"'OH, YOU DIVVIL, YOU! YOU OLD, BLATHERSKITING DIVVIL'"
Was there anything he could not do? He mimicked birds and animals; he imitated a wheezy phonograph playing "When We Were a Couple of Kids"; he recited "The Raven" and "Paul Revere's Ride"; he gave a cutting from Dickens and one from Sheridan Knowles; he showed how Joe Jefferson played Rip Van Winkle, how Sol Smith Russell did "A Poor Relation."
And all through his soul and body, as he watched his haphazard audience follow him in his moods and changes, ran the quiet magic of Art Satisfied. It is a noble braggart madness, this glorification of a cheap art by an old actor.
"Barnes, my boy," he said to himself, with a glow of rapid blood, "you have not lost them yet! See them laugh with you! Feel them cry! What does it matter if you eat watery oatmeal and live in a skylight room; are you not an artist, a resonant instrument of poetry and music and mirth, a true actor of the best parts? You are; and these are matters of the undying soul. A boarding-house is a vulgar, temporal thing. You were right to come here to-night, and do this thing without pay, for Art's sake. You uphold the honor of a calling which is founded upon Art. And, oh, most of all, you have not lost your power, you have not outlived your time! Sanderson intimated that you were a dead one—very well, to-morrow you shall triumphantly cut the acquaintance of Sanderson! To have lived until this evening before the youth of this land; to have caught the right intonation, the proper gesture; to have swept through the hearts of your hearers like a vibration of music—this is to have transcended, this is to have justified yourself! And justified yourself to whom? To Sanderson? To the world? No! You have justified Harry Barnes to Harry Barnes! You carry this human throng over the footlights and into your soul with a Chinaman's queue and a putty nose. Your Art is still that fine, secure Art which you have carried in your memory as you traversed dingy stairways on Fourteenth Street. Barnes, you live, you act, you accomplish! Bravo!"
He shook hands abstractedly all around when the affair came to a close. He remembered bundling his make-up and trinkets into a piece of newspaper and tucking it under his arm. A pleased face presented itself at one time before his eyes and a voice said, confidentially, "Mr. Barnes, I congratulate you; and the dramatic critic of the Star was here to-night."
He found himself at last out in the cool darkness of the street, and he had to stop a moment to think which way his boarding-house lay. Then he walked home, to save carfare. All the way up the silent streets his brain sang with triumph. His blood jumped in gladness; he could hardly keep from running. He declaimed aloud bits of Shakespeare, tag ends of poems; he snapped his fingers and flung out his arms in sheer excess of enthusiasm. He smiled, threw back his head, even made faces at the passersby. He boomed into a solo from an opera, and kicked his foot at a cigar stub on the sidewalk. And had anybody wished to observe when he reached his house, the spectacle would have presented itself of a caricature, funny-paper barn-stormer tramping merrily up the rattling stairs and humming, "The flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la, have nothing to do with the case."
All the next day he did not leave his room, save at meal times; for he wished to be alone and hug his exultation. To the four flat walls he repeated snatches of the things he had done the night before; up and down the rag carpet he smirked and grimaced and laughed and jigged. He sang the songs that had "taken" so well. He went through certain gestures and then deliberately exaggerated them, in a high good-humor. He was as young again as on the day when he had signed his first contract. He puffed out his chest, looked at himself in the glass with mock seriousness, and then, when the pent-up good feeling burst out in his merry eye, he winked it gleefully and said: "Oh, you divvil, you! You old blatherskiting divvil!"
At half-past four he went down to the corner and bought a copy of the Star, the late edition which had the dramatic news in it.
There it was! He felt like jumping up in the air and whooping the length of the street. On the editorial page it was. His name was in the headlines! Beneath, in the article itself, almost every other word seemed to be Barnes. It praised him here, it admired him there, it thanked him, it congratulated him, it asserted that he had saved the night for four hundred newsboys. He was so anxious to read it through and to read it fast that he skipped from paragraph to paragraph. There was over a column of it! He hurried back up to the room; and then regretted that he had not stopped to buy more copies of the paper. He locked the door and spread the paper out on the little center-table. His heart and breath almost stopped as he read the good words slowly through. When he had finished, he threw the paper aside and bounded into the middle of the room.
"Press agent, hey?" he laughed. "Press agent! I guess yes! A small matter of a column and a quarter; that's all. Only a column and a quarter about Harry Barnes! Wonder what Sanderson will think about that? Wonder if he won't get me something to do? Oh, no; I guess not. A column and a quarter!"