He gave one heavy sigh, and added: "I'm glad you were with me, it would have been worse alone." He pushed me gently from him. As I started down the street he called: "I'll send you word some time to-night what we're to do."
I left him to the reporters; I had not spoken one word from the moment I had begged to enter my dressing-room. I felt strangely sad and forlorn as I dropped, draggled and tired, into a chair. I said to mother: "It's gone! the only theatre in New York whose door was not barred against me, and—I—I think that at this moment I know just how a dog feels who has lost a loved master," and, dropping my face upon my hands, I wept long over the destruction of my first dramatic home in New York, the little Fifth Avenue Theatre.
CHAPTER FORTIETH
We Become "Barn-stormers," and Return to Open the New Theatre—Our Astonishing Misunderstanding of "Alixe," which Proves a Great Triumph.
My first thought on awaking the next morning was one of dismay, on recalling the destruction of the little "P.H.C."—that being the actors contraction of Mr. Daly's somewhat grandiloquent "Parlor Home of Comedy." My grief over the burning of the pretty toy theatre was very real, and I would have been an astonished young woman had anyone prophesied that for me, personally, the disaster was to prove a piece of unqualified good luck.
And, by the way, that expression "good luck" reminds me of one of the incidents of the fire. That morning, when the firemen went to the ruins to examine into the state of the standing front wall, they looked upward, and there, all alone, on the burned and blackened space, smiling down in friendly fashion upon them, was the picture of Clara Morris—a bit charred as to frame and smoky as to glass, but the photograph (one taken by Kurtz), absolutely uninjured, being the one and only thing saved from the ruins. The firemen very naturally wanted it for their engine-house, and Mr. Daly said that for it many were claiming, pleading, demanding, bartering—but all in vain. His superstition was aroused. Not for anything in the world, he cried, would he part from his "luck," as he ever after called the rescued picture. So there again appeared the malice of inanimate things, for how else could one account for the plunging of that line, the entire length of the staircase, of splendidly framed pictures of loveliness, into the fiery depths, while the plain and unimportant one kept its place in calm security?
Mr. Daly had a very expensive company on his hands. He had amazed other managers by his "corner" on leading men. With three already in his company he had not hesitated to draw on Boston for Harry Crisp, and on Philadelphia for Mr. Louis James; and when he added such names as George Clark, Daniel Harkins, George DeVere, James Lewis, William Lemoyne, William Davidge, A. Whiting, Owen Fawcett, George Parkes, F. Burnett, H. Bascombe, J. Beekman, Charles Fisher, George Gilbert, etc., one can readily understand that the salary of the men alone must have made quite an item in the week's expenses, and added to the sharp necessity of getting us to work as quickly as possible. And in actual truth the ruins of the little theatre were not yet cold when Mr. Daly had, by wire, secured a week for us, divided between Syracuse and Albany, and we were scrambling dresses together and buying new toilet articles—rouge, powders, and pomades, and transforming ourselves into "strolling players"; though, sooth to say, there was precious little "strolling" done after we started, for we were all rushing for rooms, for food, for trains, through a blizzard that was giving us plenty of delaying snow-drifts. And while the company was cheerfully "barn-storming," Mr. Daly was doing his best to find shelter for us in New York, engaging the little one-time church on Broadway. He had painters, paper-hangers, scrub-women, upholsterers, climbing over one another in their frantic efforts to do all he desired to have done in about one-half the regulation time allowed for such work; and while they toiled day and night with much noise and great demonstration of haste, he sat statue-still in a far corner, mentally reviewing every manuscript in his possession, searching eagerly for the one that most nearly answered to the needs of the moment. Namely, a play that required a strong cast of characters (he had plenty of men and women), little preparation, and scanty scenery (since he was short of both time and money). And, finding "Alixe," then known as "The Countess de Somerive," he stopped short. The action of the play covered but one day—that was promising. There were but three acts—good; but two scenes—better! A conventional château garden-terrace for one act, and a simply elegant morning-room or stately drawing-room, according to managerial taste, could stand for the other two acts. A strong and dramatic work—requiring the painting of but two scenes. The play was found! The company was ordered home to rehearse it.
Now at that time, to my own great anxiety, I was by way of standing on very dangerous ground. The public had favored me almost extravagantly from the very first performance of Anne Sylvester, but the critics, at least the most important two, seemed to praise my efforts with a certain unwilling drag of the pen. Nearly all their kind words had the sweetness squeezed out of them between "buts" and "ifs," and, most wounding of all, my actual work was less often criticized than were my personal defects. Occasionally an actress's work may be too good for her own welfare. You doubt that? Yet I know an actress, still in harness, who in her lovely prime made so great a hit, in the part of an adventuress, that she has had nothing else to act since. Whenever a play was produced with such a character in it, she was sent for. But if she was proposed for a loyal wife, a gentle sweetheart, a modern heroine, the quick response invariably was: "Oh, she can't play anything but the adventuress."
There is nothing more fatal to the artistic value, to the future welfare of a young player, than to be known as "a one-part actress"; yet that was the very danger that was threatening me at the time of the burning of the home theatre. Following other parts known as strong, Jezebel, the half-breed East Indian, a velvet-footed treachery and twice would-be murderess, and Cora, the quadroon mad-woman, were in a fair way to injure me greatly. Already one paper had said: "Miss Morris has a strange, intuitive comprehension of these creatures of mixed blood."
But worse than that, the most powerful of the two critics I dreaded had said one morning: "Miss Morris played with care and much feeling. The audience wept copiously" (to anyone who has long read the great critic, that word "copiously" is tantamount to his full signature, so persistently does he use it), "but her performance was flecked with those tigerish gleams that seem to be a part of her method. She will probably find difficulty in equaling in any other line her success as Cora."