BUFORD’S GOOD LUCK
In his “Klondike Monologue” at the Orpheum, Buford, the actor, made
a sudden and unexpected hit. The morning after his first appearance,
both Dominick and Berny read in the paper eulogistic notices of the
new star. Dominick was particularly interested. He remembered Buford’s
state of worry while at Antelope and was glad to see that the unlucky
player was, in the parlance of his own world, “making good.”
The evening papers contained more laudatory paragraphs. Buford’s act
was spoken of with an enthusiasm which taxed the vocabulary of the
writers who found that the phrases they had been using to describe the
regular vaudeville performances were not adequate for so sparkling an
occasion.
It was a rambling monologue of mining-camp anecdotes, recollections,
and experiences, delivered with confidential, simple seriousness.
Buford’s appearance in an immense, fur-lined overcoat with buttons made
of gold nuggets and a voluminous fur cap on his head, was given the
last touch of grotesqueness by a tiny tinsel spangle fastened on the
end of his nose. This adornment, on his entrance hardly noticeable, was
soon the focusing point of every eye. It looked as if it grew on its
prominent perch, and as he spoke, a slight, vibrating movement, which
he imparted to that portion of his visage, made the tinsel send out
continuous, uneasy gleams. The more serious his discourse was and the
more portentously solemn his face, the more glimmeringly active was the
spangle, and the more hysterically unrestrained became the laughter
of the audience. Altogether, Buford had made a success. Three days
after his first appearance, people were talking about “The Klondike
Monologue” as a few weeks before they had been talking about the last
play of Pinero’s as presented by a New York company.
From what Buford had told him, Dominick knew that the actor’s luck had
been bad, and that the period of imprisonment at Antelope was a last,
crowning misfortune. Through it he feared that he had forfeited his
Sacramento engagement, and the young man had a painful memory of the
long jeremiad that Buford, in his anxiety and affliction, had poured
out to himself and Rose Cannon. That the actor was evidently emerging
from his ill fortune was gratifying to Dominick, who, in the close
propinquity forced upon them by the restricted quarters of Perley’s
Hotel, had grown to like and pity the kindly, foolish and impractical
man.
Now, from what he heard, Buford’s hard times should be at an end. Such
a hit as he had made should give him the required upward impetus. Men
Dominick knew, who had theatrical affiliations, told him that Buford
was “made.” The actor could now command a good salary on any of the
vaudeville circuits in the country, and if “he had it in him” he might
ascend the ladder toward the heights of legitimate comedy. His humorous
talent was unique and brilliant. It was odd, considering his age, that
it had not been discovered sooner.
Berny was very anxious to see him. Hazel and Josh had seen him on one
of the first evenings and pronounced him “simply great.” She extorted
a promise from Dominick that, at the earliest opportunity, he would
buy tickets for her, and, if he could not accompany her himself, she
could go with one of her sisters. Dominick did not want to go. He had
no desire to see Buford and be reminded of the three weeks’ dream which
had interrupted the waking miseries of his life, and more than that he
hated, secretly and intensely, sitting beside Berny, talking to her
and listening to her talk, during the three hours of the performance.
The horrible falseness of it, the appearance of intimacy with a woman
toward whom he only felt a cold aversion, the close proximity of her
body which he disliked, even accidentally, to brush against, made him
shrink from the thought as from the perpetration of some mean and
repulsive deception.
He stopped to buy the tickets one midday on his way to lunch. He made
up his mind to buy three, then Berny could either take her two sisters,
or Hazel and Josh, whose craving for the theater was an unassuageable
passion. The good seats were sold out for days ahead and he had to be
content with three orchestra chairs for an evening at the end of the
following week. He was turning from the ticket office window when a
sonorous voice at his elbow arrested him:
“Mr. Ryan,” it boomed out, “do I see you at last? Ever since my
arrival in the city I have hoped for the opportunity of renewing our
acquaintance.”
It was Buford, but a rejuvenated and prosperous Buford, the reflection
of his good fortune shining from his beaming face and fashionable
figure. The red rasped look had left his features and the hollows
beneath his high cheek-bones were filled out. He was dressed in
gray with an almost foppish nicety, a fedora hat of a paler tint on
his head, and a cravat of a dull red rising in a rich puffed effect
below his collar. His shoes shone with the glassy polish of new
patent leather; the red-brown kid gloves that he carried exhaled an
attractive odor of russia-leather. He held out his hand to Dominick,
and the young man grasped it with real heartiness.
“Glad to see you, Buford,” he said, “and glad to hear you’ve made such
a success of it. I haven’t seen it myself, but I hear it’s a great
show.”
Buford, who had seen him buying the tickets, said blandly,
“But you’re going? You’ve been buying tickets, haven’t you? Oh, I’ve
got to have your opinion--nobody’s I’d think more of than Mr. Dominick
Ryan’s.”
Dominick, with the consciousness that he had just been planning not to
go reddening his face, stammered with embarrassed evasiveness,
“I’ve just been buying tickets and couldn’t get them before the end of
next week. You’re such a confounded success that everything’s sold out
days ahead. My wife wants to see you, and that’s the best I could do
for her. Her sister went on the second night and says you’re the hit of
the program. And then the papers! You’ll soon be one of the stars of
the nation.”
Buford acknowledged these compliments with cool, acquiescent
complacence.
“I have struck my gait,” he said, nodding his head in condescending
acceptance. “I have at last won my spurs.”
“But you didn’t expect to come down here when you were at Antelope.
Didn’t you tell me your engagement was for two weeks in Sacramento, and
that you were afraid you’d forfeited it by being snowed in there? How
was it you came down after all?”
“The luck turned. The tide that comes in the affairs of men came in
mine. I must say it had got down to about the lowest ebb. You’re right
about forfeiting my engagement. Got to Sacramento three weeks behind
time and found they’d procured a substitute, and all I had for my pains
was a blackguarding because the Lord had seen fit to snow me in in the
Sierras.”
Dominick laughed, and the actor allowed a slight, sour smile to disturb
the professional gravity of his face.
“Yes,” he nodded, “that’s the way of the transgressor, especially when
his transgressions ain’t of his own doing. After I’d been there two
weeks, I hadn’t a V between me and starvation. I looked for jobs with
the water squelching in my boots, and finally I had to do a turn in a
fifth-rate variety performance that showed in a sort of cellar down
a flight of stairs. That’s where the ‘Klondike Monologue’ was born.
Like lots of other good things, it had a pretty mean beginning. I just
pieced it together from bits and scraps that were the tailings of the
two years I had spent in that Arctic mill up there. It caught on from
the start--let the public alone to recognize a good thing when they
see one! That dirty cellar was pretty well sprinkled the first week,
and the second they had the standing room signs out. I didn’t introduce
the spangle till the end of the engagement. Some people think it a
great touch.”
He looked with sober questioning at Dominick, who said apologetically,
“So I hear, but I haven’t seen it.”
Buford raised his flexible brows with an air of stimulated, excusing
memory.
“True, true,” he replied, “I had forgotten. Two nights after I had
introduced the spangle, one of the ‘Granada’ people saw me. I didn’t
know it at the time, but I am a true artist; whatever my audience, I
give it of my best, and, in that instance, it was only one more case of
bread cast upon the waters. There’d been a vacancy here. Estradilla,
the Spanish Snake Dancer, was taken suddenly sick, collapsed after her
third performance, tied her intestines up in a knot with her act, they
say, and the wonder was she hadn’t done it before. Anyhow, they had to
substitute in a hurry, heard of my Klondike act and sent a man up to
see if I’d do to fill in. The next week I was here and--you know the
rest.”
“They say every man has his chance. You didn’t suppose the snowstorm
that caught you at Antelope was going to be the foundation of yours?”
Buford raised his brows till they about touched his hair, and said with
his most magisterial sonority of tone,
“No, no indeed. The ways of Fate--or let me say Providence--are truly
inscrutable. I thought that lock-up in the Sierras would be my undoing,
and I’m sure I never imagined the two years I spent in that accursed
Arctic were going to return to roost as blessings. I turned my face to
the North in a bitter hour, and it was in a bitter hour that I adopted
the stage.”
Dominick was exceedingly surprised. He had supposed Buford always to
have been an actor, to have been born to it. If he had heard that the
man had made his debut as an infant prodigy or even in his mother’s
arms in swaddling clothes, he would have felt it was in keeping
with Buford’s character, and just what he suggested. Now, in a tone
expressing his surprise, the young man queried,
“Then you went on the stage up there? You’ve only been on a few years?”
“Nearly four,” said the actor. He looked down at his shoe for a moment
as if considering, and repeated without looking up, “It will be four
next September. Trouble drove me to those far distant lands and hard
luck drove me on the stage. I’d never had anything to do with it till
then; I hadn’t a stage game about me. There’d even been a time when I
had a strong prejudice against the theater and never went to one. But
a man must live and----”
He stopped, his attention arrested by a hand laid softly on his sleeve.
A youth of Hebraic countenance had issued from a door behind him, and,
touching his arm with a hesitating, unclean finger, began to speak in
a low tone. Buford turned to the boy. Dominick backed away from them
toward the box-office window. As they conferred he took a card out of
his wallet, and hastily traced the address of the flat below his name.
He had it ready to offer Buford, when the actor, his conference over,
came toward him.
“Duty calls,” said Buford. “I am sorry, but they want me inside. But
this is not going to be our only meeting. I’m booked for two weeks
longer here, and I’m hoping to see something more of you.”
Dominick gave him the card, with assurances that he would be glad to
see him, and that his own home was a better meeting-place than the
bank. At this mark of friendship, the actor was openly gratified. He
looked at the card with a smile and said,
“Most certainly I’ll avail myself of this privilege. I hope later to be
able to place a box at your disposal. Madame, you say, is very desirous
of seeing me. Well, I’ll see to it that she does so under the most
favorable conditions. Though I have never met her, I think I may ask
you to convey my respects to her.”
He bowed impressively as though saluting Berny in person, and then,
with a last dignified farewell to Dominick, turned toward the door
which opened at his approach, disclosing the waiting Jew boy. As
the actor drew near, Dominick heard the boy break into low-toned
remonstrances, and then the door closed upon Buford’s sonorous and
patronizing notes of reproval.