"HE GRINNED AND WINKED AND FRISKED AND CAPERED"
He was so nervous, this old actor of a thousand parts, that he could eat no supper that night. He almost trotted to the gymnasium in his excitement, and, though his pockets bulged with grease paint, mustaches, wigs, and other paraphernalia, he forgot almost half of his material. At the door he had to push his way through a wriggling, impish mass of small boys who blocked the steps and the sidewalk. Inside the hall, young faces packed the place to the window-sills. To the old man the newsboys seemed as so many antagonistic bits of the younger generation, the generation which evidently would have none of him, which relegated him carelessly to the warehouse for old scenery and old settings.
He stood in dismay behind an extemporized "wing" and peered out at the restless little bodies. He fancied already that he could see grins on their sophisticated faces, ridicule in their eyes; he remembered once hearing a gallery god shout "Twenty-three!" in the middle of an actor's monologue, and what had then seemed humorous precocity now seemed hard, bitter cruelty. He fumbled at his make-up in his pockets, shuffled uneasily, and waited.
It was almost time to begin. Where were the other actors who had promised to come? The boys out front were whistling, kicking their feet upon the floor, clapping their hands, and shouting to one another. A distracted official raced here and there among other officials, asking some sort of exasperated question. Barnes could not hear what it was; but telepathically he felt that there was a hitch in the program.
At last, after waiting a quarter of an hour, the manager stepped forward and said:
"Boys, we had arranged a fine program for you to-night——"
"Good fer you!" yelled a voice.
The speaker held up his hand. "But it seems that actors are better promisers than they are actors." He smiled at his own joke, but the audience gave one long "Aw-w-w!"
"However," he continued, "we are all here now and we intend to do the best we can. If we make up our mind to, we can have a bully good time just the same. We have with us at least one kind gentleman who appreciates what a celebration like this means to the boys." ... Barnes heard and saw things as if through a fog. The arms of the speaker were gyrating and a voice shouted in the ear of the old actor: "What's your name?"
"Harry Barnes," he said, moistening his lips. Nobody had shown up except him, he kept thinking over and over to himself: nobody except him. He had the thankless job of "opening the show."
"... Harry Barnes," echoed the speaker at the end of some sort of practical talk concerning the newsboys' organization and its management. "Mister Harry Barnes"—he squinted at the program—"in singing and talking."
He turned and smiled at the old man, and to Barnes the smile seemed diabolical. Somebody clapped him on the back. There was a hurricane of whistles and shouts, and before he knew it he was in the middle of the rostrum.
Mechanically he had made his old comic entrance, tripping his right toe over his left heel, and turning to shake his fist at an imaginary enemy. The boys, determined to be pleased, giggled appreciatively.
"How—how are you, boys?" Barnes asked, seriously.
The audience snickered with delight. He was such a funny-looking old man!
"I hope you'll like my work," he went on, desperately, "or else we might as well go home. I guess I'm the whole show, for a little while, at least, as the feller said when he fell out o' the balloon." The house roared with approval.
"Go wan, Barnesy," shouted a young pair of lungs in the front row.
He straightened up, turned his back for a moment, stuck a queer set of mustaches on his upper lip, faced the crowd again, and began: "I was walkin' down the street the other day when my friend J. Pierpoint Morgan stepped up to me an' says, 'Barney, my boy'"....
The show had begun. Harry Barnes, singing and talking, had opened his carefully rehearsed bag of tricks.
There is some peculiar psychology about humor. If people make up their minds that they are going to laugh and that a performance is bound to be funny, nothing on earth can keep them from enjoying themselves. The most serious remark will be greeted with howls of approval; the most ancient joke takes on a novel and present sprightliness. In the slang of the stage, Barnes' line of patter took.
Four hundred boys simpered, smirked, grinned, giggled, tittered, chuckled, and guffawed. A wine of merriment flushed the crowd and mounted to the old mummer's brain and heart. He skipped and danced and sang; he went through all the drollery and tomfoolery, all the old comic business he could recall.
The children nudged each other, dug their fists into each other, and cheered: "Oh, you Barnesy!" "Kill it, Kid!" "Whatcha know about dat!" "Sand it down, Barnesy!" The old-timer was doing the famous lock-step jig he had done with Pat Rooney in "Patrice" fifteen or twenty years before. It was so old that it was new. Encore followed encore. The perspiration cascaded through his pores; he grinned and winked and frisked and capered. They would not let him stop. At the end of twenty-five minutes he bowed himself off the stage, and still they called him back. When he gave them, for the "call," the Little Johnny Dugan pantomime from "The Rainmakers," the East Side children, born since the day of such things, were suffocated with delight.
What did Dugan do to him?
—They say he was untrue to him.
Did Dugan owe him money?
—No; he stole McCarthy's wife!
Who? Little Johnny Dugan?
sang Barnes with a quizzical flirt of his head; and lungs that were wont to fill the city streets with news could not even gasp for laughter.
The secretary of the organization followed with a speech about future entertainments; another official read a letter from a prominent financier promising the boys a swimming-pool and a half dozen summer excursions.
"Somebody bang de box!" suggested a voice, after a pause.
Nobody could—except Barnes; and he volunteered. The whole affair was now like one big family circle, each one secure in the amity of the other, and when the old man sat down at the cracked piano, he sang as if he were singing to himself, easily and without restraint. A quiet held the house, and even the children were touched; for Harry Barnes was quavering through the simple lines of "Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot." After that he gave them the Lullaby Song from "Erminie," and somehow it did not at all appear incongruous that a careworn mimic of fifty should be singing to careworn workingmen of ten, down on the Bowery, in a gymnasium, a verse about pretty little eyelids and sleeping darlings. The world, fortunately, is not always with us; and the song ended in a silent applause.
For two hours the entertainment went on, speeches and official plans interspersed with the antics of Barnes.
