"'Often,' he admitted, 'I stayed in bed and slept because
when I was awake I was hungry. Footsore, I would gaze into the windows of restaurants, bakeries, and fruit shops, thinking the food displayed in them the most tempting and beautiful sight in the world. There were times when I literally dined on sights and smells,'
"He did every species of dramatic and musical hack work in drawing rooms, in clubs, and in special performances in theatres. Sometimes he got into an obscure provincial company, but he said that his very cleverness was a kind of curse, since the harder he worked and the better the audiences liked him, the quicker he was discharged. The established favorites of these little companies always struck when a newcomer made a hit.
"Richard Barker was the stage manager and Mansfield could never please him. After trying again and again, he once cried: 'Please, Barker, do let me alone. I shall be all right. I have acted the part.' 'Not you,' declared Barker. 'Act? You act, man? You will never act as long as you live!'
"The recollection of the rebuffs, poverty, starvation, inability to find sympathy, because, possibly, of the pride which repelled it, the ill-fortune which snatched the extended opportunity just as he was about to grasp it, the jealousy of established favorites of the encroaching popularity of newcomers, the hardships of provincial travel and life in a part of the country and at a time when the play-actor was still regarded as a kind of vagabond and was paid as such, the severity of the discipline he encountered from the despots over him—all painted pictures on his memory and fed a fire under the furnace of his nature which tempered the steel in his composition to inflexibility. The stern rod of discipline was held over him every moment and often fell with unforgetable severity. He was trained by autocrats in a school of experience more autocratic than anything known to the younger actors of this generation.
"When the part of Chevrial was given to him, Mansfield was fascinated with his opportunity, but he kept his counsel. He applied every resource of his ability to the composition of his
performance of the decrepit old rake. He sought specialists on the infirmities of roués; he studied specimens in clubs, on the avenue, and in hospitals; and in the privacy of his own room he practiced make-ups for the part every spare moment. The rehearsals themselves were sufficiently uneventful. He gave evidence of a careful, workmanlike performance, but promise of nothing more.
"While he was working out the part Mansfield scarcely ate or slept. He had a habit of dining with a group of young Bohemians at a table d'hôte in Sixth Avenue. The means of none of them made regularity at these forty-cent banquets possible, so his absence was meaningless. One evening, however, he dropped into his accustomed chair, but tasted nothing.
"'What's the matter, Mansfield?' asked one of the others.
"To-morrow night I shall be famous,' he said. 'Come and see the play,'