THE SINGER'S HEART
BY
HARRIS MERTON LYON
ILLUSTRATIONS BY J. B. MASTERS
"I never cared for the singer's fame,
But, oh, for the singer's heart
Once more—
The bleeding, passionate heart!"—"B. V."
These are a few films from the human biograph of Harry Barnes, old actor. You know, when you are old, you accept life with more or less of a sigh of quiet acquiescence, and by your cozy fire you sit and nod to an inner voice, a gentle old voice which over and over whispers and murmurs—"Once upon a time, once upon a time." And possibly Barnes would have nodded, too, but he lacked the cozy fire. Life has its dramatic unities, it would seem, and if one thing or another is awry we are apt not to perform as the book says we should. No cozy fire, says the Great Stage Manager; no nodding acquiescence, replies the Mummer in the Play.
Barnes listened, it is true, over and over to the voice which murmured "Once upon a time," but he sat not by a comfortable open grate, amid grandchildren. Instead, he lurked in East Fourteenth Street amid decaying agents' offices, hunting a chance to do a bad monologue in a worse vaudeville show. He had outlasted his time; he could not get work. He lived on those two heartless things, Hope and Memory. And for all I know he is living on them yet.
Now, you will not in your careless youth or your sceptical maturity find beauty in this story, you will not "get under the skin" of it, as the saying is, unless you have stopped sometime in your busy going, to consider, aside and with understanding, the pathos of the old actor. It is a curiously poignant human thing, written about by a few, suffered by many, and ignored by the loud, inordinate world.