Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
Local Color

“You see – it’s like this,” explained Mr. Harcourt: “It’s the scene at the dock when the heroine gets home. You two are to be two of the passengers – the director says he’ll be very glad to have you take part. I just spoke to him. There will be many others in the scene – extras, you know. Think you’d like it? It will be an experience.”

“As you say, Mr. Harcourt, it will be an experience,” said Mrs. Pilkins. “I accept with pleasure. So does my husband.”

Promptly ensued then action, and plenty of it. With many others, recruited from the ranks of the populace, the Chester Pilkinses were herded into a corner of the open-faced stage at the back side of the bazaar – a corner which the two presiding genii of that domain, known technically and respectively as the boss carpenter and the head property man, had, by virtue of their magic and in accordance with an order from their overlord, the director, transformed, even as one waited, from something else into the pierhead of a New York dock. With these same others our two friends mounted a steep flight of steps behind the scenes, and then, shoving sheeplike through a painted gangway, in a painted bulkhead of a painted ship, they flocked down across a canvas-sided gangplank to the ostensible deck of the presumable pier, defiling off from left to right out of lens range, the while they smiled and waved fond greetings to supposititious friends.

When they had been made to do this twice and thrice, when divers stumbling individuals among them had been corrected of a desire to gaze, with the rapt, fascinated stare of sleep-walkers, straight into the eye of the machine, when the director was satisfied with his rehearsal, he suddenly yelled “Camera!” and started them at it all over again.

In this instant a spell laid hold on Chester Pilkins. As one exalted he went through the picture, doing his share and more than his share to make it what a picture should be. For being suddenly possessed with the instinct to act – an instinct which belongs to all of us, but which some of us after we have grown up manage to repress – Chester acted. In his movements there was the unstudied carelessness which is best done when it is studied; in his fashion of carrying his furled umbrella and his strapped steamer rug – the Ziegler Company had furnished the steamer rug but the umbrella was his own – there was natural grace; in his quick start of recognition on beholding some dear one in the imaginary throng waiting down on the pier out of sight there was that art which is the highest of all arts.

With your permission we shall skip the orange groves, languishing through that day for Mr. and Mrs. Chester K. Pilkins to come and see them. We shall skip the San Francisco Exposition. We shall skip the Yosemite Valley, in which to Chester there seemed to be something lacking, and the Big Trees, which after all were much like other trees, excepting these were larger. These things the travellers saw within the scope of three weeks, and the end of those three weeks and the half of a fourth week brings them and us back to 373 Japonica Avenue. There daily Chester watched the amusement columns of the Eagle.

On a Monday evening at seven-fifteen he arrived home from the office, holding in his hand a folded copy of that dependable sheet.

“Chester,” austerely said Mrs. Pilkins as he let himself in at the door, “you are late, and you have kept everything waiting. Hurry through your dinner. We are going over to the Lewinsohns for four-handed rummy and then a rarebit.”

“Not to-night, Gertrude Maud,” said Chester.

“And why not to-night?” demanded the lady with a rising inflection.

“Because,” said Chester, “to-night we are going to the Bijou Palace Theatre. The Prince of the Desert goes on to-night for the first run.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Pilkins understandingly. “I’ll telephone Mrs. Lewinsohn we can’t come – make some excuse or other. Yes, we’ll go to the Bijou Palace.” She said this as though the idea had been hers all along.

Seated in the darkened auditorium they watched the play unfold upon the screen. They watched while the hero, a noble son of the Arabic sands, rescued the heroine, who was daughter to a comedy missionary, from the clutches of the wicked governor-general. They saw the barefoot Armenian maids dragged by mocking nomads across burning wastes to the tented den of a villainous sheik, and in the pinioned procession Chester recognised the damsel of the truant curl and the ticklish nose. They saw the intrepid and imperturbable American correspondent as, unafraid, he stood in the midst of carnage and slaughter, making notes in a large leather-backed notebook such as all newspaper correspondents are known to carry. But on these stirring episodes Chester K. Pilkins looked with but half an eye and less than half his mind. He was waiting for something else.

Eventually, at the end of Reel Four, his waiting was rewarded, and he achieved the ambition which all men bear within themselves, but which only a few, comparatively speaking, ever gratify – the yearning to see ourselves as others see us. While the blood drummed in his heated temples Chester Pilkins saw himself, and he liked himself. I do not overstretch the truth when I say that he liked himself first-rate. And when, in the very midst of liking himself, he reflected that elsewhere over the land, in scores, perhaps in hundreds of places such as this one, favoured thousands were seeing him too – well, the thought was well-nigh overpowering.

For the succeeding three nights Mr. Pilkins’ fireside knew him not. The figure of speech here employed is purely poetic, because, as a matter of fact, the house was heated by steam. But upon each of these three evenings he sat in the Bijou Palace, waiting for that big moment to come when he before his own eyes should appear. Each night he discovered new and pleasing details about himself – the set of his head upon his shoulders, the swing of his arm, the lift of his leg; each night, the performance being ended, he came forth regarding his fellow patrons compassionately, for they were but the poor creatures who had made up the audience, while he veritably had been not only part of the audience but part of the entertainment as well; each night he expected to be recognised in the flesh by some emerging person of a keen discernment of vision, but was disappointed here; and each night he went home at ten-forty-five and told Gertrude Maud that business on the other side of the bridge had detained him. She believed him. She – poor, blinded wretch – did not see in his eyes the flickering reflection of the spark of desire, now fanning into a flame of resolution within the brazier of his ribs.

Thursday night came, and The Prince of the Desert film concluded its engagement at the Bijou Palace. Friday night came, but Chester K. Pilkins did not. He did not come home that night nor the next day nor the next night. Without warning to any one he had vanished utterly, leaving behind no word of whatsoever nature. He was gone, entirely and completely gone, taking with him only the garments in which he stood – a black cutaway, black four-in-hand tie, black derby hat, plain button shoes, plain, white, stiff-bosomed shirt. I am quoting now from the description embodied in a printed general alarm sent out by the police department, which general alarm went so far as to mention considerable bridge-work in the upper jaw and a pair of fairly prominent ears.

At last Chester K. Pilkins, although not present to read what was printed of him, got into the papers. Being questioned by reporters, his late employers declared that the missing man was of unimpeachable habits and that his accounts were straight, and immediately then, in a panic, set experts at work on his books. Remarkable to state, his accounts were straight. In the bank, in his wife’s name, he had left a comfortable balance of savings. His small investments were in order. They likewise were found to be in his wife’s name; it seemed he had sent a written order for their transfer on the eve of his flight – if flight it was. The house already was hers by virtue of a deed executed years before. Discussing the nine-day sensation, the ladies of the neighbourhood said that even if Chester Pilkins had run away with some brazen hussy or other, as to them seemed most probable – because, you know, you never can tell about these little quiet men – at least he had left poor, dear Gertrude well provided for, and that, of course, was something.

Something this may have been; but the deserted wife mourned and was desolate. She wanted Chester back; she was used to having him round. He had been a good husband, as husbands go – not exciting, perhaps, but good. Despite strong evidences to the contrary, she could not bring herself to believe that deliberately he had abandoned her. He was dead, by some tragic and violent means, or else he had been kidnapped. Twice with a sinking heart she accompanied a detective sergeant from borough headquarters to the morgue, there to gaze upon a poor relic of mortality which had been fished out of the river, but which bore no resemblance to her Chester nor, indeed, to anything else that once had been human. After this the police lost even a perfunctory interest in the quest. But the lady was not done. She paid a retainer to a private detective agency having branches over the country, and search was maintained in many places, high and low.

Three months went by; then a fourth. Japonica Avenue may have forgotten Chester Pilkins, but Gertrude Maud had not. At the tag end of the fourth month came tidings from the main office of the detective agency which, overnight, started Mrs. Pilkins to where – as the passenger agents for the transcontinental lines so aptly phrased it – California’s Golden Strand is kissed by the pellucid waves of the Sun-Down Sea. It couldn’t be true, this report which had been brought to her by a representative of the great sleuth for whom the agency was named; indeed, it was inconceivable to one who knew her husband that such a report could be true, but she would make certain for herself. She would – so this suffering, conscientious woman told herself – leave no stone unturned. She would neglect to follow up no clue merely because of its manifest improbability.

So back she journeyed to that selfsame town where the Ziegler studios were housed. A local representative of the agency, being advised by telegraph in advance of her coming, met her at the station. Expressing physically the gentle sympathy of an honorary pallbearer, he led her to an automobile, and with her he drove for miles through streets which she remembered having traversed at least once before, until in the far suburban reaches of the city, where the blue foothills of the coast range came down toward the sea, he brought her to a centre of the moving-picture industry; not the Ziegler establishment this time, but to the curious place known as Filmville – ninety fenced-in acres of seeming madness. It was getting on toward five o’clock in the afternoon when the automobile halted before its minareted portals. Leaving Mrs. Pilkins in the car her companion went to confer briefly with a uniformed individual on duty at the door. Returning to her he spoke as follows:

“The – ahem – the party we’ve got under suspicion is out on location with a company. But they’re due back here before dark. I guess we’d better wait a spell.”

He helped her to alight, dismissed the automobile, and accompanied her to an ornamental seat facing an exceedingly ornamental fountain which spouted in a grass plot hard by the gates to Filmville. As she sat and waited, strangely clad men and women – purporting to represent in their attire many periods of the world’s history and many remote corners of the world’s surface – passed by, going in and out. From over the high walls came to her jungle sounds and jungle smells, for this large concern maintained its own zoo upon its own premises. Persistently a sacred cow of India, tethered in a recess of the fence where herbage sprouted, mooed for an absent mate. The voice of the creature matched Mrs. Pilkins’ thoughts. Internally she was mooing for her mate too.

Twilight impended when two automobile loads of principals, attired cowboyishly and cowgirlishly, came thumping out of the north along the dusty road. These persons dismounted and trooped inside. A little behind them, heralded by a jingle of accoutrement, came a dozen or so punchers riding ponies. With jest and quip bandied back and forth, and to the tinkling of their spurs, these last dropped off their jaded mounts, leaving the ponies to stand with drooping heads and dragging bridles, and went clumping on their high heels into a small wooden place, advertising liquid refreshment, which stood across the way. The detective softly joggled Mrs. Pilkins’ elbow.

“Come on, ma’am,” he said; “just follow me. And don’t say anything until you’re sure. And don’t scream or faint or anything like that – if you can help it.”

“I shan’t,” said Mrs. Pilkins, all a-tremble. She was resolved not to scream and she was not the fainting kind.

Very naturally and very properly, as a gently nurtured woman, Mrs. Pilkins had never seen the interior of a barroom. From just inside the swinging doors where her escort halted her she looked about the place with the eye of curiosity, and even though her mind swirled tumultuously she comprehended it – the glassware, the pictures on the walls, the short bar, the affable dispenser who stood behind it, and the row of cowboys who lined the front of it from end to end, with their backs and hunched shoulders all turned to her, stretching away in a diminishing perspective.

“Wait a minute, lady,” advised the detective in a whisper. “Take your time and look ’em over careful. And be sure – be sure to be sure.”

The lady strove to obey. She looked and she looked. At the back of the room three punchers were clumped together, withdrawn slightly from their fellows – a tall puncher, a medium-sized puncher, and between these two a small puncher.

“Here, ol’-timer,” bade the tall puncher, drumming with his knuckles upon the bar, “wait on fellers that a-got a real thirst. Three long beers!”

The beers were drawn and placed at properly spaced intervals before the three. Their three right elbows rose at an angle; three flagons of creamy brew vanished.

A fourth cowboy slid down toward them.

“Well,” he demanded boisterously, “how’s Little Chestnut makin’ out? Still saddle sore? Still hatin’ to think of the place where you got to meet that there old paint pony of yourn to-mor’ mornin’?”

It was the tall cowboy who made answer.

“Nix on that Chestnut thing,” he said. “That’s old stuff. You should a-seen the little man stay by that pinto of hisn when she got uptious a while ago – jist stay by her and pour the leather into her. No, sir, that there Chestnut stuff don’t go any more for this bunch. This here” – and his long flannel-clad arm was endearingly enwrapped about the shoulders of his small companion – “this here boy from now on is Old Chesty.”

Even though viewed from behind, it might be seen that the person thus rechristened was protruding a proud chest. With a little swagger he breasted the bar.

“I’m buying,” he stated loudly. “Everybody’s in on this one.”

“Whee!” yelled the big cowboy. “Chesty’s buyin’ – this one’s on Old Chesty.”

But another voice rose above his voice, over-topping it – the cry of an agonised woman:

“Oh, Chester!”

As though he had been bee-stung the little man pivoted on his heels. His chaps hung floppingly about his short legs; his blue shirt was open halfway down his sunburnt chest; his pistol holster flapped against his flank; his wide white hat was upon the back of his head; his neck was tanned brown; his face was red and sweaty; his large outstanding ears were burnt a bright, translucent crimson; his hands were dirty – but it was Chester. For one moment, contemplating the accusing, brimming eyes of the lady, he flinched and shrank as one reared amid the refining influences of Japonica Avenue under such circumstances as these might well have flinched, might well have shrunk. Then he stiffened and in all visible regards was again Old Chesty, the roughrider.

“Hello, Gertrude,” he said, just like that.

“Oh, Chester!” she wailed the words in louder key even than before.

Like the gentleman that he was, the barkeeper turned squarely round and began polishing the valve of a beer pump with the palm of his moist hand. With a glance which swiftly travelled from one to another the tall cowboy gathered up his fellows and speedily they withdrew through the swinging doors, passing the lady with faces averted, profoundly actuated all by considerations inspired of their delicate outdoor sensibilities. Except for the detective person, husband and wife, to all intents and purposes, stood alone, face to face.

“Oh, Chester,” she repeated for the third time, and now forgivingly her arms were outstretched. “Oh, Chester, how could you do it?”

“Do what, Gertrude?”

“Run away and l-l-leave me. What did you do it for?”

“Three dollars a day,” he answered simply. There was no flippancy in the reply, but merely directness.

“Oh, Chester, to give up your home – your position – me – for that! Oh, what madness possessed you! Chester, come back home.”

“Back home to Brooklyn? Not on your life.” His tone was firmness itself. He spoke commandingly, as one who not only is master of himself but of a present situation. “Gertrude, you’d better stay here, too, now that you’ve come. I guess maybe I could get ’em to work you in on the regular list of extras. You’d probably film well.” He eyed her appraisingly.

“But, oh, Chester, to go – as you went – with never a word – never a line to me!”

“Gertrude, you wouldn’t have understood. Don’t you see, honey, it’s like this.” He took her in his arms, even as she had meant to take him into hers, and, with small, comforting pats upon her heaving back, sought to soothe her. “It’s like this – I’m before the public now. Why, Gerty, I’m in the eyes of the world.”

CHAPTER VI
THE GREAT AUK

As regards the body of the house it lay mostly in shadows – the man-made, daytime shadows which somehow always seem denser and blacker than those that come in the night. The little jogs in the wall behind the boxes were just the same as coalholes. The pitched front of the balcony suggested a deformed upper jaw, biting down on darkness. Its stucco facings, shining dimly, like a row of teeth, added to the illusion. At the bottom of the pit, or the family circle, or whatever it was they called it at the Cosmos Theatre, where the light was somewhat better, the backs of the seats showed bumpily beneath the white cloths that covered them, like lines of graves in a pauper burying ground after a snowstorm.

A third of the way back, in this potter’s field of dead-and-gone laughter, a man was hunched in a despondent posture. His attitude would make you think of a lone ghost that had answered the resurrection trump too soon and now was overcome with embarrassment at having been deceived by a false alarm. The brim of his hat rested on the bridge of his nose. Belonging, as he did, to a race that is esteemed to be essentially commercial, he had the artistic face and the imaginative eyes which, as often as not, are found in those of his breed.

His name was Sam Verba. He was general director for Cohalan & Hymen, producing managers. He was watching a rehearsal of a new play, though he did not appear to be. Seemingly, if he was interested in anything at all it was in the movements of two elderly chore-women, who dawdled about the place deliberatively, with dust rags and brooms. Occasionally, as one of the women raised her voice shrilly to address her distant sister, he went “Sh-h! Sh-h!” – like a defective steam pipe. Following this the offender would lower her voice for a space measurable by seconds.

Border lights, burning within the proscenium arch, made the stage brightly visible, revealing it as a thing homely and nude. Stage properties were piled indiscriminately at either side. Against the bare brick wall at the back, segments of scenes were stacked any-which-way, so that a strip of a drawing room set was superimposed on a strip of a kitchen and that in turn overlapped part of a wainscoted library, the result being as though an earthquake had come along and shaken one room of somebody’s house into another room and that into another, and then had left them so. In sight were four women and nine men, who perched on chairs or tables or roosted, crow-fashion, upon the iron steps of a narrow staircase which ascended to the top tier of dressing rooms, extending along a narrow balcony above. The hour was eleven o’clock in the morning. Therefore these persons wore the injured look which people of their nocturnal profession customarily wear upon being summoned out of their beds before midday.

At a little table, teetering on rickety legs almost in the trough of the footlights, sat a man hostilely considering a typewritten script, which was so interlined, so marked and disfigured with crosses, stars, and erasures that only one person – the author of these ciphers – might read his own code and sometimes even he couldn’t. The man at the table was the director, especially engaged to put on this particular piece, which was a comedy drama. He raised his head.

“All right, children,” he said, “take the second act – from the beginning. Miss Cherry, Mrs. Morehead – come along. Stand by, everybody else, and, please, in Heaven’s name, remember your cues – for once.”

A young woman and a middle-aged woman detached themselves from one of the waiting groups and came downstage. The young woman moved eagerly to obey; she was an exceedingly pretty young woman. The other woman, having passed her youth, strove now to re-create it in her costume. She wore a floppy hat and a rather skimpy frock, which buttoned down her back, school-girl fashion, and ended several inches above her ankles. Under the light her dyed hair shone with the brilliancy of a new copper saucepan. There were fine, puckery lines at her eyes. Her skin, though, had the smooth texture which comes, some say, from the grease paint, and others say from plenty of sleep.

She held in one hand a flimsy, blue-backed sheaf; it was her part in this play. Having that wisdom in her calling which comes of long experience, she would read from it until automatically she had acquired it without prolonged mental effort; would let her trained and docile memory sop up the speeches by processes of absorption. Miss Cherry carried no manuscript; she didn’t need it. She had been sitting up nights, studying her lines. For she, the poor thing, was newly escaped from a dramatic school. Mrs. Morehead wanted to make a living. Miss Cherry wanted to make a hit.

These two began the opening scene of the act and, between them, carried it forward. Miss Cherry as the daughter, was playing it in rehearsal, exactly as she expected to play it before an audience, putting in gestures, inflections, short catches of the breath, emotional gasps – all the illusions, all the business of the part. On the other hand, Mrs. Morehead appeared to have but one ambition in her present employment and that was to get it over with as speedily as possible. After this contrasted fashion, then, they progressed to a certain dramatic juncture:

“But, mother,” said Miss Cherry, her arms extended in a carefully-thought-out attitude of girlish bewilderment, “what am I to do?”

Mrs. Morehead glanced down, refreshing her memory by a glance into the blue booklet.

“My child,” she said, “leave it to destiny.”

She said this in the tone of a person of rather indifferent appetite, ordering toast and tea for breakfast.

A pause ensued here.

“My child,” repeated Mrs. Morehead, glancing over her shoulder impatiently, but speaking still in the same voice, “leave it to destiny.”

“Well, well – ” snapped the man at the little table, “that’s the cue, ‘leave it to destiny.’ Come on, McVey? Come a-w-n, McVey? Where’s McVey?” He raised his voice fretfully.

A nervous, thin man hurried down the stage.

“Oh, there you are. Go ahead, McVey. You’re keeping everybody waiting. Didn’t I tell you you’d have to read the grandfather’s part to-day?”

“No, sir, you didn’t,” said McVey, aggrieved.

“Well, anyhow, I meant to,” said his superior.

“But I’m reading Miss Gifford’s part this morning,” said McVey, who was the assistant stage manager. “She had to go to see about her costumes.”

“You’ll have to read ’em both, then,” ordered the special director. “Anyhow, the parts don’t conflict – they’re not on the stage together during this act. Do the best you can. Now let’s go back and take those last two sides over again.”

Vibrantly and with the proper gesture in the proper place, Miss Cherry repeated her speech. Wearily and without gestures, Mrs. Morehead repeated hers. The flustered McVey, holding the absentee Miss Gifford’s part in one hand and the mythical grandfather’s in the other, circled upstage and, coming hurriedly down, stepped in between them.

“No, no, no,” barked the director, “don’t come on that way – you’ll throw both these ladies out. Come on at the upper side of that blue chair, Mac; that’s the door. This is supposed to be a house. You can’t walk right through the side of a house without upsetting things. You realize that, don’t you? Once more – back again to ‘leave it to destiny.’”

The rehearsal went on by the customary process of advancing a foot and a half, then retreating a foot, then re-advancing two feet. The novices in the cast were prodigal of their energy, but the veterans saved themselves against what they knew was coming later, when they would need all they had of strength and more, besides.

A young man let himself in through the box-office door and stood in that drafty, inky-black space the theatrical folks call the front of the house and the public call the back of the house. Coming out of the sunlight into this cave of the winds, he was blinded at first. He blinked until he peered out the shape of Verba, slumped down midway of a sheeted stretch of orchestra chairs, and he felt his way down the centre aisle and slipped into a place alongside the silent, broody figure. The newcomer was the author of the play, named Offutt; his age was less than thirty; and his manner was cheerful, as befitting an author who is less than thirty and has placed a play with an established firm.

“Well,” he said, “how’s everything going?”

“Rotten, thank you!” said Verba, continuing to stare straight ahead. “We’re still shy one grandfather, if that should be of any interest to you.”

“But you had Grainger engaged – I thought that was all settled last night,” said the playwright.

“That tired business man? Huh!” said Verba expressively. “By the time he’d got through fussing over the style of contract he wanted, in case he liked the part and we liked him in it, and then quarrelling about the salary he was to get, and then arguing out how high up the list his name was to appear in the billing, your friend Grainger was completely exhausted.

“And then, on top of that, he discovered we were going to Chicago after the opening in Rochester, and he balked. Said his following was here in New York. Said he’d supposed we were coming right in here after the opening instead of fussing round on the road. Said he couldn’t think of being kept out of New York at the beginning of the season unless he got at least seventy-five more a week. Said he’d go back to vaudeville first. Said he had a swell offer from the two-a-day shops anyhow.

“Then I said a few things to Grainger and he walked out on me. His following! – do you get that? Grainger could carry all the following he’s got in the top of his hat and still have plenty of room left for his head. So there you are, my son – within ten days of the tryout and nobody on hand to play dear old grandfather for you! And nobody in sight either – in case anybody should happen to ask you.”

“Oh, we’ll find somebody,” said Offutt optimistically. The young of the playwrighting species are constitutionally optimistic.

“Oh, we will, will we? Well, for example, who? – since you’re so confident about it.”

“That’s up to you,” countered Offutt, “I should worry!”

“Take it from me, young man, you’d better worry,” growled Verba morosely.

“But, Verba,” contended Offutt, “there must be somebody loose who’ll fit the part. What with thousands of actors looking for engagements – ”

“Say, Offutt, what’s the use of going over that again?” broke in Verba in a tone which indicated he was prepared to go over it again. “To begin with, there aren’t thousands of actors looking for jobs. There are a few actors looking for jobs – and a few thousand others looking for jobs who only think they can act. Offhand, I can list you just three men fit to play this grandfather part – or four, if you stick in Grainger as an added starter.”

He held up a long, slender hand, ticking off the names on his fingers.

“There’s Warburton, and there’s Pell, and there’s old Gabe Clayton. Warburton’s tied up in the pictures. Damn the movies! They’re stealing everybody worth a hang. I got a swell offer myself yesterday from the Ziegler crowd to direct features for ’em. The letter’s on my desk now. Old Gabe is in a sanitarium taking the rest cure – which means for the time being he’s practically sober, but not available for us or anybody else. And Guy Pell’s under contract to Fructer Brothers, and you know what a swell chance there is of their loaning him to our shop.

“That doesn’t leave anybody but Grainger, who’s so swelled up with conceit that he’s impossible. And, anyhow, he’s too young. Just as I told you yesterday, I only figured him in as a last chance. I don’t want a young fellow playing this part – with his face all messed up with false whiskers and an artificial squeak in his voice. I want an old man – one that looks old and talks old and can play old.

“He’s got to be right or nothing’s right. You may have written this piece, boy; but, by gum, I’m responsible for the way it’s cast, and I want a regular, honest-to-God grandfather. Only,” he added, quoting the tag of a current Broadway story, “only there ain’t no such animal.”