Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
Ladies and Gentlemen

To gain time she spooned her mouth full of apple sauce. This was like filling in a blank for a census taker, only worse. In a panic she cast about in that corner of her mind where her knowledge of geography should have been. She thought of Columbus. There ought to be a Columbus in Georgia; there just must he. There was one in Ohio, she remembered: she played it once with a Shubert road show. And one in Indiana, too. She knew a fellow from there, a chorus man in the Follies. So she took a chance:

“I was born out from a town called Columbus – about twenty miles out, I think.”

“Oh, Columbus – a lovely and a thriving little city,” he said, and she breathed easier but only for an instant. “I know it well; I know many of the older families there. If you are from near Columbus you must know the – ”

She broke in on him. These waters grew steadily deeper.

“Well, you see, I left there when I was only just a little thing. All I can remember is a big white house and a lot of colored peop – ” she caught herself – “a lot of darkies. My parents both died and my – my aunt took me. That is to say, she wasn’t my real aunt; just a close friend of the family.” Swiftly she continued to improvise. “But I always called her Auntie. She moved up North to live and brought me along with her. Her name was Smith.” (That much was pure inspiration, Smith being such a good safe common name.) “So that’s where I’ve lived most of my life – in the North. I don’t know scarcely anything about my relatives. But at heart I’ve always been a very intense Southerner.”

“I can well understand that,” he said, and the badgered fictionist hoped she had steered him back into safer shallows. “A real Southerner never ceases to be one. But I might have guessed that you had been reared among Northern influences and Northern surroundings. Your voice, in speaking, seems to betray the fact.”

She experienced a disconcerting shock. Until now, she had thought practice had made perfect. Besides, she had studied under what she regarded as first-rate schooling. At the outset of her stage career, when she first decided to be a Southern girl because being a Southern girl was popular and somehow had romance in it, she had copied her dialectics from a leading lady in a musical production, who in turn had copied the intonations of a stage director who once had been a successful black-face comedian. And if a man who had been an end man in a minstrel show for years didn’t know how Southerners talked, who did? For months, now, barring only that nosey Tobe Daly, nobody had shown suspicion. Possibly Captain Teal read the flustered look on her face and mistook its purport, for he hastened to add:

“I mean to say that the North has contaminated – or perhaps I should say, affected – your Southern pronunciation. My hearing is not the best in the world but, as well as I may hear, it would seem that you speak certain words with – shall we say, an alien inflection. Pardon me again – the fault lies with my partial deafness – but I am afraid I did not quite catch your name last evening?”

She told him.

He bent toward her across the slopped breakfast dishes. He was as eager and happy as a child with a bright new toy. That was what he would have put you in mind of – a bearded octogenarian débutante in that pitiable state we call second childhood, but for the moment tremendously uplifted by a disclosure held to be of the utmost importance.

“Why, my dear child,” he said, “you don’t mean to tell me! Where did you get your middle name? Was Lamar, by any chance, your mother’s maiden name.”

She nodded dubiously. As well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. But she had not hanged herself; in another minute she was to find that out. She had soundly strengthened herself.

“Then we are related, you and I, my dear. Not closely related, but even so, there is a relationship. I suppose you might say we are very distant cousins. Now – ”

“I never was the one to bother much about family.”

“Ah, but you would have bothered, as you call it, had you but known. Why, my dear child, you are related to some of the finest and oldest families in the South. Let me tell you who you are.”

They sat there then, she listening and secretly amused at first and on the whole rather pleased with herself, and he all afire with the enthusiasm which the aging so often give to trivialities. While his bacon grew stiffer and his egg grew limper, each according to its own special chemistry, in the nest of their pooled cold greases, he ramified a luxuriant family tree, trunk, branch and twig, dowering her with a vast wealth of kinspeople whose names she knew she never would be able to remember – Waltours, Bullochs, Gordons, Telfairs, Hustouns.

It seemed that among her forbears commonplace persons had found mighty few places. They had been statesmen, educators, railroad builders, gracious belles, warriors, orators, noble mothers, racers of fast horses, owners of broad fertile acres, kindly masters and mistresses of hundreds of black slaves, and their memories were a noble inheritance for her to carry onward with her. Just trying to keep track of the main lines almost made her head ache.

“My dear young lady,” he was saying as they got up together to quit the dining-room, emptied now of all except them, “we must see more of each other while we both are in this strange city. We who are of the old South will never lack for a congenial topic of conversation when we are thrown together. Northerners might not understand it, but you, with the legacy of blood that is in your veins – you will understand. After you, my dear; after you, please.” This was when they had gone as far as the door into the hallway. “And now then,” he was saying, as they passed along the hall, “let me tell you something more about your Grandfather Lamar’s estate and domestic establishment. The house itself I remember very clearly, as a youth. The Yankee general, Sherman, burnt it. It was white with…”

That was the proper beginning of as freakish a companionship as that habitat for curious intimacies and spiteful enmities, Mrs. H. Spicer’s, had ever seen. Of a younger man, of a man who had been indubitable flesh and blood, Tobe Daly might have felt, in a way of speaking, jealous. At least he would have been annoyed that an interloper should all of a sudden come between him and his desires upon this casual little Doll Tearsheet of the theater who called herself Blossom Lamar Clayton. But of a man old enough to be the kid’s grandfather, almost old enough to be her great-grandfather – furthermore a pompous, stilted, stupid, toploftical old dodo who behaved more like something out of one of these old-timey before-the-war novels than a regular honest-to-gracious human being – well, to be jealous of such a man would be just plain downright foolish, that’s all. For Tobe an attitude of contemptuousness appeared to be the indicated mood. So he rode, as the saying goes, the high horse, and only once did he take advantage of a favoring opportunity openly to twit the girl regarding her choice of beaux.

“That will be about all from you,” she snapped at him, using back-stage language. “I’m picking my own friends these days. And you lay off from handing out your little digs at him across the table meal-times. He may not be on to you – he’s too decent and polite himself to suspect anybody else of trying to razz him on the sly – but I’m on. So I’m serving notice on you to quit it because if you don’t, the first thing you know you’ll be in a jam with me. I know how to handle your kind. I was raised that way. I guess it’s a kind of a tip-off on the way I was raised that I had to wait until I met a man who’ll be eighty his next birthday before I met somebody who knows how to treat a girl like she was a lady.”

Tobe, drawing off, flung a parting retort at her.

“Say, kiddo, how did you find out what it feels like to be a lady?”

“I never found out,” she said. “I never knew before. But I’m taking lessons now.”

That precisely was what she was doing – taking lessons. For her it was a new experience to be on terms of confidence with a man holding her in somewhat the affectionate regard which he might have bestowed upon a daughter, did he have one. Most of the men with whom she had come in contact before this coveted to possess her. Here at last was a relationship in which the carnal played no part; she somehow sensed that had he been in his prime instead of, as he was, teetering toward an onrushing senility, Captain Teal, believing her virginal – she grimaced bitterly to herself at that – yet would have shown her no fleshly side to his nature. In these present environments he was as much out of place as Sir Roger de Coverley would be at a Tammany clambake, but the thing she liked about him was that for all his age and mental creakiness he nevertheless created out of himself an atmosphere of innate chivalry in which he moved and by which he went insulated against all unchaste and vulgarizing contacts. Not that she put this conception of him in any such words as these. But she was a woman reared in a business where observation counts, and she could feel things which she might not always express.

Toward him her own attitude rapidly became more and more protecting as a thwarted maternal complex in her – that same mothering instinct which in one shape or another expresses itself in every woman – was roused and quickened. She was pleased now that she had not obeyed an impulse which had come to her more than once in that first week of their acquaintance to confess to him that she was an imposter masquerading under false colors, making believe to be something she had never been. Confessing might have eased her conscience, but it would have wrecked his faith in her and surely it would have marred their partnership, might even have smashed it up entirely. And she didn’t want that to happen. Oddly, she felt that with each passing day she was going deeper and deeper into debt to the Captain.

The obligation, though, was mutual; it fell both ways. If from him she was absorbing a belated respect for the moralities and a desire to put on certain small grace-notes of culture, she in return was giving the antiquarian company for long hours which otherwise would have been his hours of homesickness and loneliness. Probably he was used to loneliness. He never had married – a fact which he had confided to her in their first prolonged talk. But beyond question he would, lacking her companionship, have been most woefully homesick. So she let him bore her with interminable stories of a time which was to her more ancient that the Stone Age, to the end that he should not be bored. It cost her an effort, but from some heretofore unused reservoir of her shallow being she pumped up the patience to lend a seemingly attentive ear while he discoursed unendingly and with almost an infantile vanity upon the glories of the stock from which he sprang. These repetitious tales of grandeur were pitched in the past tense; she took due note of that. She fully understood that his time of affluence was behind him. He didn’t tell her so. There was about him no guile. At seventy-nine he was as innocent a babe as ever strayed in the Hollywood woods. Nevertheless it would appear that by his code a gentleman did not plead his poverty. Honorable achievement might be mentioned; but adversity, even honorable adversity, was not a subject for conversation. But she saw how threadbare his black frock coat had become and how shiny along the seams, and how fragile and ready to fall apart his linen was. A woman would see those things. Adversity was spreading over him like a mold. But it was a clean mold. Soon, unless his fortunes mended, he would be downright shabby; but never would he be squalid or careless of the small niceties. That much was to be sensed as a certainty.

For sake of his peace of mind she secretly was glad that she had never let him see her smoking cigarettes. It seemed that in his day ladies had not smoked cigarettes. She sat up through most of one night letting out hems in her skirts. She concealed from him that she used a lip-stick and face paint. She derived a tardy satisfaction from the circumstance that in a feminine world almost universally barbered and bobbed she, months before she met him, had elected to keep her curls unshorn. Then her intent had been to conform to the image she was assuming. Flappers were common among the juveniles and some who could not be rated among the juveniles likewise flapped; but who knew when a casting director might require an old-fashioned type of girl for a costume piece. Her present reward was the old Captain’s praise for her tawny poll. He was much given to saying that a woman’s crowning glory was her hair and deploring the tendency of the newer generation to shear and shingle until the average woman’s head was like the average boy’s.

When he chid her for some slip not in keeping with his venerated ideals of womanhood on a pedestal he did it so gently that the reproof never hurt. Frequently it helped. Besides, he never put the fault on her; always he put it on the accident of her Northern upbringing.

There were lesser things that she learned from him. For instance, that it was a crime against a noble foodstuff to put sweetening in corn bread; that it was an even worse offense to the palate when one ate boiled rice with sugar and milk on it; that a cantaloup never should be regarded as a dessert but always as an appetizer; that hot biscuit should be served while hot, not after the cold clamminess of rigor mortis had set in; that Robert E. Lee was the noblest figure American life ever had produced or conceivably ever would.

To the Captain this last, though, was not to be numbered among the lesser verities. It was a very great and outstanding fact and a fact indisputable by any person inclined to be in the least degree fair-minded. He had served four years as a soldier under General Lee – a private at eighteen, a company commander at twenty-one. To have been a Confederate soldier was a more splendid and a more gallant thing even than being a member of one of the old families. He told her that half a dozen times a day. He told her many men of her family had been Confederate soldiers, too; some of them officers of high rank. She began, without conscious effort, to think of them as members of her family who belonged to her and to whom, through the binder of blood ties, she belonged.

By virtue of a certain adaptability of temperament she did more than this. That flexible mimetic quality which enabled her to slip easily into any given rôle lent itself to the putting on of a passable semblance to a full-flowered creation which might never have existed at all excepting in Captain Teal’s fancy, and one which we know probably doesn’t exist at all nowadays but which all the same was to him very real, as being the typical well-bred Southern woman of all days and all times – a sprigged-muslin, long-ringletted, soft-voiced, ultra-maidenly vision. Physically she differed from this purely abstract picture; concretely she strove to fit herself into the frame of that canvas. To herself she had an acceptable excuse for the deception. For one thing, it was good business. Her venerable admirer should know if anybody did what real old-fashioned Southern girls were like. And to one who had modeled after his pet pattern there must, sooner or later, come an opportunity to play the rôle before the camera.

So, through three weeks of that Hollywood autumn, they waited, each of them, for the call to work; and while their funds shrank, they met regularly for meals and they took strolls together and she gave to him most of her evenings. He spun his droning reminiscences of dusty years and deplored the changes worked by a devastating modernism, and she postured and posed and, bit by bit, built up and rounded out her amended characterization – a self-adopted daughter of the Lamars and Claytons – and constantly did her level best to look and act and be the part.

This went on until the end of the third week, at which point Destiny, operating through the agency of Mr. Andrew Gillespie, took a hand in their commingled affairs.

Gillespie, coming in off the lot to the head offices, was pleasantly excited over his new notion. He revealed it with no preamble:

“Say, you two, I’ve got an idea for livening up that big fight scene a little bit.”

The executive head gave a grunt which terminated in a groan. He craved to swear; but not even Mr. M. Lobel, of Lobel’s Superfilms, Inc., dared swear now. Employees whose salaries ranged above a certain figure might be groaned at but could not, with impunity, be sworn at. The ethics forbade it; also such indulgence might result in the loss of a desired director or a popular star. And Gillespie appertained to the polar list of the high salaried. So Mr. Lobel merely groaned.

“What’s the matter?” asked Gillespie sharply.

“Nothing, nothing at all, only I am thinking,” rejoined Mr. Lobel, with sorrowful resignation. “I am thinking that only two days ago right here in this very room you promised me that positively without a question you would keep down the expensives from now on on this here dam’ costume production which already it has run up into money something frightful.”

“Who said I was going to spend any more money?”

“An idea you just mentioned, Gillespie,” stated Mr. Lobel, “and with you I got to say it that ideas are usually always expensive.”

“This thing won’t cost anything – it won’t cost a cent over a couple of hundred for salary, costumes, props and all, if it costs that much. And it’ll put a little note of newness, a kind of different touch into that battle scene; that’s what I’m counting on.”

“Oh, well, Gillespie, in that case – ” The grief was lifting from Mr. Lobel. He turned to his second in command. “Wasn’t I only just now saying to you, Milton, that Gillespie is the one always for novelties?”

The director chose to disregard the compliment.

“Do you recall that handsome-looking old scout that I brought back with me here last month from the Southern trip?”

“Like a skinny Santa Claus, huh? Sure, I seen him,” said Mr. Lobel, “and wondered what you was maybe going to do with him.”

“Me, too,” said Mr. Liebermann, affectionately known among lesser members of the staff as “Oh-yes-yes Milton.” “The one with the w’ite w’iskez, you mean. Also I wondered about him.”

“Well, then, here’s the answer,” explained Gillespie. “Just a few minutes ago it came to me. I’m going to give him a bit to play in the Gettysburg stuff. Did either of you two ever happen to hear of John Burns?”

“Let me think – the name comes familiar,” said Mr. Lobel; “wasn’t he a middle-weight prize-fighter here some few years back? Let’s see, who was it licked that sucker?”

“No, no, no,” Gillespie broke in on the revery. “I mean the John Burns of the poem.”

“Sure,” assented Mr. Liebermann, who prided himself that although somewhat handicapped by lack of education in his earlier days he had broadened his acquaintance with literary subjects after he quit dress findings and tailors’ accessories. “What Gillespie means, Lobel, is the notorious poet, John Burns.”

“Are you, by any chance, referring to Robert Burns, of Scotland?” demanded Gillespie with a burr of rising indignation in his voice. Gillespie had been born in the land of cakes and haggis.

“Robert or John or Henry, what’s the odds?” countered Mr. Liebermann, and shrugged. “Are you, anyhow, so sure it was Robert? Seems to me – ”

“Am I sure? Oh, Lord!” With an effort Mr. Gillespie regained control of his feelings. “The poet I am thinking of was the American poet, Bret Harte. And Harte wrote a poem about old John Burns of Gettysburg. I don’t believe that even you ever read that particular poem, Milt.” His elaborated sarcasm was lost, though, on Mr. Liebermann. “Anyhow, I’m going to introduce the character of John Burns into the main battle-shots. And this old-timer of mine is going to play him. We can use extracts from the poem for the sub-titles. That’s what I came over to tell you, Lobel, not to discuss with our cultured friend here whether the noblest poet that ever lived – a genius that every school child in this country should be familiar with – was named Robert Burns or Oscar Burns or Isadore Burns. By the way, have either of you seen Herzog this morning? He hasn’t been on the set, or if he has I missed him. I want to send him in to Hollywood to the address where the old boy’s stopping.”

Herzog may have been a capable assistant-director – the film world so acclaimed him – but as an emissary his performances might be open to criticism as lacking in some of the subtler shadings of diplomacy.

All went smoothly at the meeting in Mrs. H. Spicer’s parlor until after he delivered the purport of his superior’s message, Captain Teal harkening attentively.

“Very well, sir,” said the Captain. “I am indebted to you, sir, for bringing me this summons. Kindly present my compliments to Mr. Gillespie and inform him that I shall report for duty tomorrow morning promptly on the hour named.”

“He ain’t waiting for any compliments, I guess,” said Herzog. “What he wants is for you to be there on time so’s we can give you the dope on the bit you’re going to play and get you measured for the clothes and all. Did I mention to you that you’re cast for a battle scene? Well, you are. Possibly you seen some of this here war-stuff in your day, eh?”

“Sir,” said the Captain stiffly, “I had four years of service in a heroic struggle such as this world never before had seen. Permit me to ask you a question: Possibly – I say possibly – you may have heard of the War Between the Sections for the Southern Confederacy?”

“Well, if I did, it wasn’t by that name,” confessed the tactless Mr. Herzog. “What’s the diff’, if I did or I didn’t?”

“None whatsoever, sir, to you,” stated Captain Teal. “The difference to me is that I took part in that great conflict.” But his irony was lost and spent itself on the soft California air. By clamping his hat, which he had worn throughout the interview, more firmly down upon his head, Mr. Herzog, still all tolerant affability, now indicated that he was about to take his departure.

“One moment, if you please,” added Captain Teal. “There is another matter which I desire may be brought to the attention of my worthy friend, Mr. Gillespie.” He spoke as one conferring favors rather than as one who just had been made the recipient of a favor. “Stopping here in this same establishment is a most gifted young Southern lady – a Miss Blossom Lamar Clayton. She has had experience of the dramatic profession; I would say she has undoubted gifts. But as yet she has been unable, through lack of suitable opportunity, to demonstrate her abilities in the local field. Personally, I am most deeply interested in her future – ”

“Why, Foxy Grandpa, you old son of a gun!” exclaimed the edified Mr. Herzog. With a jovial thumb he harpooned the Captain in the ribs. “What do you mean, you old rascal, hooking up with a skirt at your age?”

“Sir,” said Captain Teal, in an awful, withering voice, “it pleases you to be offensive. The young lady in question not only is my protégée, in a way of speaking, but I have the very great honor to be distantly related to her family. Do I make myself sufficiently plain to your understanding? And kindly remember also that my name to you, sir, and all your ilk is Teal, Captain Rodney Teal, sir.”

But Mr. Herzog declined to wither.

“No offense,” he said. “Just let me see if I get the big idea? I suppose you want Gillespie to give the gal the once-over and see whether he can use her?”

“In other words than those you use, that, sir, was the concern I had in mind,” said Captain Teal.

“Well, then, why not bring her along with you in the morning?” suggested Mr. Herzog, with a placating gesture, he being now vaguely contrite over having in some utterly inexplicable way given offense to this touchy old party, and somehow impressed by the other’s tremendous show of outraged dignity. “I suppose there’s no harm in that. If Gillespie likes her looks he might give her a show at some little thing or other; you never can tell. And he’s a great hand for making his own finds. And if he don’t fall for her you pass her along to me for a screen test, and if she comes clean there I might work her in among the extras and let her pick up a little money that way to carry her along. Get me?”

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.”