The Aerial Acrobat

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_ I

SHOWING THAT IT TAKES MORE THAN MUSCLE AND SKILL TO WORK ON THE HIGH BARS

A FEW years ago I had the pleasure of traveling for ten days with a great circus, and in this way came to know some very interesting people--elephant-keepers, lion-tamers, trapeze performers, bareback riders, not to mention the bearded lady, the dog-faced boy, and other side-show celebrities who used to eat with us in the cook-tent--there was one gentleman, appareled in blue velvet, who ate with his feet, for the reason that he had no arms, and would reach across for salt or butter with an easy knee-and-ankle movement that was a perpetual surprise.

What strange things one sees traveling with a circus! Every night there is a mile of trains to be loaded, every morning a tented city to be built. Such hard work for everybody! Two performances a day, besides the street procession. And what a busy time in the tents! Leapers getting ready, double-somersault men getting ready, clowns stuffing out false stomachs and chalking their faces, kings of the air buckling on their spangles. Ouf! How glad we all were when five o'clock came, and the concert was over, and the "big top," with its spreading amphitheater and its four great center-poles, stood silent and empty!

It was at this five-o'clock hour one day that I first saw little Nelson, the ten-year-old trapeze performer, and that picture remains among the pleasantest of my circus memories. I can recall more exciting things, like the fight between two jealous wrestlers, or the mystery of the lost Chinese giant, or the story of a wrecked train, when the wild animals escaped and the fat lady was rescued with difficulty from a burning car. And I can recall sad things, the case of that poor trapeze girl, two weeks a widow, who nevertheless went through her act twice a day and tripped away kissing her hands to the crowd while her heart was breaking. And saddest of all was the case of beautiful "Zazel," once the much-advertised "human cannonball," then suddenly a helpless cripple after a fall from the dome of the tent. Her husband, one of the circus men, told me how she lived for more than a year in a plaster case swung down from the ceiling, and of her sweetness and patience through it all. And she finally recovered, I am glad to say, so that she could walk--a pale, weak image of this once splendid circus queen.

But let me come to Nelson. This sturdy little fellow was one of the circus children, "born on the sawdust," brought up to regard lion cages as the proper background for a nursery, and thinking of father and mother in connection with the flying bars and bareback feats. It was Nelson's ambition to follow in his father's steps and become a great artist on the trapeze. Indeed, at this time he felt himself already an artist, and at the hour of rest would walk forth into the middle ring all alone and with greatest dignity go through his practice. He would not be treated as a child, and scorned any suggestion that he go out and play. Play? He had work to do. Look here! Do you know any man who can throw a prettier row of flip-flaps than this? And wait! Here's a forward somersault! Is it well done or not? Did he come over with a good lift? Like his father, you think? Ah! I can still see his chest swell with pride.

Nelson was not a regular member of the show; he was a child, and merely came along with his parents, the circus being his only home; but occasionally, after much teasing or as a reward for good behavior, his father would lead the boy forth before a real audience. And how they would applaud as the trim little figure in black-and-yellow tights rose slowly to the tent-top, feet together, body arched back, teeth set on the thong of the pulley-line that his father held anxiously!

And how the women would catch their breath when Nelson, hanging by his knees in the long swing, would suddenly pretend to slip, seem to fall, then catch the bar cleverly by his heels and sweep far out over the spread of faces, arms folded, head back, and a look that said plainly: "Don't you people see what an artist I am?"

This boy possessed the two great requisites in a trapeze performer, absolute fearlessness and a longing to perform in the air--which longing made him willing to take endless pains in learning. It would seem that acrobats differ from divers, steeple-climbers, lion-tamers, and the rest in this, that from their early years they have been strongly drawn to the career before them, to leaping, turning in the air, and difficult tricks on the trapeze and horizontal bars. The acrobat must be born an acrobat, not so much because his feats might not be learned by an ordinary man, but because the particular kind of courage needed to make an acrobat is not found in the ordinary man. In other words, to be an aerial leaper or an artist on the flying bars is quite as much a matter of heart as of agility and muscle. There are men who know how to do these things, but can't.

In illustration of this let me present three of my circus friends, Weitzel and Zorella and Danny Ryan, trapeze professionals whose daring and skill are justly celebrated. Zorella's real name, I may say, is Nagel, and so far from being a dashing foreigner, he is a quiet-spoken young man from Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he learned his first somersaults tumbling about on sawdust piles. And at sixteen he was the only boy in the region who could do the giant swing. Whereupon along came a circus with an acrobat who needed a "brother," and Nagel got the job. Two days later he began performing in the ring, and since then--that was ten years ago--he hasn't missed a circus day.

The act that has given these three their fame includes a swing, a leap, and a catch, which seems simple enough until one learns the length and drop of that swing, and how the leapers turn in the air, and what momentum their bodies have as they shoot toward the man hanging for the catch from the last bar. It is Weitzel who catches the other two. He was "understander" in a "brother" act before he learned the trapeze; and the man who earns his living by holding two or three men on his head and shoulders while they do tricks of balancing is pretty sure to build up a strong body. And Weitzel needs all his strength when Danny springs from the pedestal over there at the tent-top fifty-two feet away, and, swinging through a half-circle thirty-six feet across, comes the last sixteen feet flying free, and turning twice as he comes. For all his brawny arms, Weitzel would be torn away by the clutch of that hurling mass, were not the strain eased by the stretch of fourteen thongs of rubber, seven on a side, that support his bar cords. And sometimes, as the leapers catch, the bar sags full four feet, and then, as they "snap off" down to the net, springs nine feet up, so that Weitzel's head has many a time bumped the top support.

The catcher-man must hold himself ready for a dozen different leaps, must watch for the safety clutch where the four hands grip first at the elbows, then slide down the forearms to the wrists and hold there where the tight-bound handkerchiefs jam; he must know how to seize Zorella by the ankles when he shoots at him feet up after a backward double; he must know how to land Danny when he comes turning swiftly with eyes blindfolded and body bound in a sack.

All these feats are hard enough to do, yet still harder, one might say, is the mere starting to do them. There are scores of acrobats, well skilled in doubles and shoots and twisters, who would not for their lives go up on the pedestal whence Ryan and Zorella make their spring, and simply take the first long swing hanging from the trapeze. Nothing else, simply take the swing!

The fact is, there is an enormous difference between working on horizontal bars say ten feet above ground, and on the same bars thirty feet above ground, or between a trapeze act with leaps after a moderate swing, and the same act with leaps after a long swing. Often I have watched Ryan and Zorella poised on the pedestal just before the swing and holding the trapeze bar drawn so far over to one side that its supporting wires come up almost horizontal; and even on the ground it has made me dizzy to see them lean forward for the bar which falls short of the pedestal, so that they can barely catch it with the left-hand fingers, while the right hand clings to the pedestal brace. They need the send of that initial spring to give them speed, but--

Well, there was a very powerful and active man in Columbus, Ohio, a kind of local athlete, who agreed, on a wager, to swing off from the pedestal as Danny and Zorella did. And one day a small company gathered at the practice hour to see him do it. He said it was easy enough. His friends chaffed him and vowed he "couldn't do it in a hundred years." The big man climbed up the swinging ladder to the starting-place, and stood there looking down. When you stand on the pedestal the ground seems a long way below you, and there is little comfort in the net. The big man said nothing, but began to get pale. He had the trapeze-bar all right with one hand; the thing was to let go with the other.

For ten minutes the big man stood there. He said he wasn't in a hurry. His friends continued to joke him. One man urged him to come down. The professionals told him he'd better not try it if he was afraid--at which the others laughed, and that settled it, for the big man was afraid; but he was stubborn, too, and, rising on his toes, he threw his right arm forward and started. He caught the bar safely with his right hand, swept down like a great pendulum, and at the lowest point of the swing was ripped away from the bar with the jerk of his two hundred pounds, and went skating along the length of the net on his face until he was a sorry-looking big man with the scratch of the meshes. Not one athlete in twenty, they say, without special training, could hold that bar after such a drop.

Zorella cited a case in point where a first-class acrobat was offered a much larger salary by a rival circus to become the partner of an expert on the high bars. "This man was crazy to accept," said Zorella, "and everything was practically settled. The two did their act together on the low bars in great shape. Then they tried it on the high bars, and the new man stuck right at the go-off. Queerest thing you ever saw. He had to start on the end bar with a giant swing,--that gives 'em their send, you know,--then do a backward single to the middle bar, then a shoot on to the last bar, and from there drop with somersaults down to the net. All this was easy for him on the low bars, but when he got up high--well, he hadn't the nerve to let go of the first bar after the giant swing. He kept going round and round, and just stuck there. Seemed as if his hands were nailed fast to that bar. We talked to him, and reasoned with him, and he tried over and over again, but it was no use. He could drop from the last bar, he could shoot from the middle bar, but to save his life he couldn't let go of the first bar. I don't know whether he was afraid, or what; but he couldn't do it, and the end of it was, he had to give up the offer, although it nearly broke his heart."

And even acrobats accustomed to working at heights feel uneasy in the early spring when they begin practising for a new season. The old tricks have always in a measure to be learned over again, and they work gradually from simple things to harder ones--a straight leap, then one somersault, then two. And foot by foot the pedestal is lifted until the body overcomes its shrinking. Even so I saw Zorella one day scratched and bruised from many failures in the trick where Weitzel catches him by the ankles. Here, after the long swing, he must shoot ahead feet first as if for a backward somersault, and then, changing suddenly, do a turn and a half forward, and dive past Weitzel with body whirling so as to bring his legs over just right for the catch. And every time they missed of course he fell, and risked striking the net on his forehead, which is the most dangerous thing an acrobat can do. To save his neck he must squirm around, as a cat turns, and land on his back; which is not so easy in the fraction of a second, especially if you happen to be dazed by a glancing blow of the catcher-man's arm.

II

ABOUT DOUBLE AND TRIPLE SOMERSAULTS AND THE DANGER OF LOSING HEART

IN talking with my circus friends I was surprised to learn that a trapeze performer in perfect practice, say in mid-season, may suddenly, without knowing why, begin to hesitate or blunder in a certain trick that he has done without a slip for years. This happened to Danny Ryan in the fall of 1900, when he found himself growing more and more uncertain of his difficult pirouette leap, a feat invented by himself in 1896, and never done by another performer. Danny did it first when he used to play the clown with the spring-board leapers who do graceful somersaults over elephants and horses. With them would come Danny, made up as a fat man, and do a backward somersault and a full twister at the same time, the effect being a queer corkscrew turn that made the people laugh. They little suspected that this awkward-looking leap was one of the most difficult feats in the air ever attempted, or that it had cost Ryan weeks of patient practice and many a hard knock before he mastered it.

And then one day, after doing it hundreds of times with absolute ease, he did it badly, then he did it worse, then he fell, and finally began to be afraid of it and left it out of the act. Acrobats shake their heads when you ask for an explanation of a thing like that. They don't know the explanation, but they dread the thing.

"When a man feels that way about a trick, he's got to quit it for a while," said Ryan, "or he'll get hurt. 'Most all the accidents happen where a performer forces himself against something inside him that says stop. Sometimes an acrobat has to give up his work entirely. Now, there's Dunham,--you've heard of him,--the greatest performer in the world on high bars. They'll give him any salary he wants to ask. Graceful? Well, you ought to see him let go from his giant swing and do a back somersault clean over the middle bar and catch the third! And now they say he's gone out of the business. Somebody told me it was religion. Don't you believe it. He's had a feeling--it's something like fear, but it isn't fear--that he's worked on high bars long enough."

"He's had bad luck with his partners, too," remarked Weitzel. "Couple of 'em missed the turn somehow and got killed. Say, that takes a man's nerve as much as anything, to have his partner hurt. I don't wonder Dunham wants to quit."

"Tell you where it's hard on an acrobat," put in Zorella--"that's where he can't quit on account of his family--where he needs the money. I remember a young fellow joined the show out west to leap over elephants. He got along well enough over two elephants, but when it came to three, why, we could all see he was shaky. Some of the boys told him he'd better stop, but he said he'd try to learn, and he was such a nice, modest fellow and worked so hard that everybody wished him luck. But it wasn't any use. One day he tackled a double over three elephants, and came down all in sections, with his right foot on the mattress and his left foot on the ground. That was his last leap, poor fellow, for the ankle bones snapped as his left foot struck, and a few hours later he lay in the dressing-room tent, pretty white, with the doctors over him. I'll never forget the way he looked up at us when we came in. He was game all right, but his eyes were awful pathetic. 'Well, boys' said he, 'here I am. I did the best I could.' Turned out he'd done it for a sick wife and a little baby. Pretty tough, wasn't it?"

Speaking of leaps over elephants brings to my mind an afternoon when I watched a circus rehearsal in the open air. That is a thing better worth seeing, to my mind, than the regular performance; the acrobats and riders in their every-day clothes are more like ordinary men and women, and their feats seem the more difficult for occasional slips and failures.

Here, for instance, are a mother and daughter, in shirt-waists, watching the trick monkey ride a pony, when suddenly a whistle sounds, and off goes the mother to drive three plunging horses in a chariot-race, while the daughter hurries to her part in an equestrian quadrille. And now these children playing near the drilling elephants trot into the ring and do wonderful things on bicycles. And yonder sleepy-looking man is a lion-tamer; and those three are the famous Potters, aerial leapers; and this thick-set fellow in his shirt-sleeves is Artressi, the best jumper in the circus. He's going to practise now; see, they are putting up the spring-board and the long downward run that leads to it. These other men are jumpers, too, but Artressi is the star; he draws the big salary.

Now they start and spring off rather clumsily, one after another, in straight leaps to the mattress. They won't work into good form for some days yet. Here they come again, a little faster, and two of them try singles. Here comes Artressi. Ah! a double forward, and prettily taken. The crowd applauds. Now a tall man tries a double. Gradually the practice gets hotter until every man is doing his best. There will be stiff joints here in the morning, but never mind!

In a resting-spell I sat down by Artressi and talked with him about leaping. It was hard, he said, going off a spring-board into empty air. Didn't know how it was, but he could always do better with something to leap over, say elephants or horses. He could judge the mattress easier; wasn't so apt to miss it. What was his biggest leap? Well, four elephants and three camels was about his best, with a pyramid of men on top. He'd cleared that twice a day for weeks some years ago, but he wouldn't do it now. No, sir; four elephants was enough for any man to leap over if he had a wife and child. That made a flight of thirty feet, anyhow, from the spring-board to the ground. Oh, yes, he turned two somersaults on the way--forward somersaults. It wasn't possible for anybody to clear four elephants and turn backward somersaults.

I asked Artressi (his real name is Artress) about a leap with three somersaults, and found him positive that such a feat will never become part of a regular circus program. A man can turn the three somersaults all right, but he loses control of himself, and doesn't know whether he is coming down right or wrong. In fact, he is sure to come down wrong if he does it often. Then he mentioned the one case where he himself had made a leap with three somersaults. It was down in Kentucky, at the home of his boyhood. Years had passed since he had seen the town, and in that time he had risen from nothing to a blaze of circus glory. He had become the "Great Artressi" instead of little Joe Artress, and now he was to appear before the people who knew him.

It was perhaps the most exciting moment of his life, and as he came down the run toward the spring-board he nerved himself to so fine an effort that instead of doing two somersaults over the horses and elephants, as he intended, he did three, and, by a miracle of fortune, landed safely. That was his first and last triple; he wasn't taking chances of a broken neck or a twisted spine, which had been the end of more than one ambitious leaper. No, sir; he would stick to doubles, where a man knows exactly what he's doing.

In talking with acrobats, I came upon an interesting phenomenon that seems almost like a violation of the laws of gravitation. It appears that the movements of a performer on the bars or trapeze are affected in a marked degree by the slope of the ground underneath. In other words, although bars and trapeze may rest on supports that are perfectly level, yet the swing of an acrobat's body will be accelerated over a downward slope or retarded over an upward slope. So true is this that the trapeze performer swinging over an upward slope will often require all his strength to reach a given point, while over a downward slope he must hold back, lest he reach it too easily and suffer a collision. Nevertheless, the swing in both cases is precisely the same, with rigging and bars fixed to a true level.

On this point there have been endless arguments, and many persons have contended that acrobats must imagine all this, since the upward or downward slope of the ground under a trapeze can in no way affect the movement of that trapeze. I fancy the wisdom of such people is like that of the professors who proved some years ago that it is a physical impossibility for a ball-player to "pitch a curve." There is no doubt that trapeze performers are obliged to take serious account of the ground's slope in their daily work, to note carefully the amount of slope and the direction of slope, and to take their precautions accordingly. If they did not they would fail in their feats. Those are the facts to which all acrobats bear witness, let scientists explain them as they may.

"Suppose the ground slopes to one side or the other under your trapeze," I asked Ryan, one day. "How does that affect you?"

"It draws you down the slope, and makes your bar swing that way."

"What do you do about it?"

"Sometimes I pull the bar over a little in starting, so as to balance the pull of the hill; but that's uncertain. It's better to fix the rigging so that the bar is a little higher on the downhill side."

Ryan said that a straight-ahead downhill slope is the worst for a man, because he is apt to hold back too hard, being afraid of bumping into his partner, and so he doesn't get send enough, and falls short of his mark.

"But all slopes are bad for us," he said, "and we try hard to get our things put up over level ground."

This is but one instance of the jealous care shown by acrobats for their bars and rigging. These things belong not to the circus, but to the individual performers, who put every brace and knot to the severest test. For the high bars a particular kind of hickory is used with a core of steel inside. Every mesh of the net must resist a certain strain. The bars themselves must be neither too dry nor too moist. The light must come in a certain way, and a dozen other things. Many an accident has come through the failure of some little thing.

This much is certain, that acrobats often suffer without serious injury falls that would put an end to ordinary men. Like bareback riders, they know how to fall, this art consisting chiefly in "tucking up" into a ball and hardening the muscles so that the shock is eased. Also they have by practice acquired the power of deciding instantly how to make the body protect itself in an emergency.

"Now," said Ryan, "I'll give you a case where two of us did some quick thinking, and it helped a lot. We were with a circus in Australia, making a night run. It was somewhere in New South Wales, and every man was asleep in his bunk. First thing we knew, bang, rip, tear! a drowsy engineer had smashed into us and taken the rear truck of our sleeper clean off, and there were the floor timbers of our car bumping along over the ties. We had the last car.

"Our engineer never slowed up, and our floor was going into kindling-wood fast. It was as dark as pitch, and nobody said a word. Fred Reynolds and I--Reynolds was a clown acrobat--had lower berths right at the end, next to the negro porter, and I don't say we escaped because we were acrobats, but--well, this is what we did. Fred gave one mighty leap, just like going over elephants, and cleared the whole trail of wreckage that was pounding along behind the car and landed safe on the track. It was a crazy thing to do, in my opinion, but it worked. I made a spring for the chandelier, and hung there until the train stopped. And afterward I found my trousers back on the road-bed with the legs cut clean off, and I guess my own legs would have gone the same way if they'd been there. What did the porter do? Oh, he did nothing, and--and he was killed."

III

IN WHICH THE AUTHOR TRIES HIS HAND WITH PROFESSIONAL TRAPEZE PERFORMERS

ON this particular morning--it was a damp day in February--I had been watching the Potter family, familiar on circus posters in tights and spangles, at their practice of aerial leaps, when Henry Potter, who is husband, father, and brother of the others, and chief of the act, suggested that if I wanted a vivid idea of what it was to work on the flying trapeze I might come up and take his place on the cradle and let Tom chuck the "kid" across to me and see if I could catch him.

The "kid" was Roy Potter (sometimes Royetta, when presented in feminine trappings), a slender lad of seventeen, who had just been doing doubles and twisters and half turns, leaping with shoot and graceful curve from brother to brother up there in mid-air under the rafters of this moldering old skating-rink.

"Go ahead," he urged; "it's easy enough. All you've got to do is hang by your knees, and it can't hurt the boy, for he'll drop in the net if you miss him. Besides, we'll put the 'mechanic' on him."

The "mechanic" is an arrangement of waist straps and trailing pulley-ropes that guard a gymnast while he is learning some new feat.

Doubtless, I should have declined this amiable offer had I taken time to consider, for there was no particular appropriateness in a man who knew nothing about the trapeze, except such rudiments as boys of twelve get in their own back yards, taking part offhand in a leaping performance thirty feet above ground with "the phenomenal and fearless Potters"--I quote the circus signs--"greatest of all great acrobatic aerials." Yet he put it so plausibly--I certainly would get a better idea of the thing--and he made it out so simple--anybody can hang by his knees--that I said all right; I would go up on the cradle and catch the "kid."

This cradle is composed of two steel bars, about a foot apart, that are held rigid by tackle and wire braces. You climb to it (after emptying your pockets) by a swinging ladder, none too secure, and, seated here, look down as from the dome of a circus tent. On a line with you are other cradles, where your partners are coolly preparing to do things. You glance across at them anxiously, then down at the net, which seems a long way beneath.

"Better put some rosin on your hands," sings out Potter from the ground, where he is arranging the "mechanic" lines.

"It's in that little bag on the wire," calls the boy from his perch. "Rub it along your wrists, too; we'll ketch better."

H'm! We will, eh? I do as I am told, and realize that even the trifling movement to get this rosin-bag involves a certain peril.

"Now lean back," comes the word; "catch one bar in the crotch of your knees and brace your feet under the other. That's right. Hang 'way down. Stretch your arms out, and when I say, 'Now,' pull up and reach for the 'kid'--you'll see him coming."

Sure enough, although the blood was in my head, I could see over there Tom Potter's red shirt and the boy's blue one as they poised for the swing. Then Tom's body dropped back, and he swept the lad at full arm's length, through a half circle, and let him go head first, cutting the air, straight at me.

"Now," cried Harry, and I reached out as best I could, only to see the boy, a second later, floundering in the net below me. And they all were laughing. In trying to reach one way I had actually reached the other, and withdrawn my arms instead of extending them, which made me understand better than an hour of words that a man hanging head down at a height finds his muscles as hard to control as a penman writing with his left hand for the first time. He cannot even see straight until his eyes learn to gage distances and the relation of things presented upside down.

With some pains and an awkward clutching at the braces I got myself back into a sitting position, while Roy climbed again good-naturedly to his starting-cradle. A trapeze performer must have infinite patience.

Again we tried the trick, and this time, as I hung expectant, I felt my wrists clutched tight, and there was the agile leaper swinging back, pendulum fashion, from my arms, then forward, then back, while the bar strained under my knees.

"Now, throw him!" called Harry. "Stiffen out and chuck him back to Tom. Now!"

Alas! I made a bungle of it. I could not give him send enough, and the boy, falling short of Tom's arms, dangled from the "mechanic" lines half-way down to the net. It was quite plain that more than good intentions are needed to chuck young gentlemen through flights of eighteen feet. I was feeling decidedly queer by this time--a sort of half-way-over-the-Channel faintness, and could imagine what it must be to work up here, right at the peak of a "big-top" tent, under the scorch of an August sun, with the stifle of a great audience coming up from below. I expressed a readiness to descend.

"Try a drop into the net," suggested Tom Potter. "See, hang by your hands, like this. Keep your legs together and lift 'em out stiff. Then--"

Down he went, and landed easily on his shoulders.

"Better put the 'mechanic' on him," said Harry, and presently young Roy was beside me on the cradle, securing me to the drop-lines with a double hitch.

"You want to be sure to lift yer legs," he remarked. "I knew a feller that struck the net straight on his feet and broke his knees."

"Don't you worry," said Harry; "if you don't fall right, I'll hold you with the 'mechanic.'"

Of course, when a man has started at this sort of thing he must see it through, so I hung obediently by my hands, lifted my legs, and--

"Now," cried Harry, and instantly, before I had time to think or note sensations, I was on my back in the net. And I understood what a terrible problem it is for a gymnast, falling with such swiftness, to turn two or three somersaults in the air and land with the body at just the angle of safety, for a shade too much one way may mean a broken leg, and a shade too much the other way an injured spine.

For some time after my aerial experience I sat around rather limp and white, giving but indifferent attention to the breaking in of young Clarence Potter, baby of the family, now in his first fortnight's practising. He certainly showed a game spirit, this little fellow. When his father said, "Jump," he jumped, and when the call came for a forward somersault across and a half turn he went at it like a veteran, though his wrists must have burned with red chafes where they caught him. Of course he had the 'mechanic' on all the time.

"We have to handle him very careful," said his father, "he's so limber. It wouldn't take much to break his back. But he'll harden up soon. People have an idea that gymnasts are supple-jointed. That's all nonsense. A gymnast won't bend as much as an ordinary business man. There are too many bunches of muscles all over him that keep him stiff. See, feel along here." He prodded my hand into his back and sides. "Not big muscles, mind, but lots of small ones. Say, it's a fine thing to have your body trained. I don't believe there's a healthier-- Hey, there! Keep those legs together. Easy now. Good boy!" The little fellow had made a pretty turn and drop to the net, and was striding along its meshes, beaming at the praise.

"He'll make a gymnast," said Potter, "because he's got a head on him, and can fix his mind on what he's doing. Oh, it takes more than body to make a great acrobat. It takes brains, for one thing, and heart. I believe I'll be able to train that boy so he can do a triple. I mean do it, not get through it in a Lord-help-me way. Most people say a triple can't be done for a regular act because it's too uncertain and too dangerous. But they used to say that of a double. It's all a matter of taking time enough in the practice. That's the thing, practice. Why, look at us. We don't open for months yet, but we're up here every morning all through the winter getting our act down so fine, and the time so perfect, that when summer comes we can't fail."

"How do you mean, getting the time perfect?"

"Why, in trapeze work everything depends on judging time. Just now when you were hanging from the cradle you couldn't see much, could you? Well, we can't, either. We have to know when to do things by feeling the time they take. Say it's a long double swing, where the men cross and change bars. Each man grabs or lets go at the second or part of a second when the watch inside him says it's time to grab or let go. That's the only watch he has, and it's the only one he needs."

"And he dives by the sense of time?"

"That's right."

"And does triple somersaults by the sense of time?"

"Certainly he does. He can't see. What could you see, falling and whirling? A gymnast has no different eyes from any other man. He's got to feel how long he must keep on turning. And it's good-by gymnast if his feeling is a quarter of a second out of the way."

"Do you mean that literally?"

Mr. Potter smiled. "I'll give you a case, and you can judge for yourself. There was a fellow named Johnnie Howard in the Barnum show. He was doing trapeze work with the famous Dunham family, and was very ambitious to equal Dunham in all his feats, which was a large contract, for Dunham is about the finest gymnast in the world. What a pretty triple he can do, clean down from the top of the tent, and land right every time!

"Well, Howard he kept trying triples, and sometimes he got 'em about right and sometimes he didn't. Dunham told him he'd better stick to doubles until he'd had more practice, but Howard wouldn't have it, and he kept right on. Prob'ly he thought Dunham was jealous of him. Anyhow, he tried a triple one night at Chicago, in the Coliseum, and that was the last triple he ever did try. He misjudged his time by a quarter of a turn--that is, he turned three somersaults and a quarter instead of just three--and struck the net so that he twisted his spinal column, and he died a few weeks later. That last quarter of a turn killed him, and it probably didn't take over a tenth of a second."

Here was something to think about. Precision of movement to tenths of a second, with no guidance but a man's own intuition of time, and a life depending on it!

"Can a man regulate the speed of his turning while he is in the air?"

"Certainly he can. That's the first thing you learn. If you want to turn faster you tuck up your knees and bend your head so the chin almost touches your breast. If you want to turn slower you stretch out your legs and straighten up your head. The main thing is your head. Whichever way you point that your body will follow. In our act we do a long drop from the top of the tent, where you shoot straight down, head first, for fifty or sixty feet and never move a muscle until you are two feet over the net. Then you duck your head everlastingly quick and land on your shoulders."

I asked Mr. Potter how long a drop would be possible for a gymnast. He thought a hundred feet might be done by a man of unusual nerve, but he pointed out that the peril increases enormously with every twenty feet you add, say to a drop of forty feet. When you have dropped sixty feet you are falling thirty-five miles an hour; when you have dropped eighty feet you are falling nearly sixty miles an hour. And so on. It seemed incredible that a man shooting down, head first, at such velocity would wait before turning until only two feet separated him from the net.

"It can't be," said I, "that in one of these straight drops a gymnast is guided only by his sense of time?"

Potter hesitated a moment. "You mean that he uses his eyes to know when to turn? I guess he does a little, although it is mostly sense of time."

"You wouldn't get a man to do it blindfolded?" I suggested.

"Not a straight drop, no; but a drop with somersaults, yes."

"What, two somersaults down to the net, blindfolded?"

"Yes, sir, that would be easy. I tell you a man's eyes don't help him when he's turning in the air. Why, Tom and I would throw that boy of mine (Royetta) across from one to the other, he turning doubles, just the same whether he was blindfolded or not. It wouldn't make any difference.

"I'll tell you another thing," he continued, "that may surprise you. It's possible for a fine gymnast to swing from a bar, say sixty feet above the net, turn a back somersault--what we call a cast somersault--then shoot straight down head first for thirty feet and then tuck up and turn a forward somersault, landing on his shoulders. I couldn't do it myself ever since I got hurt down in Mexico, but Tom Hanlon could. I mention this to show what control a man can get over his body in the air. He can make it turn one way, then go straight, and then turn the other way."

After proper expression of wonder at this statement, I asked Mr. Potter if something might not go wrong with this wonderful automatic time machine that a gymnast carries within himself. Of course there might, he said, and that is why there is such need of practice. Let a man neglect his trapeze for a couple of months, and he would be almost like a beginner. And even the best gymnasts, he admitted, men in the pink of training, are liable to sudden and unaccountable disturbances of mind or heart that make them for the moment unequal to their most familiar feats.

"I'll tell you what accounts for the death of most gymnasts," he went on. "It's changing their minds while they're in the air. That's what we call it, but it's only a name. Nobody knows just what happens when a gymnast changes his mind--I mean what happens inside him. What happens outside is that he's usually killed.

"Now there was Billy Batcheller. He was a fine leaper, and could do his two somersaults over four elephants or eight horses with the prettiest lift you ever saw. He could do it easy. But one day--we were showing out west with the Reynolds circus--as he came down the leaping-run he struck the board wrong, somehow, and in the turn he changed his mind; instead of doing a double he did one and a half and shot over the last horse straight for the ground, head first. One second more and he was a dead man; he would have broken his neck sure, but I saw him coming and caught him so with my right arm, took all the skin off under his chin, and left the print of my hand on his breast for weeks. But it saved him. And the queer thing was he never could explain it--none of them ever can; he just changed his mind. So did Ladell, who used to do doubles from high bars down to a pedestal. He made his leap one night, just as usual--it was at Toronto, in 1896, I think--and as he turned he changed his mind, and I forget how he landed, but it killed him all right."

"Did you ever have an experience of this kind yourself?" I asked.

"Not exactly," he answered, "and I'm thankful I haven't, but I came near it once in Chicago. It was the night after Howard got hurt, and I guess fear--just plain, every-day fear--was at the bottom of my feeling. My wife and I were doing an act sixty feet above the ground, and without a net. I would hang by my hands from a couple of loops at the top of the Coliseum, and she would hang, head down, from my feet, her ankles locked across mine, just a natural locking of the feet, with no fastenings and only ordinary performing shoes.

"When I had her that way, a man below would pull a drag-rope and get us swinging higher and higher, until finally we would come right up to a horizontal. I tell you it was a hair-raising thing to see, but until this night I had never thought much about the danger. I thought of it now, though, as I remembered Howard's fall, and I got so nervous for my wife that I felt sure something terrible was going to happen. I was just about in the state where a man starts his act and can't go through with it, where he changes his mind. And you'll be surprised to hear what gave me heart to go on."

"What was it?"

"It was the music, sir; and ever since that night I've understood why some generals send their soldiers into battle with bands playing. As we stood by the dressing-room entrance waiting to go on, it seemed as if I couldn't do it, but when I heard the crash of that circus band calling us, and came out into the glare of light and heard the applause, just roars of it, why, I forgot everything except the pride of my business, and up we went, net or no net, and we never did our toe swing better than that night. Just the same, I'd had my warning, and I soon got another act instead of that one; and--" He hesitated. "Well, sir, to-day I wouldn't take my wife up and do that toe swing the way we used to, not for a million dollars. And yet she's crazy to do it."

IV

SOME REMARKABLE FALLS AND NARROW ESCAPES OF FAMOUS ATHLETES

AS we finished our talk, Mr. Potter asked me to call some evening at their rooms, on Tenth Street, and see a family of trapeze performers in private life. I was glad to accept this invitation, and looked in upon them a day or two later. Like the other figures in these studies of thrilling lives, they presented a modest, simple picture in their home circle. There is nothing in the externals of lion-tamers, steeple-climbers, divers, balloonists, or gymnasts to betray their unusual calling. Nor is there any heroic sign in eye or voice or bearing. They are plain, unpretentious folk, for the most part, who do these things and say little about them.

In one room were Tom and Royetta playing checkers, while Clarence, the "kid," weary, no doubt, from the morning's practice, lay on a bed storing up resistance against the next day's shoots and twisters. In a room adjoining were Mr. Potter himself and Mrs. Potter enjoying the call of a lady acrobat, one of the famed Livingstons, trick bicyclists.

As soon as was fitting, I put the old question to Mr. Potter, the question that always interests me, how it happened that he became a gymnast, and he went back to his Western boyhood and the early longings that possessed him to be a performer in the air. Plainly he was born with the gymnast instinct, and he ran away from home to follow his heart's desire. Then he told us how at seventeen he was traveling with a ten-cent show, doing a single trapeze act in the ring and an out-of-door free exhibition of tight-rope walking from canvas top to ground. Once he went at a difficult feat so eagerly--he was always his own teacher--that he fell clean off a trapeze sixty feet above ground, and by some kind providence that watches over boys escaped serious injury.

"It's queer about falls," said Mr. Potter. "It's often the little ones that kill. Now, there I fell sixty feet, and you might say it didn't hurt me at all. Another time, showing in Yucatan, I fell only forty feet, and smashed two ribs. And the worst fall I ever had was fifteen feet at the Olympia, in London. I was driving four horses in a tandem race, and was thrown straight on my head. That time I nearly broke my neck."

"Twenty-five feet is my best fall," put in Mrs. Potter, smiling. "I was doing an act on the flying rings, and one of 'em broke. Remember that, Harry?"

His face showed how well he remembered it. "Perhaps you won't believe this," he said, "but when I saw her falling I couldn't move. I was 'tending her in the ring, and wasn't ten feet from where she struck. I could have caught her and saved her if my legs would only have moved. But there they were frozen, sir, and I just had to stand still and see my wife come down smash on her head. Pretty tough, wasn't it? She lay unconscious for two days--that was at Monette, Missouri. Oh, yes, I remember it!"

I asked Mrs. Potter if she had ever been afraid, and she shook her head. Never once, not even at Chicago, in the perilous toe swing, when even the other gymnasts told her she would certainly be killed. She knew her husband would hold her safe, and she really enjoyed that toe swing more than any act they ever did.

"I'll tell you this, though," she admitted, "I would be afraid to do these things with any one except my husband."

"Yes, and I'd be afraid to have her," added Potter. "Why, down in Mexico, when I broke my ribs, there was a man--a fine gymnast, too--who offered to take my place so we wouldn't lose our salary, but every time I saw him practice with my wife it made me so nervous I called it off and let the salary go."

In spite of these manifest hazards, Potter insists that there is no healthier life than a gymnast leads. "We never are ill," he said, "we never take cold, we travel through all sorts of fever-stricken countries and never catch anything, and we always feel good. Look at that boy of mine! He's seventeen years old, and he's got a chest on him like a man. Thirty-eight inches is what it measures. Why, I can't find a coat that'll fit him."

He went on to point out some plain advantages, in addition to health, that ordinary citizens might derive from a moderate knowledge of trapeze work. In a fire, for instance, a man so trained would have little difficulty in saving himself and others by climbing and swinging. And firemen themselves would double their efficiency by regular practice on high bars.

Again, in case of a runaway, a man familiar with the trapeze knows how and when to spring for the bridle of a plunging horse. Or should he find himself almost under the wheels of a trolley-car, he could leap for the platform rail and swing up to safety.

"I'll give you a case," said Potter, "where the training we get helped a good deal. It was a season when I was working with the Barnum outfit; we were showing in the East, and during the hippodrome races a little girl got away from her people somehow, and the first thing anybody knew, there she was out on the track, with three four-horse chariots not a hundred feet off, and coming on a dead run. As the crowd saw the child they gave a great 'Uff' in fear, and lots of women screamed. It wasn't in human power to stop those horses, and it seemed as if the little tot must be killed.

"She was about half-way across the track when I started for her. Lots of men would have started just as I did, but very few would have gone at just the right angle to save her. Most men would have tried to run straight across, but I was sure the horses would trample me and the child, too, if I tried that. So I took her on a slant, running across and away from the horses, and I caught her little body as a gymnast knows how, didn't waste any time at it, and then--hoo!--we were over, with the breath of those horses on our necks. If it hadn't been for the practice I've had judging time and distance, we'd both have been killed that trip."

I come now to another occasion when I spent two profitable hours with the St. Belmos, husband and wife, who for years past and in many parts of the world have appeared in a trapeze act that calls for the greatest nerve and precision of movement. As a climax to this act, St. Belmo makes a leap and swing of forty feet over his audience, springing head first through a circle of knives and fire that barely lets his body pass, then catching a suspended trapeze that breaks away at his touch and carries him on in a long sweep, then leaping again, feet first, from this flying bar through a paper balloon, where he holds by his arms and drops swiftly thirty-five feet to the ground.

I was surprised to find the hero of this perilous feat rather the reverse of athletic in appearance. St. Belmo struck me as a pale, thin, almost sickly man. Yet I judge it would fare ill with any one who tried to impose upon him as an invalid. Over that spare form are hard, tireless muscles, and for years to come St. Belmo feels equal to leaping this obstacle of blades and flame.

Most people, I suppose, in watching this act would imagine the knives to be of wood and tinsel, but I saw that they were of steel, and sharp, heavy double-edged knives a foot long, murderous weapons made by St. Belmo himself out of old saws. And fifteen of these, with points turned inward, form the heart through which this gaunt yet rather genial gymnast shoots his way.

I asked St. Belmo about the accidents that he had suffered. Had he ever struck the knives when leaping through? Yes, again and again. He had torn his clothes to tatters on them, and lined his body with scars. But that was years ago, when he was learning. Now he never touched the knives. He could leap through them, eyes shut, as surely as a man puts a spoon in his mouth without striking his teeth.

How about falls in the air? Well, he remembered two in particular, one at Syracuse, where he missed the trapeze because some one was careless in fastening a snap-hook that held it, and when he came through the blades and flames head first, and reached for the bar, the bar had swung away, and he plunged on smash down to the ground, and broke both legs.

"Didn't you look for the bar before you made the leap?" I questioned.

He shook his head. "I never see the bar for the dazzle of fire. I know where it must be, and leap for that place. If it isn't there, why--" He pointed down to his legs, and smiled ruefully.

He had another fall at Seattle, where he came down thirty-five feet and put both his knees out of joint, all because he was thinking of something else as he shot toward the balloon, and forgot to throw out his arms and catch in the hoop. It was exactly the case of a man who might walk over the edge of a housetop through absent-mindedness.

"Ever have a feeling of fear?" I asked.

"I don't know as you'd call it fear exactly," he began.

"Yes, it was fear, too," put in his wife, teasing. "I've seen your knees shake so up on the pedestal that you almost tumbled off."

"No wonder my knees shook," protested St. Belmo; "they've been out of joint times enough. Naturally, after an accident you feel a little queer for a while; but I'll own up there was once I felt afraid, and it wasn't long ago, either."

"I know," said his wife; "up at the Twenty-second Regiment Armory."

"That's right; it was in December. Remember when that bicycle-diver was killed? His name was Stark? Poor chap! He was a friend of ours, and we were there when it happened. You know, he got too much speed on the incline, and struck the far edge of the tank instead of the water. That was in the afternoon, and the same night we had to go on and do our act. I looked at that tank, and then I said, 'Boys, I'm leary about this, but I'm going to do my act. I'll come down somehow, boys; you watch me.' Honest, I thought I was going to be killed, but I got through all right."

Then he explained that the greatest danger in his act is neither at the knives nor at the balloon, but in the swift drop after the balloon with the hoop under his arms. This hoop, as it goes down, winds up a spring overhead that acts as a break on the fall, though a very slight one. Just before St. Belmo reaches the floor he lifts his arms above the hoop and drops through it to the ground, but he must do that at precisely the right moment, or he will suffer accident. If he drops through too soon he will strike too hard, and may break his legs. If he does not drop through soon enough, the hoop may jerk his arms out of the sockets. And in spite of this formidable alternative St. Belmo assured me that for more than a dozen years now he has made this drop continually, and never failed once.

Think of a calling that requires a man to steer perpetually, by the closest fraction of a shave, between a pair of broken legs and a pair of dislocated arms! Fancy such an alternative as part of the regular after-dinner routine! And then consider what marvelous precision must be in these bodies and minds of ours when a man can face such a hazard for years and never come to grief. _

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