Back and forth with pails. Back and forth with loads of bricks.
“What’s the matter with the men?” was Hahn’s first question.
Wallie explained. “They do the dainty work. They put one brick on
top of the other, with a dab of mortar between. But none of the
back-breaking stuff for them. The women do that.”
And it was so. They were down in the pits mixing the mortar, were the
women. They were carrying great pails of it. They were hauling bricks,
up one ladder and down. They wore short full skirts with a musical
comedy chorus effect. Some of them looked seventy and some seventeen.
It was fearful work for a woman. A keen wind was blowing across the
river. Their hands were purple.
“Pick Mizzi,” said Wallie. “If you can pick her I’ll know I’m right.
But I know it, anyway.”
Five minutes passed. The two men stood silent. “The one with the
walk and the face,” said Hahn, then. Which wasn’t very bright of
him, because they all walked and they all had faces. “Going up the
pit-ladder now. With the pail on her head.” Wallie gave a little laugh
of triumph. But then, Hahn wouldn’t have been Hahn had he not been able
to pick a personality when he saw it.
Years afterward the reviewers always talked of Mizzi’s walk. They
called it her superb carriage. They didn’t know that you have to
walk very straight, on the balls of your feet, with your hips firm,
your stomach held in flat, your shoulders back, your chest out, your
chin out and a little down, if you are going to be at all successful
in balancing a pail of mortar on your head. After a while that walk
becomes a habit.
“Watch her with that pail,” said Wallie.
Mizzi filled the pail almost to the top with the heavy white mixture.
She filled it quickly, expertly. The pail, filled, weighed between
seventeen and twenty kilos. One kilo is equal to about two and
one-fifth pounds. The girl threw down her scoop, stooped, grasped the
pail by its two handles and with one superb unbroken motion raised the
pail high in her two strong arms and placed it on her head. Then she
breathed deeply, once, set her whole figure, turned stiffly, and was
off with it. Sid Hahn took a long breath as though he himself had just
accomplished the gymnastic feat.
“Well, so far it’s pretty good. But I don’t know that the American
stage is clamoring for any hod-carriers and mortar mixers, exactly.”
A whistle blew. Twelve o’clock. Bricks, mortar, scoops, shovels were
abandoned. The women in their great clod-hopping shoes flew chattering
to the tiny hut where their lunch boxes were stored. The men followed
more slowly, a mere handful of them. Not one of them wore overalls
or apron. Out again with their bundles and boxes of food--very small
bundles. Very tiny boxes. They ate ravenously the bread and sausage and
drank their beer in great gulps. Fifteen minutes after the whistle had
blown the last crumb had vanished.
“Now, then,” said Wallie. And guided Hahn nearer. He looked toward
Mizzi. Everyone looked toward her. Mizzi stood up, brushing crumbs from
her lap. She had a little four-cornered black shawl, folded cross-wise,
over her head and tied under her chin. Her face was round and her
cheeks red. The shawl, framing this, made her look young and cherubic.
She did not put her hands on her hips, or do any of those story-book
things. She grinned, broadly, showing strong white teeth, made strong
and white through much munching of coarse black bread; not yet showing
the neglect common to her class. She asked a question in a loud clear
voice.
“What’s that?” asked Hahn.
“She’s talking a kind of hunky Hungarian, I guess. The people here
won’t speak German, did you know that? They hate it.”
The crowd shouted back with one voice. They settled themselves
comfortably, sitting or standing. Their faces held the broad smile of
anticipation.
“She asked them what they want her to sing. They told her. It’s the
same every day.”
Mizzi Markis stood there before them in the mud, and clay, and straw of
the building débris. And she sang for them a Hungarian popular song of
the day which, translated, sounds idiotic and which runs something like
this:
“A hundred geese in a row
At the head of the procession
Going into a coop
A stick over his shoulder--”
No, you can’t do it. It means less than nothing that way, and certainly
would not warrant the shrieks of mirth that came from the audience
gathered round the girl. Still, when you recall the words of “A Hot
Time”:
“When you hear them bells go ting-ling-ling,
All join round and sweetly you must sing
And when the words am through in the chorus all join in
There’ll be a _hot time_
In the _old town_
Tonight
My
Ba-
By.”
And yet it swept a continent, and Europe, and in Japan they still think
it’s our national anthem.
When she had finished the crowd gave a roar of delight, and clapped
their hands, and stamped their feet, and shouted. She had no unusual
beauty. Her voice was untrained, though possessed of strength and
flexibility. It wasn’t what she had sung, surely. You heard the song
in a hundred cafés. Every street boy whistled it. It wasn’t that
expressive pair of shoulders, exactly. It wasn’t a certain soothing
tonal quality that made you forget all the things you’d been trying not
to remember.
There is something so futile and unconvincing about an attempted
description of an intangible thing. Some call it personality; some call
it magnetism; some a rhythm sense; and some, genius. It’s all these
things, and none of them. Whatever it is, she had it. And whatever it
is, Sid Hahn has never failed to recognize it.
So now he said, quietly, “She’s got it.”
“You bet she’s got it!” from Wallie.
“She’s got more than Renée Paterne ever had. A year of training and
some clothes--”
“You don’t need to tell me. I’m in the theatrical business, myself.”
“I’m sorry,” stiffly.
But Hahn, too, was sorry immediately. “You know how I am, Wallie. I
like to run a thing off by myself. What do you know about her? Find out
anything?”
“Well, a little. She doesn’t seem to have any people. And she’s decent.
Kind of a fierce kid, I guess, and fights when offended. They say she’s
Polish, not Hungarian. Her mother was a peasant. Her father--nobody
knows. I had a dickens of a time finding out anything. The most
terrible language in the world--Hungarian. They’ll stick a ‘b’ next to
a ‘k’ and follow it up with a ‘z’ and put an accent mark over the whole
business and call it a word. Last night I followed her home. And guess
what!”
“What?” said Hahn, obligingly.
“On her way she had to cross the big square--the one they call Gisela
Tér, with all the shops around it. Well, when she came to Gerbeaud’s--”
“What’s Gerbeaud’s?”
“That’s the famous tea room and pastry shop where all the swells go and
guzzle tea with rum in it and eat cakes--and say! It isn’t like our
pastry that tastes like sawdust covered with shaving soap. Marvelous
stuff, this is!”
After all, he was barely twenty-four. So Hahn said, good-naturedly,
“All right, all right. We’ll go there this afternoon and eat an acre of
it. Go on. When she came to Gerbeaud’s--”
“Well, when she came to Gerbeaud’s she stopped and stood there,
outside. There was a strip of red carpet from the door to the street.
You know--the kind they have at home when there’s a wedding on Fifth
Avenue. There she stood at the edge of the carpet, waiting, her face,
framed in that funny little black shawl, turned toward the window,
and the tail of the little shawl kind of waggling in the wind. It
was cold and nippy. I waited, too. Finally I sort of strolled over
to her--I knew she couldn’t any more than knock me down--and said,
kind of casual, ‘What’s doing?’ She looked up at me, like a kid, in
that funny shawl. She knew I was an Englees’ right away. I guess I
must have a fine open countenance. And I had motioned toward the red
carpet, and the crowded windows. Anyway, she opens up with a regular
burst of fireworks Hungarian, in that deep voice of hers. Not only
that, she acted it out. In two seconds she had on an imaginary coronet
and a court train. And haughty! Gosh! I was sort of stumped, but
I said, ‘You don’t say!’ and waited some more. And then they flung
open the door of the tea shop thing. At the same moment up dashed an
equipage--you couldn’t possibly call it anything less--with flunkeys
all over the outside, like trained monkeys. The people inside the shop
stood up, with their mouths full of cake, and out came an old frump
with a terrible hat and a fringe. And it was the Arch-Duchess, and her
name is Josefa.”
“Your story interests me strangely, boy,” Hahn said, grinning, “but I
don’t quite make you. Do Arch-Duchesses go to tea rooms for tea? And
what’s that got to do with our gifted little hod-carrier?”
“This Duchess does. Believe me, those tarts are good enough for the
Queen of Hearts, let alone a duchess, no matter how arch. But the plot
of the piece is this. The duchess person goes to Gerbeaud’s about twice
a week. And they always spread a red carpet for her. And Mizzi always
manages to cut away in time to stand there in front of Gerbeaud’s and
see her come out. She’s a gorgeous mimic, that little kid. And though
I couldn’t understand a word she said I managed to get out of it just
this: That some day they’re going to spread a red carpet for Mizzi and
she’s going to walk down it in glory. If you’d seen her face when she
said it, S. H., you wouldn’t laugh.”
“I wouldn’t laugh anyway,” said Hahn, seriously.
And that’s the true story of Mizzi Markis’s beginning. Few people know
it.
There they were, the three of them. And of the three, Mizzi’s ambition
seemed to be the fiercest, the most implacable. She worked like a
horse, cramming English, French, singing. In some things she was like
a woman of thirty; in others a child of ten. Her gratitude to Hahn
was pathetic. No one ever doubted that he was in love with her almost
from the first--he who had resisted the professional beauties of three
decades.
You know she wasn’t--and isn’t--a beauty, even in that portrait of
her by Sargent, with her two black-haired, stunning-looking boys, one
on each side. But she was one of those gorgeously healthy women whose
very presence energizes those with whom she comes in contact. And then
there was about her a certain bounteousness. There’s no other word for
it, really. She reminded you of those gracious figures you see posed
for pictures entitled “Autumn Harvest.”
While she was studying she had a little apartment with a middle-aged
woman to look after her, and she must have been a handful. A born
cook, she was, and Hahn and Wallie used to go there to dinner whenever
she would let them. She cooked it herself. Hahn would give up any
engagement for a dinner at Mizzi’s. When he entered her little
sitting-room his cares seemed to drop from him. She never got over
cutting bread as the peasant women do it--the loaf held firmly against
her breast, the knife cutting toward her. Hahn used to watch her and
laugh. Sometimes she would put on the little black head-shawl of her
Budapest days and sing the street-song about the hundred geese in a
row. A delightful, impudent figure.
With the very first English she learned she told Hahn and Wallie that
some day they were going to spread a fine red carpet for her to tread
upon and that all the world would gaze on her with envy. It was in her
mind a symbol typifying all that there was of earthly glory.
“It’ll be a long time before they do any red carpeting for you, my
girl,” Sid Hahn had said.
She turned on him fiercely. “I will not rest--I will not eat--I will
not sleep--I will not love--until I have it.”
Which was, of course, an exaggerated absurdity.
“Oh, what rot!” Wallie Ascher had said, angrily. And then he had
thought of his own symbol of success, and his own resolve. And his face
had hardened. Sid Hahn looked at the two of them; very young, both of
them, very gifted, very electric. Very much in love with each other,
though neither would admit it even in their own minds. Both their stern
young faces set toward the goal which they thought meant happiness.
Now, Sid Hahn had never dabbled in this new stuff--you know--complexes
and fixed ideas and images. But he was a very wise man, and he did know
to what an extent these two were possessed by ambition for that which
they considered desirable.
He must have thought it over for weeks. He was in love with Mizzi,
remember. And his fondness for Wallie was a thing almost paternal. He
watched these two for a long, long time, a queer grim little smile on
his gargoyle face. And then his mind was made up. He had always had his
own way. He must have had a certain terrible enjoyment in depriving
himself of the one thing he wanted most in the world--the one thing he
wanted more than he had ever wanted anything.
He decided that Destiny--a ponderous, slow-moving creature at
best--needed a little prodding from him. His plans were simple, as all
effective plans are.
Mizzi had been in America just a year and a half. Her development was
amazing, but she was far from being the finished product that she
became in later years. Hahn decided to chance it. Mizzi had no fear of
audiences. He had tried her out on that. An audience stimulated her.
She took it to her breast. She romped with it.
He found a play at last. A comedy, with music. It was frankly built for
Mizzi. He called Wallie Ascher into his office.
“I wouldn’t try her out here for a million. New York’s too fly. Some
little thing might be wrong--you know how they are. And all the rest
would go for nothing. The kindest audience in the world--when they
like you. And the cruelest in the world when they don’t. We’ll go on
the road for two weeks. Then we’ll open at the Blackstone in Chicago.
I think this girl has got more real genius than any woman since--since
Bernhardt in her prime. Five years from now she won’t be singing.
She’ll be acting. And it’ll _be_ acting.”
“Aren’t you forcing things just a little?” asked Wallie, coolly.
“Oh, no. No. Anyway, it’s just a try-out. By the way, Wallie, I’ll
probably be gone almost a month. If things go pretty well in Chicago
I’ll run over to French Lick for eight or ten days and see if I can’t
get a little of this stiffness out of my old bones. Will you do
something for me?”
“Sure.”
“Pack a few clothes, and go up to my place and live there, will you?
The Jap stays on, anyway. The last time I left it alone things went
wrong. You’ll be doing me a favor. Take it and play the piano, and have
your friends in, and boss the Jap around. He’s stuck on you, anyway.
Says he likes to hear you play.”
He stayed away six weeks. And any one who knows him knows what hardship
that was. He loved New York, and his own place, and his comfort, and
his books; and hotel food gave him hideous indigestion.
Mizzi’s first appearance was a moderate success. It was nothing like
the sensation of her later efforts. She wasn’t ready, and Hahn knew
it. Mizzi and her middle-aged woman companion were installed at the
Blackstone Hotel, which is just next door to the Blackstone Theatre, as
any one is aware who knows Chicago. She was advertised as the Polish
comedienne Mizzi Markis, and the announcements hinted at her royal
though remote ancestry. And on the night the play opened, as Mizzi
stepped from the entrance of her hotel on her way to the stage door
just forty or fifty feet away, there she saw stretched on the pavement
a scarlet path of soft-grained carpet for her feet to tread. From the
steps of the hotel to the stage door of the theatre, there it lay, a
rosy line of splendor.
The newspaper played it up as a publicity stunt. Every night, while
the play lasted, the carpet was there. It was rolled up when the stage
door closed upon her. It was unrolled and spread again when she came
out after the performance. Hahn never forgot her face when she first
saw it and realized its significance. The look was there on the second
night, and on the third, but after that it faded, vanished, and never
came again. Mizzi had tasted of the golden fruit and found it dry and
profitless, without nourishment or sweetness.
The show closed in the midst of a moderate success. It closed abruptly,
without warning. Together they came back to New York. Just outside New
York Hahn knocked at the door of Mizzi’s drawing room and stuck his
round ugly face in at the opening.
“Let’s surprise Wallie,” he said.
“Yes,” said Mizzi, listlessly.
“He doesn’t know the show’s closed. We’ll take a chance on his being
home for dinner. Unless you’re too tired.”
“I’m not tired.”
The Jap admitted them, and Hahn cut off his staccato exclamations with
a quick and smothering hand. They tiptoed into the big, gracious,
lamp-lighted room.
Wallie was seated at the piano. He had on a silk dressing-gown with a
purple cord. One of those dressing-gowns you see in the haberdashers’
windows, and wonder who buys them. He looked very tall in it, and
rather distinguished and a little Favershammy, but not quite happy. He
was playing as they came in. They said, “Boo!” or something idiotic
like that. He stood up. And his face!
“Why, hello!” he said, and came forward, swiftly, “Hello! Hello!”
“Hello!” Hahn answered. “Not to say hello-hello.” Wallie looked at the
girl. “Hello, Mizzi.”
“Hello,” said Mizzi.
“For God’s sake, stop saying hello!” roared Hahn.
They both looked at him absently, and then at each other again.
Hahn flung his coat and hat at the Jap and rubbed his palms briskly
together.
“Well, how did you like it?” he said, and slapped Wallie on the back.
“How’d you like it--the place I mean, and the Jap boy and all? H’m?”
“Very much,” Wallie answered, formally. “Very nice.”
“You’ll be having one of your own some day soon. That’s sure.”
“I suppose so,” said Wallie, indifferently.
“I would like to go home,” said Mizzi, suddenly, in her precise English.
At that Wallie leaped out of his lounging coat. “I’ll take you!
I’ll--I’ll be glad to take you.”
Hahn smiled a little, ruefully. “We were going to have dinner here, the
three of us. But if you’re tired, Mizzi, I’m not so chipper myself,
when it comes to that.” He looked about the room, gratefully. “It’s
good to be home.”
Wallie, hat in hand, was waiting in the doorway. Mizzi, turning to
go, suddenly felt two hands on her shoulders. She was whirled around.
Hahn--he had to stand on tiptoe to do it--kissed her once on the mouth,
hard. Then he gave her a little shove toward the door. “Tell Wallie
about the red carpet,” he said.
“I will not,” Mizzi replied, very distinctly. “I hate red carpets.”
Then they were gone. Hahn hardly seemed to notice that they had left.
There were, I suppose, the proper number of good-byes, and see you
to-morrows, and thank-yous.
Sid Hahn stood there a moment in the middle of the room, very small,
very squat, rather gnomelike, but not at all funny. He went over to
the piano and seated himself, his shoulders hunched, his short legs
clearing the floor. With the forefinger of his right hand he began to
pick out a little tune. Not a sad little tune. A Hungarian street song.
He did it atrociously. The stubby forefinger came down painstakingly on
the white keys. Suddenly the little Jap servant stood in the doorway.
Hahn looked up. His cheeks were wet with tears.
“God! I wish I could play!” he said.
_Metropolitan Magazine_
“CLOTHES MAKE THE MAN”
BY
BOOTH TARKINGTON
“CLOTHES MAKE THE MAN”[8]
By BOOTH TARKINGTON
Mr. and Mrs. Baxter, having walked a hot half mile from church, drooped
thankfully into wicker chairs upon their front porch, though their
ten-year-old daughter, Jane, who had accompanied them, immediately
darted away, swinging her hat by its ribbon and skipping as lithesomely
as if she had just come forth upon a cool morning.
“I don’t know how she does it!” her father moaned, glancing after her
and drying his forehead temporarily upon a handkerchief. “That would
merely kill me dead, after walking in this heat.”
Then, for a time, the two were content to sit in silence, nodding to
occasional acquaintances who passed in the desultory after-church
procession. Mr. Baxter fanned himself with sporadic little bursts of
energy which made his straw hat creak, and Mrs. Baxter sighed with the
heat, and gently rocked her chair.
But, as a group of five young people passed along the other side of the
street, Mr. Baxter abruptly stopped fanning himself, and, following the
direction of his gaze, Mrs. Baxter ceased to rock. In half-completed
attitudes they leaned slightly forward, sharing one of those pauses of
parents who unexpectedly behold their offspring.
The offspring, in this case, was their son, William.
“My soul!” said William’s father. “Hasn’t that girl gone home _yet_?”
“He looks pale to me,” Mrs. Baxter murmured absently. “I don’t think he
seems at all well, lately.”
During the seventeen years since the arrival of William, their first
born, Mr. Baxter had gradually learned not to protest anxieties of
this kind, unless he desired to argue with no prospect of ever getting
a decision.
“Hasn’t she got any _home_?” he demanded testily. “Isn’t she ever going
to quit visiting the Parchers and let people have a little peace?”
Mrs. Baxter disregarded this outburst as he had disregarded her remark
about William’s pallor. “You mean Miss Pratt?” she inquired dreamily,
her eyes following the progress of her son. “No, he really doesn’t look
well at all.”
“Is she going to visit the Parchers all summer?” Mr. Baxter insisted.
“She already has, almost,” said Mrs. Baxter.
“Look at that boy!” the father grumbled. “Mooning along with those
other moon-calves--can’t even let her go to church alone! I wonder how
many weeks of time, counting it out in hours, he’s wasted that way this
summer?”
“Oh, I don’t know! You see, he never goes there in the evening now.”
“What of that? He’s there all day, isn’t he? What do they find to talk
about? That’s the mystery to me! Day after day, hours after hours--My
soul! What do they _say_?”
Mrs. Baxter laughed indulgently. “People are always wondering that
about the other ages. Poor Willie! I think that a great deal of the
time their conversation would be probably about as general as it is
now. You see Willie and Joe Bullitt are walking one on each side of
Miss Pratt, and Johnnie Watson has to walk behind with May Parcher. Joe
and Johnnie are there about as much as Willie is, and of course it’s
often his turn to be nice to May Parcher. He hasn’t many chances to be
tête-à-tête with Miss Pratt.”
“Well, she ought to go home. I want that boy to get back into his
senses. He’s awful!”
“I think she is going soon,” said Mrs. Baxter. “The Parchers are to
have a dance for her Friday night, and I understand there’s a floor to
be laid in the yard and great things. It’s a farewell party.”
“That’s one mercy, anyhow!”
“And if you wonder what they say,” she resumed, “why, probably they’re
all talking about the party. And when Willie _is_ alone with her--well,
what does anybody say?” Mrs. Baxter interrupted herself to laugh.
“Jane, for instance--she’s always fascinated by that darkey, Genesis,
when he’s at work here in the yard, and they have long, long talks;
I’ve seen them from the window. What on earth do you suppose they talk
about? That’s where Jane is now. She knew I told Genesis I’d give him
something if he’d come and freeze the ice-cream for us to-day, and when
we got here she heard the freezer and hopped right around there. If you
went out to the back porch you’d find them talking steadily--but what
on earth about I couldn’t guess to save my life!”
And yet nothing could have been simpler: as a matter of fact, Jane and
Genesis were talking about society. That is to say, their discourse was
not sociologic; rather it was of the frivolous and elegant. Watteau
prevailed with them over John Stuart Mill--in a word, they spoke of the
beau monde.