Part 13

“That’s all very well,” observed Miss McSears with firmness. “But I don’t go to midnight suppers in other folks’ houses, with a bunch of strangers--”

“Strangers once but lovers now,” stated the flit firmly, “speaking for self _and_ lady friend.”

“--and no chaperon,” pursued the spokeswoman of the proprieties, reddening but obstinate. “So you count--”

“Silence in the ranks!” ordered Dolly Barrett. “I’m an officer and a widow. Is that enough?”

“Plenty for me, and praise to Heaven for the good news,” said the sike, enthusiastically. “I don’t mean the officer part,” he added significantly, “but the other.”

Mr. Watts regarded him curiously. “There may be more in these Western universities than a Harvard man would suspect,” he murmured.

“And to think,” sighed the sike, “that a few weeks hence I shall be pouring pious platform platitudes into the happy ears of inattentive youth!”

“Forward in light foraging order!” commanded the gob.

* * * * *

The party entered the house, which was evidently being hastily cleaned for the return of the owners. A subdued noise as of servants in commotion could be heard in the rear. On a hall stand stood a collection of mail in three piles. The flit chancing to glance at it, stood petrified. Selecting a post-card he advanced upon the rear of the unheeding gob, turned up the bottom of the wide and floppy left trouser-leg, read from the sewn-in slip the name inscribed thereon, compared it with the address on the post-card, turned down the trouser-leg to one fold and with a sudden, sardonic inspiration not only left it so, but adjusted the other one to match it.

“Mr. Schuyler Tappan Veeder,” he observed with concentrated bitterness, straightening up.

“Here,” responded the gob, cheerfully. “What about it?”

“This is _your_ joint,” declared the flit in solemn accusation.

“Not while my fond parents enjoy their present health,” was the genial reply.

But the soul of Corporal Slayter was hot with suspicion. “What kinda con game you been workin’ on me?” he said, surlily. “Call yourself Chaw Veeder.”

“Barring the presence of ladies, you’re a liar,” retorted the gob promptly. “It’s my pals call me Chaw. Which reminds me.” Producing a rich-hued bar from his pocket, he bit off a generous chunk and expertly stowed it. The angry eyes of his pal flickered a little. But he was unconvinced.

“You’re phony,” he growled. “A masqueradin’ dude.” He pointed to the trousers which he had left “cuffed.” “That’s your style,” he asserted. “Me, I’m through. I’ll not be made a guy of. C’mon, Nora.”

* * * * *

The gob stretched forth an iron-muscled hand which he inserted forcibly and affectionately between the flit’s neck and his collar. “Pause a moment, Claude,” he besought. “Girls, will you kindly muffle your ears? Thanks. Now, Freddie, you lop-sided, cross-grained, bone-headed, swivel-eared, pizen-souled descendant of ten generations of mule-thieves, before I break your jaw in three places at once, listen while I tell you what you are.” And he told him. But of the telling there is no record, because after the preface, Mr. Watts retired for air and the sike ran out to seek a pencil and paper and returned too late for the exordium. The flit, spell-bound, relaxed his expression of disfavor. When it was over he bent down and readjusted the gob’s trouser-legs to the regulation straightness. Apology could go no further.

“You win, Chaw,” said he shamefacedly. “Speed up the wedding feast.”

It is recorded in the unwritten history of Fifth Avenue’s most costly and exclusive section, that there came, upon a midnight clear, a din as of ten thousand structural riveters in progressive action, giving place to sounds of revelry by early morning, which in turn was succeeded by the Anvil Chorus, above the surface of which soared a valiant barytone proclaiming, “The Voice that Breathed O’er Eden.” Mr. Chaw Veeder’s supper-party, back in the tank, was adjourning to night-court to seek a marrying magistrate. For, as in the old song, love (in the person of Mr. Reuben Renssalaer Watts) had found out the way, and the telephone, reaching a friendly judge, had arranged a special emergency license.

Many queer equipages with strange cargoes visit night-court on sundry errands; but the tank with its wedding-party broke the record.

Court adjourned informally, to rush out and ascertain who was bombing the locality and why. When the party entered, they beheld two policemen struggling to extricate the magistrate from the frantic embrace of Mr. Bingle Foxley, who was yelling:

“Save me! It’s coming after me. I hear it. Don’t let it get me, Judge!”

When at length his Honor was released, the sike greeted him with surprise.

“It’s you, is it?”

“It’s me,” agreed the magistrate. “Or if not me, I.” He was the bearded victim of “Cherchez la Chicken.”

“We found him,” remarked the sike, indicating Mr. Reuben Renssalaer Watts.

“So I perceive. It’s a small world.”

“Small like a Harlem flat,” confirmed Miss Nora McSears discontentedly. “You can’t turn around in it without rousing the family. _That_,” she pursued, pointing out to Corporal Slayter one of the policemen engaged in preventing Mr. Foxley from crawling into the commitment file, “is Pa.”

“Howdy, Pa!” said the flit.

“Whaddye mean, ‘Pa’?” demanded the thunderstruck officer.

“In-law,” explained Mr. Slayter. “To-be,” he added.

“Perhaps,” amended Miss McSears.

“Sure thing,” asseverated the flit blithely. “It’s in the air. You can’t dodge it.”

“Other things difficult to dodge are in the air,” observed the magistrate. “Reuben, as friend to friend and unofficially, how did you get these?”

“By the hour,” replied Mr. Watts. “I hired ’em.”

“Are you responsible for their actions?”

“Upon and after the hour of 11:05 P.M., I am.”

“You escape,” pronounced the magistrate. “At 11:02 P.M. I am informed, an armored tank filled with desperadoes, I. W. W. Bolshevists, anarchists, nihilists, prohibitionists and other enemies of the public welfare, invaded West Forty-fourth Street and did there and then interrupt an orderly meeting of the Society for the Abolition of Tobacco, Bridge, Dancing and other Hellish Habits, by felonious means, to wit: firing upon it with machine guns, gatlings, howitzers, hand-grenades, rifles, revolvers and sundry lethal weapons, against the ordinances duly made and provided for the maintenance of the peace.”

“So help me God,” intoned a large, solemn, pulpy person, rising in his seat.

“That’s the guy,” cried the flit, “that called us ‘Bol-she-_vee_-ki!’ Lemme attim.”

“Then you admit that you are them,” said the magistrate. “Or, if not them, they.”

“We do,” said the gob; “with mitigating circumstances.”

“There is a warrant out against you.”

A blond and frescoed portent projected itself upward from a side bench. “Make it two, Judge. And make the second one for murder.”

“Saints preserve us!” groaned the sike. “The sorrowing protectress of the silhouetted pup!”

“It is a small world,” repeated the magistrate. “This gentleman (indicating the stricken Mr. Foxley) who originally came here for the purpose of taking the pledge, now prefers the charge that you instigated to attack him without provocation a prehistoric monster of the dragon or fire-spouting persuasion which, after destroying his automobile, chased him through a plate-glass window and totally wrecked his nerves. Comparing his description of the monster with my own impression of your vehicle, and remembering that the female of the species is more deadly than the male, I conclude that it is her. Or, if not her, it. What have you to say?”

“Just this,” answered Mr. Watts with annoyance, “I came here to be married, not prosecuted. Come now, Hartley, as friend to friend, can’t you fix this? It may be my last chance.”

“Your friend with the talent for blackmail seems to be a person of infinite resource,” said the magistrate, glancing toward the sike. “Has he any suggestions?”

“If I may be permitted,” said the sike, modestly rising, “I suggest, first, that Mr. Foxley is too good a sport to spoil a wedding, if assured that the groom will never again travel Fifth Avenue in a tank. (Mr. Foxley grunted.) As for the noble cause of Suppression of Tobacco _et cetera_, I propose a generous epithalamic contribution thereto by the happy bridegroom. We now come to the ill-fated canine, and its sorrowing owner. Though myself in a state of genteel poverty, I will gladly start a subscription to bury it, or if that prove impracticable, to have it pasted in a scrap-book, with appropriate honors.”

“Nothin’ doin’!” asserted the bereaved blonde in angry tones. “I wanta tell you--”

“One moment, please. Would it not soothe your injured feelings to be invited to the wedding and to sign as legal witness? There is a reporter present, and I assume that the nuptials of Mr. Reuben Renssalaer Watts with Miss Carey Vail will receive a meed of desirable publicity extending to all who participate.”

“Not _the_ Miss Carey Vail!” exclaimed the awe-struck blonde, who went into Society eagerly, though vicariously, through the medium of the daily press.

“The same,” declared Mr. Watts. “Positively last appearance in that rôle. That is,” he added anxiously, “if you accept our earnest invitation to come to the wedding.”

“Chawmed, I’m suah,” murmured the lady, and proceeded to powder her nose from an apparatus concealed in a dangling bag.

The sike felt a soft touch on his elbow. Lieutenant Dolly Barrett’s large gray eyes glowed warmly up into his.

“You ought to be running the Peace Conference,” she opined.

“And to think,” mourned the sike, “that next month I’ll be acting the melancholy mentor to a flock of corn-fed prairie-rubes.”

“Court will convene in my private room for matrimonial purposes at once,” proclaimed the magistrate.

The ceremony was brief and business-like. The witnesses were the sike and Mrs. Barrett, quite close together, the flit and Miss McSears (bracketed by the former), the gob, with rating and ship attached, Mr. Foxley in a shaken hand, and Mrs. Eudora Fotheringay in letters half an inch high and ninety degrees slant. The whole party attended by the court officials went out to see the pair off. The flit, saluting, stepped forward.

“Cab, sir?”

“Certainly,” assented the bridegroom.

“Certainly not,” amended the bride.

“Not?” queried the flit, crestfallen.

“Taxi,” said the new Mrs. Watts decisively, hailing one as it rounded the corner.

“Cab, lady?” coyly invited the flit, turning to Miss McSears, as the bridal couple were whirled away.

“Subway,” retorted Pa McSears emphatically, “speaking for self and daughter.”

“Cab, sir?” the operator solicited Mr. Bingle Foxley.

“Help!” responded that gentleman, making a leap for the nearest haven, which chanced to be Mrs. Fotheringay’s limousine, where he was hospitably received.

“Cab, Chaw?” cried the desperate flit, seeing his custom dropping away.

“Life is sweet,” observed the gob, and followed Mr. Foxley into his perfumed retirement.

“Cab, buddy?” almost wept Corporal Slayter, addressing himself in a seductive coo to Professor Follansbee James. “_And_ sister,” he added, noting the confidential juxtaposition of the two heads.

“We are walking, thank you so much,” said Lieutenant Barrett sweetly.

“Old Bird,” the sorrowing flit addressed the metallic accomplice of his crimes, “we are, as it were, dumped into Cupid’s ash-can. Cheer up! I will never desert you.” His eyes fell upon the legend, “To be returned.” “I’d forgotten about that,” he murmured, “Where to, I wonder?” He reversed the placard and was confronted by this warning in red and minatory letters:

Do Not Operate

Condemned as

DANGEROUS

The flit cast a pensive eye up the street where the dust of the bridal departure still hung, shifted it to the wake of the Fotheringay limousine bearing the gob and the reformed Foxley from the stricken field, glanced yearningly toward the corner where Miss Nora McSears, temporarily a parental captive, threw him a swift and comforting signal, and regarded with benignity two uniformed figures marching along the sidewalk side-by-side, in that sweet accord which apostles of the millennium prescribe not alone for the lion and the lamb, but also for the officer and the soldier in the ranks.

“Dangerous,” he repeated, as a grin, appreciative but tender, lighted up his rugged features. Then, with conviction, “_I’ll_ say it is!”

_McClure’s Magazine_

YOU’VE GOT TO BE SELFISH

BY

EDNA FERBER

YOU’VE GOT TO BE SELFISH[7]

By EDNA FERBER

When you try to do a story about three people like Sid Hahn and Mizzi Markis and Wallie Ascher you find yourself pawing around among the personalities, helplessly. For the three of them are what is known in newspaper parlance as national figures. One n. f. is enough for any short story. Three would swamp a book. It’s like one of those plays advertised as having an allstar cast. By the time each luminary has come on, and been greeted, and done his twinkling, the play has faded into the background. You can’t see the heavens for the stars.

Surely Sid Hahn, like the guest of honor at a dinner, needs no introduction. And just as surely will he be introduced. He has been described elsewhere and often; perhaps nowhere more concisely than on page 16, paragraph two, of a volume that shall be nameless, though quoted, thus:

“Sid Hahn, erstwhile usher, call-boy, press agent, advance man, had a genius for things theatrical. It was inborn. Dramatic, sensitive, artistic, intuitive, he was often rendered inarticulate by the very force and variety of his feelings. A little, rotund, ugly man, with the eyes of a dreamer, the wide, mobile mouth of a humorist, the ears of a comic ol’ clo’es man. His generosity was proverbial, and it amounted to a vice.”

Not that that covers him. No one paragraph could. You turn a fine diamond this way and that, and as its facets catch the light you say, “It’s scarlet! No--it’s blue! No--rose!--orange!--lilac!--no--”

That was Sid Hahn.

I suppose he never really sat for a photograph and yet you saw his likeness in all the magazines. He was snapped on the street, and in the theatre, and even up in his famous library-study-office on the sixth and top floor of the Thalia Theatre Building. Usually with a fat black cigar, unlighted, in one corner of his commodious mouth. Everyone interested in things theatrical (and whom does that not include?) knew all about Sid Hahn--and nothing. He had come, a boy, from one of those middle-western towns with a highfalutin Greek name. Parthenon, Ohio, or something incredible like that. No one knows how he first approached the profession which he was to dominate in America. There’s no record of his having asked for a job in a theatre, and received it. He oozed into it, indefinably, and moved with it, and became a part of it and finally controlled it. Satellites, fur-collared and pseudo-successful, trailing in his wake, used to talk loudly of I-knew-him-when. They all lied. It had been Augustin Daly, dead these many years, who had first recognized in this boy the genius for discovering and directing genius. Daly was, at that time, at the zenith of his career--managing, writing, directing, producing. He fired the imagination of this stocky, gargoyle-faced boy with the luminous eyes and the humorous mouth. I don’t know that Sid Hahn, hanging about the theatre in every kind of menial capacity, ever said to himself in so many words:

“I’m going to be what he is. I’m going to concentrate on it. I won’t let anything or anybody interfere with it. Nobody knows what I’m going to be. But I know.... And you’ve got to be selfish. You’ve got to be selfish.”

Of course no one ever really made a speech like that to himself, even in the Horatio Alger books. But if the great ambition and determination running through the whole fibre of his being could have been crystallized into spoken words they would have sounded like that.

By the time he was forty-five he had discovered more stars than Copernicus. They were not all first magnitude twinklers. Some of them even glowed so feebly that you could see their light only when he stood behind them, the steady radiance of his genius shining through. But taken as a whole they made a brilliant constellation, furnishing much of the illumination for the brightest thoroughfare in the world.

He had never married. There are those who say that he had had an early love affair, but that he had sworn not to marry until he had achieved what he called success. And by that time it had been too late. It was as though the hot flame of ambition had burned out all his other passions. Later they say he was responsible for more happy marriages contracted by people who did not know that he was responsible for them, than a popular East Side shadchen. He grew a little tired, perhaps, of playing with make-believe stage characters, and directing them, so he began to play with real ones, like God. But always kind.

No woman can resist making love to a man as indifferent as Sid Hahn appeared to be. They all tried their wiles on him; the red-haired ingénues, the blonde soubrettes, the stately leading ladies, the war horses, the old-timers, the ponies, the prima donnas. He used to sit there in his great, luxurious, book-lined inner office, smiling and inscrutable as a plump joss-house idol, while the fair ones burnt incense and made offering of shewbread. Figuratively he kicked over the basket of shewbread and of the incense said, “Take away that stuff! It smells!”

Not that he hated women. He was afraid of them, at first. Then, from years of experience with the femininity of the theatre, not nearly afraid enough. So, early, he had locked that corner of his mind, and had thrown away the key. When, years after, he broke in the door, lo! (as they say when an elaborate figure of speech is being used) lo! the treasures therein had turned to dust and ashes.

* * * * *

It was he who had brought over from Paris to the American stage the famous Renée Paterne, of the incorrigible eyes. She made a fortune and swept the country with her song about those delinquent orbs. But when she turned them on Hahn, in their first interview in his office, he regarded her with what is known as a long level look. She knew at that time not a word of English. Sid Hahn was ignorant of French. He said, very low, and with terrible calm to Wallie Ascher who was then acting as a sort of secretary, “Wallie, can’t you do something to make her stop rolling her eyes around at me like that? It’s awful! She makes me think of those heads you shy balls at, out at Coney. Take away my inkwell.”

Renée had turned swiftly to Wallie and had said something to him in French. Sid Hahn cocked a quick ear. “What’s that she said?”

“She says,” translated the obliging and gifted Wallie, “that monsieur is a woman-hater.”

“My God! I thought she didn’t understand English!”

“She doesn’t. But she’s a woman. Not only that, she’s a Frenchwoman. They don’t need to know a language to understand it.”

“Where did you get that, h’m? That wasn’t included in your Berlitz course, was it?”

Wallie Ascher had grinned--that winning flash lighting up his dark, keen face. “No, I learned that in another school.”

Wallie Ascher’s early career in the theatre, if repeated here, might almost be a tiresome repetition of Hahn’s beginning. And what Augustin Daly had been to Sid Hahn’s imagination and ambition, Sid Hahn was to Wallie’s. Wallie, though, had been born to the theatre--if having a tumbler for a father and a prestidigitator’s foil for a mother can be said to be a legitimate entrance into the world of the theatre.

He had been employed about the old Thalia for years before Hahn noticed him. In the beginning he was a spindle-legged office boy in the up-stairs suite of the firm of Hahn & Lohman, theatrical producers, the kind of office boy who is addicted to shrill clear whistling unless very firmly dealt with. No one in the outer office realized how faultless, how rhythmic were the arpeggios and cadences that issued from those expertly puckered lips. There was about his performance an unerring precision. As you listened you felt that his ascent to the inevitable high note was a thing impossible of achievement. Up--up--up he would go, while you held your breath in suspense. And then he took the high note--took it easily, insouciantly--held it, trilled it, tossed it.

“Now look here,” Miss Feldman would snap--Miss Feldman of the outer office typewriter--“look here, you kid. Any more of that bird warbling and you go back to the woods where you belong. This ain’t a--a--”

“Aviary,” suggested Wallie, almost shyly.

Miss Feldman glared. “How did you know that word!”

“I don’t know,” helplessly. “But it’s the word, isn’t it?”

Miss Feldman turned back to her typewriter. “You’re too smart for your age, you are.”

“I know it,” Wallie had agreed, humbly.

There’s no telling where or how he learned to play the piano. He probably never did learn. He played it, though, as he whistled--brilliantly. No doubt it was as imitative and as unconscious, too, as his whistling had been. They say he didn’t know one note from another, and doesn’t to this day.

At twenty, when he should have been in love with at least three girls, he had fixed in his mind an image, a dream. And it bore no resemblance to twenty’s accepted dreams. At that time he was living in one room (rear) of a shabby rooming house in Thirty-ninth Street. And this was the dream: By the time he was--well, long before he was thirty--he would have a bachelor apartment with a Jap, Saki. Saki was the perfect servant, noiseless, unobtrusive, expert. He saw little dinners just for four--or, at the most, six. And Saki, white-coated, deft, sliding hot plates when plates should be hot; cold plates when plates should be cold. Then, other evenings, alone, when he wanted to see no one--when, in a silken lounging robe (over faultless dinner clothes, of course, and wearing the kind of collar you see in the back of the magazines) he would say, “That will do, Saki.” Then, all evening, he would play softly to himself those little, intimate, wistful Schumanny things in the firelight with just one lamp glowing softly--almost sombrely--at the side of the piano (grand).

His first real meeting with Sid Hahn had had much to do with the fixing of this image. Of course he had seen Hahn hundreds of times in the office and about the theatre. They had spoken, too, many times. Hahn called him vaguely, “Heh, boy!” but he grew to know him later as Wallie. From errand boy, office boy, call boy, he had become, by that time, a sort of unofficial assistant stage manager. No one acknowledged that he was invaluable about the place, but he was. When a new play was in rehearsal at the Thalia, Wallie knew more about props, business, cues, lights, and lines than the director himself. For a long time no one but Wallie and the director was aware of this. The director never did admit it. But that Hahn should find it out was inevitable.

He was nineteen or thereabouts when he was sent, one rainy November evening, to deliver a play manuscript to Hahn at his apartment. Wallie might have refused to perform an errand so menial, but his worship of Hahn made him glad of any service, however humble. He buttoned his coat over the manuscript, turned up his collar, and plunged into the cold drizzle of the November evening.

Hahn’s apartment--he lived alone--was in the early fifties, off Fifth Avenue. For two days he had been ill with one of the heavy colds to which he was subject. He was unable to leave the house. Hence Wallie’s errand.

It was Saki--or Saki’s equivalent--who opened the door. A white-jacketed, soft-stepping Jap, world old looking like the room glimpsed just beyond. Some one was playing the piano with one finger, horribly.

“You’re to give this to Mr. Hahn. He’s waiting for it.”

“Genelmun come in,” said the Jap, softly.