Careers of Danger and Daring

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 aërial 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, aërial 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 aërial 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 aërials." 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.