Part 13

Having reached this resolve I decided to go on the walk I had mapped out anyways, because what is home with a disappeared snake in it? And so I started, and as I come past the door in the lower hall, which its marked "Superintendent," which is Riverside-Drivese for Janitor, what would I hear but Rudie singing to himself out of the fullness of his heart or something.

I went out in wrath and the spring sun and after a while I begun to feel less sore and miserable in my heart, partially because of the fresh air and partially through irritation at the stylish trouser-leg that both of mine was in. But the day was too sweet for a person to stay mad long. Ain't it remarkable the way spring can creep into even a city and somehow make it enchanted and your heart kind of perk up and take notice--do you get me? You do, or Gawd pity you! It's the light, I guess, just the same as the audience holds hands when they turn on the ambers with a circular drop for a sunset or something.

And by the time I had walked along the Avenue and seen all the decorations which was already put up for the first regiments home, I commenced getting real fired and excited with my new job. It looked like the powdered-sugar industry was going to suffer because about all the plaster in the country seemed to be being used on arches which looked like dago-wedding cakes and you actually missed the dolls dressed like brides and grooms off the top of them. And here and there was some funny looking columns of the same white stuff and on the Public Library steps a bunch of spears and shields was thrown all over the place just as if a big Shakespearian production had suddenly give it up in despair and left their props and hoofed it back to Broadway. It certainly was imposing.

Up at 59th Street was a arch that looked like Coney Island frozen solid. It was all of little pieces of glass:--heavy glass and millions of pieces. I don't know what good they did, but they shone something grand, and must of cost a terrible lot of money. I guessed the boys would certainly feel proud to march under it provided none of it fell on their heads.

Believe you me, by the time I got home my head was full of imaginary architecture like Luna Park and Atlantic City jumbled together with a set I seen in "The Fall of Rome" when we was shooting it at Yonkers. And after I had squirmed out of my walking suit and was a free woman once more, in a negligee, which is French for kimona which is Japanese for wrapper, well, anyways, I lay in it and opened up the evening paper because I am not one to let the news get ahead on me and have acquired the habit of reading it regular the same as my daily bath.

But it was hard to keep my attention on it because Maude was still missing and also I kept thinking, when not of her, of the lovely arches and so forth my ten thousand would build. I had about settled on pink-stucco, with real American beauties strung on it and a pair of white kittens in plaster--symbol of the best known Theatrical Ladies Association in Broadway, and I expect the world--at the top, when I opened the paper again and I see something which set my mind thinking.

"70th will add thousands to ranks of unemployed."

Yes, that's just what it said. And I went on and read the piece where it said how enough men to start a real live city was being fed at soup-kitchens and bread lines, not in Russia or Berlin, but right in N. Y. C., N. Y., U. S. A.! Somehow, coming right on top of all their arches and so forth, it sort of struck me in the pit of my stomach and give me the same sinking sensation like a second helping of griddle-cakes a hour later--you know! The thought of all that money going on arches that after they was once marched under was no good to anybody but the ones which built them and the ones which carted them away, had me worried. Think of all the soup that glass and plaster would of made! Do you get me? You do or you're a simp! And it also besides struck me that while the incoming boys would undoubtedly enjoy them city frostings, them which had already marched under them and was now in the bread-line must be kind of fed up with it. Then I thought of the ten thousand intrusted to me to spend which had been gladly given in small sections by willing citizens who wanted to do some little thing to show appreciation to the boys which had went over there, and I begun to realize I had been told I could spend it anyways I wanted to.

And when I thought of that pink arch and roses I blushed, although nobody had, fortunately, heard me mention it, except the two fool dogs, aloud.

Believe you me, I then see like a bolt from the blue, as the poet says, that arches was all right in their way but they was in the traffic's way at best and made mighty poor eating. And so naturally with Ma having it continually before me, I thought of ten thousand dollars worth of eats, because while there is quite a lot of red X canteens for men in uniform, how about the poor birds which had just got out of a uniform and not yet got into a job? Besides there is something kind of un-permanent about food unless a salary to get more with follows it as a chaser.

And so I lay there in comfort all but for the thought of Maude, and figured and figured what would I do. It seemed it was a cinch to get money from people to give the boys a welcome but what to spend it on was certainly a stiff one. But after a while I commenced to get a idea. Which it's a fact I am seldom long without one when needed which together with my great natural talent is what has made me the big success I am.

Work! That was the welcome the boys needed. Work and a little something substantial to start on. So this is what I figured. Suppose we was to divide up that ten thousand, how many boys would it take care of, and how?

Say we had ten men. A thousand each. Too much, of course. Twenty men. Five hundred per ea. Still too much. Well, then forty men. Two fifty. Well, they could use it of course, but it was not a constructive idea. It was too much for a present and not enough to invest. So how about 80. Well, that was $125. per man. This was doing something pretty good by eighty men that would very likely need it, but it seemed sort of unfair not to take in more of the boys. So I split it again and had one hundred and sixty boys with $62.50 in their pockets.

Well, I felt kind of good over this idea and there was only two real troubles with it which is to say that $31.25 for three hundred and twenty boys looked nicer if there was only some way to handle it right. But how?

I put in another hard think and then I got it. The way to make that $31.25 a real present was to make it a payment on something and then with the other hand pass out a job at the same time, which would not alone keep the soldier but allow him to cover the difference.

And to get away with this all I needed now was a popular investment and 320 perfectly good steady jobs.

Well, with the Victory Loan the first part was easy enough, and I concluded to pay twenty-five dollars on each of three hundred and twenty one hundred dollar victory notes, making myself responsible for the lot the same as if I was a bank and getting a job for each note and having the giver of the job hold the note on the soldier and pay me the instalments and I would pay myself back, or if not nobody would be stung outside of me, supposing any one of them failed to come across. I was going to take a big lot for myself and another ten didn't much matter.

And then with the remaining $6.25 each, well, I would pool that for leaflets enough to go around the whole division and on the leaflet I would have printed the facts and a list of the jobs and just what they was, with how much kale per week went with them, and see that the boys got them while the parade was forming and then it would be up to them, because the home folks can only do so much and then it's up to the army their own selves just as with munitions and sugar and red X work while the big show was on. They did the work but we gave them the job--we and the Germans. And now all we could do again was to give them a job--and it's enough, judging from how they went after the first one.

And then, just as I come smack up against the awful fact of where would I get them jobs Ma come in and says the hot-dogs and liberty-cabbage which it's the truth we always translate them into American at our table, was getting cold and as long as I was paying for them I'd better eat them while they was fit. So I says all right and we went in and did so.

Believe you me, it certainly is a remarkable thing the way you start on a afternoon's work like I done, all full of vigor and strength and how your ideas and courage and everything will sort of leak away toward the time to put on the feed-bag at Evensong. And how again the ideas and pep comes back in the evening once you have eaten. There was almost perfect silence the first few minutes we sat down or would of been except for Ma taking her tea out of the saucer, which I can't learn her not to do and the only way I keep her from disgracing me at the Ritz and etc., is to make sure she don't order it. But when the first pangs was attended to I commenced to feel more conversational.

"Work," I says, thinking of what I had been thinking of. "Work is the one thing that stands by a person. Everything else in life can go bluey and their work will see them through. That's why it's been so popular all these years, and where these Bolsheviks make their big mistake. Because they don't work and not working they get bored to death and so they commence rioting. Do you remember that quotation from that well-known cowboy poet, Omaha Kiyim, "Satan will find business still for idle hands to do?" How good that applies to strikes--idle hands--ain't that perfect? And it written so long ago!"

"How long?" says Ma.

"Oh, I dunno. Maybe three hundred years," I says.

Ma laid down her knife and spoon, she being quite entirely through, and looked me in the eye.

"I will remember them words, daughter," she says very solemn.

And it's the truth I never noticed how serious she was about it until I come to look back on it nearly three weeks later.

IV

And during that time which has been so immortally fixed in writing by the grandest book with the same name, I was as busy as the great American cootie is supposed to be on his native hearth--only it ain't that piece of furniture but another, of course. Do you get me? I'm afraid so! Well, I was as busy as what you think. To begin with I called a committee-meeting in the privacy of my grey French enamel boudoir where I wear my boudoir cap and have the day-bed hitched and this committee meeting consisted entirely of myself and the two fool dogs. And after I had gone through all the motions, I appointed myself a sub-committee of one to carry out the meeting's resolutions and do all the work.

This is about what would of happened if I had done it the regular way and asked Ruby Roselle and Maison Rosabelle and the other girls. We would of had a mahogany table and a gavel and a pitcher of ice-water and a lot of hot-air and a wasted morning and in the end I would of been the goat anyways, so I thought why not do it single-handed in the first place and be done? I could print all their names on the leaflets and they would be perfectly satisfied.

So having got over the necessary formalities as you might say, I accepted the nomination and got to work. Fortunately I wasn't doing anything except a solo dance at the Palatial at supper-time and one picture. And so I had most of my days to myself. The Fixings on the Avenue grew and blossomed and so did my contribution to the Welcome Home Committee. I didn't get to go to any of their meetings but I don't imagine they even missed me at the time. And while the arches and other motion-picture scenery was being as completed as they ever would be, so was my list. My monument took up less space, but when you gave it the once-over it seemed maybe a little more rain-proof than the others. Apparently all there was to it was slips of paper six by eight with this printed on them. At the top it says:

"WELCOME HOME"

"HOWDY BOYS, AND OUR HEARTFELT THANKS!

DO YOU NEED A JOB? HERE ARE THREE HUNDRED AND TWENTY AND A VICTORY NOTE

GOES WITH EVERY ONE!"

Then come the list. I will put down a part of it so you can realize what a assortment of things has to be done to keep the seive in civilization.

4 handsome juveniles for motion-picture work--stage experience unnecessary.

2 experienced camera men.

2 marcel-wavers.

6 chemists, Marie La Tour Complexion Powder Co.

2 salesmen, Marie La Tour Turkish Cigarette Co.

16 waiters, Palatial Hotel.

1 traveling man, Marie La Tour Silk Underwear Co.

2 experienced lineotypers, Motion Picture Gazette.

2 experienced pressmen, Motion Picture Gazette.

1 publicity man, experienced, Motion Picture Gazette.

3 fillum cutters.

1 stylish floorman. Must be handsome and refined, not over 30. Apply Maison Rosabelle, Hats and Gowns.

1 orchestra complete, with leader. Apply "Chez La Tour" (my old joint of parlour-dancing days).

30 chorus men.

2 sparring partners for Madame Griselda, the famous lady-boxer.

And etc, add affinities, as the Romans used to say. And every one a real genuine job paying good money. And getting them nailed was no cinch, believe you me, except, of course, I being such a prominent person I didn't have as much trouble as some would of. Especially where a firm was using my name on something, they could hardly refuse me. I seen everybody personally myself, and only the bosses and in the end nobody had turned me down except the one from which I had bought my new bear-cat roadster for Jim's welcome home present and it was _some_ roadster, being neatly finished in pale lavender with yellow running-gear and a narrow red trim and tapestry upholstery on the seats which was so low and easy you involuntarily started to pull up the blankets after you got settled. You know, the kind of a car you have to look up from to see which way the cop is waving.

Well, anyways, you would of thought the bird which had sold it to me for cash money, him being the manager of the luxurious car-corrall himself, would offer to take on some of the boys. But no, he says there was too many auto salesmen in the world already, and that they had ought to be diverted into selling some of the new temperance drinks where their trained imagination would undoubtedly be of great value.

Well, anyways, he was the only one turned me down and I had the slips printed and stored away in a couple of cretone hat-boxes and commenced allotting the victory-note pledges. And then I tripped over the fact that I was a job short. There was the stuff all printed, and a job too short and it the night before the big parade! Well, I decided that when the time come I would make the extra job if I couldn't find it, and believe you me, I was as wore out looking for them as a Ham with his hair cut like a Greenwich village masterpiece. Not that I ever saw one and I have often wondered where the artists which drew them that way, did.

But in the meantime I had got hold of the Dahlia sisters, and Madame Broun and La Estelle, and Queenie King and a lot of other easy-lookers and had it all fixed for them to be on hand below Fourteenth Street at ten o'clock to give out the slips while the boys was mobilizing or whatever they call it. And then just as I was getting into the limousine with Musette and the two cretone hat boxes full and the two fool dogs and Ma, who would come up to me but Ruby Roselle with a new spring set of sables which it is remarkable how she does it in burlesque, still far be it from me to say a word about any person, having been in the theatrical world too long not to realize that it is seldom as red as it is painted and that the coating of black is only on the outside.

Well, anyways, up she comes from her new flat which is only two doors from mine and a awful mean look in those green eyes of hers under a sixty dollar hat that looked it, while mine cost seventy-five and looked fifteen, which is far more refined only Ruby would never believe that: which is one main difference between her and I. And she stopped me with one of those deadly sweet womanly smiles and says in a voice all milk and honey and barbed wire, she says:

"How's this, dearie, about the Theatrical Ladies Committee," she says. "I only just heard of it from Dottie Dahlia," she says. "What was it made you leave me off?"

Well, seeing that the armistice was not yet broken I felt I might let her distribute a few leaflets, although I had left her name off the signatures at the bottom on account of her never having proved she wasn't a alien enemy to anything besides dramatic art, which hadn't to be proved. So I handed her a string of talk about this being a small affair and how I had thought she would of been too busy to do anything just now, which made her mad because there is some talk on account of that she wasn't working just then. But she took a few leaflets and read the signature at the bottom. "Theatrical Ladies' Welcome Committee" and got real red in the face.

"Why, my friend Mr. Mulvaney spoke to me about this!" she says. "I was to of been treasurer, or something! Do you mean to say you spent ten thousand dollars on _them!"_ and she pointed to the leaflets like a one-act small-time.

"Yep!" I says. "Take 'em home and try 'em on your piano!" I says. "But you will have please to pardon me now. I got to beat it!"

And with that I climbed in with the rest of the family and we was rushed down town to N. Y.'s Bohemian Quarter, where the 70th Division was about to hang around waiting to parade. Which it is certainly remarkable the places the highly moral U. S. A. Government picks out for her soldiers to wait about in say from Paris to Washington Square, and I think their wives and sweethearts have stood for a good deal of this sort of thing, to say nothing of wives and sisters being kept from going abroad. I don't know have any homes been broken up this way, but I will say that Marsailles and Harlem would of listened better to the patiently waiting homebodies.

Well, anyways, down we went to the amateur white lights, and by the time we reached Twenty-Third we begun to run into bunches of the boys. Bands was playing and all, and--oh my Gawd, what's the use trying to tell about it? There was plenty to tell, but ain't every one _seen_ it? If not at N. Y. C., why in some town which may be more jay but with its heart in the right place, and the heart is the thing which counted this time as per usual. Believe you me, mine was in my throat and so was everybody elses when they seen them lean brown boys with their grown-up faces!

Well, we stopped down to Eleventh and Sixth and got out and commenced walking around handing out the leaflets, and at first they weren't taking 'em very seriously, but pretty soon they began to get on to who I was and of course that caught them and a good many tucked the slips inside their tin hats and all of them pretty near had seen me in "The Kaiser's Killing" and I got pretty near as big a ovation as I had tried to offer them. And as for the parade they was very good-natured, but it seemed to me that as usual the stay-at-homes in the grandstands was getting the best of it and the boys doing all the work, for parading, no more than a first-class dancing act, ain't quite the pleasure to the ones that does it, that it is to them that only stands and waits, as the saying is.

V

The crowds on the Avenue was something fierce, and the only ones which had the right of way, outside of officers and cops, was the motion-picture men. I seen Ted Bearson, my own camera man from the Goldringer Studios, and Rosco, my publicity man, and they was talking together. I stepped back in among the boys, because I wasn't looking for any personal publicity myself on this particular day, wishing to leave all that to the division and I knew that if Ted was to see me he would shoot me.

But ain't it the truth that the modester a public person like me is, the more attention they attract? My sweet, quiet voice, silent though snappy clothes, and retiring manner have been in Sunday spreads and motion-picture magazine articles practically all over the world and America, and my refinement is my best-known characteristic. Publicity is like men. Leave 'em alone and they simply chase you. Pretend you don't want them, and you can't lose them. And the more reluctant I am about being noticed, the wilder the papers get! Only, of course, without a good publicity man this wouldn't, perhaps, be a perfectly safe bet.

So this day, having got rid of all my leaflets, I was slowly working my way toward the Avenue, when publicity was thrust upon me.

You know this Bohemian part of New York is made up of old houses which is so picturesque through not having much plumbing and so forth and heat being furnished principally by the talk of the tenants on Bolshevism and etc. These inconveniences makes a atmosphere of freedom and all that and furnishes a district where the shoe-clerk can go and be his true self among the many wild, free spirits from Chicago and all points west. Well, this neighborhood could stand a lot of repairs, not alone in the personal sense, but in a good many of the buildings, but these are seldom made until interfered with by the police or building departments. And on the corner of the street which I was now at there was a big old house full of people who _did_ something, I suppose, and these were mostly bursting out through the open windows or sitting on the little balconies which looked like they couldn't hold a flower pot and a pint of milk with any safety much less a human. But there they was, sitting, with all the indifference to fate, for which they are so well known. I couldn't but notice the risk they ran, but I should worry how many radicals are killed, and so I paid but little heed until I noticed that there was three little kids--all ragged children of the dear proletariat--which some of the Bohemians had hauled up on a balcony which was too frail for adults. The minute I see that balcony I was scared to death, although the short-haired girl and the long-haired man which was letting the kids out on it was laughing and care-free as you please. The kids got out all right, and then something awful happened.

Right below was a open space at the head of this particular column, where the officers and color-bearers and etc was. Rosco and Ted was getting a picture of them. But while I generally watch a camera, this time I didn't on account of watching the kids. And as I looked that rotten old balcony broke and one them, a little girl, fell through and hung there, caught by her skirt, and it a ragged one at that. Everybody screamed and yelled and sort of drew back, which is the first way people act at a horror before they begin to think. I yelled myself, but I started toward her, because the radicals couldn't reach her from above and from below the ground was fully twenty feet away and nothing but a fence with spikes and a dummy window-ledge way to one side. But I had a idea I might make it for what with two generations on the center trapeze and never a drop of liquor and not to mention what I done in pictures, I think quicker than some and act the same. But my new skirt prevented, and ahead of me dashed a soldier.

In a minute he had scaled the wall and worked his way along the spikes to that ledge, and then while the crowd watched breathlessly he had that kid under one arm and was back on the wall again. He held her close, turned around, crouched down and then jumped. And as he jumped I screamed and run forward, for Oh My Gawd, it was Jim!