As a rule
Fussie had the most wonderful sense of the stage, and at rehearsal would
skirt the edge of it, but never cross it. But at Brooklyn one night when
we were playing "Charles I."--the last act, and that most pathetic part
of it where Charles is taking a last farewell of his wife and
children--Fussie, perhaps excited by his run over the bridge from New
York, suddenly bounded on to the stage! The good children who were
playing Princess Mary and Prince Henry didn't even smile; the audience
remained solemn, but Henry and I nearly went into hysterics. Fussie knew
directly that he had done wrong. He lay down on his stomach, then rolled
over on his back, whimpering an apology--while carpenters kept on
whistling and calling to him from the wings. The children took him up to
the window at the back of the scene, and he stayed there cowering
between them until the end of the play.
America seems to have been always fatal to Fussie. Another time when
Henry and I were playing in some charity performance in which John Drew
and Maude Adams were also acting, he disgraced himself again. Henry
having "done his bit" and put on hat and coat to leave the theater,
Fussie thought the end of the performance must have come; the stage had
no further sanctity for him, and he ran across it to the stage door
barking! John Drew and Maude Adams were playing "A Pair of Lunatics.
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