HE history of the world is a history of migrations, and to those already on the pages of time must now be added the tour of the "Eleanor" company which began again in the first week of January. Its formal record would probably read very much like that of the ten thousand Greeks in its dull monotony—"Hence they marched out two hundred miles to Buffalo where they played three nights and a matinée"—but its actual intimate story would more resemble "The Flight of a Tartar Tribe." It gave all that same impression of hurry and scamper.
A map of that tour of the "Eleanor" company should, in fact, have been hung on the wall of some manager's office, covered with little red and black pins, as an awful example of how such a thing should never be done. In a checkered path all over New England and northern New York and once dipping down into Pennsylvania and Ohio, its trail showed a series of leaps, crisscrosses, return engagements, huge "jumps," and retracings of steps which would have driven any normal road manager into bankruptcy; but there was no other way for it. Starting out on an uncertain date, in the middle of the season, and under entirely independent auspices, the company had to snap an open date where it could, sometimes not knowing on Saturday night where it would play on the second week following. The huge, pompous, and expensive "Eleanor" company traveled at times like a "Tom show" or a Gipsy circus, the marvel and outlaw of that theatrical winter, an unexplained comet shooting across the theatrical sky. It played one-night stands at ruinous cost. It laid over once from Wednesday to Monday. It played in towns that never before had seen a first-class attraction. It played in theaters so small that if every seat in the house had been taken, the receipts would not have covered even the day's expenses. At the "farthest west" of the tour in Ohio, Bellsmith, one night, asked Israels:
"Well, how do we stand for the first six weeks?"
To which Israels in reply shook his head, "Mr. Bellsmith, I don't dare to tell you."
Of course all hope of earning a profit had been entirely abandoned. That hope had been abandoned long before the company left Leicester, for Bellsmith had discovered that making over a musical comedy was very much like making over a house. A little paint here, a few bricks there, would seem, at first sight, to promise a complete renovation; but, once the new paint and new bricks are in place, all the rest of the structure begins to look shoddy.
For one thing, Bellsmith in the interest of his own music had tripled the regular orchestra which he "carried," laying no dependence at all on the orchestras of the "houses" that were visited. A "house" orchestra in a small city can be counted on only for comets, but he had insisted on trumpets. The "duchess motif," as he had written it, required, for a theater orchestra, an inordinate amount of wood winds, with the result that he had been required correspondingly to build up his strings. When the tour finally ended in Boston, he was "carrying" twenty-four men besides the conductor and filling out with four more. Two double-bass players, far out of the average, had been required for "The Bull Fiddle Overture." One of them had been taken outright from a symphony orchestra.
The case was, in fact, best expressed on another occasion by Israels. Standing, in Bangor, Maine, in the rear of the house, with the local manager, the latter listened a moment to the full, rich tone of the overture and watched the phalanx of bows rising and falling. He too shook his head.
"Mr. Israels, how in the world do you do it?"
"We don't," replied Mr. Israels.
At the very worst point of the tour Bellsmith telegraphed to Dr. MacVickar:
To which the doctor wired in reply:
But yet, although they made no money, nevertheless the time came when they ceased to lose a great deal. House managers in larger cities began to hear of them and wanted them. They went to Columbus especially to give a "feature" during the week of a large convention. There came a time when Israels dared to ask for a guarantee, for all the money "brought into the house" up to a certain figure. At another time he came to Bellsmith in grim amusement.
"Mr. Bellsmith, another week like the last and I think we 'll almost make expenses."
"In that case," said BelLsmith, "I think I' ll telegraph to New York for a basset horn. I've always wanted a basset horn in that orchestra. It sounds just like Mrs. Trip when she's trying to talk like Ellen Terry. A good player could burlesque her, note for note."