Read Ebook: McClure's Magazine Vol 31 No 2 June 1908 by Various

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McCLURE'S MAGAZINE

MY FIRST APPEARANCE IN AMERICA THE DECREE MADE ABSOLUTE PRESIDENT JOHNSON AND HIS WAR ON CONGRESS THE CRYSTAL-GAZER BOB, D?BUTANT TWO PORTRAITS BY GILBERT STUART MARY BAKER G. EDDY HER FRUITS THE KEY TO THE DOOR THE WAYFARERS THE PROBLEMS OF SUICIDE PRAIRIE DAWN THE DOINGS OF THE DEVIL YOUNG HENRY AND THE OLD MAN EDITORIAL

Transcriber's Note: The Table of Contents was added by the transcriber.

MY FIRST APPEARANCE IN AMERICA

ELLEN TERRY

The first time that there was any talk of my going to America was, I think, in 1874, when I was playing in "The Wandering Heir." Dion Boucicault wanted me to go, and dazzled me with figures, but I expect the cautious Charles Reade influenced me against accepting the engagement.

When I did go, in 1883, I was thirty-five and had an assured position in my profession. It was the first of eight tours, seven of which I went with Henry Irving. The last was in 1907, after his death. I also went to America one summer on a pleasure trip. The tours lasted three months at least, seven months at most. After a rough calculation, I find that I have spent not quite five years of my life in America. Five out of sixty is not a large proportion, yet I often feel that I am half American. This says a good deal for the hospitality of a people who can make a stranger feel so completely at home in their midst. Perhaps it also says something for my adaptableness!

"When we do not speak of things with a partiality full of love, what we say is not worth being repeated." That was the answer of a courteous Frenchman, who was asked for his impressions of a country. In any case it is almost imprudent to give one's impressions of America. The country is so vast and complex that even those who have amassed mountains of impressions soon find that there still are mountains more. I have lived in New York, Boston, and Chicago for a month at a time, and have felt that to know any of these great towns even superficially would take a year. I have become acquainted with this and that class of Americans, but I realize that there are thousands of other classes that remain unknown.

My first voyage was a voyage of enchantment to me. The ship was laden with pig-iron, but she rolled and rolled and rolled. She could never roll too much for me. I have always been a splendid sailor, and I feel jolly at sea. The sudden leap from home into the wilderness of waves does not give me any sensation of melancholy.

What I thought I was going to see when I arrived in America, I hardly remember. I had a vague idea that all American women wore red flannel shirts and bowie knives and that I might be sandbagged in the street! From somewhere or other I had derived an impression that New York was an ugly, noisy place.

Ugly! When I first saw that marvellous harbour I nearly cried--it was so beautiful. Whenever I come now to the unequalled approach to New York I wonder what Americans must think of the approach from the sea to London. How different are the mean, flat, marshy banks of the Thames, and the wooden toy light-house at Dungeness, to the vast, spreading harbour, with its busy multitude of steam boats and ferry boats, its wharf upon wharf, and its tall statue of Liberty dominating all the racket and bustle of the sea traffic of the world!

That was one of the few times in America when I did not miss the poetry of the past. The poetry of the present, gigantic, colossal, and enormous, made me forget it. The "sky-scrapers," so splendid in the landscape now, did not exist in 1883; but I find it difficult to divide my early impressions from my later ones. There was Brooklyn Bridge, though, hung up high in the air like a vast spider's web. Between 1883 and 1893 I noticed a great change in New York and other cities. In ten years they seemed to have grown with the energy of tropical plants. But between 1893 and 1907 I saw no evidence of such feverish increase. It is possible that the Americans are arriving at a stage when they can no longer beat the record! There is a vast difference between one of the old New York brownstone houses and one of the fourteen-storied buildings near the river, but between this and the Times Square Building or the still more amazing Flatiron Building, which is said to oscillate at the top--it is so far from the ground--there is very little difference. I hear that they are now beginning to build downwards into the earth, but this will not change the appearance of New York for a long time.

I had not to endure the wooden shed in which most people landing in America have to struggle with the custom-house officials--a struggle as brutal as a "round in the ring" as Paul Bourget describes it. We were taken off the "Britannic" in a tug, and Mr. Abbey, Lawrence Barrett, and many other friends met us--including the much-dreaded reporters.

London, when I come back from America, always seems at first like an ill-lighted village, strangely tame, peaceful, and backward. Above all, I miss the sunlight of America, and the clear blue skies of an evening.

"Are you glad to get back?" said an English friend.

"Very."

"It's a land of vulgarity, isn't it?"

It is sad to remember that Mr. Stanford White was one of the best of these splendid architects. It was Stanford White with Saint-Gaudens, that great sculptor, whose work dignifies nearly all the great cities in America, who had most to do with the Exhibition buildings of the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893. It was odd to see that fair dream city rising out of the lake, so far more beautiful in its fleeting loveliness than the Chicago of the stock-yards and the pit which had provided the money for its beauty. The millionaires did not interfere with the artists at all. They gave their thousands--and stood aside. The result was one of the loveliest things conceivable. Saint-Gaudens and the rest did their work as well as though the buildings were to endure for centuries instead of being burned in a year to save the trouble of pulling down! The World's Fair recalled to me the story of how Michelangelo carved a figure in snow which, says the chronicler Vasari who saw it, "was superb."

It must have been very irritating to Saint-Gaudens when he fell a victim to that extraordinary official Puritanism which sometimes exercises a petty censorship over works of art in America. The medal that he made for the World's Fair was rejected at Washington because it had on it a beautiful little nude figure of a boy--holding an olive branch--emblematical of young America. I think a commonplace wreath and some lettering were substituted.

Saint-Gaudens did the fine bas-relief of Robert Louis Stevenson which was chosen for the monument in St. Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh. He gave my daughter a medallion cast from this, because he knew that she was a great lover of Stevenson. The bas-relief was dedicated to his friend, Joe Evans. I knew Saint-Gaudens first through Joe Evans, an artist who, while he lived, was to me and to my daughter the dearest of all in America. His character was so fine and noble--his nature so perfect. Many were the birthday cards he did for me, original in design, beautiful in execution. Whatever he did, he put the best of himself into it. I wrote this in my diary the year he died:

"I heard on Saturday that our dear Joe Evans is dangerously ill. Yesterday came the worst news. Joe was not happy, but he was just heroic, and this world wasn't half good enough for him. I wonder if he has gone to a better. I keep on getting letters about him. He seems to have been so glad to die. It was like a child's funeral, I am told, and all his American friends seem to have been there--Saint-Gaudens, Taber, etc. A poem about the dear fellow by Mr. Gilder has one very good line in which he says the grave 'might snatch a brightness from his presence there.' I thought that was very happy, the love of light and gladness being the most remarkable thing about him, the dear sad Joe."

Robert Taber, dear, and rather sad too, was a great friend of Joe's. They both came to me first in the shape of a little book in which was inscribed: "Never anything can be amiss when simpleness and duty tender it." "Upon this hint I spake," the book began. It was all the work of a few boys and girls who from the gallery of the Star Theatre, New York, had watched Irving's productions and learned to love him and me. Joe Evans had done a lovely picture by way of frontispiece of a group of eager heads hanging over the gallery's edge, his own and Taber's among them. Eventually Taber came to England and acted with Henry Irving in "Peter the Great" and other plays.

Like his friend Joe, he too was heroic. His health was bad and his life none too happy--but he struggled on. His career was cut short by consumption and he died in the Adirondacks in 1904.

"Wherein does the superiority lie?" wrote another critic in comparing our productions with those which had been seen in America up to 1884. "Not in the amount of money expended, but in the amount of brains; in the artistic intelligence and careful and earnest pains with which every detail is studied and worked out. Nor is there any reason why Mr. Irving or any other foreigner should have a monopoly of either intelligence or pains. They are common property and one man's money can buy them as well as another's. The defect in the American manager's policy heretofore has been that he has squandered his money upon high salaries for a few of his actors; and in costly, because unintelligent, expenditure for mere dazzle and show."

His children came to stay with me in London. When we were all coming home from the theatre one night after Faust , I said to little Willie:

"Well, what do you think of the play?"

"Oh my!" said he, "it takes the cake."

"Won't you give me a kiss?" said Henry to the same little girl one night.

At the Washington house, the servants danced a cake-walk for me--the coloured cook, a magnificent type, who "took the cake," saying, "That was because I chose a good handsome boy to dance with, Missie." They sang, too. Their voices were beautiful--with such illimitable power, yet as sweet as treacle.

The little page boy had a pet of a woolly head--Henry once gave him a tip, a "fee," in American-English, and said: "There, that's for a new wig when this one is worn out," gently pulling the astrakhan-like hair. The tip would have bought him many wigs, I think!

"Why, Uncle Tom, how your face shines to-night!" said my hostess to one of the very old servants.

"Yes, Missie, glycerine and rose-water, Missie!"

He had taken some from her dressing-table to shine up his face in honour of me! A shiny complexion is considered to be a great beauty among the blacks. The dear old man! He was very bent and very old; and looked like one of the logs that he used to bring in for the fire--a log from some hoary, lichened tree whose life was long since past. He would produce pins from his head when you wanted one; he had them stuck in his pad of white woolly hair. "Always handy then, Missie," he would say.

"Ask them to sing 'Sweet Violets,' Uncle Tom."

He was acting as a sort of master of the ceremonies at the entertainment the servants were giving me.

"Don't think they know dat, Miss Olly."

"Why I heard them singing it the other night!" And she hummed the tune.

Washington was the first city I had seen in America where the people did not hurry, and where the social life did not seem entirely the work of women. The men asserted themselves here as something more than machines in the background, untiringly turning out the dollars while their wives and daughters give luncheons and teas at which only women are present.

There! I am beginning to generalize--the very thing I was resolute to avoid. How silly to generalize about a country which embraces such extremes of climate as the sharp winters of Boston and New York, and the warm winds of Florida which blow through palms and orange groves!

THE DECREE MADE ABSOLUTE

BY MARIE BELLOC LOWNDES

James Tapster was eating his solitary, well-cooked dinner in his comfortable and handsome house, a house situated in one of the half-moon terraces which line and frame the more aristocratic side of Regent's Park, and which may, indeed, be said to have private grounds of their own, for each resident enjoys the use of a key to a portion of the Park entitled locally the "Inclosure."

Very early in his life Mr. Tapster had made up his mind that he would like to live in Cumberland Crescent, and now he was living there; very early in his life he had decided that no one could order a plain yet palatable meal as well as he could himself, and now for some months past Mr. Tapster had given his own orders, each morning, to the cook.

To-night Mr. Tapster had already eaten his fried sole, and was about to cut himself off a generous portion of the grilled undercut before him, when he heard the postman's steps hurrying around the Crescent. He rose with a certain quick deliberateness, and, going out into the hall, opened the front door just in time to avoid the rat-tat-tat. Then, the one letter he had expected duly in his hand, he waited till he had sat down again in front of his still empty plate before he broke the seal and glanced over the type-written sheet of note-paper:

SHORTERS COURT, THROGMORTON ST. November 4, 190-.

DEAR JAMES:

In reply to your letter of yesterday's date, I have been to Bedford Row and seen Greenfield, and he thinks it probable that the Decree will be made Absolute to-day; in that case you will have received a wire before this letter reaches you.

Your affect' brother, WM. A. TAPSTER.

In the same handwriting as the signature were added two holograph lines: "Glad you have the children home again. Maud will be round to see them soon."

Mr. Tapster read over once again the body of the letter, and there came upon him an instinctive feeling of intense relief; then, with a not less instinctive feeling of impatience, his eyes traveled down again to the postscript: "Maud will be round to see them soon." Well, he would see about that! But he did not exclaim, even mentally, as most men feeling as he then felt would have done, "I'll be damned if she will!" knowing the while that Maud certainly would.

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