which he was bound, being still in Mos

cow.

more

The business in question, as was made clear in the preliminary consultation which V. G. Tchertkof held with N. K. Muravyof, the solicitor, consisted in getting fresh signatures from Lyoff Nikolaievich, whose great age made it desirable to make sure, without delay, of his wishes being carried out by means of a unassailable legal document. Strakhof brought the draft of the will with him, and laid it before Lyoff Nikolaievich. After reading the paper through, he at once wrote under it that he agreed with its purport, and then added, after a pause: "All this business is very disagreeable to me, and it is unnecessary. To insure the propagation of my ideas by taking all sorts of measures-why, no word can perish without leaving its trace, if it expresses a truth, and if the man who utters it believes profoundly in its truth. But all these outward means for insuring it only come of our disbelief in what we utter."

And with these words Lyoff Nikolaievich left the study.

Thereupon Mr. Strakhof began to consider what he must do next, whether he should go back with empty hands, or whether he should argue it out.

He decided to argue it out, and endeavored to explain to my father how painful it would be for his friends after his death to hear people blaming him for not having taken any steps, despite his strong opinion on the subject, to see that his wishes were carried out, and for having thereby helped to transfer his copyrights to the members of his family.

Tolstoy promised to think it over, and left the room again.

At dinner Sófya Andréyevna "was evidently far from having any suspicions." When Tolstoy was not by, however, she asked Mr. Strakhof what he had come down about. Inasmuch as Mr. Strakhof had other affairs in hand besides the will, he told her about one thing and another with an easy conscience.

Mr. Strakhof described a second visit to Yasnaya, when he came to attest the same will as a witness.

As I said good-by to Sófya Andréyevna, I examined her countenance attentively. Such complete tranquillity and cordiality toward her departing guests were written on it that I had not the smallest doubt of her complete ignorance of what was going on. . . . I left the house with the pleasing consciousness of a work well done—a work that was destined to have a considerable historic consequence. I only felt some little twinge within, certain qualms of conscience about the conspiratorial character of the transaction.

But even this text of the will did not quite satisfy my father's "friends and advisers"; it was redrafted for the fourth and last time in July, 1910.

This last draft was written by my father himself in the Limonovski Forest, two miles from the house, not far from Mr. Tchertkof's estate.

Such is the melancholy history of this document, which was destined to have historic consequences. "All this business is very disagreeable to me, and it is unnecessary," my father said when he signed the paper that was thrust before him. That was his real opinion about his will, and it never altered to the end of his days.

Is there any need of proof for that? I think one need know very little of his convictions to have no doubt about it.

Was Lyoff Nikolaievich Tolstoy likely of his own accord to have recourse to the protection of the law? And, if he did, was he likely to conceal it from his wife and children?

He had been put into a position from which there was absolutely no way out. To tell his wife was out of the question; it would have grievously offended his friends. To have destroyed the will would have been worse still; for his friends had suffered for his principles morally, and some of them materially, and had been exiled from Russia. He felt himself bound to them.

And on the top of all this were his fainting fits, his increasing loss of memory, the clear consciousness of the approach of death, and the continually growing nervousness of his wife, who felt in her heart of hearts the unnatural estrangement of her husband, and could not understand it. If she asked him what it was that he was concealing from her, he would

either have to say nothing or to tell her the truth. But that was impossible.

So it came about that the long-cherished dream of leaving Yásnaya Polyána presented itself as the only means of escape. It was certainly not in order to enjoy the full realization of his dream that he left his home; he went away only as a choice of evils.

"I am too feeble and too old to begin a new life," he had said to my brother Sergei only a few days before his depar

ture.

Harassed, ill in body and in mind, he started forth without any object in view, without any thought-out plan, merely in order to hide himself somewhere, wherever it might be, and get some rest from the moral tortures which had become insupportable to him.

"To fly, to fly!" he said in his deathbed delirium as he lay at Astapova.

"Has papa considered that mama may not survive the separation from him?" I asked my sister Sasha on October 29, when she was on the point of going to join him at Shamerdino.

"Yes, he has considered all that, and still made up his mind to go, because he thinks that nothing could be worse than the state that things have come to here," she answered.

I confess that my explanation of my father's flight by no means exhausts the

question. Life is complex and every explanation of a man's conduct is bound to suffer from one-sidedness. Besides, there are circumstances of which I do not care to speak at the present moment, in order not to cause unnecessary pain to people still living. It may be that if those who were about my father during the last years of his life had known what they were doing, things would have turned out differently.

The years will pass. The accumulated incrustations which hide the truth will pass away. Much will be wiped out and forgotten. Among other things my father's will will be forgotten-that will which he himself looked upon as an "unnecessary outward means." And men I will see more clearly that legacy of love and truth in which he believed deeply, and which, according to his own words, "cannot perish without a trace."

In conclusion I cannot refrain from quoting the opinion of one of my kinsmen, who, after my father's death, read the diaries kept both by my father and my mother during the autumn before Lyoff Nikolaievich left Yásnaya Polyána.

"What a terrible misunderstanding!" he said. "Each loved the other with such poignant affection, each was suffering all the time on the other's behalf, and then this terrible ending! . . . I see the hand of fate in this."

NE afternoon in January, 1888, Mr.

Charles E. Hurd, literary editor of the "Boston Transcript," gave me two theater-tickets and asked if I had ever seen Jim Herne play. I told him I had

not.

"Do so at once," said he; "for he is a realist after your own heart."

I accepted the tickets with pleasure, and that night witnessed the performance of "Drifting Apart," by James A. and Katharine Herne.

They were playing at that time on a second-rate, out-of-the-way stage in the South End, and their surroundings were cheap and tawdry, but I can still define. the profound impression made upon me by their action and the play.

The plot of the piece was very simple. In the first act Jack, the middle-aged husband of Mary Miller, was shaving himself in preparation for a trip to the village to purchase some Christmas presents, and all through the scene, which was charmingly set, Herne moved unaffectedly, joking, chuckling, making quaint toilet preparations with a naturalism I had never before seen upon the stage; and Katharine was almost equally delightful as the wife. When at the close of the act her sailor husband returned with his arms full of bundles, helplessly intoxicated, the horror, the despair, which filled the heart of Mary formed a complete and piteous contrast to the delicious comedy which had preceded it.

The two acts which followed, being a dream, were less moving, but the fourth act, which brought Jack back to sobriety and restored the reality of the simple New England coast life of the opening scene, was almost equally colloquial. The play closed with satisfying glow, with Jack repentant and Mary forgiving.

This quiet naturalism, this unaffected humor, deeply moved and interested me,

and I felt it my duty to write to Herne, thanking him for the pleasure he had given me. I also expressed my admiration of the acting of "Miss" Herne, and went on to say that by such writing as that in the first and last acts of "Drifting Apart" he had allied himself with the best localcolor fictionists of New England, and deserved the encouragement and support of the same public.

A day or two later I received a modest and earnest letter from him in which he said:

"I am going on the road very soon, but when I return in May I shall be very glad to have you come out to my house."

The wish was fulfilled some months later, and in answer to a note of cordial invitation I hastened to call upon them at their home in Ashmont. It was a modest, unesthetic frame cottage such as a carpenter might live in, but Mrs. Herne met me at the door, looking quite like Mary Miller of the play, and presented to me her three little daughters, Julie, Crystal, and Dorothy, who made me instantly at home in the family sitting-room and library.

That first evening with them, filled with cordial explanations and tumultuous argument, is still vivid in my mind. It was in effect a session of congress, a religious revival, and a swift Irish comedy. Our clamor lasted far into the night, and I went away at last with a feeling that these people were my kind. I had never met such instant and warmhearted understanding and sympathy. My head rang with their piquant phrases, their earnest and changeful voices.

At this time I was an active, I fear a pestiferous, advocate of Henry George's land theories, and at our next meeting, after we had discussed the drama and the newer forms of acting to the dregs, I switched the conversation to the single

tax. In the end I converted them both. Then we examined into the constitution of matter and Spencer's theories of evolution, and Mrs. Herne, who was not only a genuine humorist, but a thinker of intuitive subtlety and a lover of science, took the fullest part in all these excited debates. We beat our chairs and warred over the nebular hypothesis with entire unconsciousness of time.

This extraordinary family brought to me a wholly new world-a world of swift and pulsating emotion, a world of aspiration, of brave battle for an art. It is difficult for me to express in a few words how much they and their lovely children meant to me during the years which followed. They were at once a puzzle and an inspiration.

Herne, I soon discovered, was half-way on the road toward a truer, finer form of dramatic art, and the tragic result of his aspiration seemed to be that just in proportion as his writing increased in truth and his acting gained in subtlety he ceased to please the public, even the public he had already won in other plays. He confessed that he was sinking deeper and deeper into debt day by day, and my influence was not particularly helpful at this moment; for my criticism rendered him discontented with the plays which had hitherto given. him comfort and a sense of security, and did not materially aid him in his effort to do something higher and finer.

He had made a great deal of money with "Hearts of Oak," his first play, which was part English and part American, but had lost heavily on his second play, "The Minute-Men," a picturesque study of colonial times, and was steadily dropping money on "Drifting Apart.' Naturally he was discouraged, though never embittered.

"The managers all admit the good points of my play," he explained to me. "In fact, they say it is too good. 'The public does n't want a good play,' they say. 'It wants bad plays. Write a bad play, Jim. Not too bad, but just bad. enough,' is their advice. Meanwhile I must play in theaters which are not suited to my way of doing things, and am obliged to insert into my play tricks and turns which I despise."

He related these experiences with a smile, but admitted that he was disheart

ened, and I at once offered to assist him in finding an audience and a better theater. I assured him that there was a public for his plays if he could but reach it, and bluntly added that he could do better work than he had done, and that no play could be too good. "I want you to write a play," I said to him, "in which there are no compromises at all."

Under the influence of my optimism he took heart, and began to revise "Drifting Apart" for the third time. It was supposed at one time that I worked with him on this play, but as a matter of fact I never suggested a line in any of his plays, although he read them to me scene by scene. In this case I followed his revisions almost day by day, encouraging him to cut out the very parts which his theatric advisers considered the most vital parts of the piece. As he wrote me afterward, I upheld his elbow.

"I never was as much encouraged to proceed in the work I have laid out to accomplish as I have been by you," he wrote. "You have, as it were, indorsed my judgment and showed me that it is possible to succeed and to force acknowledgment in spite of the opposition I have met with and the obstacles I have yet to overcome."

My admiration for Mrs. Herne's art was almost unbounded. I felt that she could play other and much more important parts than Mary Miller. There was in "Drifting Apart" a scene-in the dream -wherein a poor little mother sits holding her child in her lap while it dies of cold and hunger, and the exquisite restraint and the marvelous fidelity to nature with which Katharine Herne played this tragic episode convinced me that she was one of the great actresses of America. The music which accompanied this scene, a wailing little melody, came to embody. for me all the pathos and defeat which lay in the failure of the play.

My happiest days in Boston were associated with this house. I loved the children, those three vivid and dramatic little tow-haired girls, and their mother's lambent wit and sudden, outflashing humor enthralled me. I had never known such people, for they were subject to all that is most typical of Celtic extravagances and change of mood. They brought me to know many other famous figures in their

strange world. They introduced me to William Gillette, Harry Pitt, Mary Shaw, Robson and Crane, Maud Banks, and many others of their friends, and before long I was not only thinking of writing plays, but planning a general reform. of the stage through the formation of the first Independent Theater Society in Society in America.

Having "discovered" the Hernes, I was eager to let all my friends know how fine, how important, they were. I dragged Mr. Howells down into the South End to see the play, and I insisted that Clement of the "Transcript" and Flower of the "Arena" should report upon it. Flower at once became quite as enthusiastic as I, and not only commented upon the Hernes editorially, but commissioned me to write an article for an early number of the magazine.

Soon all my literary friends knew what the Hernes were trying to do. As a publicity agent, without pay, I was indefatigable, I suspect, a nuisance, and yet my efforts proved to be of no financial value. The Hernes left the South End theater discouraged, but not defeated. Herne had in fact the most marvelous staying powers. He always bobbed up like the traditional cork. Just when I thought he was beaten to earth, he rose with a chuckle and went at it again.

My brother Franklin joined the company in the autumn, and during the next year we both shared the amazing dramatic ups and downs of "the road." I was present at the opening of the season in Troy, and met them again in Brooklyn. I suffered with them when the houses were small, and exulted with them when the sales were large. I traveled with them, spending long hours on the train discussing why the play did not appeal, and forecasting its chances of success in the next "stand." I know the desolating effect of the slow dropping of seats in a half-filled auditorium.

In after years, when the skies were fair, we were all able to laugh over these miserable experiences; but they were not funny at the time, or, at least, if they were funny, it was because Herne's irrepressible humor made them so. I suffered apparently more than he, for I was wholly unaccustomed to the abrupt changes of mood which mark theatrical life, or per

haps I was deceived by the readiness with which they both rose from depression.

Often I took their depressions, which always had in them a touch of exaggeration, to be despairs, while, on the contrary, their humorous sallies often concealed from me the more poignant of their griefs. Altogether this was a very sorrowful as well as a most beautiful friendship, and gave me deeper insight into the singular and passionate world of the stage in which they lived and had their being.

In the summer of 1890, James A., as I called him, decided to give up "Drifting Apart" and produce a new play upon which he had been working, called "Margaret Fleming." In this I was instantly and profoundly interested. A volume of Ibsen's plays had just been translated. "A Doll's House" had been produced at a matinée by Mrs. Richard Mansfield, and the discussion of an independent theater was in full swing. I told every one I met of Herne's new play, and did everything I could to get it put on; but all to no purpose. The managers of Boston as well as those of New York would not consider it for a moment, although up to that time it was by all odds the most original of Herne's plays.

One day at a luncheon given to Herne by Mr. Howells, the dramatic situation was thoroughly gone into, and James A., with boyish frankness, confessed that he was at his wits' end. "Every theater in Boston and most of those in New York have refused to consider my new play," he said. And to this I was able to bear corroborative testimony, for I had been personally rebuffed by five Boston managers.

Mr. Howells then spoke of a like case in Berlin, and related how Sudermann and his associates had secured a hall on a side street, and made production of their plays, then, "They brought the public to them by sheer force of their dramatic novelty," said Howells. "Why don't you do as they did-hire a sail-loft or a stable somewhere, and produce your play in simplest fashion? The people will come to see it if it is new and vital."

Poor Herne did not take fire at this suggestion, for he had reached almost the last ounce of his courage and pretty nearly the last dollar of his savings. But he went away with the idea revolving in his head, and after using every argument to get the