Ladies and Gentlemen

Which generous avowal so mollified the old Captain that, in token of his forgiveness and his gratitude, he bestowed upon Mr. Herzog a most ceremonious handshake at parting.

As it turned out, here was one beginner who needed no rehearsals. Noting how aptly the aged novice seemed to slip into the personality of the part as soon as he had put on the costume, with its saffron vest, its curl-brimmed, bell-crowned high hat, its blue coat that was swallow-tailed and tall in the collar, “and large gilt buttons size of a dollar” – see the poem for further details – Gillespie decided that a rehearsal might be a mistake. It might make this eleventh hour addition to the cast self-conscious, which of course was what Gillespie above all things desired to avoid. He didn’t want Captain Teal to try to act. As he repeatedly emphasized, he just wanted him to be himself.

Nor did it occur to Gillespie, any more than it occurred to Herzog, assisting him in the day’s job, to take the old man into their confidence touching on what of theme and development had gone before in the making of this masterpiece of an historical production, or on what would follow after. Players of character bits are not supposed to know what the thing’s about. Indeed, there are times when the patron of the silent drama, going to his favorite theater and viewing the completed work, is inclined to believe that some of the principal performers could have had but a hazy conception of what it was all about. Nobody, one figures, ever explained the whys and wherefores to them, either. However, that is neither here nor there, this being no critique of the technique of the motion-picture art but merely an attempt to describe an incident in the filming of one particular scene in one particular motion-picture, namely the epic entitled “Two Lovers of War-Time.”

There should have been a broad sea of ripening wheat rolling upward along a hillside slope to a broken stone wall. Gillespie, usually a stickler for the lesser verities, was compelled to forego the ripening wheat because, while outdoor stagecraft has gone far in these later times and studio stagecraft has gone still farther, you cannot, in California in the fall of the year, months after the standing crop has been cut, artificially produce a plausible semblance of many acres of nodding grain all ready for the reaper. So he contented himself with a stubble field, and privately hoped no caption observer would record the error. But the traditional stone fence, which is so famous in song and story, was there. And thither the Captain was presently escorted.

“Now, here’s the layout,” specified Herzog, who actively was in charge of this phase of the undertaking. “You’re supposed to be the only civilian” – Herzog pronounced it civil-an– “the only civilian in the whole town that didn’t beat it when the enemy came along. All the rest of ’em took it on the run to the woods but you stuck because you ain’t scared of nobody. You’re one of these game old patr’ots, see? So you just loaded up your old rifle and you declared yourself in. So that makes you the hero of the whole outfit, for the time being. Get me?.. Good! Well, then – now follow me clos’t, because this is where the real action starts – the very next morning you happen to be out here on the edge of the town and right over yonder is where the big doings bust out. The book that the chief got the notion for these shots out of don’t say how you got here in the first place but we’re taking it for granted, me and Gillespie are, that you’re just fiddling around looking for trouble on your own hook. The book does say, though – it’s a poetry book – that your gang get a slant at you when you show up and they start in making funny cracks and asking you where you got them funny clothes you got on and asking you what you think you’re going to do anyhow with that there big old musket you’re lugging with you.

“But I figure that would kind of slow up the action, so I’ve changed it around some from the way the book’s got it. The way it’s going to be is the battle gets going good before you join in. One gang – one army, I mean – is behind that fence and the other army comes running up towards ’em from down at the foot of that hill yonder, whooping and yelling and shooting and all. And with that, you cut in right between ’em, all by your lonesome, and take a hand. That brings you out prominent because you’re the only guy in sight that’s dressed different from everybody else. All the rest of these guys are in soldier’s clothes. So this gives you your chance to hog the picture for a w’ile. It’s good and fat for you along here.

“Well, then, that other army that I’ve just been telling you about comes charging on right up to the wall and there’s close-in fighting back and forth – hand-to-hand stuff, what I mean – for two or three minutes before the break comes and the gang that is due to be licked decide they’ve had enough and start retreating. And all this time you’re right in the thick of it, shooting first, and then when your gun’s empty you club it by the barrel and fight with it that way. Don’t be afraid of being too rough, neither. These extras are under orders to go at one another raw, so it’ll be more like a battle ought to be. Them that puts the most steam into it will get a finnuf slipped to ’em. They know that, and I wouldn’t be surprised but what probably a couple of dozen of ’em should get laid out in earnest; so you needn’t feel backward about wading in and doing your share. Just put yourself right into it, that’s the idea, and cut loose regardless. I’ll be off to one side cueing you through my megaphone which way to go when they first pick you up for the long shots, but after that it’s all up to you. Don’t think about the camera nor nothing else. Don’t look at a camera. Don’t look around, even to see where any of the cameras are. But then, seeing you told me yourself only last week about having fought in one of them regular wars, I guess I don’t need to tell you how to go to it. It’ll all come back to you in less than a minute, I’ll bet you… Now then, come on over here and let me get you set.”

Herzog’s optimistic prediction was justified. In less than a minute it did come back to Captain Teal. The first preliminary crackle of musketry fire brought it back to him with a mighty surge of clamoring, swirling memories. The first whiff of acrid powder smoke in his nostrils, the first sight of those ragged gray uniforms, those dusty blue uniforms, changed the memories into actualities. The weight of sixty years slipped off his shoulders; the rich saps of youth mounted for a little passing time into his pithy marrows, giving swiftness to his rickety legs and strength to his withered arms. It was proof of what an imagination fired by vivid reminders of clanging bygone things could do for an ancient’s body.

Headlong once more into battle went Captain Teal, and as he did he uttered sundry long-drawn wolfish yells, one yell right behind another, until you would have thought, had you been there to listen, that his throat surely must split itself wide open.

In he went, and he took sides. He took the wrong side. That is to say, and speaking from strictly a technical standpoint, he took the wrong side. But from Captain Teal’s standpoint he took the right side and the only side which with honor he might take. To be sure, no one beforehand had advised him specifically in this matter of taking sides. It had been Herzog’s oversight that he had not dwelt more clearly upon this highly important point, which he had assumed his venerable pupil would understand. And now it was Herzog’s handicap, as the Captain’s intention became plain, that Herzog’s hoarsely bellowed commands – commands at the outset but merging swiftly into harsh and agonized outcries – should fall upon that ear of Captain Teal which was his deafer ear.

Not that it would have made any difference to Captain Teal had he been able to hear. With his head back and his parted white whiskers flowing rearward over his shoulders, with the Rebel yell still shrilly and constantly issuing from him, he went in and he took command of those onrushing supernumeraries who wore the gray, and he bade them go with him and give the Yankees hell, and he led them on up the hill to where the blue-clad forces held its crest. Theirs not to question why, theirs but to do or die; which, as may be recalled, was once upon a time precisely and identically the case with other doughty warriors taking part in an earlier onslaught upon the serried field of battle. If, at the last moment their overlords chose to amend the preordained course of events, so be it. Since confusion and chaos were to rule the hour, why then in that case might the best man win. Behold, now, how all drilled plans had suddenly been tossed aside; but at least they had a fit commander to follow after. And at least they knew the purport of that most dwelt-upon and salient order – to smite and spare not. They were lusty lads, these extras, no lustier perhaps than the Unionists yonder awaiting the clash and grapple, but better captained.

And so, while the obedient camera-men kept on grinding, and while Herzog shrieked and impotently danced and finally, casting his megaphone from him, stood and profaned his Maker’s name, Long John Burns led Pickett’s charge, and Gettysburg, after sanguinary losses on both sides, was a Confederate victory, and American history most wondrously was remade.

“Ow!” Mr. Lobel heaved the sorrowful expletive up from his lower stomach spaces. “All them extras to pay for all over again! All them re-takes to be retook. All that money wasted because a crazy old loafer must run – must run – ” He grasped for the proper word.

“Run amuck,” supplied Liebermann, proud of his erudition.

“ – Must run a regular muck. Yes, if you should ask me, one of the worst mucks ever I have seen in my whole life,” continued Mr. Lobel. “And you it was, Gillespie, that stood right here in this office only last Toosday of this week and promised me you should keep down expensives. Who’s a man going to believe in this picture business? I ask you!”

“What of it?” said Gillespie. “It was worth a little money to let the old laddy-boy get the smoke of battle in his nose once more before he dies and have a thrill. I didn’t think so awhile ago when he was rampaging through that flock of extras, but I’m beginning to think so now. We’ll tell him he’s just a trifle too notionate for this game and pay him off – with a wee something on the side for a bonus. If you won’t do it I’ll do it myself out of my own pocket. And then we’ll ship him back to that sleepy little town where he came from. Anyhow, it’s not a total loss, Lobel, remember that. We’re going to salvage something out of the wreck. And we owe the old boy for that.”

“What do you mean, salve something out of it?” inquired Mr. Lobel.

“We grab off that little Clayton girl – the one I tried out in those interior shots yesterday. She’s got it in her, that kid has. I don’t mean brains, although at that I guess she’s about as smart as the average fluffy-head that’s doing ingénues along this coast. But she’s got the stuff in her to put it over. Tell her a thing once and she’s got it. And she screens well. And she’s naturally camera-wise. She’ll go a good way, I predict. And if it hadn’t been for the old man we wouldn’t have her. He practically rammed her down my throat. It seems she’s his cousin, eight or ten times removed, and nothing would do him but that I must hitch her onto the payroll. To get him in the proper humor I had to take her on. But now I’m glad of it. I’ll be wanting a little contract soon for this Clayton, Lobel, so we’ll have her tied up before somebody else begins to want her. Because, sooner or later, somebody else will.”

Traffic swirled past the two Southerners where they stood in a side eddy in the train shed. They were saying good-by, and now all at once the girl felt a curious weakness in her knees as though she were losing a dependable prop.

“I must get aboard,” he said, looking down at her from his greater height. “We’ll be leaving in a minute or so. You need not distress yourself about me, my dear. I could never have been happy for very long in this place – it’s not like our country. These Northern people mean well no doubt; but after all they’re not our people, are they? And this avocation was not suited for one of my years and – and antecedents; that I also realize. I have no regrets. In fact” – a flare lit in his faded old eyes – “in fact, I greatly enjoyed the momentary excitement of once more facing the enemies of our beloved land – even in make-believe. Indeed, I enjoyed it more than I can tell. I shall have that to look back on always – that and the very great pleasure of having known you, my dear.”

He lifted her hand and kissed it and started away, and she saw him going – a picture out of a picture book – through a sudden mist of tears. But he came back for one more farewell passage:

“Remember, my dear,” he said, “that we – you and I – are of the Old South – the land of real gentlemen and real ladies. You’ll remember that always, won’t you?”

And now, with both her arms around him and her lips pressed hard against his ruddy old cheek, she promised him she would.

She meant it, too, at the moment. And perhaps she did and then again perhaps she didn’t. The world she lived in is so full of Tobe Dalys. As the brethren of the leathern pants and the silken neckerchiefs of Hollywood are so fond of saying – those mail-order movie cow-punchers who provide living backgrounds for the Westerns – “Quien sabe?”

Killed with Kindness

Needles and pins, needles and pins, when a man’s married his trouble begins. That’s the way the old application goes. But in the case of Jerome Bracken it didn’t go. After he married, life ran for him on very smooth rollers and there were neither needles nor pins to prick him. Possibly that was because he chose for his wife a virtuous and well-meaning woman, one a bit narrow in her views perhaps and rather stiffly opinionated, as a good many good women are who protect their own tepid moralities behind a quill-work of sharp-pointed prejudices. They are the female porcupines of the human race, being colorless and lethargic in their mentalities but acute and eager when they take a dislike. Still, the porcupine rates high among the animals. While generally not beloved, it generally is respected. And undoubtedly this lady who became Mrs. Jerome Bracken was well-meaning and remained straitly so until the end of all regulated things.

Or then on the other hand, possibly Jerome Bracken’s marriage was a success because he picked precisely the sort of woman who had the qualifications for being a suitable wife to an up-and-coming man, a man who kept on up and kept on coming until he had arrived, with both feet planted on how firm a foundation! But then Jerome always had been, as the phrase is, a clever picker. He proved that when as a very young man he moved to Dyketon and picked Queen Sears for his girl. He kept on proving it – by picking the right business, the right code of deportment before the eyes of mankind, the right church to belong to, and precisely the right father-in-law.

This Queenie Sears, now; she was not the one he married, naturally not. Queenie Sears was not the sort any man in his sane senses would marry, she being what used to be called a fancy woman. She was an inmate of Madam Carrie Rupert’s house when he first met her and it was there, under that hospitable but disreputable roof, down on Front Street in Dyketon’s red-light district, that the meeting took place.

About this first meeting there was nothing significant. He called, a stranger, and she entertained him, it being her business to entertain callers. He at this time was a shrewd but countrified youth of twenty or thereabouts. She was a little older than that, blonde, simple-minded, easy-going, rather pretty in an insipid way, with a weak, self-indulgent mouth. Already she was plump, with the certainty before her that, barring ill health to pull her down, the succeeding years would enhance her plumpness into rolls and cushions of fat. Probably, if the truth were known, she deliberately elected to take on this life she was leading. However, and be that as it may, she had the customary story to account for her present vocation when somebody who was maudlin with a sympathy based on alcohol asked her how she came to be what she was.

Hers was a stock story lacking novelty as well as sincerity – a sentimental fiction dealing with a trusting and ignorant maiden’s downfall in an orange grove vaguely described as being “away down South,” and then discovery and disgrace and a traditional proud father whose heart could be flinty and yet broken, and a shamed girl’s flight in the night and all the rest of the stage props. But sometimes it was a plantation instead of an orange grove; or if the inquirer happened to be a Southerner, it might be a ranch in the far West. Queenie was taking no chances on getting herself checked up.

As for Jerome, his tale was a short one, not particularly interesting but having the merit, as hers did not, of a background of fact. Raised on a farm in the central part of the state; poor parents; common school education; lately landed in Dyketon; stopping now at a second-rate boarding-house out on Ninth Street; working for eighteen a week as a bookkeeper at Stout & Furst’s clothing store; ambitious to better himself in both these latter regards – that, brought up to date, was young Bracken.

Nor was there any special significance in the intimacy which followed between these two. He visited her at more or less regular intervals. Thus early he was shaping his days into a calculated and orderly routine which remained a part of him forever after. She liked him, being at heart kindly and, considering her trade, susceptible to affectionate impulses; he liked her, being lonely, and that substantially was all there was to it.

At the end of a year he began his journey up in the world. Mr. Gus Ralph, president of the Ralph State Bank, took him on as an assistant receiving teller at a hundred a month and prospects. Unknown to the newcomer, Mr. Ralph had had his eye on him for some time – a young man of good manners and presumably of good habits, bright, dignified, industrious, discreet, honest – in short, a hustler. Mr. Ralph was on the lookout for that kind. He made a place for the young man, and from the hour when he walked into the counting-house and hung up his hat Jerome was justifying the confidence Mr. Ralph put in him. If he was continuing to sow his wild oats – and privately he was – at least he sowed none during banking hours, nor did any part of his harvesting in public, which was sufficient for his new boss. Mr. Ralph often said he had been a youngster once himself, saying it with an air which indicated that he had been very much of a youngster indeed.

At the end of six months more, which would make it about eighteen months in all, young Jerome ceased his sowing operations altogether. He didn’t fray the rope; he cut it clean through at a single decisive stroke.

“Queenie,” he said to her one night, “this is going to be the last time I’m ever coming down here to see you.”

“Well, Jerry,” she answered, “that’ll be all right with me unless you start going to see some other girl in some other house along the row here.”

“It’s not that,” he explained. “I’m going to quit going down the line altogether. I’m through” – he made a gesture with his hands – “through with the whole thing from now on.”

“I see,” she said, after a moment or two. “Been getting yourself engaged to some nice girl – is that the way it is, Jerry?”

“Yes,” he told her, “that’s the way it is, Queenie.”

She did not ask who the nice girl might be nor did he offer to tell her. In that ancient age – the latter decades of the last century before this one – there was a code for which nearly everybody of whatsoever station had the proper reverence. In some places – bar-rooms, for example, and certain other places – a gentleman did not bring up the name of a young lady. It was never the thing to do.

“Here, Jerry,” she said next. “I’ll be kind of sorry to say good-by, but I want you to know I wish you mighty well. Not that you need my good wishes – you’re going ahead and you’ll keep on going – but I want you to have them. Because, Jerry, if it was my dying words I was speaking I’d still say it just the same – you’ve always been on the square with me, and that’s what counts with a girl like me. You never came down here drunk, you never used rough language before me, you never tried to bilk me or take advantage of me any kind of way. Yes, sir, that’s what counts. Even if I don’t never see you face to face again I won’t forget how kind and pleasant you’ve been towards me. And I’d die before I’d make any trouble for you, ever. You go your way and I’ll go mine, such as it is, and that’ll be all there is to it so far as I’m concerned.

“Now then, you’ve told me some news; I’ll tell you some. I’m fixing to buy out Miss Carrie. She wants to quit this business and go over to Chicago and live decent. She’s got a married daughter there, going straight, and anyhow she’s made her pile out of this drum and can afford to quit, and I don’t blame her any, at her age, for wanting to quit. But me, it’s different with. I’ve got a little money saved up of my own and she’s willing to take that much down and take a mortgage on the furniture and trust me for the rest of the payments as they fall due. And just yesterday we closed up the bargain, and next week the lease and the telephone number and all go in my name. So you see I’m trying to get along, too, the best way I can.” She lifted the glass of beer that she was holding in her hand. “Here’s good luck!”

She took the draught down greedily. Her full lips had the drooping at their corners which advertises the potential dipsomaniac.

Face to face, through the rest of her life he never did speak to her. To be sure, there were at irregular intervals telephone conversations between them. I’ll come to that part of it later. Anyhow, they were not social conversations, but purely business.

He saw her, of course – Dyketon was a small place then; it was afterwards that it grew into a city – but always at a distance, always across the wide gulf that little-town etiquette digs for encounters in public between the godly and the ungodly. Once in a while she would pass him on the street, she usually riding in a hack and he usually afoot, with no sign of recognition, of course, on the part of either. Then again, some evening at the theater, he, sitting with his wife down-stairs, would happen to glance up toward the “white” gallery and she would be perched, as one of a line of her sisters of transgression, on the front row there. The Dyketon theater management practiced the principle of segregation for prostitutes just as the city government practically enforced it in the matter of their set-apart living-quarters. These communal taboos were as old as the community itself was. Probably they still endure.

With time, even the occasional sight of his old light-o’-love failed to revive in his mind pictures of the house where he once had knowledge of her. The memories of that interior faded into a conglomerate blur. One memory did persist. Long after the rest was a faint jumble he recalled quite sharply the landlady’s two pets – her asthmatic pug-dog with its broody cocked eyes, and her wicked talking parrot with its yellow head and its vice for gnawing woodwork and its favorite shrieked refrain: “Ladies, gent’men in the parlor!”

He remembered them long after he forgot how the place had smelled of bottled beer and cheap perfumery and unaired sofa-stuffing; and how always on the lower floor there had prevailed in daytime a sort of dusky gloom by reason of the shutters being tightly closed and barred fast against sunlight and small boys or other Peeping Toms who might come venturing on forbidden ground; and how, night-times, above the piano-playing of the resident “professor” and the clamor of many voices there would cut through the shrill squeals of an artificial joy – the laughter forced from the sorry souls of those forlorn practitioners at the oldest and the very saddest of human trades.

The one he married was the only daughter of his employer, Mr. Gus Ralph; a passionless, circumspect young woman three or four years his senior. The father approved heartily of the engagement and in testimony thereof promptly promoted Jerome to a place of more responsibility and larger salary; the best families likewise gave to this match their approval. Even so, Mr. Ralph never would have advanced the future son-in-law had not the latter been deserving of it. The elder man’s foresight had been good, very, very good. Jerome was cut out for the banking business. He proved that from the start. He knew when to say no, and prospective borrowers learned that his no meant no. Personally he was frugal without being miserly and, in the earlier days at least, he had firmness without arrogance; and if personally he was one of the most selfish creatures ever created, he had for public affairs a fine, broad spirit.