Part 14

He turned to a desk heaped high with manuscripts of plays whose fate had long since been sealed by the circumstance that Leonard produced nothing but his annual revue. He utilized them, nevertheless, in the reception and dismissal of visitors; and by way of informing Al Sands that his visit was at an end Leonard immediately became absorbed in the title page and _dramatis personæ_ of a thick manuscript bound in blue vellum paper. To any other manager, its inordinate length would have made it impossible, because, reckoning that one page of manuscript consumes one minute in its performance, there were eight hours and twenty-five minutes of solid drama contained within its covers; but for J.J. Leonard's purposes, this was, if anything, an advantage.

Thus, at the beginning of the season, when obscure members of the "Comics" Company would summon up sufficient courage to call on Leonard with a request for more salary, the impression they received from discovering their employer in the perusal of so weighty a manuscript was not at all dispelled by the noise with which Leonard closed it and threw it back on his desk. It frequently banged twenty dollars a week off a timid actor's salary, and was therefore Leonard's favorite manuscript.

"I suppose I get anyhow one orchestra rehearsal," Al Sands said, with his hand on the door knob.

"Saturday morning at eleven downstairs," J.J. said, without looking up.

The manuscript was called "Death and Transfiguration" and suggested in its treatment Tolstoy's "Resurrection" with just a hint of "Twin Beds," but for anything Leonard had learned of its contents, it might just as well have been a combination of "Romeo and Juliet" and "Oh, Boy!" All he knew about it was that his father, Sam Lippmann, had brought it into the office and asked him to read it when he found the time; and although as the resolution of the Board of Trustees of the Bella Hirschkind Home for Indigent Females had so aptly put it, an all-wise Providence had gathered Sam unto his fathers some three years before, J.J. had still not found the time. Nevertheless, out of respect for his father he continued to believe that he was going to find the time some time or other, and he periodically instructed his secretary to notify the author that his manuscript was under consideration by Mr. Leonard and a decision would be rendered upon it in due course.

These notifications were all sent to Gerald Dane, care of The Fitgood Shirt Company, 22A Washington Place, New York City; and while it may seem a piece of pure coincidence that, half an hour after the incidents above set forth, Gershon Danowitz entered the Washington Place factory of the Fitgood Shirt Company, it may be readily explained upon the score that he was the sole proprietor of it and that Gerald Dane labored there under the shirt-business name of Gershon Danowitz, Jr.

"Well," Gershon, Jr., demanded impatiently before his father had time to remove his hat and coat, "did you ask him about it?"

The proprietor of the Fitgood Shirt Company and President of the Bella Hirschkind Home for Indigent Females immediately lost his benevolent manner and became livid with rage.

"What do you mean--did I ask him?" he bellowed. "It ain't enough that I am insulted about the benefit already. I should ask him about your _verflüchte Schauspiel_ yet!"

He tore off his hat and coat and threw them on to a chair.

"Sam Lippmann, that was a friend!" he cried. "I should ought to of been shot before I ever met that old crook, _olav hasholom_. Throws the whole burden of them fakers of females on my shoulders and then he goes to work and encourages my only son that he should be a play writer yet!"

"Now look here, pop," Gershon, Jr., protested. "There isn't any need to get so excited."

"Isn't there?" Gershon, Sr., began. "Well, let me tell you something, Gershon. Once and for all I want you to get through with this nonsense. You have been fooling away your time here long enough. Either you must got to be a play writer _oder_ a shirt manufacturer, but you couldn't be both, y'understand."

He had been delivering the same ultimatum at intervals of a week or so for more than three years, and it had always been accepted by Gershon, Jr., as incidental to the avocation of dramatist and to be dismissed with some such rejoinder as "Hire a hall!" or even, in less respectful moments, "Tell it to Sweeney." But on this occasion Gershon, Jr., maintained what his father ought to have recognized as an ominous silence; for only the night before, while dining on West Houston Street, somebody at the next table had audibly informed a female companion that the feller with the spectacles and that leather sample case--don't look now--was the one that wrote all them shows for them now Washington Square actors. And although the female companion was extremely rustic in her appearance and said, "What! That homely looking feller with the long hair?" the incident had fired his imagination, nevertheless.

"Because when a young feller gets to be already twenty-six years old, he ain't a child no longer," Gershon, Sr., continued, his philanthropic manner beginning to reassert itself. He intended it to be a heart-to-heart conversation such as any president of any home might hold with a thoughtless son in whom there wasn't, so to speak, a button's worth of harm, and to that end settled himself comfortably in the revolving chair at his office desk; but Gershon, Jr., refused to perform in the role assigned to him.

"I know I ain't," he said with a firmness that ought to have warned Gershon, Sr.

"You bet your life you ain't," Gershon, Sr., went on, just as though he were not addressing a dramatist who only the night before had been mistaken for the author of the entire Washington Square Players repertoire. "And when a feller gets to be twenty-six years old in any business--particularly the shirt business----"

"To hell with the shirt business!" Gershon, Jr., exclaimed.

If a spectator had arisen in the body of the Supreme Court at Washington and said the same thing about the Constitution of the United States the combined bench and bar there present could have been no more shocked than Gershon, Sr., was. For at least a minute he sat in his office chair unable to move, unable even to enunciate; but at last he tottered to his feet.

"Go on," he said, "out of here, before I kick you out."

"You wouldn't kick anybody out," Gershon, Jr., retorted. "For three years now I've sat and listened to you giving advice, and I ain't going to stand for it any longer."

"And for how many years did he sit and listen to you cutting teeth and having colic?" inquired a stout, florid gentleman in a fur overcoat. He had entered the office unnoticed at the very moment of Gershon, Jr.'s sacrilegious outbreak against the shirt industry, and although shirts were only one department of the Gembitz-Jones Mercantile Company's jobbing business in Los Angeles, Marcus Gembitz was hardly less shocked than Gershon, Sr., himself. "Ain't you ashamed to talk that way to your father?"

He might just as well have asked Trotzky and Lenin if they weren't ashamed to speak disrespectfully about such decent, estimable people as the Russian bourgeoisie, for in the lexicon of a Greenwich Village dramatist, derived in great measure from the prefaces to the published plays of Bernard Shaw, there are no such words as respect for parents. In fact, even in that crucial moment--the turning point of a career, as it were--when Gershon, Jr., was putting on his hat and coat preparatory to abandoning the shirt business forever, he could not help snorting contemptuously at such a hopelessly old-fashioned remark.

"Here!" Gershon, Sr., demanded. "Where are you going?"

For answer Gershon, Jr., crushed his hat over his forehead. It was a black, soft hat--essentially a dramatist's hat and not a shirt-manufacturer's hat. And then looking around the office, much as the Prisoner of Chillon must have looked around his dungeon at the moment of liberation--if he ever was liberated--he opened the door, and the next moment it closed behind him with a bang. Indeed, had it closed with a clang instead of a bang, the effect could not have been more dramatic.

"_Nu_, Danowitz," Marcus Gembitz said at last, "don't worry your head. He'll come back."

"I don't want him to come back," Gershon, Sr., said. "He's made his bed. Now he could rot in it for all I care."

Gembitz waved his hands in deprecation of such harshness.

"Say!" he said. "You'll get over that feeling." He patted Danowitz's shoulder consolingly. "After all," he continued, "we all have trouble with our children and it comes out all right."

"With children maybe, but with an only child, Mr. Gembitz, that's something else again," Danowitz said. His head nodded slowly as he began to realize the bereavement he had suffered.

"Mind you," he went on, "I begged his mother she shouldn't send him to college, because if you have two sons and one of them goes to college, supposing something happens to you, _Gott soll hüten_, you've anyhow one left to look after the business, but if you've got only one son and him a college gradgewate, y'understand, what is it? Am I right or wrong?"

"Couldn't a college gradgewate also run a business?" Gembitz inquired.

"In some business, _maybe_," Danowitz said. "But in a business where there is such a competition like the shirt business, Mr. Gembitz, such business you've got to learn it from the bottom up, whereas a college gradgewate learns a business from the top down, and while some college gradgewates reaches the bottom quicker as others, y'understand, when such a college gradgewate is also a play writer, before he has learned even the top of the business, understand me, the bottom has dropped out of it."

"Even so," Gembitz said, "you've got to make allowances for your boy."

"I would never forgive him--never," Danowitz said emphatically.

"Say!" Gembitz protested. "I would make you a bet right now that in less than two weeks the young feller would be back on the job and you would never think nothing had happened at all. Forgiving children is the easiest thing fathers could do. Why, you take me, for instance, Danowitz, and the troubles which you got with your boy ain't already a marker to what I got with my daughter, which I told my wife how it would come out if she lets her take vocal.

"'Learn her first to make a decent cup of coffee,' I says to my wife, 'or that she should cook _chotzig_ a potato,' I says.

"But you know how it is in Los Angeles, Danowitz. Everybody figures that if their daughter ain't got no other talent, she looks like Mary Pickford; and my wife has settled in her mind that my Sadie has only got to take for twelve hundred dollars singing lessons to be a second Geraldine Patti, y'understand. Right now she is in Chicago staying with her aunt and taking vocal from an _Italiener_, which he has got the nerve to charge more for one office call than a first-class A-number-one stomach specialist."

"Well, that's the way it goes," Gershon, Sr., declared, with a tremulous sigh. "I've got a good business and nobody to leave it to but the boy, and nothing would do but that he must be a play writer _doch_. You have got an only daughter which you are well fixed enough that she could have a good husband and a good home, and I suppose the first thing you know, you would be firing her out of the house for getting a job singing in a moving-picture theayter or something."

"Say!" Gembitz remarked. "The girl is very far from reaching that point, y'understand, but if she did, understand me, firing her out of the house would be the furthest from my thoughts. Hafter all, Danowitz, children has got their rights as well as parents, and if your son or my daughter thinks they've got openings above the shirt business or the home, y'understand, the thing to do is to look at the matter from philosophy."

Once more he patted Danowitz's shoulder.

"Now come, Danowitz," he said, "this here business about your Gershon is going to blow over, and in the meantime I would like to see what you've got in some popular-price percales. My reservations for Los Angeles is all taken for tomorrow, and I ain't got no time to lose."

For more than an hour Gershon, Sr., displayed his spring line of shirts, and in spite of his broken-hearted condition succeeded in procuring from Gembitz a most satisfactory order at prices slightly above the market, since Gembitz could not find it within his ordinarily businesslike nature to add to Danowitz's troubles by standing out for bedrock figures. In fact, once or twice Gembitz suspected that Danowitz was taking advantage of a customer's kindness of heart by sandwiching rather extravagant quotations between two outbursts of emotion at his son's ungrateful behavior. But Gembitz's sympathy for Danowitz, as of one father for another, outweighed the trade antagonism which as a jobber he would normally have felt toward a manufacturer, and he allowed Danowitz to get away with a couple of items which upon mature reflection he considered to be little short of grand larceny. Nevertheless, after checking up the order and correcting a few mistakes which Danowitz in his grief had made in his own favor, the two parents shook hands warmly.

"You will see, Danowitz," Gembitz declared, "that your boy will be back here in a few days, and you and him will be just as good friends as ever."

"Him with me, maybe," Danowitz said, "but not me with him."

"_Ach_! That's nonsense!" Gembitz exclaimed. He was about to enlarge upon the amount of forgiveness which a parent ought to display to an erring child, when the telephone bell rang.

"Excuse me," Danowitz said, taking the receiver from the hook. "Hello.... Yes, this is the Fitgood Shirt Company. Hello.... Mister Who? ... Yes, he's right here."

He turned to Gembitz.

"For you, Mr. Gembitz," he said.

"For me?" Gembitz cried. "Why, nobody knows I'm here, excepting I told the twentieth-floor clerk at the hotel she should ring me up here in case a package didn't come from my tailor, but the package came just as I left. I wonder who it would be?"

"Might if you answered the phone, maybe you would find out," Danowitz suggested.

"Give it to me," Gembitz said. "Hello.... Yes, this is Mr. Gembitz.... You are the twentieth-floor clerk, yes? ... You got a what? ... What kind of wire? ... A telegram? ... Sure, go ahead and open it."

He smiled at Danowitz.

"Ain't it funny, when you get a telegram, you always think sickness or death and it turns out to be nothing," he said. "Probably my partner is---- Oh, hello! ... Yes, I'm listening.... It's from Chicago.... Yes, I understand--Chicago.... Mrs. Clarence Fimpel. That's my wife's sister.... Yes, go ahead.... What? ... _Shema Beni_! What do you think of that?"

He hung up the receiver and stared at Danowitz while his florid complexion grew suddenly purple.

"Mr. Gembitz!" Danowitz exclaimed. "What's the matter? Is somebody sick or something?"

Gembitz flipped his right hand in a gesture of despair.

"Worser," he said. "My Sadie has run away to be an actress."

"An actress?" Danowitz repeated.

"The telegram says, 'Sadie in New York, threatens go on stage, stop her,' signed Mrs. Clarence Fimpel," Gembitz said. "And she don't even give the telephone number in New York where Sadie threatens to go on the stage."

"Don't it say letter follows?" Danowitz asked. "Most telegrams do, and usually you couldn't tell nothing about it till the letter arrives."

"I don't care if fifty letters follows," Gembitz declared, striking the desk with his clenched fist. "If the girl wants to go on the stage, she can go."

He rose from the chair on which he was sitting and looked as though he were about to raise both hands in the classic gesture that used to accompany all parental curses with or without a snowstorm off stage.

"But if she does," he said, "she'll never see a penny of my money--not one penny."

He sank back into his chair and covered his eyes with his right hand.

"A shame and a disgrace!" he muttered. "My only daughter to be an actress!"

Danowitz shrugged his shoulders.

"Say!" he said. "Lots of girls from good families has threatened to go on the stage and even went. Hafter all, what is so terrible that your daughter should be an actress, Mr. Gembitz? An actress could behave herself the same like anybody else and very often does."

"She should never come near my house again," Gembitz said with a groan.

"Schmooes!" Danowitz exclaimed. "If the girl makes a hit on the stage, you will be proud of her the same like any other father."

He patted Gembitz's back reassuringly, but Gembitz only shook his head.

"You don't know me, Danowitz. When I make up my mind, I make up my mind," he concluded. "And I would never forgive her--never."

The passage of a camel through the eye of a needle or of a rich man into Heaven is a relatively easy matter compared with the admission of an aspiring playwright to the presence of a manager, and when Gershon Danowitz, Jr., called at the office of J.J. Leonard on the following Saturday morning, it was only because Leonard failed to notice the Jr. on Gershon's visiting card that he succeeded in getting an audience.

"Tell that faker to come in here," Leonard said to the office boy who brought it in. "I want to talk to him."

He almost bit his cigar in two as he framed in sufficiently strong language just how he was going to break to the president of the Bella Hirschkind Home for Indigent Females that if one-half of the increased expenses of running off the benefit were not forthcoming from the treasury of the Home, there wasn't going to be any benefit at all.

"Now, looky here, Danowitz," he began, as Gershon, Jr., entered, and then broke off suddenly when he discovered that his visitor was not the person he supposed him to be. "Say! Who let you in here?" he bellowed.

It is hardly necessary to say that the question was embroidered with profanity selected at random from a particularly rich vocabulary, and for a moment Gershon, Jr., forgot that he was no longer the manager of a prosperous shirt business.

"Who do you think you're talking to--a shipping clerk?" he asked. "I sent in my card, and your boy told me to come in."

Leonard picked up the card and looked at it again.

"Oh, you're the old man's son," he said.

"I'm not any man's son," Gershon replied. "I'm here on my own account."

It was at this juncture that he saw his play on Leonard's desk.

"I called to see you about this," he said. Forthwith the habits of five years spent in the shirt business began to assert themselves. What he held in his hand seemed to him not a manuscript but a shirt, a high-grade shirt--in fact, an entire line of high-grade shirts--and he addressed himself to the task of selling it to Leonard, much as if Leonard had been a retailer with a chain of haberdashery stores and hence a prospective customer of large buying capacity. It was an entirely novel experience for the theatrical manager. He had met brash playwrights, shy playwrights, intellectual playwrights, and playwrights who were acquainted with every device of the theater since the days of Corneille and Racine, but a playwright who was also a first-class, cracker jack, A-number-one shirt salesman was something he had never been called upon to cope with, and he was soon completely at Gershon's mercy.

For more than an hour his only contributions to the dialogue were, "But, say!" or "Now, listen here," all of which Gershon treated as mere punctuation. In disposing of this one manuscript, he was using enough salesmanship to sell shirts in gross lots, and he talked on and on to such good purpose that by twelve o'clock, not only had he caused Leonard to accept in writing "Death and Transfiguration," a play in three acts and a prologue by Gerald Dane, but they had also discussed its forthcoming production to the extent of changing its title to "Early to Bed," merging the prologue into the first act and cutting between the laughs so as to bring its acting time well within the conventional period of one hundred and thirty minutes.

"And now," Gershon, Jr., said, shortly before half-past twelve, "we'll go out and have a bit of lunch."

Leonard looked at his watch and impiously uttered a pious exclamation.

"I've got a rehearsal downstairs," he said.

"All right, I'll go with you," Gershon remarked, and a few minutes later Leonard vaguely wondered why he was not surprised to find himself seated side by side with Gershon, Jr., in one of the last rows on the ground floor of the Cabot Theater. An orchestra of less than ten musicians--using the term in its occupational and not its artistic meaning--was playing an accompaniment to a song in which the word "Dixie" recurred at intervals. So far as it affected Gershon, however, it might just as well have been Bosnia or Herzegovina, for he was concerned not with the song but the singer. He clutched Leonard's arm convulsively.

"Who's the lady?" he asked in a shrill whisper.

"What lady?" Leonard asked in return. "Lady" was a word he reserved for members of the audience. For performers, whether as principals or chorus women, he possessed a fund of synonyms which had never been included in any thesaurus. "Oh, _her_!" he exclaimed, when he realized that he was sitting next to a layman. "She's one of them--now--McNallys."

"Yes?" Gershon said. He had, of course, heard of such theatrical families as the Drews, the Barrymores, and even the Eight Brothers Byrne, but, even though he was not prepared to admit it, he had never heard of the McNally family.

"Which one is she?" he asked, as though he knew all the others.

"She's the fifth or the sixth," Leonard said. "I forget which."

"The sixth," a voice said from the seat back of them, "and the best of the bunch, J.J."

"But she can't sing for nuts, Al," Leonard replied, without looking around.

"Of course, I'm no judge of singing," Gershon began, by way of protest, but he immediately became silent at a warning nudge from Leonard.

"She ain't got no more voice than I have," Leonard said.

"Say!" Al Sands retorted. "She can put over a song without singing a note. All she's got to do is to stand there, and it's across. Am I right or wrong?"

Leonard clutched Gershon's knee, but this additional warning was entirely unnecessary. Six years of buying and selling made him realize at once that even though Miss McNally combined all the more attractive features of Maxine Elliott, Billie Burke, and Mrs. Mildred Harris Chaplin, these were commodities just as much subject to bargain and sale in the theater as merchandise is in the dry-goods district.

"She's a great performer," Al Sands added, emphatically.

Leonard turned around in his seat.

"What am I--a new beginner?" he asked. "Have I been putting on for seven years now a show where I got to play to twenty-two thousand to break even, without being my own judge of what's good and what ain't?"

These figures, representing the gross weekly receipts of the "Comics," and the profanity with which they were quoted, made such an impression on Al Sands that he was silent for at least thirty seconds.

"She's a big find," he said at last.

"She's a rank amateur," Leonard retorted. "I bet she ain't left her home a month already."

"Well, what _of_ it?" Sands asked. That was just what Gershon wanted to know. Here was a McNally--member, no doubt, of an old theatrical family--in short, the sixth McNally, and yet she was a rank amateur and had just left her home.

"What _of_ it?" Leonard said. "Why, there's _this_ of it: I suppose you expect I should pay you the old figure when all you got to pay _her_ is fifty a week."