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.
“No, he doesn’t want to see me. Just give it to him, see?”
“Genelmun come in.” Evidently orders.
“Oh, all right. But I know he doesn’t want--”
Wallie turned down his collar with a quick flip, looked doubtfully
at his shoes, and passed through the glowing little foyer into the
room beyond. He stood in the doorway. He was scarcely twenty then, but
something in him sort of rose, and gathered, and seethed, and swelled,
and then hardened. He didn’t know it then but it was his great resolve.
Sid Hahn was seated at the piano, a squat, gnomelike little figure,
with those big ears, and that plump face, and those soft eyes--the
kindest eyes in the world. He did not stop playing as Wallie appeared.
He glanced up at him, ever so briefly, but kindly, too, and went on
playing the thing with one short forefinger, excruciatingly. Wallie
waited. He had heard somewhere that Hahn would sit at the piano thus,
for hours, the tears running down his cheeks because of the beauty of
the music he could remember but not reproduce; and partly because of
his own inability to reproduce it.
The stubby little forefinger faltered, stopped. He looked up at Wallie.
“God, I wish I could play!”
“Helps a lot.”
“You play?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“Oh, most anything I have heard once. And some things I kind of make
up.”
“Compose, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Play one of those.”
So Wallie Ascher played one of those. Of course you know “Good
Night--Pleasant Dreams.” He hadn’t named it then. It wasn’t even
published until almost two years later, but that was what he played
for Sid Hahn. Since “After the Ball,” no popular song has achieved
the success of that one. No doubt it was cheap, and no doubt it was
sentimental, but so, too, are the “Suwanee River” and “My Old Kentucky
Home,” and they’ll be singing those when more classical songs have long
been forgotten. As Wallie played it his dark, thin face seemed to gleam
and glow in the lamplight.
When he had finished playing Sid Hahn was silent for a moment. Then,
“What’re you going to do with it?”
“With what?”
“With what you’ve got. You know.”
Wallie knew that he did not mean the song he had just played. “I’m
going to--I’m going to do a lot with it.”
“Yeh, but how?”
Wallie was looking down at his two lean brown hands on the keys. For
a long minute he did not answer. Then: “By thinking about it all the
time. And working like hell.... And you’ve got to be selfish.... You’ve
got to be selfish....”
As Sid Hahn stared at him, as though hypnotized, the Jap appeared in
the doorway. So Hahn said, “Stay and have dinner with me,” instead of
what he had meant to say.
“Oh, I can’t! Thanks. I--” He wanted to, terribly, but the thought was
too much.
“Better.”
They had dinner together. Even under the influence of Hahn’s
encouragement, and two glasses of mellow wine whose name he did not
know, Wallie did not become fatuous. They talked about music--neither
of them knew anything about it, really. Wallie confessed that he used
it as an intoxicant and a stimulant.
“That’s it!” cried Hahn, excitedly. “If I could play I’d have done
more.”
“Why don’t you get one of those piano-players? Whatyoucallems--” then,
immediately, “No, of course not.”
“Nah, that doesn’t do it,” said Hahn, quickly. “That’s like adopting a
baby when you can’t have one of your own. It isn’t the same. It isn’t
the same. It looks like a baby, and acts like a baby, and sounds like a
baby--but it isn’t yours. It isn’t you. That’s it! It isn’t you!”
“Yeh,” agreed Wallie, nodding. So perfectly did they understand each
other, this ill-assorted pair.
It was midnight before Wallie left. They had both forgotten about the
play manuscript whose delivery had been considered so important. The
big room was gracious, quiet, soothing. A fire flickered in the grate.
One lamp glowed softly--almost sombrely.
As Wallie rose at last to go he shook himself slightly like one coming
out of a trance. He looked about the golden room. “Gee!”
“Yes, but it isn’t worth it,” said Hahn, “after you’ve got it.”
“That’s what they all say,”--grimly--“_after_ they’ve got it.”
The thing that had been born in Sid Hahn’s mind thirty years before was
now so plainly stamped on this boy’s face that Hahn was startled into
earnestness. “But I tell you, it’s true! It’s true!”
“Maybe. Some day, when I’m living in a place like this, I’ll let you
know if you’re right.”
In less than a year Wallie Ascher was working with Hahn. No one knew
his official title or place. But, “Ask Wallie. He’ll know,” had
become a sort of slogan in the office. He did know. At twenty-one his
knowledge of the theatre was infallible (this does not include plays
unproduced. In this no one is infallible) and his feeling for it
amounted to a sixth sense. There was something uncanny about the way
he could talk about Lotta, for example, as if he had seen her; or Mrs.
Siddons; or Mrs. Fiske, when she was Minnie Maddern, the soubrette. It
was as though he had the power to cast himself back in the past. No
doubt it was that power which gave later to his group of historical
plays (written by him between the ages of thirty and thirty-five) their
convincingness and authority.
When Wallie was about twenty-three or four years old Sid Hahn took him
abroad with him on one of his annual scouting trips. Yearly, in the
spring, Hahn swooped down upon London, Paris, Berlin, seeking that of
the foreign stage which might be translated, fumigated, desiccated
or otherwise rendered suitable for home use. He sent Wallie on to
Vienna, alone, on the trail of a musical comedy which was rumored to
be a second _Merry Widow_ in tunefulness, chic and charm. Of course
it wasn’t. _Merry Widows_ rarely repeat themselves. Wallie wired
back to Hahn, as arranged. The telegram is unimportant, perhaps, but
characteristic.
Mr. Sid Hahn,
Hotel Savoy,
London,
England.
It’s a second all right but not a second _Merry Widow_. Heard of
a winner in Budapest shall I go. Spent to-day from eleven to five
running around the Ringstrasse looking for mythical creature known as
the chic Viennese. After careful investigation wish to be quoted as
saying the species if any is extinct.
This, remember, was in the year 1913, B. W. Wallie, obeying
instructions, went to Budapest, witnessed the alleged winner, found it
as advertised, wired Hahn and was joined by that gentleman three days
later.
Budapest, at that time, was still Little Paris, only wickeder. A city
of magnificent buildings, and unsalted caviar, and beautiful dangerous
women, and frumpy men (civilian) and dashing officers in red pants,
and Cigány music, and cafés, and paprika, and two-horse droshkies.
Buda, low and flat, lay on one side; Pest, high and hilly, perched
picturesquely on the other. Between the two rolled the Blue Danube
(which is yellow).
It was there that Hahn and Wallie found Mizzi Markis. Wallie found her,
really. Mizzi Markis, then a girl of nineteen, was a hod-carrier.
As Hahn stepped from the train, geometrically square in a long ulster
that touched his ears and his heels, Wallie met him with a bound.
“Hello, S. H.! Great to see you! Say, listen, I’ve found something.
I’ve found something big!”
Hahn had never seen the boy so excited. “Oh, shucks! No play’s as good
as that.”
“Play! It isn’t a play.”
“Why, you young idiot, you said it was good! You said it was darn good!
You don’t mean to tell me--”
“Oh, that! That’s all right. It’s good--or will be when you get through
with it.”
“What you talking about then? Here, let’s take one of these things with
two horses. Gee, you ought to smoke a fat black seegar and wear a silk
hat when you ride in one of these! I feel like a parade.” He was like a
boy on a holiday.
“But let me tell you about this girl, won’t you!”
“Oh, it’s a girl! What’s her name? What’s she do?”
“Her name’s Mizzi.”
“Mizzi what?”
“I don’t know. She’s a hod-carrier. She--”
“That’s all right, Wallie. I’m here now. An ice bag on your head and
real quiet for two or three days. You’ll come around fine.”
But Wallie was almost sulking. “Wait till you see her, S. H. She sings.”
“Beautiful, is she?”
“No, not particularly. No.”
“Wonderful voice, h’m?”
“N-n-no. I wouldn’t say it was what you’d call exactly wonderful.”
Sid Hahn stood up in the droshky and waved his short arms in windmill
circles. “Well, what the devil does she do then, that’s so good! Carry
bricks?”
“She _is_ good at that. When she balances that pail of mortar on her
head and walks off with it, her arms hanging straight at her sides--”
But Sid Hahn’s patience was at an end. “You’re a humorist, you are. If
I didn’t know you I’d say you were drunk. I’ll bet you are, anyway.
You’ve been eating paprika, raw. You make me sick.”
Inelegant, but expressive of his feelings. But Wallie only said, “You
wait. You’ll see.”
Sid Hahn did see. He saw next day. Wallie woke him out of a sound sleep
so that he might see. It was ten-thirty a. m. so that his peevishness
was unwarranted. They had seen the play the night before and Hahn
had decided that translated and with interpolations (it was a comic
opera) it would captivate New York. Then and there he completed the
negotiations which Wallie had begun. Hahn was all for taking the first
train out, but Wallie was firm. “You’ve got to see her, I tell you.
You’ve got to see her.”
Their hotel faced the Corso. The Corso is a wide promenade that runs
along the Buda bank of the Danube. Across the river, on the hill, the
royal palace looks down upon the little common people. In the day
the monde and the demi-monde of Budapest walked on the Corso between
twelve and one. Up and down. Up and down. The women, tall, dark,
flashing-eyed, daringly dressed. The men sallow, meager, and wearing
those trousers which, cut very wide and flappy at the ankles, make
them the dowdiest men in the world. Hahn’s room and Wallie’s were on
the second floor of the hotel, and at a corner. One set of windows
faced the Corso, the river, and Pest on the hill. The other set looked
down upon a new building being erected across the way. It was on this
building that Mizzi Markis worked as hod-carrier.
The War accustomed us to a million women in overalls doing the work
of a million men. We saw them ploughing, juggling steel bars, making
shells, running engines, stoking furnaces, handling freight. But to
these two American men, at that time, the thing at which these laboring
women were employed was dreadful and incredible.
Said Wallie: “By the time we’ve dressed, and had breakfast, and walked
a little and everything it’ll be almost noon. And noon’s the time.
After they’ve eaten their lunch. But I want you to see her before.”
By now his earnestness had impressed Hahn who still feigned an
indifference he did not feel. It was about 11:30 when Wallie propelled
him by the arm to the unfinished building across the way. And there he
met Mizzi.