CHAPTER V
THE EYES OF THE WORLD
If there were a hundred men in a crowd and Chester K. Pilkins was there he would be the hundredth man. I like that introduction. If I wrote a book about him I doubt whether I could sum up Mr. Pilkins' personality more completely than already I have done in this the first sentence of this the first paragraph of my tale. Nevertheless, I shall try.
Card-indexing him, so to speak, filling in the dotted lines after the fashion pursued by a candidate for admission to Who's Whosoever Can, we attain this result: Name? Chester K(irkham) Pilkins; born? certainly; parentage? one father and one mother; lives? only in a way of speaking; married? extensively so; business? better than it was during the panic but not so good as it might be; recreations? reading, writing, arithmetic and the comic supplements; clubs? Prospect Slope Pressing, Montauk Chess, Checkers and Whist, King's County Civic Reform and Improvement; religion? twice on Sunday, rarely on week-days; politics? whatever is the rule; height? sub-average; weight? less than sub-average; hair? same as eyes; eyes? same as hair; complexion? variable, but inclining to be fair, and warmer in moments of embarrassment; special distinguishing characteristics? Oh, say, what's the use?
This would apply to Chester K. Pilkins as once he was, not as now he is. For there has been a change. As will develop. But at the time when we begin our study of him Mr. Pilkins resided in a simple and unostentatious manner in Brooklyn, N. Y., on one of those streets which are named for semi-tropical flowering shrubs for the same reason that hunting dogs are named for Greek goddesses and race horses for United States senators and tramp steamers for estimable maiden ladies. In a small, neat house, almost entirely surrounded by rubber plants, he lived with his wife, Mrs. Gertrude Maud Pilkins. This phraseology is by deliberate intent. His wife did not live with him. He lived with her. To have referred to this lady as his better half would be dealing in improper fractions. At the very lowest computation possible, she was his better eight-tenths.
By profession he was an expert bookkeeper, in the employ of a firm doing a large bond and stock brokerage business on the sinful or Manhattan shore of the East River. The tragedy and the comedy, the sordid romance and the petty pathos of Wall Street rolled in an unheeded torrent over his head as he, submerged deep in the pages of his ledgers, sat all day long dotting his _i_'s and crossing his _t_'s, adding his columns and finding his totals. Sometimes of evenings he stayed on to do special accounting jobs for smaller concerns in need of his professional services.
Otherwise, when five o'clock came he took off his little green-baize apron, his green eyeshade and his black calico sleeve protectors, slipped on his detachable cuffs, his hat and his coat, took his umbrella in hand, and leaving New York and its wicked, wanton ways behind him, he joined with half a million other struggling human molecules in the evening bridge crush--that same bridge crush of which the metropolis is so justly ashamed and so properly proud--and was presently at home in Brooklyn, which is a peaceful country landscape, pastoral in all its instincts, but grown up quite thickly with brick and mortar. There he gave his evenings to the society of his wife, to the chess problems printed from time to time in the _Eagle_, and to reading his encyclopedia, which had been purchased on the instalment plan, at the rate of so much down, so much a week. It seemed probable that Mr. Pilkins would finish reading his encyclopedia before he finished paying for it, which is more than most of us can say, however literary our aims and aspirations. He liked to pick up a volume for half an hour or so immediately prior to his retiring. He said it rested him. He had got as far as the middle of the very interesting one named _Gib to Jibe_. Once in a while, though, the Pilkinses went out in society. That is to say, Mrs. Pilkins went, and took Mr. Pilkins with her.
I would not have you believe from all this that Mr. Pilkins entertained no views of his own on current topics. His convictions upon certain heads were most definite and settled, and on favourable occasions openly he voiced them. Among other things he believed that if somebody would only start up an old-time minstrel show, such as we used to see when we were boys, it would make a fortune; that the newspapers printed a pack of lies every day because they had to have something to fill up their columns; that there was a great deal of grafting going on and something should be done about it right away; that the winters were changing, because of the Gulf Stream or something, so you couldn't depend on the climate any more; that owing to the high cost of living it was practically impossible to get a good sixty-cent table-d'hôte dinner nowadays; and that Mrs. Pilkins was in many respects a very unusual woman.
She was all of that. Get Gertrude Maud. She looms before us, large and full of figure, majestic of bearing and fair of face, her general aspect indeed a very general aspect. She was competent by inheritance and domineering by instinct. It was common talk in the circle in which Gertrude Maud moved, towing Chester behind her, that she had Bohemian leanings. True, she had never smoked a cigarette in all her blameless life, nor touched her lips to strong drink; nor yet had she patronised studio teas and attended the indoor anarchistic revels of the parlour-radicals established in the neighbourhood of Washington Square. Rather she betrayed her Bohemian trend by what she wore than by what she did.
She was addicted to festooning about her neck large polished beads of the more popular hard woods and upon her bosom plaquelike articles which apparently had originated with a skilled cabinetmaker and joiner. Her wrists and her forearms she adorned with art-work bracelets of hammered metals set with large muddy-looking stones--almost anything that would look well in a collection of geological specimens was, in the eyes of Gertrude Maud, jewelry. Her costumes of state, displayed in connection with these ornamentations culled from the vegetable and mineral kingdoms, were cut square in the neck and extended straight up and down, being ungirthed at the waistline but set off with red and blue edgings, after the style of fancy tea towels. As her woman friends often remarked in tones of admiration, she had never worn stays in her life, and yet just look what a figure she had! Sometimes, the weather being favourable, she wore sandals.
Excelling, as she did, in the social graces, Mrs. Pilkins was greatly in demand for neighbourhood parties. She was an amateur palmist of great note. At a suitable time in the course of the evening's festivities she would possess herself of the left hand of some gentleman or lady present--usually a gentleman's hand--and holding it palm upward, she would gently massage its surface and then begin uttering little gasping sounds betokening intense surprise and gratification.
"Do you know, really," she would say when she had in part recovered, such being the regular formula, "I don't believe in all my experience I hardly ever saw such an interesting hand?"
Peering close and ever closer she would trace out the past, the present and the future, seeing strange influences coming into the other's life, and long journeys and dark strangers; and presently, with a startled cry, she would pounce upon the heart line, and then, believe me, she would find out things worth telling! And if the owner of the captive hand chanced to be a young man whose life was so exemplary as to be downright painful, he would endeavour by his air to convey the impression that the fence round the South Flatbush Young Ladies' Seminary had been builded extra high and extra strong especially on his dangerous account. Hardly could the rest wait to have Mrs. Pilkins read their palms too. And while this went on, Mr. Pilkins would be hanging about on the outskirts of the group, feeling very null and void. Really his only excuse for being there at all was that Gertrude Maud needed some one to get her rubbers off and on and to bring her home.
Naturally, as one adept in the divination of the dearest characteristics of men and women, and also because she was a wife and subject to the common delusions of wives as a class, Mrs. Pilkins felt she knew Chester--felt she could read him like a book. This only goes to show how wrong a woman and a wife can be. For behind the mild and pinkish mask which he showed to her and to creation at large Chester Pilkins nursed unsuspected ambitions, undreamed-of dreams. He hankered with a hankering which was almost a pain to stand for once anyhow before the eyes of the world. Within him a secret fire seethed; he ached and glowed with it, and yet none knew of it. He would have died in his tracks before he voiced his burning desire to any human being, yet constantly it abode with him. He was tired--oh, so tired--of being merely one of the six millions. He craved to be one among the six millions. He peaked and he pined with it.
This longing is commoner probably among city dwellers than among those who live in the smaller settlements of men, and for that there is, as I believe, a good and sufficient reason. In the little community there are no nobodies. Anybody is somebody. But where the multitude is close-packed, nearly anybody is everybody and nearly everybody is anybody. The greater the number within a given space, the fewer are there available for purposes of pomp, prominence and publicity. A few stand out above the ruck; the rest make up the unconsidered mass--mute, inglorious and, except briefly in the census figures, unsung. And Chester K. Pilkins yearned to stand out.
Twice in his life he had thought he was about to attain conspicuousness and be pointed out by men as something other than Mrs. Chester K. Pilkins' husband. They were narrow escapes, both of them. Because each was such a narrow escape, that made the disappointment all the greater. Once on a rainy, blowy evening, when the narrow gore of Nassau Street where it debouches into Park Row was a mushroom bed of wet, black umbrella tops and the bridge crush at the mouth of the Bridge took on an added frenzy, a taxicab, driven at most unlawful speed, bored through the fringes of the press, knocked a man galley west, and, never checking its gait, fled into the shelter of the L pillars toward Chatham Square and was gone from sight before more than six or eight spectators could get its license numbers wrong.
The man was Chester K. Pilkins. He was butted violently from behind as he fought his way across the asphalt, with his collar turned up against the wet gusts and his thoughts intent on getting a seat aboard the transpontine car. He never had gotten a seat aboard it yet, but there was no telling when he might. Immediately on being struck he was projected some yards through space in a galley-westerly direction, and when he struck he rolled over and over in the mud, greatly to the detriment of a neat black overcoat buttoning under a fly front, and with silk facings upon the lapels, then in its third season of service. Kind hands--very many of them--lifted him up from where he lay with a long scratch on his nose and a passing delusion within his brain that he had taken a long rough trip somewhere and was coming back by slow stages. Sympathetic persons, about equally divided in their opinion as to whether most of his bones were or were not broken, bore him with all gentleness into the drug store in the World Building, propped him against a show case, and packed about him in a dense mass, those good Samaritans in the front row calling upon those behind them to stand back, in heaven's name, and give him a little air. There a kindly disposed bootblack brushed him off, and a soda-water clerk offered him malted milk with a dash of nerve tonic in it, and a policeman, using a stubby lead pencil, took down his name and address in a little red book, and a blithe young interne came on the tail of an ambulance with a kit of surgical tools in his hand, and presently departed, obviously disappointed to find there was no need of a capital operation to be performed forthwith upon the spot; and, altogether, the victim was made much of. A little later, somewhat shaken and sore but not materially damaged, he rode home--standing up and swaying in the aisle, as was customary--holding with one hand to a strap and with the other at intervals caressing his wounded nose.
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."
"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."