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species of three-legged ostrich. The teller would listen raptly aa he dwelled, in detail, on the expedition's struggles with cholera, head-hunters, crocodiles, women, ticks, witch doctors, booze, quicksand and missionaries. When Fields had concluded, the teller would ask respectfully about the next trip. "We're going into the Arctic," Fields would tell him. "We've fitted out an expedition to hunt the northern Mexican hairless — for scientific purposes, of course. See you around 1906, if we come through."
"Good-by," the teller would cry, much affected. "The best of luck, Professor Bascom!"
In this phase, Fields, at nineteen, enjoyed talking, and especially lying, offstage. Perhaps this was because he had quit talking onstage. With Fulton, and part of the time with Irwin, he had not only talked in dramatic roles but had accompanied his juggling with patter. When he began to get the upper hand of Irwin, he abandoned the patter, for some reason he never cleared up. One of his public utterances on the subject, in 1926, was ambiguous and elliptical : "When I began, I used to do what we called a 'dumb act.' That is, I didn't talk: it was all dumb show. Then I started using lines to help get the laughs. For I want to emphasize this point: even when I seemed to be just drifting along, without any particular purpose to guide me, I did have a definite desire." His desire was, of course, to become a comedian, but why he decided to approach it silently, around the turn of the century, none of his friends knew. The best guess is that Fields, who, as he said, was always looking into the future though he seemed to be proceeding haphazardly, had his eye on a European tour. International bookings were denied to many kinds of American vaudeville, because of the difference in languages; straight juggling obviously carried no such handicap. "The important post of closing the first half fell to W. C. Fields, a 'dumb act,' " said Variety of one of Fields' early vaudeville appearances.
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