
Unheeded are my glowing charms–
No heroes claim a moonlight tryst– All empty are my hungry arms–
My virgin cheeks are all unkissed.
Oh, would some cavalier might haste
To crown me with his manly love,
And, with his arm about my waist,
Feed on my cherry lips above.
Alas, my blush and bloom will fade,
And I shall lose my dulcet notes– Then I shall die an old, old maid,
And none will mourn Miss Alice Oates._
[Illustration: FRANCIS WILSON.]
Of his friendship with Francis Wilson there is no need to write here, for is it not fully set forth in that charming little brochure, in which Mr. Wilson gives to the world a characteristic sketch of the Eugene Field and bibliomaniac he knew, and in whose work he was so deeply interested? But Mr. Wilson does not tell how he was pursued and plagued with the following genial invention which Field printed in his column in 1884, and which still occasionally turns up in country exchanges:
“Mr. Francis Wilson, the comedian, is a nephew of Pere Hyacinthe, the ancient divine. During his recent sojourn in Paris he was the pere’s guest, and finally became deeply interested in the great work of reform in which the famous preacher is engaged. His intimate acquaintances say that Mr. Wilson is fully determined to retire from the stage at the expiration of five years and devote himself to theological pursuits. He gave Pere Hyacinthe his promise to this effect, and his sincerity is undoubted.”
William Florence, the comedian, was an actor of whom, on and off the stage, Field never wearied. Night after night would we go to see “Billy,” as he was familiarly and irreverently called, as Bardwell Slote in the “Mighty Dollar,” or as Captain Cuttle in “Dombey and Son.” Although originally an Irish comedian of rollicking and contagious humor, Florence had played “Bardwell Slote” so constantly and for so many years that his voice and manner in every-day life had the ingratiating tone of that typical Washington lobbyist. Before his death, while touring with Jefferson as Sir Lucius O’Trigger in “The Rivals,” he renewed his earlier triumphs in Irish character, but, even here the accents of the oily Bardwell gave an additional touch of blarney to his brogue.
One of the stories that Field delighted to tell of Florence dates back to 1884, when Monseigneur Capel was in the United States. It related with the circumspection of verity how Florence and the Monseigneur had been friends for a number of years. Meeting on the street in Chicago, the story ran, after a general conversation Florence asked Capel whether he ever spent an evening at the theatre, intending, in case of an affirmative reply, to invite him to one of his performances. Capel shook his head. “No,” said he, “it has been twenty-four years since I attended a theatre, and I cannot conscientiously bring myself to patronize a place where the devil is preached.” Florence protested that the monseigneur placed a false estimate on the theatrical profession.
“Ah, no,” replied Capel, with a sad smile; “you people are sincere enough; you don’t know it, but you preach the devil all the same.”
“Well, your grace,” inquired Florence, with great urbanity, “which is worse, preaching the devil from the stage without knowing it, or preaching Christ crucified from the pulpit without believing it?”
“Both are reprehensible,” replied Monseigneur Capel; and, bowing stiffly, he went his way, while Florence shrugged his shoulders a la his own fascinating creation of Jules Obenreizer in “No Thoroughfare,” and walked off in the opposite direction, whistling to himself as he walked.
Florence delighted in companionship and in the good things and good stories of the table, whether at a noon breakfast which lasted well through the afternoon or at the midnight supper which knew no hour for breaking up, and he never came to Chicago that we did not accommodate our convenience to his late hours for breakfast or supper. Nothing short of a concealed stenographer could have done these gatherings justice. Mr. Stone footed the bills, and Field, Florence, Edward J. McPhelim of the Chicago Tribune, poet and dramatic critic, and three or four others of the Daily News staff did the rest. The eating was good, although the dishes were sometimes weird, the company was better, the stories, anecdotes, reminiscences, songs, and flow of soul beyond compare. Field, who ate sparingly and touched liquor not at all, unless it was to pass a connoisseurs judgment upon some novel, strange, and rare brand, divided the honors of the hour with the entire company.
In acknowledgment of such attentions, Florence always insisted that before the close of his engagements we should all be his guests at a regular Italian luncheon of spaghetti at Caproni’s, down on Wabash Avenue. It is needless to say that the spaghetti was merely the central dish, around which revolved and was devoured every delicacy that Florence had ever heard of in his Italian itinerary, the whole washed down with strange wines from the same sunny land. Florence’s fondness for this sort of thing gave zest to a story Field told of his friend’s experience in London, in the summer of 1890. The epicurean actor had made an excursion up the Thames with a select party of English clubmen. Two days later Florence was still abed at Morley’s, and, as he said, contemplated staying there forever. Sir Morell Mackenzie was called to see him. After sounding his lungs, listening to his heart, thumping his chest and back, looking at his tongue, and testing his breath with medicated paper, Sir Morell said:
“As near as I can get at it, you are a victim of misplaced confidence. You have been training with the young bucks when you should have been ploughing around with the old stags. You must quit it. Otherwise it will do you up.”
“Well now,” said Florence, as related by Field, “that was the saddest day of my life. Just think of shutting down on the boys, after being one of them for sixty years! But Sir Morell told the truth. The Garrick Club boys were terribly mad about it; they said Sir Morell was a quack, and they adopted resolutions declaring a lack of confidence in his medical skill. But my mind was made up. ‘Billy,’ says I to myself, ‘you must let up, you’ve made a record; it’s a long one and an honorable one. Now you must retire. Your life henceforth shall be reminiscent and its declining years shall be hallowed by the refulgent rays of retrospection.’ To that resolution I have adhered steadily. People tell me that I am as young as ever; but no, they can’t fool me, I know better.”
[Illustration: WILLIAM J. FLORENCE.]
Whereupon, according to Field, “Joe” Jefferson broke in incredulously: “Just to illustrate the folly of all that talk, I’ll tell you what I saw last night. When I returned to the hotel, after the play, I went up to Billy’s room and found Billy and the President of the Philadelphia Catnip Club at supper. What do you suppose they had? Stewed terrapin and frapped champagne!”
“That’s all right enough,” exclaimed Mr. Florence. “Terrapin and champagne never hurt anybody; I have had ’em all my life. What I maintain is that people of my age should not and cannot indulge in extravagance of diet. The utmost simplicity must be the rule of their life. If Joe would only eat terrapin and drink champagne he wouldn’t be grunting around with dyspepsia all the time. He lives on boiled mutton and graham bread, and the public call him ‘the reverend veteran Joseph Jefferson.’ I stick to terrapin, green turtle, canvasbacks, and the like, and every young chap in the land slaps me on the back, calls me Billy, and regards me as a contemporary. But I ain’t; I’m getting old–not too old, but just old enough!”
A dozen years with the boys had done for Field’s digestion what the robust Florence was dreading after sixty, and to the day of his death, Field, from the rigid practice of his self-denial, pitied and sympathized with the unhappy wight who had received the warning given to Florence, “You must quit training with the boys, otherwise it will do you up.” But he had no more obeyed the warning as to coffee and pie than Florence did as to the injunction of Sir Morell against terrapin and champagne.
[Illustration: COMMODORE CRANE.
_From a drawing by Eugene Field._]
Another “Billy,” William H. Crane, was one of Field’s favorites, and the one with whose name he took the greatest liberties in his column of “Sharps and Flats.” His waggish mind found no end of humor in creating a son for Mr. Crane, who was christened after his father’s stage partner, Stuart Robson Crane. This child of Field’s sardonic fancy was gifted with all the roguish attributes that are the delight and despair of fond parents. Scarcely a month, sometimes hardly a week, went by that Field did not print some yarn about the sayings or doings of the obstreperous Stuart Robson Crane. Every anecdote that he heard he adapted to the years and supposed circumstances of “Master Crane.” The close relations which existed between Field and the Cranes–for he included Mrs. Crane within the inner circle of his good-fellowship–may be judged from the following tribute:
_MRS. BILLY CRANE
A woman is a blessing, be she large or be she small, Be she wee as any midget, or as any cypress tall: And though I’m free to say I like all women folks the best, I think I like the little women better than the rest– And of all the little women I’m in love with I am fain To sing the praises of the peerless Mrs. Billy Crane.
I met this charming lady–never mind how long ago– In that prehistoric period I was reckoned quite a beau: You’d never think it of me if you chanced to see me now, With my shrunken shanks and dreary eyes and deeply furrowed brow; But I was young and chipper when I joined that brisk campaign At Utica to storm the heart of Mrs. Billy Crane.
We called her Ella in those days, as trim a little minx As ever fascinated man with coquetries, methinks! I saw her home from singing-school a million times I guess, And purred around her domicile three winters, more or less, And brought her lozenges and things–alas: ’twas all in vain– She was predestined to become a Mrs. Billy Crane!
That Mr. Billy came in smart and handsome, I’ll aver, Yet, with all his brains and beauty, he’s not good enough for her: Now, though I’m somewhat homely and in gumption quite a dolt, The quality of goodness is my best and strongest holt, And as goodness is the only human thing that doesn’t wane, I wonder she preferred to wed with Mr. Billy Crane.
Yet heaven has blessed her all these years–she’s just as blithe and gay As when the belle of Utica, and she ain’t grown old a day! Her face is just as pretty and her eyes as bright as then– Egad! their gracious magic makes me feel a boy again, And still I court (as still I were a callow, York State swain) With hecatombs of lozenges that Mrs. Billy Crane!
That she has heaps of faculty her husband can’t deny– Whenever he don’t toe the mark she knows the reason why: She handles all the moneys and receipts, which as a rule She carries around upon her arm in a famous reticule, And Billy seldom gets a cent unless he can explain The wherefores and etceteras to Mrs. Billy Crane!
Yet O ye gracious actors! with uppers on your feet, And O ye bankrupt critics! athirst for things to eat– Did you ever leave her presence all unrequited when In an hour of inspiration you struck her for a ten? No! never yet an applicant there was did not obtain A solace for his misery from Mrs. Billy Crane.
Dear little Lady-Ella! (let me call you that once more, In memory of the happy days in Utica of yore) If I could have the ordering of blessings here below, I might keep some small share myself, but most of ’em should go To you–yes, riches, happiness, and health should surely rain Upon the temporal estate of Mrs. Billy Crane!
You’re coming to Chicago in a week or two and then. In honor of that grand event, I shall blossom out again In a brand-new suit of checkered tweed and a low-cut satin vest I shall be the gaudiest spectacle in all the gorgeous West! And with a splendid coach and four I’ll meet you at the train– So don’t forget the reticule, dear Mrs. Billy Crane!_
And he may doubt, who never knew this master torment, that Field carried out his threat to appear at Crane’s “first night” with that low-cut satin vest and that speckled tweed suit, which did indeed make him a gaudy spectacle. But his solemn face gave no sign that his mixed apparel was making him the cynosure of all curious eyes.
Mr. Crane suffered from the same digestive troubles that confined Florence to terrapin and champagne and Field to coffee and pies, and so the state of his health was a constant source of paragraphic sympathy in “Sharps and Flats.” In such paragraphs the actor and President Cleveland were often represented as fellow-fishermen at Buzzard’s Bay–Crane’s summer home being at Cohasset. How they were associated is illustrated in the following casual item:
Mr. William H. Crane, the actor, is looking unusually robust this autumn. He seems to have recovered entirely from the malady which made life a burden to him for several years. He thought there was something the matter with his liver. Last July he put in a good share of his time blue-fishing with Grover Cleveland. One day they ran out of bait.
“Wonder if they’d bite at liver?” asked Crane.
“They love it,” answered Cleveland.
So without further ado Crane out with his penknife, amputated his liver, and minced it up for bait. He hasn’t had a sick day since.
By way of introduction to a few words respecting the close, quizzical, and always sincere friendship that existed between Field and Helena Modjeska, the following invention of March 29th, 1884, may serve to indicate the blithesome spirit with which he tortured facts when racketting around for something to add to the bewilderment of his readers and his own relaxation:
A letter from Mr. William H. Crane imparts some interesting gossip touching the Cincinnati dramatic festival. It says that an agreeable surprise awaits the patrons of the festival in an interchange of parts between Madame Modjeska and Mr. Stuart Robson, the comedian; that is to say, Modjeska will take Mr. Robson’s place in the “Two Dromios,” and Robson will take Madame Modjeska’s place in the great emotional play of “Camille.” It is well known that Modjeska has a penchant for masculine roles, and her success as Rosalind and Viola leaves no room for doubt that she will give great satisfaction in the “Comedy of Errors.” Mr. Robson has never liked female roles, but his falsetto voice, his slender figure, his smooth, rosy face, and his graceful, effeminate manners qualify him to a remarkable degree for the impersonation of feminine characters. Moreover, his long residence in Paris has given him a thorough appreciation and elaborate knowledge of those characteristics, which must be understood ere one can delineate and portray the subtleties of Camille as they should be given. Those who anticipate a farcical treatment of Dumas’s creation at Mr. Robson’s hands will be most wofully surprised when they come to witness and hear his artistic presentation of the most remarkable of emotional roles.
[Illustration: MODJESKA.]
Elsewhere I have referred to the roguish pleasure Field took in ascribing the authorship of “The Wanderer” to Helena Modjeska. That was before he came to Chicago, and seemed to be the overture to a friendship that continued to exchange its favors and tokens of affection to the close of his life. The doings of the Madame and Count Bozenta, her always vivacious and enjoyable husband, were perennial subjects for Field’s kindliest paragraphs. As he says, he was a great theatre-goer, but Field became a constant one when “Modjesky” came to town. Her Camille–a character in which she was not excelled by the great Bernhardt herself–had a remarkable vogue in the early eighties. She imparted to its impersonation the subtle charm of her own sweet womanliness, which served to excuse Armand’s infatuation and as far as possible lifted the play out of its unwholesome atmosphere of French immorality to the plane of romantic devotion and self-sacrifice. Her Camille seemed a victim of remorseless destiny, a pure soul struggling amid inexorable circumstances that racked and cajoled a diseased and suffering body into the maelstrom of sin.
Field was so constituted that, without this saving grace of womanliness, the presentation of Camille, with all its hectic surroundings, would have repelled him. He did not care to see Mademoiselle Bernhardt a second time in the role, and he fled from the powerful and fascinating portrayal of pulmonary emotion which initiated the audiences of Clara Morris into the terrors of tubercular disease. Night after night, when Modjeska played Camille, Field would occupy a front seat or a box. When so seated that his presence could not be overlooked from the stage, he was wont to divert Camille from her woes with the by-play of his mobile features. Wherever he sat, his large, white, solemn visage had a fascination for Madame Modjeska, and from the time she caught sight of it until Camille settled back lifeless in the final scene, she played “at him.” He repaid this tribute by distorting his face in agony when Camille was light-hearted, and by breaking into noiseless merriment as her woes were causing handkerchiefs to flutter throughout the audience. When we went to visit her next day, as we often did, she scarcely ever failed to reproach him in some such fashion as: “Ah, Meester Fielt, why will you seet in the box and talk with your overcoat on the chair to make Camille laugh who is dying on the stage? Ah, Meester Fielt, you are a very bad man, but I lof you, don’t we, Charlie?” And the count always stopped rolling a cigarette long enough to acknowledge that Field was their dearest friend and that they both loved him, no matter what he did. Next to his wife, the count was devoted to politics, which he discusses with all the warmth and gesticulations of a Frenchman and the intelligence of a Polish-American patriot.
[Illustration: FIELD WITNESSING MODJESKA AS CAMILLE. _From a drawing by Eugene Field._]
If there were any other visitors present, Modjeska always insisted on Field’s giving his imitation of herself in Camille, in which he rendered her lines with exaggerated theatrical sentiment and with the broken-English accent, such as Modjeska permitted herself in the freedom of private life. She would give him Armand’s cues for particular speeches and his impassioned “Armo, I lof, I lof you!” never failed to convulse her, while his pulmonary cough was so deep and sepulchral that it rang through the hotel corridors, making other guests think that Modjeska herself was in the last stages of a disease she simulated unto death nightly. After Field had added colored inks to his stock in trade, these fits of coughing were succeeded by a handkerchief act, in which the dying Camille appeared to spit blood in carmine splotches. No burlesque that I have seen of a play frequently burlesqued ever approached the side-splitting absurdity of these rehearsals for the benefit of the heroine of “Modjesky as Cameel.”
_An’, while Modjesky stated we wuz somewhat off our base, I half opined she liked it by the look upon her face, I rekollect that Hoover regretted he done wrong In throwin’ that there actor through a vista ten miles long._
When Field went to California in search of health, in the winter of 1893-94, Madame Modjeska placed her ranch, located ten miles from the railway, half-way between San Diego and Los Angeles, at his disposal. The ranch contained about a thousand acres, and he was given carte blanche to treat it as his own during his stay–a privilege he would have hastened to invite all his friends to share had his health been equal to the opportunity to indulge in merry-making.
[Illustration: TWO PROFILES OF EUGENE FIELD. _The upper one drawn in pencil by Field himself; the lower one by Modjeska. Reproduced from a fly-leaf of Mrs. Thompson’s volume of autograph verse._]
At a breakfast given to Modjeska at Kinsley’s, April 22d, 1886, Field read the following poem in honor of the guest:
_TO HELENA MODJESKA
In thy sweet self, dear lady guest, we find Juliet’s dark face, Viola’s gentle mien, The dignity of Scotland’s martyr’d queen– The beauty and the wit of Rosalind.
What wonder, then, that we who mop our eyes And sob and gush when we should criticise–
Charmed by the graces of your mien and mind– What wonder we should hasten to proclaim The art that has secured thy deathless fame? And this we swear: We will endorse no name But thine alone to old Melpomene,
Nor will revolve, since rising sons are we, Round any orb, save, dear Modjeska, thee Who art our Pole star, and will ever be._
As originally written by Field, the rhymes in the first four lines of this tribute fell alternately, the lines being transposed so that they ran in order first, third, fourth, and second of the poem as it appears above. For the fifth and sixth lines of his first version Field wrote:
_What wonder, then, that we who mop our eyes When we are hired to rail and criticise?_
It is a question the reader can decide for himself whether his second thought was an improvement. His original intention contemplated a longer poem, but after he had written a fourteenth line that read:
_The radiant Pole star of the mimic stage–_
Field concluded to wind it up with the fourteenth line, as in the finished version.
Upon the back of the original manuscript of these lines to Madame Modjeska I find this Sapphic fragment under the line–suggestive of its subject, “The Things of Life”:
_A little sour, a little sweet,
Fill out our brief and human hour, meet_
He never filled out the blank or gave a clue as to what further reflections on the springs of life were in his mind.
I never knew Field to be as infatuated with any stage production as with the first performance of the pirated edition of “The Mikado” in Chicago, in the summer of 1885. The cast was indeed a memorable one, including Roland Reed as Koko, Alice Harrison as Yum-Yum, Belle Archer as Pitti-Sing, Frederick Archer as Pooh-Bah, George Broderick as the Mikado, and Mrs. Broderick as Katisha. The Brodericks had rich church-choir voices, Belle Archer was a beauty of that fresh, innocent type that did one’s eyes good simply to look upon, and she was just emerging into a career that grew in popularity until her untimely death. Archer was a stilted English comedian who seemed built to be “insulted” as Pooh-Bah, while Roland Reed and Miss Harrison were two comedians of the first rank. As a singing soubrette, daring, versatile, and popular, Miss Harrison had no superiors in her day. The entire company was saturated with the spirit and “go” of Gilbert, and fairly tingled with the joyous music of Sullivan. The fact that the production was of a pirated version, untrammelled by the oversight of D’Oyley Carte, added zest to the performance and enlisted Field’s partisan sympathy and co-operation from the start. He enjoyed each night’s performance with all the relish of a boy eating the apples of pleasure from a forbidden orchard. When the season came to an end, as all good things must, Field, Ballantyne, and I went to Milwaukee to see that our friends had a fair start there. We got back to Chicago on the early morning milk train, and in “Sharps and Flats” the next day Field recorded the definitive judgment that “Miss Alice Harrison, in her performance of Yum-Yum in Gilbert and Sullivan’s new opera of ‘The Mikado,’ has set the standard of that interesting role, and it is a high one. In fact, we doubt whether it will ever be approached by any other artist on the American stage.”
It never has been approached, nor has the opera, so far as my information goes, ever been given with the same Gilbertian verve and swing. The subsequent performance of “The Mikado” by the authorized company, seen throughout the United States, seemed by comparison “like water after wine.”
On the operatic stage Madame Sembrich was by all odds Field’s favorite prima donna. He was one of the earliest writers on the press to recognize the wonderful beauty of the singer’s voice and the perfection of her method. He easily distinguished between her trained faculty and the bird-like notes of Patti, but the personality of the former won him, where he remained unmoved when Patti’s wonderful voice rippled through the most difficult, florid music like crystal running water over the smooth stones of a mountain brook. Field’s admiration for Sembrich often found expression in more conventional phrases, but never in a form that better illustrated how she attracted him than in the following amusing comment on her appearance in Chicago, January 24th, 1884, in Lucia:
It is not at all surprising that Madame Sembrich caught on so grandly night before last. She is the most comfortable-looking prima donna that has ever visited Chicago. She is one of your square-built, stout-rigged little ladies with a bright, honest face and bouncing manners. Her arms are long but shapely, and in the last act of Lucia her luxurious black hair tumbles down and envelopes her like a mosquito net. Her audience night before last was a coldly critical one, of course, and it sat like a bump on a log until Sembrich made her appearance in the mad scene, where Lucheer gives her vocal circus in the presence of twenty-five Scotch ladies in red, white, and green dresses, and twenty-five supposititious Scotch gentlemen in costumes of the Court of Louis XIV. Instead of sending for a doctor to assist Lucheer in her trouble, these fantastically attired ladies and gentlemen stand around and look dreary while Lucheer does ground and lofty tumbling, and executes pirouettes and trapeze performances in the vocal art.
Then the audience began to wake up. The comfortable-looking little prima donna gathered herself together and let loose the cyclone of her genius and accomplishments. It was a whirlwind of appoggiaturas, semi-quavers, accenturas, rinforzandos, moderatos, prestos, trills, sforzandos, fortes, rallentandos, supertonics, salterellos, sonatas, ensembles, pianissimos, staccatos, accellerandos, quasi-innocents, cadenzas, symphones, cavatinas, arias, counter-points, fiorituras, tonics, sub-medicants, allegrissimos, chromatics, concertos, andantes, etudes, larghettos, adagios, and every variety of turilural and dingus known to the minstrel art. The audience was paralyzed. When she finally struck up high F sharp in the descending fourth of D in alt, one gentleman from the South Side who had hired a dress-coat for the occasion broke forth in a hearty “Brava!” This encouraged a resident of the North Side to shout “Bravissimo,” and then several dudes from the Blue Island district raised the cry of “Bong,” “Tray beang,” and “Brava!”
The applause became universal–it spread like wild-fire. The vast audience seemed crazed with delight and enthusiasm. And it argues volumes for the culture of our enterprising and fair city that not one word of English was heard among the encouraging and approving shouts that were hurled at the smiling prima donna. Even the pork merchants and the grain dealers in the family circle vied with each other in hoarsely wafting Italian words of cheer at the triumphant Sembrich. French was hardly good enough, although it was utilized by a few large manufacturers and butterine merchants who sat in the parquet, and one man was put out by the ushers because he so far forgot himself and the eclat of the occasion as to shout in vehement German: “Mein Gott in himmel–das ist ver tampt goot!” It was an ovation, but it was no more than Sembrich deserved–bless her fat little buttons!
Remember, this was nearly twenty years ago. It argues much for the saneness of Field’s enthusiasm, as well as for the perfection of Madame Sembrich’s methods, that she is still able to arouse a like enthusiasm in audiences where true dramatic instinct and high vocal art are valued as the rarest combination on the operatic stage.
Two manuscript poems in my scrap-book testify that another songster, early in Field’s Chicago life, enjoyed his friendship and inspired his pen along a line it was to travel many a tuneful metre. The first, with frequent erasures and interlineations, bears date May 25th, 1894, and was inscribed, “To Mrs. Will J. Davis.” It runs as follows:
_A HUSHABY SONG
The stars are twinkling in the skies, The earth is lost in slumber deep–
So hush, my sweet, and close your eyes And let me lull your soul to sleep;
Compose thy dimpled hands to rest, And like a little birdling lie
Secure within thy cosy nest
Upon my mother breast
And slumber to my lullaby;
So hushaby, oh, hushaby.
The moon is singing to the star