Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
Local Color

Next morning he bought all the morning papers printed in English – there are still a considerable number of morning papers in Greater New York that are printed in English – and with a queer, strangled little beat of anticipatory pride in his throat-pulse he searched assiduously through all of them, page by page and heading by heading, for the account of his accident. He regarded that accident in a proprietary sense. If it wasn’t his, whose then was it? Only one paper out of all the lot had seen fit to mention the affair. In a column captioned Small Brevities he found at last a single, miserable, puny six-line paragraph to the effect that a pedestrian – pedestrian, mind you! – giving his name as Charles Piffles, had been knocked down by an unidentified automobile, and after having been given first-aid treatment by Patrolman Roger P. Dugan, of the Peck’s Slip Station, and receiving further attention at the hands of Ambulance Surgeon Max Loeb, who came from Battery Place Hospital in response to a call, was able to go to his home, at such and such an address, borough of Brooklyn. And even the house number as set down was incorrect. From that hour dated Chester K. Pilkins’ firm and bitter belief in the untrustworthiness of the metropolitan press.

The other time was when he was drawn on a panel for jury duty in the trial of a very fashionable and influential murderer. A hundred householders were netted in that venire , and of the number I daresay Chester Pilkins was the hundredth. With the ninety and nine others he reported at a given hour at a given courtroom, and there for two days he waited while slowly the yawning jury box filled with retired real-estate dealers and jobbers in white goods. Finally his own name was reached and the clerk called it out loudly and clearly. Shaking the least bit in his knees and gulping hard to keep his Adam’s apple inside his collar, Mr. Pilkins took the stand and nervously pledged himself truthfully to answer all such questions as might be put to him touching on his qualifications for service in the case now on trial. He did answer them truthfully; more than that, he answered them satisfactorily. He had no conscientious scruples against the infliction of capital punishment for the crime of murder in the first degree. From his readings of the public prints he had formed no set and definite opinion as to the guilt or innocence of the accused. He was not personally acquainted with the deceased, with the prisoner at the bar, with the attorneys upon either side, with the officers who had made the arrest, with the coroner’s physician who had conducted the autopsy, or with any one connected in any way with the case. He professed himself as willing to be guided by His Honour on the bench in all matters pertaining to the laws of evidence, while exclusively reserving the right to be his own judge of the weight and value of the testimony itself. So far, so good.

The district attorney nodded briefly. The lawyers for the murderer, confabbing with their heads together, gave no sign of demur. The presiding justice, a large man, heavily moustached and with more chins than he could possibly need, who had been taking a light nap, was aroused by the hush which now befell and sat up, rustling in his black silk sleeping gown.

Behind Chester Pilkins’ waistcoat Chester Pilkins’ heart gave a little gratified jump. He was about to be accepted; he would be in the papers. He saw a sketch artist, who sat just beyond the rail, squint at him from under his eyebrows and lower a pencil to a scratch pad which was poised upon a right kneecap. A picture would be published. What mattered it though this picture would purely look excessively unlike him? Would not the portrait be suitably labelled? Mentally he visualised the precious lines:

Juror No. 9 – Chester K. Pilkins, No. 373 Japonica Avenue; certified accountant; 39; married; no children.

From somewhere back of the moustache His Honour’s voice was heard rumbling forth hoarsely:

“If-no-objections-from-either-side-let-juror-be-sworn.”

At Mr. Pilkins’ side appeared a court functionary bearing a grimed and venerable volume containing many great truths upon its insides and many hungry germs upon its outside. Mr. Pilkins arose to his feet and stretched forth a slightly tremulous hand to rest it upon The Book. In this moment he endeavoured to appear in every outward aspect the zealous citizen, inspired solely by a sense of his obligations to himself and to the state. A sort of Old Roman pose it was. And in that same moment the blow fell and the alabaster vase was shattered.

Senior counsel for the defence – the one with the long frock coat and the sobbing catch in his voice – bobbed up from where he sat.

“Defence-excuses-this-gentleman,” he grunted, all in one word, and sat down again.

The artist scratched out a shadowy outline of the lobe of Mr. Pilkins’ left ear and the southeastern slope of his skull – for already this talented draftsman had progressed thus far with the portrait – and in less than no time our Mr. Pilkins, surcharged now with a sense of injury and vaguely feeling that somehow his personal honour had been impugned, was being waved away from the stand to make room for a smallish, darkish gentleman of a Semitic aspect. With his thoughts in such turmoil that he forgot to take with him the bone-handled umbrella which he had carried for two years and better, he left the courtroom.

Really, though, he never had a chance. The defence had expended upon him one of its dwindling store of peremptory challenges because in the moment of being sworn he appeared a person of so stern and uncompromising an exterior. “Besides,” the senior counsel had whispered hurriedly to his associates – “besides, he seems so blamed anxious to serve. Bad sign – better let him go.” And so they let him go. But, on the other hand, had he worn a look less determined the district attorney would have challenged him on the suspicion of being too kind-hearted. The jury system is a priceless heritage of our forefathers, and one of the safeguards of our liberties, but we do things with it of which I sometimes think the forefathers never dreamed.

Thus, with its periods of hopefulness and its periods of despairing, life for our hero rolled on after the placid fashion of bucolic Brooklyn, adrowse among its mortary dells and its masonry dingles, until there came the year 1915 A. D. and of the Constitution of the United States the One Hundred and I forget which. For long the Pilkinses had been saving up to take a trip to Europe, Chester particularly desiring to view the Gothic cathedrals of the Continent, about which Volume Cad to Eve of his encyclopedia discoursed at great length and most entertainingly. For her part, Mrs. Chester intended to mingle in the gay life of the artistic set of the Latin Quarter, and then come home and tell about it.

By the summer of 1914 there was laid by a sum sufficient to pay all proper costs of the tour. And then, with unpardonable inconsiderateness, this war had to go and break out. The war disagreeably continuing, Europe was quite out of the question. If Europe must have a war it couldn’t have the Pilkinses. So in the early spring of the following year, the combined thoughts of Mr. and Mrs. Pilkins turned longingly westward. Mr. Pilkins had never been beyond Buffalo but once; that was when, on their wedding tour, they went to Niagara Falls. Mrs. Pilkins once had visited her married sister residing in Xenia, Ohio. Such portion of the Great West as lay beyond Xenia was to her as a folded scroll. So Westward Ho! it was.

I deem it to have been eminently characteristic of Chester that he spent three evenings preparing, with the aid of timetables, descriptive folders furnished by a genial and accommodating ticket agency and a condensed hotel directory, a complete schedule of their projected itinerary, including the times of arrivals and departures of trains, stop-overs, connections, cab and bus fares, hotel rates, baggage regulations, and what not. Opposite the name of one junction town beyond the Rockies he even set down a marginal note: “At this point see Great American Desert.”

Leaving Chicago on the second lap of the outbound half of the momentous journey, they took a section in a sleeping car named appropriately for a Hindu deity. For once in his life Chester was above his wife, where he could look down upon her. But that was in the nighttime, when he lodged in the upper. Daytimes he reverted to his original and regular state, becoming again one of the submerged tenth of one-tenth. In the dining car Mrs. Pilkins selected the dishes and gave the orders, and he, submissive as the tapeworm, ate of what was put before him, asking no questions. In the club car, among fellow travellers of his own sex, he was as one set apart. They talked over him and round him and if needs be through him to one another; and when, essaying to be heard upon the topics of the day, then under discussion, he lifted up his voice some individual of a more commanding personality – the member of the legislature from Michigan or the leading osteopath of Council Bluffs – would lift his voice yet higher, wiping him out as completely as though he had been a naught done in smudged chalk upon a blackboard. After all, life in the free and boundless West threatened to become for him what life in cribbed, cabined and confined Brooklyn had been; this was the distressing reflection which frequently recurred to him as he retired all squelched and muted from the unequal struggle, and it made his thoughts dark with melancholy. Was there in all this wide continent no room for true worth when habited in native modesty?

In time they reached a certain distinguished city of the Coast, nestling amid its everlasting verdure and real-estate boomers. But in the rainless season the verdure shows an inclination to dry up. However, this was in the verdant springtime, when Nature everywhere, and especially in California, is gladsome and all-luxuriant. From the station a bus carried them through thriving suburbs to a large tourist hotel built Spanish Mission style and run American plan. The young man behind the clerk’s desk took one prognostic look at Chester as Chester registered, and reached for a certain key, but while in the act of so doing caught a better glimpse of Mrs. Chester, and, changing his mind, gave them a very much better room at the same price. There was something about Mrs. Pilkins.

That evening, entering the dining-room, which was a great, soft-pine Sahara of a place dotted at regular intervals with circular oases called tables, each flowing with ice water and abounding in celery, in the native ripe olives shining in their own oils, and in yellow poppy blossoms in vases, the Pilkinses instantly and intuitively discovered that they had been ushered into a circle new to them. Some of the diners in sight were plainly, like themselves, tourists, transients, fly-by-night sightseers from the East, here to-day and going to-morrow. But sundry others present, being those who had the look about them of regular guests, were somehow different. Without being told, the newcomers at once divined that they were in a haunt of the moving-picture folk, and also by the same processes of instinctive discernment were informed of another thing: As between the actors newly recruited from that realm of art which persons of a reminiscent turn of mind are beginning to speak of as the spoken drama, and the actors who had been bred up and developed by its one-time little half-sister, the moving-picture game, a classifying and separating distinction existed. It was a distinction not definable in words, perhaps; nevertheless, it was as apparent there in that dining-room as elsewhere. You know how the thing goes in other lines of allied industries? Take two agents now – a road agent, let us say, and a book agent. Both are agents; both belong to the predatory group; both ply their trades upon the highway with utter strangers for their chosen prey; and yet in the first flash we can tell a book agent from a road agent, and vice versa. So it was with these ladies and gentlemen upon whom Chester K. Pilkins and wife – beg pardon, Mrs. Chester K. Pilkins and husband – now gazed.

At the table to which a post-graduate head-waitress escorted them and there surrendered them into the temporary keeping of a sophomore side-waitress there sat, in a dinner coat, a young man of most personable appearance and address, with whom, as speedily developed, it was not hard to become acquainted, but, on the contrary, easy. Almost as soon as the Pilkinses were seated he broke through the film ice of formality by remarking that Southern California was, on the whole, a wonderful country, was it not? Speaking as one, or as one and a fractional part of another, they agreed with him. Did it not possess a wonderful climate? It did. And so on and so forth. You know how one of these conversations grows, expands and progresses.

Presently there were mutual introductions across the fronded celery and the self-lubricating ripe olive. This accomplished, Mr. Pilkins was upon the point of stating that he was in the accounting line, when their new acquaintance, evidently holding such a detail to be of no great consequence, broke in upon him with a politely murmured “Excuse me” and proceeded to speak of a vastly more interesting subject. His name, as they already knew, was Mr. Royal Harcourt. He was of the theatrical profession, a thing they already had guessed. He told them more – much more.

It would seem that for long he had withstood the blandishments and importunities of the moving-picture producers, standing, as it were, aloof from them and all their kind, holding ever that the true artist should remain ever the true artist, no matter how great the financial temptation to enter the domain of the silent play might be. But since so many of equal importance in the profession had gone into the pictures – and besides, after all was said and done, did not the pictures cater educationally to a great number of doubtlessly worthy persons whose opportunity for acquaintance with the best work of the legitimate stage was necessarily limited and curtailed? – well, any way, to make a long story no longer, he, Mr. Royal Harcourt, had gone into the pictures himself, and here he was. Taking it that he had been appealed to, Mr. Pilkins nodded in affirmation of the wisdom of the step, and started to speak. “Excuse me, please,” said Mr. Harcourt courteously but firmly. Plainly Mr. Harcourt was not yet done. He resumed. One who had a following might always return to the legitimate finding that following unimpaired. Meanwhile, the picture business provided reasonably pleasant employment at a most attractive remuneration.

“So, as I said just now,” went on Mr. Harcourt, “here I am and here you find me. I may tell you that I am specially engaged for the filming of that popular play, The Prince of the Desert, which the Ziegler Company is now making here at its studios. My honorarium – this, of course, is in confidence – my honorarium for this is eight hundred dollars a week.” He glanced at their faces. “In fact, strictly between ourselves, nine hundred and fifty.” And with a polished finger nail Mr. Harcourt flicked an imaginary bit of fluff from a fluffless coat lapel.

Awe descended upon the respective souls of his listeners, and there lingered.

“And of course for that – that figure – you play the leading part?” Mrs. Pilkins put the question almost reverently.

A trace, just a trace, of unconscious bitterness trickled into their tablemate’s voice as he answered:

“No, madam, I could hardly go so far as to say that – hardly so far as to say that exactly. My good friend, Mr. Basil Derby, has the title rôle. He originated the part on Broadway – perhaps that explains it. I play the American newspaper correspondent – a strong part, yet with touches of pure comedy interspersed in it here and there – a part second only to that of the star.”

“Does he – this Mr. Derby – does he get anything like what you are paid?” ventured Mr. Pilkins. Surely the Ziegler Company tempted bankruptcy.

“I suspect so, sir, I suspect so.”

Mr. Harcourt’s tone indicated subtly that this world was as yet by no means free from injustice.

Before the meal was anywhere near ended – in fact, before they reached the orange sorbet, coming between the roast beef au jus and the choice of young chicken with giblet sauce or cold sliced lamb with pickled beets – the Pilkinses knew a great deal about Mr. Royal Harcourt, and Mr. Royal Harcourt knew the Pilkinses were good listeners, and not only good listeners but believing ones as well. So a pleasant hour passed speedily for all three. There, was an especially pleasant moment just at the close of the dinner when Mr. Harcourt invited them to accompany him at ten o’clock on the following morning to the Ziegler studios, and as his guest to witness the lensing of certain episodes destined to figure in the completed film drama of The Prince of the Desert. Speaking for both, Mrs. Pilkins accepted.

“But, Gertrude Maud,” murmured Mr. Pilkins doubtfully as the two of them were leaving the dining-room to hear the orchestra play in the arched inner garden where the poinsettia waved its fiery bannerets aloft, reminding one somewhat of the wagging red oriflamme of a kindred member of the same family – the Irish setter – and the inevitable spoiled childling of every tourist hotel romped to and fro, whining for pure joy, making life a curse for its parents and awakening in the hearts of others reconciling thoughts touching upon the late King Herod, the bald-headed prophet who called the bears down out of the hills, and the style of human sacrifices held to be most agreeable to the tastes of the heathenish god Moloch. “But, Gertrude Maud,” he repeated demurringly as he trailed a pace behind her, seeing she had not heard or seemed not to have heard. In her course Mrs. Pilkins halted so suddenly that a double-stranded necklet of small wooden darning eggs of graduated sizes clinked together smartly.

“Chester,” she stated sharply, “don’t keep bleating out ‘Gertrude Maud’ like that. It annoys me. If you have anything to say, quit mumbling and say it.”

“But, Ger – but, my dear,” he corrected himself plaintively, “we were going to visit the orange groves to-morrow morning. I have already spoken to the automobile man – ”

“Chester,” said Mrs. Pilkins, “the orange groves can wait. I understand they have been here for some time. They will probably last for some time longer. To-morrow morning at ten o’clock you and I are going with that nice Mr. Harcourt. It will be an interesting experience and a broadening one. We are here to be broadened. We will see something very worth while, I am convinced of it.”

Indeed, they began to witness events of an acutely unusual nature before ten o’clock. As they came out from breakfast there darted down the lobby stairs at the right a young maiden and a youth, both most strikingly garbed. The young lady wore a frock of broad white-and-black stripes clingingly applied to her figure in up-and-down lines. She had a rounded cheek, a floating pigtail, and very large buckles set upon the latchets of her twinkling bootees. The youth was habited as a college boy. At least he wore a Norfolk jacket, a flowing tie of the Windsor, England, and East Aurora, New York, variety, and trousers which were much too short for him if they were meant to be long trousers and much too long for him if they were meant to be short trousers. Hand in hand, with gladsome outcry, this pair sped through the open doors and vaulted down the porch steps without, as nimbly as the chamois of the Alpine steeps, toward a large touring car, wherein sat a waiting chauffeur, most correctly liveried and goggled.

Close behind them, in ardent pursuit, an elderly, rather obese gentleman, in white waistcoat, white side whiskers and white spats – patently a distressed parent – tore into sight, waving his arms and calling upon the fleeing pair to halt. Yet halted they not. They whisked into the rear seat of the automobile just as the elderly gentleman tripped on a crack in the planking of the veranda and was precipitated headlong into the arms of a fat bellboy who at this exact moment emerged from behind a pillar. It was a very fat bellboy – one that could not have weighed an ounce less than two hundred pounds, nor been an hour less than forty years old – and he was grotesquely comical in a suit of brass buttons and green cloth incredibly tight for him. Locked in each other’s arms the parent and bellboy rolled down the steps – bumpety-bump! – and as progressing thus in close communion they reached the surface of the driveway, a small-town policeman, wearing long chin whiskers and an enormous tin star, ran forward from nowhere in particular, stumbled over their entangled forms and fell upon them with great violence. Then while the three of them squirmed and wriggled there in a heap, the automobile whirled away with the elopers – it was, of course, by now quite plain that they must be elopers – casting mocking, mirthsome glances backward over their diminishing shoulders.

“Slap stick! Rough-house! Cheap stuff! But it goes – somehow it goes. The public stands for it. It passes one’s comprehension.” It was Mr. Royal Harcourt who, standing just behind the Pilkinses, commented in tones of a severe disparagement. They became cognisant also of a man who had been stationed in the grass plot facing the hotel, grinding away at a crank device attached to a large camera. He had now ceased from grinding. Except for the camera man, the disapproving Mr. Harcourt and themselves, no one else within sight appeared to take more than a perfunctory interest in what had just occurred.

“Come with me,” bade Mr. Harcourt when the outraged parent, the fat bellboy and the small-town policeman had picked themselves up, brushed themselves off and taken themselves away. “You have seen one side of this great industry. I propose now to introduce you to another side of it – the artistic side.”

He waved his arm in a general direction, and instantly a small jitneybile detached itself from a flock of jitneybiles stationed alongside the nearer curbing and came curving up to receive them. This city, I may add in passing, was the home of the original mother jitney, and there, in her native habitat, she spawned extensively before she moved eastward, breeding busily as she went.

To the enlarged eyes of the Pilkinses strange phases of life were recurringly revealed as the vehicle which their guide had chartered progressed along the wide suburban street, beneath the shelter of the pepper trees and the palms. Yet the residential classes living thereabout appeared to view the things which transpired with a languid, not to say a bored, manner; and as for Mr. Harcourt, he, sitting in front alongside the driver, seemed scarcely to notice them at all.

For example: Two automobiles, one loaded with French Zouaves and the other with Prussian infantrymen, all heavily armed and completely accoutred, whizzed by them, going in the opposite direction. A most winsome, heavily bejewelled gypsy lass flirted openly with an affectionate butler beneath the windows of a bungalow, while a waspish housemaid, evidently wrought to a high pitch by emotions of jealousy, balefully spied upon them from the shelter of an adjacent shrubbery clump. Out of a small fruit store emerged a benevolent, white-haired Church of England clergyman, of the last century but one, in cassock, flat hat and knee breeches. With him walked a most villainous-appearing pirate, a wretch whose whiskered face was gashed with cutlass scars and whose wicked legs were leathered hip-deep in jack boots. These two were eating tangerines from the same paper bag as they issued forth together.

The car bearing our friends passed a mansion, the handsomest upon the street. Out from its high-columned portals into the hot sunshine staggered a young man whose lips were very red and whose moustache was very black, with great hollows beneath his eyes and white patches at his temples – a young man dressed in correct evening attire, who, pausing for a moment, struck his open hand to his forehead with a gesture indicative of intense despair – you somehow opined he had lost all at the gaming table – then reeled from sight down a winding driveway. One glimpsed that his glistening linen shirt bosom was of a pronounced saffron cast, with collar and tie and cuffs all of the same bilious tone to match.

“Noticed the yellow, didn’t you?” asked Mr. Harcourt. “That means he’s been doing indoor stuff. Under the lights yellow comes out white.”

At the end of a long mile the jitney halted at a gateway set in a high wooden wall beyond which might be seen the peaks of a glass-topped roof. About this gateway clustered a large assemblage of citizens of all ages and conditions, but with the young of both sexes predominating. As the young women uniformly wore middy blouses and the young men sport shirts, opened at the neck, there were bared throats and wide sailor collars wherever one looked.

“Extra people,” elucidated their host. “They get three a day – when they work. We’ll probably use a lot of them to-day.”

Within the inclosure a new world unfolded itself for the travellers from the Atlantic seaboard – in fact, sections of several new worlds. At the heels of Mr. Harcourt they threaded their way along a great wooden stage that was open, front and top, to the blue skies, and as they followed after him they looked sideways into the interior of a wrecked and deserted Belgian farmhouse; and next door to that into a courtroom now empty of everything except its furnishings; and next door to that into a gloomy dungeon with barred windows and painted canvas walls. They took a turn across a dusty stretch of earth beyond the far end of the segmented stage, and, lo, they stood in the gibbering midriff of an Oriental city. Behind all was lath, furring and plaster, chicken wire, two-by-fours and shingle nails; but in front ’twas a cross-section of teeming bazaar life. How far away seemed 373 Japonica Avenue, Brooklyn, then!

An energetic man in laced boots and a flannel shirt – Mr. Harcourt called him the director – peered angrily into the perspective of the scene and, waving a pasteboard megaphone in command, ordained that a distant mountain should come ten feet nearer to him. Alongside of this young man Mohammed was an amateur. For the mountain did obey, advancing ten feet, no more and no less. Half a score of young men in cowboy garb enshrouded themselves in flowing white draperies, took long, tasselled spears in their hands, and swung themselves upon the backs of horses – and, behold, a tribe of Bedouins trotted through the crowded, winding way, scattering mendicants, priests, camel drivers and peddlers from before their path.

Upon the edge of all this Chester K. Pilkins hovered as one entranced. He had lost Mrs. Pilkins; he was separated from Mr. Harcourt.

He became aware of three damsels of tender years who sat in a row upon a pile of rough lumber near at hand. They wore flowing robes of many colours; they were barefooted, their small toes showing pleasantly pink and white below the hems of their robes, and their arms were drawn primly behind them. He watched them. Although manifestly having no part in the scene then being rehearsed for filming, they continued to hold their arms in this restrained and presumably uncomfortable attitude, as though they might be practising some new form of a deep-breathing exercise.

As he watched, one of the three, catching his eye, arose and came padding her little bare feet through the dust to where he stood.

“Do me a favour?” she inquired archly.

“Why – why, yes, certainly, if possible,” answered Mr. Pilkins.

“Sure, it’s possible. See this?” She shook her head, and a wayward ringlet which dangled down against one cheek was agitated to and fro across her pert face. “Well, it’s tickling my nose something fierce. Tuck it back up out of sight, will you?”

“I’m – I’m afraid I don’t understand,” stammered Mr. Pilkins, jostled internally.

She turned slowly round, and he saw then that her wrists were crossed behind her back and firmly bound together with a length of new cotton rope.

“I’m one of the captive Armenians,” she explained, facing him again. “More’n a hour ago Wagstaff – he’s the assistant director – he tied us up. We gotta stay all tied up, just so, till our scene goes on. He’s such a bug on all them little details – Wagstaff is! Go on – be a good fella and get this hair up out of my face, won’t you? I’ll be sneezing my head off in another minute. But say – mind the make-up.”

A brightish pink in colour, Mr. Pilkins extended a helping hand, tingling inside of himself.

“Chester!”

It was his master’s voice, speaking with most decided masterfulness. As though the errant curl had been red-hot Mr. Pilkins jerked his outstretched fingers back. The Armenian maiden retired precipitately, her shoulders twitching.

“Chester, come here!”

Chester came, endeavouring, unsuccessfully, to avoid all outward semblance of guilt.

“Chester, might I ask what you were doing with that – that young person?” Mrs. Pilkins’ manner was ominous.

“I was helping her – a little – with her hair.”

“With her – why, what – do you – ”

“She is tied. Her hands, you know. … She – ”

“Tied, is she?” Mrs. Pilkins bestowed a chilled stare upon the retreating figure of the captive. “Well, she deserves to be. They should keep her tied. Chester, I want you to stay close to me and not go wandering off again.”

“Yes, my dear, I will – I mean, I won’t.”

“Besides, you may be needed any minute now. Mr. Harcourt” – she indicated that gentleman, who had approached – “has been kind enough to invite us to take part in this beautiful production.”

“But, my dear – but – ”

“Chester, I wish for my sake you would refrain from keeping on saying ‘but.’ And please quit interrupting.”