Part 96

Those last days ashore were filled with a strange mellowness. Ethel Barrymore came down from Boston to see him. They had an intimate talk about the old days. When she left him she saw tears in his eyes. That night, just as she was about to go on in "The Shadow" in Boston, she received this telegram from him:

Nice talk, Ethel. Good-by. C. F.

The Lusitania sailed at ten o'clock on Saturday morning, May 1, 1915. Even at the dock Frohman could not resist his little joke. When Paul Potter, who saw him off, said to him:

"Aren't you afraid of the U boats, C. F.?"

"No, I am only afraid of the I O U's," was the reply.

CHARLES FROHMAN ON BOARD SHIP]

In his farewell steamer letter to Dillingham, written as the huge ship was plowing her way down the bay, he drew a picture of a submarine attacking a transatlantic liner. The last lines he wrote on the boat were prophetic of his fate. Ann Murdock had sent him a large steamer basket in the shape of a ship. The lines to her, brought back by the ship's pilot, were:

The little ship you sent is more wonderful than the big one that takes me away from you.

Like most of his distinguished fellow-voyagers, and they included Charles Klein, Elbert Hubbard, Justus Miles Forman, and Alfred G. Vanderbilt, Frohman had frequently traveled on the Lusitania. By a curious coincidence he had once planned to use her sister ship, the Mauretania, for one of his daring innovations. He had a transatlantic theater in mind. In other words, he proposed to produce whole plays on shipboard. He took over a small company headed by Marie Doro to try out the experiment. Early on the voyage Miss Doro succumbed to seasickness and the project was abandoned.

The last journey of the Lusitania was uneventful until that final fateful day. Frohman had kept to his cabin during the greater part of the trip. He was still suffering great pain in his right knee, and walked the deck with difficulty. Occasionally he appeared in the smoking-room, and was present at the ship's concert on the night before the end.

At 2.33 o'clock on the afternoon of May 7th the great vessel rode to her death. Eight miles off the Head of Kinsale, and within sight of the Irish coast, she was torpedoed by a German submarine. She sank in half an hour, with frightful loss of life, including more than a hundred Americans.

Frohman's hour was at hand, and he met it with the smiling equanimity and unflinching courage with which he had faced every other crisis in his life. When the crash came he was on the upper promenade deck. He had just come from his luncheon and was talking with George Vernon, the brother-in-law of Rita Jolivet, the actress, who was also on board. They were now joined by Captain Scott, an Englishman on his way from India to enlist. When Miss Jolivet reached them Frohman was smoking a cigar and was calm and apparently undisturbed.

Scott went below to get some life-belts. He returned with only two. He had started up with three, but gave one to a woman on the way. Miss Jolivet had provided herself with a belt.

Scott started to put one of the life-preservers on Frohman, who protested. Finally, with great reluctance, he acquiesced. There was no belt left for Scott. Frohman insisted that he get one, whereupon the soldier said:

"If you must die, it is only for once."

There was a responsive look and a whimsical smile on Frohman's face at this remark. He kept on smoking. Then he started to talk about the Germans. "I didn't think they would do it," he said. He was apparently the most unruffled person on the ship.

The great liner began to lurch. Frohman now said to Miss Jolivet:

"You had better hold on the rail and save your strength."

The ship's list became greater; huge waves rolled up, carrying wreckage and bodies on their crest. Then, with all the terror of destruction about him, Frohman said to his associates, with the serene smile still on his face:

"Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure of life."

Instinctively the four people moved closer together, they joined hands by a common impulse, and stood awaiting the end.

The ship gave a sudden lurch; once more a mighty green cliff of water came rushing up, bearing its tide of dead and debris; again Frohman started to say the speech that was to be his valedictory. He had hardly repeated the first three words--"Why fear death?"--when the group was engulfed and all sank beneath the surface of the sea.

No situation of the thousands that he had created in the theater was so vividly or so unaffectedly dramatic as the great manager's own exit from the stage of life. Smilingly he had made his way through innumerable difficulties; smilingly and with the highest heroism he met his fate.

The only survivor of the quartet that stood hand in hand on those death-cluttered decks was Miss Jolivet, and it was she who told the story of those last thrilling minutes.

Charles Frohman's body was recovered the next day and brought to Queenstown. A fortnight later it reached New York. On the casket was the American flag that the dead man had loved so well. Though princes of capital, famous playwrights, and international authorities on law and art went down with him, the loss of Frohman overshadowed all others. In the eyes of the world, the loss of the Lusitania was the loss of Charles Frohman.

His noble and eloquent final words, so rich with courageous philosophy, not only joined the category of the great farewells of all time, but wherever read or uttered will give humanity a fresher faith with which to meet the inevitable. In a supreme moment of the most colossal drama that human passion ever staged, fate literally hurled him into the universal lime-light to enact a part that gave him an undying glory. The shyest of men became the world's observed.

The last tribute to Charles Frohman was the most remarkable demonstration of sorrow in the history of the theater. The one-time barefoot boy of Sandusky, Ohio, who had projected so many people into eminence and who had himself hidden behind the rampart of his own activities, was widely mourned.

The principal funeral services were held at the Temple Emanu-El in New York. Here gathered a notable assemblage that took reverent toll of all callings and creeds. It was proud to do honor to the man who had achieved so much and who had died so heroically.