SOME REMARKABLE FALLS AND NARROW ESCAPES OF FAMOUS ATHLETES
AS we finished our talk, Mr. Potter asked me to call some evening at their rooms, on Tenth Street, and see a family of trapeze performers in private life. I was glad to accept this invitation, and looked in upon them a day or two later. Like the other figures in these studies of thrilling lives, they presented a modest, simple picture in their home circle. There is nothing in the externals of lion-tamers, steeple-climbers, divers, balloonists, or gymnasts to betray their unusual calling. Nor is there any heroic sign in eye or voice or bearing. They are plain, unpretentious folk, for the most part, who do these things and say little about them.
In one room were Tom and Royetta playing checkers, while Clarence, the "kid," weary, no doubt, from the morning's practice, lay on a bed storing up resistance against the next day's shoots and twisters. In a room adjoining were Mr. Potter himself and Mrs. Potter enjoying the call of a lady acrobat, one of the famed Livingstons, trick bicyclists.
I asked Mrs. Potter if she had ever been afraid, and she shook her head. Never once, not even at Chicago, in the perilous toe swing, when even the other gymnasts told her she would certainly be killed. She knew her husband would hold her safe, and she really enjoyed that toe swing more than any act they ever did.
"I'll tell you this, though," she admitted, "I would be afraid to do these things with any one except my husband."
"Yes, and I'd be afraid to have her," added Potter. "Why, down in Mexico, when I broke my ribs, there was a man—a fine gymnast, too—who offered to take my place so we wouldn't lose our salary, but every time I saw him practice with my wife it made me so nervous I called it off and let the salary go."
In spite of these manifest hazards, Potter insists that there is no healthier life than a gymnast leads. "We never are ill," he said, "we never take cold, we travel through all sorts of fever-stricken countries and never catch anything, and we always feel good. Look at that boy of mine! He's seventeen years old, and he's got a chest on him like a man. Thirty-eight inches is what it measures. Why, I can't find a coat that'll fit him."
He went on to point out some plain advantages, in addition to health, that ordinary citizens might derive from a moderate knowledge of trapeze work. In a fire, for instance, a man so trained would have little difficulty in saving himself and others by climbing and swinging. And firemen themselves would double their efficiency by regular practice on high bars.
Again, in case of a runaway, a man familiar with the trapeze knows how and when to spring for the bridle of a plunging horse. Or should he find himself almost under the wheels of a trolley-car, he could leap for the platform rail and swing up to safety.
"I'll give you a case," said Potter, "where the training we get helped a good deal. It was a season when I was working with the Barnum outfit; we were showing in the East, and during the hippodrome races a little girl got away from her people somehow, and the first thing anybody knew, there she was out on the track, with three four-horse chariots not a hundred feet off, and coming on a dead run. As the crowd saw the child they gave a great 'Uff' in fear, and lots of women screamed. It wasn't in human power to stop those horses, and it seemed as if the little tot must be killed.
"She was about half-way across the track when I started for her. Lots of men would have started just as I did, but very few would have gone at just the right angle to save her. Most men would have tried to run straight across, but I was sure the horses would trample me and the child, too, if I tried that. So I took her on a slant, running across and away from the horses, and I caught her little body as a gymnast knows how, didn't waste any time at it, and then—hoo!—we were over, with the breath of those horses on our necks. If it hadn't been for the practice I've had judging time and distance, we'd both have been killed that trip."
I come now to another occasion when I spent two profitable hours with the St. Belmos, husband and wife, who for years past and in many parts of the world have appeared in a trapeze act that calls for the greatest nerve and precision of movement. As a climax to this act, St. Belmo makes a leap and swing of forty feet over his audience, springing head first through a circle of knives and fire that barely lets his body pass, then catching a suspended trapeze that breaks away at his touch and carries him on in a long sweep, then leaping again, feet first, from this flying bar through a paper balloon, where he holds by his arms and drops swiftly thirty-five feet to the ground.
I was surprised to find the hero of this perilous feat rather the reverse of athletic in appearance. St. Belmo struck me as a pale, thin, almost sickly man. Yet I judge it would fare ill with any one who tried to impose upon him as an invalid. Over that spare form are hard, tireless muscles, and for years to come St. Belmo feels equal to leaping this obstacle of blades and flame.
Most people, I suppose, in watching this act would imagine the knives to be of wood and tinsel, but I saw that they were of steel, and sharp, heavy double-edged knives a foot long, murderous weapons made by St. Belmo himself out of old saws. And fifteen of these, with points turned inward, form the heart through which this gaunt yet rather genial gymnast shoots his way.
THROUGH A PAPER BALLOON AT THE END OF A GREAT FEAT.
I asked St. Belmo about the accidents that he had suffered. Had he ever struck the knives when leaping through? Yes, again and again. He had torn his clothes to tatters on them, and lined his body with scars. But that was years ago, when he was learning. Now he never touched the knives. He could leap through them, eyes shut, as surely as a man puts a spoon in his mouth without striking his teeth.
How about falls in the air? Well, he remembered two in particular, one at Syracuse, where he missed the trapeze because some one was careless in fastening a snap-hook that held it, and when he came through the blades and flames head first, and reached for the bar, the bar had swung away, and he plunged on smash down to the ground, and broke both legs.
"Didn't you look for the bar before you made the leap?" I questioned.
He shook his head. "I never see the bar for the dazzle of fire. I know where it must be, and leap for that place. If it isn't there, why—" He pointed down to his legs, and smiled ruefully.
He had another fall at Seattle, where he came down thirty-five feet and put both his knees out of joint, all because he was thinking of something else as he shot toward the balloon, and forgot to throw out his arms and catch in the hoop. It was exactly the case of a man who might walk over the edge of a housetop through absent-mindedness.
"Ever have a feeling of fear?" I asked.
"I don't know as you'd call it fear exactly," he began.
"Yes, it was fear, too," put in his wife, teasing. "I've seen your knees shake so up on the pedestal that you almost tumbled off."
"No wonder my knees shook," protested St. Belmo; "they've been out of joint times enough. Naturally, after an accident you feel a little queer for a while; but I'll own up there was once I felt afraid, and it wasn't long ago, either."
"I know," said his wife; "up at the Twenty-second Regiment Armory."
"That's right; it was in December. Remember when that bicycle-diver was killed? His name was Stark? Poor chap! He was a friend of ours, and we were there when it happened. You know, he got too much speed on the incline, and struck the far edge of the tank instead of the water. That was in the afternoon, and the same night we had to go on and do our act. I looked at that tank, and then I said, 'Boys, I'm leary about this, but I'm going to do my act. I'll come down somehow, boys; you watch me.' Honest, I thought I was going to be killed, but I got through all right."
Then he explained that the greatest danger in his act is neither at the knives nor at the balloon, but in the swift drop after the balloon with the hoop under his arms. This hoop, as it goes down, winds up a spring overhead that acts as a break on the fall, though a very slight one. Just before St. Belmo reaches the floor he lifts his arms above the hoop and drops through it to the ground, but he must do that at precisely the right moment, or he will suffer accident. If he drops through too soon he will strike too hard, and may break his legs. If he does not drop through soon enough, the hoop may jerk his arms out of the sockets. And in spite of this formidable alternative St. Belmo assured me that for more than a dozen years now he has made this drop continually, and never failed once.
Think of a calling that requires a man to steer perpetually, by the closest fraction of a shave, between a pair of broken legs and a pair of dislocated arms! Fancy such an alternative as part of the regular after-dinner routine! And then consider what marvelous precision must be in these bodies and minds of ours when a man can face such a hazard for years and never come to grief.