Madame Eulalie’s Rare PlumsThe Strand Magazine, July 1929
IN the big room at the back of Magnolia Hall on West Ninety-Third Street, New York City, that draughty cavern where so many musical comedies have gone through the painful process of getting themselves born, the rehearsal of Goble and Cohn’s stupendous new production, “Coralie,” had been interrupted by one of those mysterious pauses. These occur at irregular intervals throughout the preparation of every musical piece, and last till the Man Behind the Cigar claps his hands peevishly and wants to know what the blazes we’re wasting time like this for.
The company, glad of the respite, stood chatting in groups. The pianist, having put his feet up on the keys, lit a cigarette. Near the door a little knot of managers, librettists, producers, dance-directors, and Yes-old-man-but-do-just-listen-to-me-for-a-minute men were waving their hands and strenuously debating. Above the din of battle rose a voice saying that it had been twenty years in the show business.
On a bench in a corner, the Deputy Assistant Lyric Writer sat chewing a pencil and staring bleakly before him. Somebody had just told him to write in ten lines for the girls in the Finale, and, like all lyrists, the only thing he could think of was to have them strew something in the path of the happy young couple on their wedding-day. He was working on this inspiration when a girl, simply clad in pink shoes and a bathing-suit, detached herself from a neighbouring group and came and sat down beside him.
“Busy?” she said.
“Listen,” said the Deputy Assistant Lyrist. “What do people strew?”
“How do you mean, strew?”
“Why, strew.” The lyrist made strewing motions.
“Oh, strew?” The girl reflected. “Roses.”
“I’ve had ’em strewing roses in the Opening Chorus.”
“Sawdust.”
“Not sawdust.” The lyrist’s face cleared. He looked like Shakespeare getting the idea for Hamlet. “I know! Sunshine.”
“Sunshine?”
“Rays of happy sunshine.”
His companion shook her head.
“You expect us girls to go about strewing rays of happy sunshine? It can’t be done—not on forty dollars a week.”
“You’ll do it—and like it,” said the lyrist firmly.
“Oh, well,” said the girl, “I suppose, when you come right down to it, there’s nothing that can’t happen in musical comedy. Yes, sir, that’s the first lesson we wage-slaves in the Ensemble have to learn. Did I ever tell you about the career of Pearl Delahay? There was a case.”
“I’m busy,” said the lyrist. “I’m trying to concentrate, I don’t want to hear about any Pearl Delahays.”
“It isn’t what we want in this life,” said the girl, with gentle rebuke. “Come to that, I don’t want to strew rays of happy sunshine.”
She mused for awhile, smiling reminiscently.
I MET her in this very hall (she said). We’re sitting round the piano for the first chorus-rehearsal of a show called “Ask Dad.” There’s thirty-two of us, and I’m on the edge of the mob-scene and there’s only one other girl on my bench, and we’re far enough away from the centre of things to be able to have a little quiet conversation without getting called down by the maestro, so naturally we become sociable.
She was a pretty kid, with a turned-up nose and rather a sort of soppy, small-town expression and the brightest red hair you ever saw. I told her my name and asked what was hers.
“Pearl Delahay,” she says. “At least, it isn’t.”
“Make up your mind.”
“Well, what I mean, I’m married.”
“I’m on the verge,” I said. This was just before Jim and I teamed up. “Mine does company-managing. He’ll probably get the Number Two Company of this show, if there ever is one. And if we both have a good season you ought to be buying the wedding-present round about next August.”
Well, after talking of this and that for awhile, we decide we like each other all right, and when “Ask Dad” goes on the preliminary road-tour we’ll kick in together. And it was on this road-tour that she told me all about herself—some of it in Cleveland, some of it in Detroit, and the rest one night in the Childs restaurant on the boardwalk at Atlantic City just before we come into New York.
Pearl had escaped from an up-State town near the Canadian border. It was called Franklin, and her name was Mrs. Gooch, and her husband ran the Always Open garage which is half-way up Main Street on your right as you leave the Baptist Chapel. He was doing well enough and making good money, what with the Always Open and a little bootlegging on the side; but you can say what you like, Pearl told me, a garage in a small town doesn’t afford real scope for a romantic girl, and so she left home and come to Broadway to go on the stage and fulfil herself. “Ask Dad” was her second show. Before that she was in a thing called “Come On In”—but the audiences didn’t, and just when she was fulfilling herself up in Schenectady they closed down on her.
Well, that’s all right, I said, but what does old man Gooch think about it? Isn’t he sore? She says Yes, but that’s not worrying her much. What’s on her mind, if anything, is her three-year-old son, Elmer. Leaving Elmer, she keeps feeling, is not so good. There’s a sister of Brewster—which is the husband—looking after him, but she’s far from easy about this sister, who has views and may be teaching the kid vegetarianism. What’s more, she wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t run to Christian Science as well. And, on top of all that, a mother’s heart is a mother’s heart.
“You ought to go home,” I said.
“If Brewster would show one flash of romance,” said Pearl, “I would. But he’s hopeless. But I do miss little Elmer a whole lot. This is him,” she said, producing a photograph. “Gee, I miss that kid. Yes, sir, I certainly would like to see Elmer again.”
I took a swift look at the photograph.
“Why?” I said.
And it wasn’t till after the opening in New York that she would speak to me again.
WELL, “Ask Dad” was a wow. We opened at the Imperial and knocked the customers bow-legged. Before the end of the first week we’d got ’em hanging from the roof by their eyelids, and a Number Two Company was being got ready with my Jim looking after it. So he’s all right and I’m all right, and about the middle of the second week it looks as if this Pearl Delahay is the all-rightest of the whole bunch; for she’s pulled out of the chorus in the first act to speak lines.
The way it happens was like this. One morning we were down at the theatre rehearsing a number, when Mr. Pottinger—“Ask Dad” was a Pottinger and Abeles show—came in and stopped the proceedings and caught hold of Walter Catfield, our comic, by the top coat-button.
“Say, listen,” says Mr. Pottinger. “I’ve got a peach of a gag for you. Thought it out in my bath this morning. It’s in the garden scene. You’re kidding the girls and a fellow walks across the stage—one of the chorus-men made up as a bimbo with a high forehead and tortoiseshell-rimmed cheaters—kinda intellectual-looking, you get me—and one of the girls says to you: ‘Do you see that man?’ and you say ‘Yes’——”
“I say ‘Yes,’ do I?” says Walter. “That ought to be a scream.”
“Wait!” cries Mr. Pottinger, clutching the button. “Wait! Wait! That’s not the gag. You say ‘Yes,’ and she says ‘Do you know who he is?’ and then you say ‘No.’ ”
“And you black out on the big laugh, I suppose?”
“Wait! Wait!” says Mr. Pottinger, clutching tighter than ever and beginning to giggle as he thinks what’s coming. “I’m coming to the gag now. When you say ‘No,’ the girl says ‘Why, he’s the great authority on fish-culture,’ and then you spring it. You say, ‘Fish-culture? I didn’t know fish had any culture—to speak of.’ How’s that? Isn’t that a wam?”
I’m not sure Walter’s so altogether sold on the thing as Mr. Pottinger would have liked him to have been, but he says he’ll try it at the Wednesday matinée, and then comes the business of choosing a Jane for the other half of the sketch. All of us girls stand round trying to look full of intelligence, but that red hair catches Mr. Pottinger’s eyes and there’s no one else in the race.
“You,” says Mr. Pottinger, pointing. “The human torchlight procession. What’s your name?”
“Pearl Delahay,” says this Pearl Delahay.
“Well, you’ll feed Mr. Catfield his lines. Come right down to the foots, don’t mumble, and give them the teeth.”
Well, sir, I want to tell you, this Pearl took her art serious. If she didn’t lift ’em out of their seats, it wasn’t going to be for want of careful study. Me being her particular buddy, I get the heavy weight of it. She’d read those lines over to me till they were written on my brain in letters of fire, and I got so I couldn’t bear to look at fish for weeks and weeks. It was her first big part on Broadway, and she meant to show them.
Why, after the Tuesday night performance, she actually wanted to drag me off to a midnight show that an English company was giving.
“No,” I said, firm. “I get enough of the theatre without going out of my way to attend milkman’s matinées. What’s the idea?”
You’ll never guess. She wanted to study the methods of some girl that London was wild over. Thought she might pick up a hint or two. Said she’d heard her technique was so wonderful.
“Say, listen,” I told her. “You’ve got to be careful. If you don’t watch out, you’re apt to get so good you’ll play Walter Catfield right off the stage to-morrow, and then there’ll be trouble.”
So she consented to cut out the midnight performance; and next day we rolled up to the stage door for the big show, this Pearl muttering to herself about fish and me trying not to listen, when suddenly, as we were going in, there appeared from nowhere a long, skinny, freckled, lantern-jawed bozo with big feet, mail-order clothes, and one of those small-town hair-cuts that leave the back of the neck looking like it had been peeled.
“Pearl!” says this exhibit.
The coming star halts in her tracks, spellbound.
“Brewster!” She gave a gulp. “Whatever are you doing here, you poor fish?” she said, her mind, no doubt, running on her part.
Brewster shuffled his feet, and the sound was like waves breaking on a stern and rock-bound coast.
“Pearl,” he said. “Pearl,” he said. “Pearl,” he said. “I want you to come back home with me, Pearl. There’s a train at four-thirty. That’ll give us time to go and see that new Harold Lloyd picture.”
“You mean you think I’m going to give up the stage?”
“Little Elmer needs a mother’s care,” said Brewster. “I don’t like the way he’s hiccuping.”
“Hiccuping?” says Pearl.
“Hiccuping,” says Brewster, “is right.”
“Why doesn’t Ellabelle stop him hiccuping?”
“She says it ain’t really hiccuping. Only imagination or something. I don’t quite get her. But a fellow can’t say a word to her without having her jump down his throat like he’d insulted her or something. All I say is that little Elmer sounds like a motor-cycle, and I claim he needs a mother's care.”
I could see Pearl was shaken, but the call of her art was too strong.
“I can’t abandon the stage just when my foot is on the ladder of success,” she says. “Why, this very afternoon I’m speaking lines in a big scene with the highest-paid comedian in New York.”
“Then you won’t come home?”
“How can I?”
“Is that your last word?”
“Yes, it is.”
“O.K.,” says Brewster. “Well, I guess I’ll go see that Harold Lloyd and then get aboard the four-thirty. Pleased to have met you.”
THE great public don’t know how tough it is for we artists. A girl’s got to go on and speak her part, I mean, no matter how much her bosom may be seething with all sorts of feelings. What with the strain of studying her lines and the shock of hearing that her little Elmer is going around with his cut-out open, I don’t wonder Pearl was upset. For the break she made that afternoon I claim she was more to be pitied than censured. Not that you could have got Mr. Pottinger to look at it that way in a million years.
What happened was this. The matinée started, and there was Mr. Pottinger standing in the wings, all ready to listen to his nifty and the gales of laughter it’s going to provoke, and the action of the drama works along to the spot where Mr. Pottinger’s nifty was to occur, and one of the chorus-boys came on with a property forehead and horn-rimmed glasses, acting kind of pensive and intellectual, like a man that’s an authority on fish-culture, and Pearl gave a sort of shiver as if she’d been walking in her sleep and rudely awakened, and then she took a step down to the footlights and looked up at the second balcony and cleared her throat and she said:—
“Do you see that man?”
“Yes,” says Walter Catfield. And Mr. Pottinger bending tensely forward in the wings like a hound straining at the leash.
“He’s very cultured,” says Pearl. “What I mean, he’s fond of fish.”
There’s a moment’s pause, with the audience sitting in respectful silence, and then Walter Catfield says, “Is that so?” in a dazed sort of way, and the drama proceeds.
I looked out of the corner of my eye and saw Mr. Pottinger turning Alice-blue with anguish on account of his nifty going virtually for nothing; and then he disappeared and worked round to the back to where we girls made our next exit. And no sooner were we off stage than the whole place was ringing with the sound of him firing Pearl.
That night she tells me she’s transferred to the Ensemble of the Number Two Company, about to tour the small towns.
WELL, you might say it looked a safe bet that this Pearl Delahay had spoken her last lines under the Pottinger and Abeles banner. But you can never tell in the show business, and Fate had much in store for her. I didn’t see her for a week or two, and pretty soon the Number Two went out and opened at the Harmanus-Bleecker in Albany, to play three nights and a matinée and then troop around in New York State.
And then one Saturday I get a telegram from Jim saying the girl playing the part of the Maid has sprained an ankle, and he’s mentioned me to headquarters, and I’m told at the office to pack a suit-case and hurry off to a hamlet called Eulalia, to open there on the Monday night.
Well, I got to Eulalia on the Sunday morning, and Jim met me at the station and we went off to the hotel for a bite of lunch, and while we were busy digging in along came Lew Ginsberg, our advance man, all worked up and full of interest and curiosity.
“Say, who’s Pearl Delahay?” asked Lew Ginsberg.
“I don’t know,” says Jim. “Isn’t she——”
“Certainly she is,” I said. “That girl with red hair. She and I roomed together when the show was on the road before the New York opening. She’s in the Number Two chorus now.”
“That’s what I thought,” says Lew. “I knew I knew the name. There must be some mistake.”
“What about?”
“Well, we play a place called Franklin next week, and I’ve got a letter from the editor of the Franklin Argus-Gazette saying I can have all the space I want for a write-up of this Pearl Delahay. Why Pearl Delahay?”
“I’ll tell you,” I said. “This Franklin is this Pearl Delahay’s home-town.”
“Is that so?”
“It certainly is. She was born and bred in Franklin, and her husband runs the Always Open garage on Main Street on the right as you leave the Baptist Chapel.”
“Important, if true,” says Lew Ginsberg. “But I can’t go giving big write-ups to chorus-Janes.”
So he decides that, as far as Pearl Delahay is concerned, publicity is the curse of the modern stage; and we go trooping around for the next week and on the Sunday morning we fetch-up at this Franklin.
I’m bound to say that the first impression I got of Pearl’s home-town was that any girl who left it and went to New York to fulfil herself had a good smart head and deserved credit. None of these up-State towns are what you might call Babylons on a Sunday morning when you’ve just come off a train and haven’t got the cinders out of your hair yet, and Franklin, as far as I can see, is no exception. There were a few of the prominent citizens leaning up against walls and a few dogs massaging themselves in the road, and for the first couple of hundred yards that’s all there is in the way of excitement.
And then, as we turned into Main Street, things livened up. Stretched right across the fairway between a couple of trolley-posts was a great big streamer, and on it these words:—
GREETINGS, PEARL!
And a few yards on another:—
WE’RE WITH YOU, PEARL!
And, just outside the hotel, one more:—
WELCOME TO FRANKLIN’S
FAVORITE CHILD!
We’re just drinking in this third one, when there’s a sound of galloping hooves in the rear and up charges Lew Ginsberg.
“Do you see what I see?” asks Lew anxiously.
“What’s it all about?” says Jim.
“The best way of finding out is to ask her,” I said. “I’ll go in and see if she’s registered yet. I think she came off the train ahead of us.”
So I went into the hotel, found this Pearl, and came back to the boys.
“Interviewed by our representative,” I said, “Miss Delahay made the following statement. It seems she never knew we were ever going to take in Franklin in our wanderings in the wilderness, so she’s been writing long, chatty letters to the home-town folks, telling them what a good part she has and what a riot she is and how she only wishes they could all be there to see her, and a lot like that. The result is, they’ve got the impression she’s some sort of a star.”
“Well!” says Lew.
“Well!” says Jim.
“The poor wet smack!” says Lew.
“You can’t blame the girl,” I said.
“Can’t I?” says Lew. “Watch me!”
“I don’t see what it matters.”
“You don’t?” says Jim. “Has it occurred to you what the inhabitants of this burg are going to say when they discover their idol tucked away in the second row of the chorus? They’ll wreck the theatre.”
“And lynch the management, most likely,” agrees Lew. “When you get out in the wilds like this, you never know what lengths the populace won’t go to when stirred. Probably every second man in a place of this sort packs a gun and uses it if you so much as look cross-eyed at him.”
“I must get Mr. Pottinger on the long distance,” says Jim, all worked up.
So he goes off to the ’phone and I go up to my room, and presently he appears in the doorway, looking at me in a sad sort of way, and then he shuts the door and comes across and looks at me some more, sadder than ever.
“Say, listen,” says Jim.
“Spill it.”
“You’ve always been a sport. You’ll admit that?”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“Well, be one now, kid. I’ve been talking to Mr. Pottinger and he’s madder than a wet hen, but he agrees the only way out is to let this Pearl Delahay play a part to-morrow night. And,” says Jim, avoiding my eye, “the only part that’s short enough for a Dumb Dora like her to get up in in the time is yours. How about it?”
I put the poor geek out of his misery.
“Ho kay, agribble by me,” I said. “Go as far as you like. I don’t mind sitting out front and watching her fulfil herself.”
“Baby,” says Jim, “I’ve said it before and I say it again and I don’t care who hears me. You’re all right.”
And he kisses me in a reverent sort of way and goes off. And I go off to this Pearl’s room and find her all full of ecstasy and ambition, walking about with the prompt-script in her hand, studying.
“Wish you luck,” I said.
“Thanks,” said this Pearl. “You know, Mae, this is my big chance. I hear Mr. Pottinger’s coming down to-morrow. That’s a wonderful compliment, don’t you think?”
“If you look at it that way.”
“What I mean, a big New York manager coming all the way to Franklin just because he wants to see me play.”
My own personal view was that, if Mr. Pottinger was really coming to Franklin, it was simply so that he could be on hand to wring her neck the moment the curtain has fallen, instead of waiting till the company got back to New York.
I was wondering whether or not to say so, when the ’phone rang. I was nearest, so I answered it.
“Friend of yours down below,” I said, putting a hand on the receiver. “Name of Brewster.”
Pearl got agitated.
“I can’t see him. I won’t see him. Go down and tell him I’m studying my part and I can’t see him. I don’t want to see him and I won’t see him.”
“Have I got this straight? What you’re trying to say is that you won’t see him?”
“I simply won’t.”
“All right. I’ll break the bad news.”
SO down into the lobby, and there’s Brewster, looking more than ever like something you’re glad isn’t yours.
“Hello!” I said.
“Hello!” said Brewster.
“I’ve got a message for you from Pearl.”
“Where is she?”
“Upstairs.”
“I want to see her.”
“Well, you can’t.”
“Why not?”
“She’s busy with her art.”
“Art? Art who?”
“How do you mean, art who?”
“Say, listen,” says this Brewster. “This guy Art, who is he? One of the company?”
Well, I explained, but I don’t think it penetrated, and there was a kind of fierce look in his eye that made me hope there wasn’t anybody in the troupe whose name happened to be Arthur.
“Any message for Pearl?” I asked.
“Yes. Tell her little Elmer has broken out.”
“Violent?”
“Spots.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“It is if you go near him. He soaked me on the nose this morning, and I haven’t been able to smell anything since. I never saw a child so blamed fractious. And he’s bit his Aunt Ellabelle.”
“Well, that’s all to the good, isn’t it?” I said, remembering one or two things Pearl had told me about her.
“Pink spots, you tell Pearl,” says Brewster. “And mention that in my opinion he needs a mother’s care.”
I slipped this information to Pearl, but she didn’t seem as interested as she might have been. She looks at me in an absent kind of way and says it’s probably only what’s-its-name or something. I could see she was studying too hard to worry about gossip from the home. Mr. Pottinger was to be at rehearsal next day, and spots have to be pretty considerably pink to take a girl’s mind off her job when she knows that.
WELL, even in a place like Franklin time passes. Night fell, and next morning broke, and there was a rehearsal in the lobby of the theatre, with Mr. Pottinger watching it and muttering to himself in low tones whenever Pearl was in action, so you could see he’d not forgiven her on account of his nifty going for virtually nothing. And the shades of evening descended once more and the hour of the performance approached.
The birds who build the theatres in these road-towns always seem to have the idea that nothing’s ever going to play in them except Ben Hur with a company of two hundred, not counting camels, ancient Roman senators, and elephants. The audience gets plenty of elbow-room. The Franklin Opera House was about four hundred yards by two hundred and fifty; and when I went in at eight-fifteen, in spite of the fact that probably every man, woman, and child in the place—exclusive of little Elmer, of course, who’s confined to his bed with pink spots—had rolled up to see Franklin’s Favorite Daughter perform, there were still a few empty seats. In fact, I had a choice of about a hundred and seventy-five of them; so, seeing Brewster sitting all by himself in the back row, I made for him. Company is company, even if it’s Brewster.
“How’s Elmer?” I said, friendly, parking myself next to him.
He hadn’t seemed any too pleased to see me at first, but the mention of Elmer makes him open up.
“Still got ’em.”
“The spots?”
“Spots,” said Brewster, “is right. I'm pretty near off my head. I don’t hardly know what I’m doing.”
I told him.
“You’re treading on my foot,” I said.
“I’m desprit,” says this Brewster, sort of mumbling darkly. “I don’t know but what I may commit some rash act,” he says, “being so desprit. I was up with him all night, and it’s made me kind o’ desprit.”
And, looking at him, I note that he does seem a mite moth-eaten and wild-looking. And then they turn down the lights and the show begins.
“Yessir, good and desprit!” I hear him mutter in the darkness.
Well, you know, I want to be fair-minded, and I’m perfectly willing to admit that maybe a girl sitting on the side-lines watching another girl playing her part isn’t the best possible judge of dramatic technique; but I’m bound to say it seemed to me that this Pearl Delahay—my understudy, as you might call her—was about the most awful yell for help I’d ever set eyes on.
And I wasn't the only one that thought so, either. She hadn’t more than played her first scene when I become aware of a sort of low, growling sound to the south-west, like thunder rumbling in the distance, and there was Mr. Pottinger. I could just see his bald dome glistening in the twilight; and, judging from the noise he was making, this Pearl’s performance was hurting him even more than it did me. If he’d been on a bed of sickness he couldn’t have acted more unhappy. Every now and then there’d be a lull, and then up would bubble another groan, starting at the soles of his feet and trickling out at the top.
It was a relief when the curtain fell and there wasn’t any more Act One to be sat through.
“Well?” I said to Brewster.
“Well what?” says Brewster.
“Now that you’ve seen her in action, is love dead?”
“Whose love?”
“Your love.”
“Her beauty maddens me like wine.”
“You got that out of a movie sub-title,” I said.
“What of it?” says Brewster.
So, seeing that he wasn’t chummy and that nothing I could say was going to make him and me be like one big family or a salon or anything like that, I eased into the silence.
And soon after that the second act started.
Now, it seemed to me that at the end of Act One the stage-manager or somebody in authority ought to have stepped in front of the curtain and warned the audience that the worst was yet to come. For it was in the second act that Pearl Delahay was due to sing.
The thing was one of these building numbers, and Pearl did the first verse and refrain. And she hadn’t more than started the first line when I saw that all that had gone previous wasn’t to be reckoned as suffering at all.
This Pearl Delahay’s great defect as a singer was what you might call too much indecision. She don’t seem like she was able to come right out in a frank and manly manner and make up her mind once and for all which key this musical number is in. She’s one of those song-birds that’ll try anything once, and she wobbled to and fro, making experiments, till the hair rose stiff on my head. And so it would have done on Mr. Pottinger’s, if he’d had any. It isn’t easy for a man to register a great deal of emotion in a dark theatre when he’s only got a bald head to do it with, but Mr. Pottinger was making a darned good try.
Even Brewster seems moved. I could hear him moaning softly at my side.
And so it goes on through the verse and the first half of the refrain. And then, just as Pearl’s rounding into the straight for the big finish and climbing as close as she can get to the high note, and just as I’m clutching the arms of my seat and Mr. Pottinger’s head shivering with strong emotion, something suddenly cracks in the dark like a pistol-shot.
And, what’s more, it is a pistol-shot. And the next second the fellow in charge of the drum is doing a backward dive because there’s a bullet gone clean through his instrument. And, looking round, I see this Brewster resuming his seat.
“Was that you?” I said. And I spoke in what they call in books a low, strangled voice.
“Yes,” he says.
“What’s the idea?” I said. “Drums cost money.”
And then, as some of the populace began to surge in our direction, I grabbed his gun, and I pushed it out of sight in my bag, just as the first wave of citizenry breaks over us.
“Did you do that?” says somebody, gripping Brewster by the arm.
Brewster doesn’t answer. He’s gone sort of limp. I piped up on his behalf.
“Certainly not,” I said. “It came from somewhere over there.”
“Over where?”
“Over there,” I said, pointing. “Ask the gentleman with the bald head.”
So the hue and cry goes off in the direction of Mr. Pottinger.
“Was that you shooting?” they ask.
Mr. Pottinger rose to his feet, put one hand in his waistcoat, cleared his throat, and made a statement.
“Gentlemen,” said Mr. Pottinger, speaking for publication and voicing his sentiments fearlessly, “it was not I who shot. This I attribute to the fact that on leaving New York I carelessly omitted to bring a firearm with me, though I might have known it would be needed. I fear I cannot take the credit for this public-spirited act. I would say, however, in conclusion, that what has occurred cannot but shed fresh lustre on the fair name of Franklin. I thank you one and all.”
Or something like that. I can’t remember the exact words.
WELL, they’ve rung down the curtain by now, and the house lights are up, and it seems to be the general opinion that whatever entertainment there may be in “Ask Dad” is over for the night, and most of the Franklin intelligentsia seem to be trying to see how quick they can get out; so, as there doesn’t appear to be anything to keep me, I go round behind to see what’s doing there. And I come on the stage just as Mr. Pottinger is finishing telling this Pearl Delahay that she draws her two weeks’ salary and severs her connection with the troupe this very night.
“I always thought you were bad,” says Mr. Pottinger, “but I never realized before that you were bad enough to make the audience shoot at you.”
“Have they found out who did it, sir?” asks Lew Ginsberg.
“Not yet,” says Mr. Pottinger. “But they think it must have been the local dramatic critic.”
Whereupon this Pearl dissolves into tears, and I get hold of her and lead her off.
When we came out, all was quiet. The company had dressed and sneaked off to the hotel. We made for the stage door, which, like all stage doors, opens on to a dark alley with lots of tin cans and scraps of old paper in it; and we’d hardly got out into this alley when something that’s not a tin can comes out of the shadows.
“Pearl!” it says.
It was Brewster, better known as Old Sure-Shot, the Peerless Marksman of the Sierras.
“Pearl,” says Brewster, “I’m sorry, Pearl. What I mean, I owe you an apology. I shouldn’t have gone shooting you up that way. I don’t know what made me done it, Pearl. But I’d been sitting up all night with little Elmer, Pearl, on account his spots making him fractious, and when I see you up there, Pearl, looking so beautiful, something seem to come over me like a rash and I try to drill a hole in you. Can you ever forgive me, Pearl?”
“Brewster!” says this Pearl, taking a running jump into his arms.
“Pearl!” says this Brewster.
“Brewster!” says this Pearl.
And I leave them at it.
THE whole thing is, this is a funny world, and you can’t ever tell how some people’s minds are going to work, especially if they’re the sort of minds that anyone would be justified in mistaking in a dim light for an order of cauliflower. Pearl comes to see me next morning just before the train pulls out, and she explains what you might call the inwardness of the thing.
Up till the big night, it seems, she’d fallen into a habit of looking on Brewster more or less as just one of those annoying accidents that happen to a young girl before she gets enough experience to side-step them. No soul, she thought; he hadn’t, if you get me, no romance. And she’s so overcome and uplifted by the discovery that he is one of those great spirits that go about trying to fill girls with lead that she’s decided to go back home and live happily ever after. Also, Elmer’s spots are better. And, furthermore, she’s said enough to Ellabelle to keep her out of the family circle for years and years. That’s one advantage of serving a term in the chorus. You do get to learn how to talk to people.
“Pretty soft,” I said to Jim, as Franklin receded in the distance. “Pretty soft we girls make it for our husbands. All you have to do is to hit us with a flat iron or push us under a truck or loose off a gun at us from time to time, and love can never wane.”
“I’ll bear it in mind,” says Jim.
Note:
cut-out: A valve in the exhaust system of a motor vehicle which allows exhaust gases to vent, bypassing the muffler, reducing back pressure on the engine and thus temporarily increasing performance at the cost of increased noise.
Printer’s error corrected above:
Magazine, p. 3a: In the compound “Yes-old-man-but-do-just-listen-to-me-for-a-minute” (as in Cosmopolitan) the magazine had a line break after ‘man’ and the hyphen was omitted there.