The old actor out of employment! A target for jokes, a piece of battered, ancient "property" cluttering up a new and very busy stage. You smile at his curious figure, unconscious of the broken misery that aches beneath, where life has died and living goes paradoxically on; and only sometimes late at night do you get a part of that hidden ache when you hear old legs drag weary feet up the boarding-house stairs, past your door and on up into the skylight room on the roof, despondently to bed; and you know that the old man has had another unsuccessful day among the agents and the managers. You can sometimes interpret the querulous little laugh over the thin oatmeal at breakfast, sometimes you can guess the water in the rapidly winking eyes; but of course you do not proclaim your deductions. Civilization is a process of making less noise about things.
This is a segment of the life-film of Harry Barnes, old actor, as he traveled the stones of Fourteenth Street. Not the Rialto, where fat men adorned with fat diamonds smoke fat cigars in order to narcotize fat consciences; but Fourteenth Street, grimy with old, sparsely-tenanted buildings, where theatrical offices three flights up bargain for the driblets of trade among the low music-halls and the cheapest vaudeville houses, where niggardly, gray-haired agents have for two generations sat among their dusty contracts and their rusty pens, haggling over bread-and-water salaries with the jetsam of a too-volatile profession.
Harry was old and dropsical with drink, a sad hero for a careless story. The only ideal he had ever had, besides one, was to arrive at the fine fame of printer's ink: headlines, bill-boards, critical notices, reproductions of his photograph. But this was long ago. He had longed to be chronicled in his time, preëminent and large; this he had desired with that hungry passion for display which only an actor can feel. But this, remember, was once upon a time. His other ideal—no need to mention it amid Momus and his mimes!—was to sway people with laughter and tears, to burn them with romance, to chasten them with tragedy, to carry them with him in his frenzy, to play upon them with his art.
Art! Do you care for a grotesque, serious evening in its humblest presence? Have you time to listen, over beer glass and cigarette, to a broken-down old actor out of a job?
HARRY BARNES, OLD ACTOR
Barnes was incongruously named when he was given the name of Harry. It is a flippant name. It calls up merriness, youth, bravado, color, song. Barnes was forty-nine, streaked with grey, heart-sick, pallid, shuffling, timorous, sorry, and forlorn. Three decades of grease paint had made his skin flabby; and three decades of what the grease paint stood for had done likewise by his soul. It was thus that he drifted from doorway to doorway in Fourteenth Street, down by the Elevated, where dry little agents told him in dry little voices that there was nothing for him from day to day. It was thus that he dragged his feet up the boarding-house stairs to his skylight room, night after night, carrying the two heartless fardels, Hope and Memory.
It was approaching a certain holiday, a holiday which came on Sunday.
"Harry," said old Tony Sanderson, after he had finished informing the actor that there was no news for him, "why don't you do a little press-agent work for yourself? Get your name in the paper. That might help you get something to do."