my hands. I’m through with the bandit business. I’m a has-been, a
second-rater, and I don’t mind admittin’ it. I suppose you know that we
shades go back to earth now and then to see how things are comin’ along,
take a hand in ’em, too, if we feel like it. Sometimes we play one-night
stands for the mejums. Captain Kidd had a job all last season at a kind
of continuous performance seance in Boston. Took all sorts of parts, from
Julius Cæsar to Andrew Jackson. One night he was materializin’ as John
Bunyun, and he couldn’t find his chewin’ tobacco or something, and he
kind o’ forgot himself and he used the particular brand of language that
Bunyun didn’t and—well, that ended the Massachusetts engagement. We don’t
all go in for performin’. Personally, I prefer just to go around the old
places and mix in with the crowds and compare old times to these, but I’m
not going back again for a while. My last trip was a little too much for
me. I got a shock and I guess I need a good long rest.
“I’d heard considerable about this tipping business, pro and con, but I
thought it just meant slippin’ the colored waiter a nickel if he happened
to be extra spry and accommodatin’. That’s the way it used to be out in
Missouri back in seventy-nine. But tipping today! Yours truly and his
gang was called bandits, and train robbers, and highwaymen, and I don’t
know what all, when we was carryin’ on our profitable little business of
forty years ago, but we had nothing on the members of the Amalgamated
Association of Tip Extractors of 1922. We were pikers, that’s all,
plain, everyday pikers. We had no organization, no system, no nothing.
It was just about the difference between running a peanut stand and a
billion-dollar trust. I suppose if we were operatin’ today with our
old gang we’d have a cash register and an addin’ machine and a private
telephone exchange and a card index of past and prospective customers
and a publicity department, to see that the papers got our names and
pictures straight. But, shucks! Even then we couldn’t compete with the
great national hold-up game that’s going on all the time. On that last
trip down below I was never so discouraged and humiliated in my life. I
sat in a hotel restaurant and watched a head waiter at work. From the
professional standpoint it was beautiful. Nothing could have been more
artistic. But it made me feel blue, made me realize how I had neglected
my opportunities. There he stood, no mask on his face, no gun in his
hand, dressed in a swallowtail and biled shirt, takin’ toll so fast he
hadn’t time to count it. Everybody gave up, without a murmur. And the
next day, too, he was there at the same old stand, as if there wasn’t any
such thing as a sheriff within fifty miles. No look-out men on guard, no
disguise, no frisking the victims for concealed weapons. The folks just
handin’ out the coin as meek as lambs. It was a revelation to me. In
the old days we never stayed two days in the same place, nor two hours
neither, believe me. But somebody said that head waiter had been on that
same job for fifteen years. Fifteen years! I’d have owned the state of
Missouri if they’d let me alone that long.
“It made me positively sick to see how the hold-up boys are getting away
with it so easy these days, and a friend recommended an ocean trip. ‘Take
a run over to Europe and back,’ he says. ‘You’ve never been to sea and
it’ll do you good.’ The day I boarded the boat I asked a stranger who
had the next cell to put me wise to this tipping business, because I
wanted to do the right thing. ‘Five dollars to your stateroom steward,’
he said, ‘and five to the saloon steward.’ ‘I don’t drink any more,’ I
said. ‘Saloon means dining room.’ ‘Oh, all right,’ I said. ‘And two-fifty
to the deck steward and the same to the library steward. The smoke room
steward will expect a couple of dollars and the boy who blacks your
boots about one-fifty. Bath steward, two dollars. Card room steward, one
dollar. And of course you’ll tip the barber and anyone else who does you
a service.’
“Going into the washroom, the first sign I saw read: ‘Please tip the
basin.’ And I walked right out and went to bed for two days. The waiter
brought in all my meals—a dollar tip a meal. When I had recovered enough
to sit on deck in one of them overgrown Morris chairs, I couldn’t
get that tipping idea out of my head. A friend introduced me to a fat
fellow in uniform. I didn’t catch the name, but automatically handed
him fifty cents and then learned that he was the captain. The day we
arrived at Liverpool the passengers were all drawn up on deck and so were
the pirates—excuse me, I mean the crew. Then came the ringing words of
command: ‘Present alms!’ And we handed over all the coin we had left. I
only wished Captain Kidd had been there. He’d have learned something new
about his old game.
“I confess I had thought some of going back into the hold-up business,
just to keep my hand in, but never again now. Too much competition, and
I’m too old to learn new ways. Good-bye, young man, and if you want to
say a good word for an old man who never did you any harm, put this in
your article:
“‘Jesse James may have had his faults, but he was different from some of
the folks who are now carrying on the business—he never robbed the same
man twice.’”
X
SHAKESPEARE MENTIONS MOVIES
The thought of interviewing a gentlemanly genius like William Shakespeare
after stacking up against such remote and formidable characters as
Bluebeard, Brigham Young and Jesse James was most refreshing, though it
took some nerve after all to tackle the world’s champion dramatic poet. I
had feared he might be slightly disinclined to talk, not being familiar
with the ways of modern journalism, but I was speedily set at ease on
that point.
“Not talk for publication?” said the shade of Shakespeare, as he resumed
his seat in his Morris chair upon my entrance, and tried to look like
his pictures. “Not talk for publication? Did you ever know an actor,
playwright or a poet who wouldn’t? And I’ve been all three, and a
theatrical manager thrown in. It’s quite a while since I trod the boards,
or walked the ties, but I’ve managed to keep fairly in touch with the
times from frequent trips down below to oblige my mediumistic friends.
There’s a great boom on just now. I could get an engagement every night
in the week, and a pair of matinées, if I cared to perform. But there’s
nothing in it. If they’d let me perform in my own plays it would be
different. But there’s not much demand for them, it seems. All they’ll
let me do is play the tambourine in a dark cabinet and scribble on slates
and turn tables—just vaudeville I call it. And I see they’re beginning to
censor my plays and cut out all references to booze on account of the new
prohibition law. They made one of my actors quit giving the line: ‘I can
call spirits from the vasty deep.’ Said it gave a wrong impression and
tantalized men in the audience who thought the speaker was referring to
his private stock down cellar. Well, all the world’s a stage—and the last
time I was down I noticed most of the girls seemed to believe in making
up for their parts. Talk about fresh paint!
“But you wished me to compare modern theatrical conditions with those of
my day. This is an age of specialists, but as I have said, when I was on
earth, ‘One man in his time plays many parts.’ I used to write a play,
hire a company, rehearse it, take the leading part myself, sell tickets
at the door, usher, beat the bass drum, fill the lamps and sweep out.
I’ve died on the stage and two minutes later gone up into the top gallery
to bounce a couple of rowdies. But we were all trained to versatility
in those days. No women were allowed to act, you know. You can’t imagine
how nice and peaceful it was in our companies. Nobody ever threatened
to quit because the type of his name on the posters was an eighth of
an inch smaller than somebody else’s. Nobody ever cried all over the
stage because somebody made disparaging remarks about his complexion or
said his teeth showed he was ten years older than he claimed. But there
were disadvantages, too, from the absence of the girls. Men had to take
feminine parts. And you take an Ophelia, for instance, who chews tobacco
and is drunk half the time, and it’s hard to invest the part with the
genuine pathos it demands. I remember one time I hired a tall, gawky
youth to play the part of Desdemona. He was all right the first week,
but after that his voice suddenly began changing, and it sounded like a
phonograph record that’s had a fall and got twisted. A Desdemona with a
deep bass voice that switches to a shrill soprano without warning and
then back again to the husky rumbling in the space of thirty seconds is
bound to incur adverse criticism.
“I once had a Lady Macbeth, too, who had a habit of smoking his pipe
behind the scenes while waiting for his cue. And one time, when he
got the call, he absent-mindedly forgot to put his pipe away. It is
entirely contrary to tradition for Lady Macbeth to smoke a pipe in the
sleep-walking scene, and I had to dispense with his services the next
Saturday night. And barring absent-mindedness, he was the best Lady
Macbeth I ever had, too. I suppose our performances were pretty bum.
But there were no daily newspaper dramatic critics then, and we didn’t
know how rotten we were. Ignorance was bliss, both for us and for our
audiences. We were handicapped, also, by lack of scenery. Our property
man had a sinecure. The only ‘set’ we had consisted of a couple of
kitchen chairs and a tin pan—the latter for the thunder. We used the
chairs for thrones or mossy banks or anything else that happened to be
needed. The audience had to picture the rest of the scenery. There was
no curtain and the orchestra consisted of one performer. That insured
harmony in the orchestra. Our equipment was ahead of your modern
companies in only one respect: that of costumes. We always had plenty of
costumes, such as they were. The last time I was down below I attended
a musical comedy performance, and I was pained to observe how badly
handicapped the management was in the matter of costumes. There weren’t
half enough to go around. And the thermometer was below zero, too. As
I said, we always had enough costumes, because we used the same ones
in every performance. Everybody, from Romeo to old King Lear, wore an
antiquated red bathrobe and slippers. At least we managed to keep warm.
Unlike your modern managers, we never had to hang out the ‘Standing room
only’ sign. Nobody would have gone if he couldn’t get a seat. But I’ve
been told that nowadays theater audiences will stand for anything. I can
believe it after seeing some of your plays. As I have remarked in one of
my own compositions, ‘Sweet are the uses of advertisements.’
“But to return to our discussion. The present generation has witnessed a
wonderful addition to the dramatic art. I refer to the moving pictures.
You thought I wouldn’t be for them? I am. I think they’re wonderful. I
only wish we’d had them in my day. I’d have been able to retire about
ten years sooner. You see, the highest salary I ever got was about
twenty-five a week, and out of that I had to pay my board and traveling
expenses—everything but hauling trunks to the hotel. Then I went into
the producing game and did a little better. But even then, some Saturday
nights, the ghost didn’t walk—except the one in Hamlet. I understand the
average salary of a modern moving picture actor is a million dollars
a year and accident insurance. Newcomers learning the business draw
down nominal pay of five thou’ a week. Small my-lord-the-carriage-waits
parts get only two thousand a week, and so on down to the supes and
scene-shifters and deckhands struggling to support their families on a
hundred or so a day. I figure that the salary of a first-class movie
actor for one year would have supported in luxury all the actors of my
day for their entire lifetimes. And they’d have saved money. In my day
an actor was about the next thing to a professional pauper. Like the
dentist, he eked out a hand-to-mouth existence, but unlike the dentist he
didn’t often have the opportunity of filling an aching void—his stomach.
Life was just one bill collector after another. When anybody was needed
to play the rôle of the half-starved apothecary in Romeo and Juliet there
was no trouble finding a fellow who looked the part. There was always a
rush of volunteers for the banquet scenes—if real food was provided. But
I don’t begrudge your modern actors their prosperity. I only wish the
stuff had been handed around a little earlier. That’s all.”
“Are you so enthusiastic over the movies, Mr. Shakespeare, that you like
to have them produce your own plays? Or is that sacrilege?”
“I’d like to have my plays in the movies if they’d produce them
properly. But what makes me sore is to have them leave out all the pep.
When a play is transferred from the book or the stage to the movie,
certain necessary changes should be made. The first requirement of the
picture play is action. There’s no place for talk. Now, if they’re
going to have my plays in the movies, I wish they’d popularize ’em. For
instance, in my day there wasn’t an actor who knew how to throw a pie.
Nobody could fire a pistol without ever taking aim—the way the movie
actors do it. I hate to see my plays fail just for lack of a few pies
and pistols, artistically handled. When one of my productions is put on
the screen they engage some long-faced tragedian who’s immersed in great
gobs of gloom all the time—some impressive individual with a St. Bernard
voice that’s entirely wasted in the movies. What I say is: get somebody
like Charlie Chaplin for Romeo and Mary Pickford for Juliet, Mary Carr or
Nazimova for the nurse, and put some punch into it. Take Hamlet: imagine
Ben Turpin and his fat side kick as grave diggers! What a rattling good
duel Doug Fairbanks and Bill Hart could pull off with pistols at forty
paces! If they’re going to have my plays in the movies, then have movie
actors give them; that’s all I say. And make them real movie plays while
they’re about it.”
“One question more, Mr. Shakespeare. You have described most graphically
the seven ages of man. In view of femininity’s wonderful progress, could
you not give me a parting message on the ages of woman?”
The great dramatist pondered deeply for a moment and then replied in an
impressive tone. “Woman has only two ages nowadays,” he said with a sigh.
“Her real one and the one she uses to vote.”
His air of finality showed me that our interview was at an end.
XI
ADAM CONDEMNS FEMININE FASHIONS
I had been assigned to interview Eve on the feminine fashions of 1922,
but the maid said she was out, and so I had to fall back on old Adam
instead. I approached the father of the race not without diffidence,
feeling so painfully young and fearing he would not care to talk for
publication, but his opening remarks set me entirely at ease.
“Not care to be quoted!” he exclaimed. “I’m mighty glad of the
opportunity. I don’t have one so often, now that Eve stays home so much.
You see, she calls only on people of the first families, and they’re not
very numerous around here. The neighbors say she gives herself airs,
and so they don’t call on her. It’s been a lasting source of grief
that she’s ineligible to join the Daughters of anything. She arrived
too early on the scene. It used to be awfully galling to her to hear
the women all talking about their family trees and boasting of their
ancestors, and swapping lies about what their great-great-grandfathers
said to George Washington at the battle of San Juan Hill, or whatever
it was, and giving an expurgated edition of what George Washington said
to Lord Cornwallis, as handed down to posterity in the family records.
Eve used to sit in a corner and weep while the Daughters of the Mexican
Revolutions or the Granddaughters of Russian Independence (to be eligible
for the latter you must have an ancestor who shot at least one grand
duke, five assassinations making you an ace; and if your relative
happened to pot a Czar your social position is assured forever) were
spinning their yarns and trying to make each other jealous. But now she’s
organized a new society, the Mothers of Humanity, and she’s president,
secretary, treasurer and chairman of the committee on membership. She’s
away this afternoon calling on Mrs. Methuselah and they’re trying to get
up some scheme that will induce all the women they want to blackball to
apply for membership.
“Yes, poor Eve has had a pretty hard time right from the start, and I
don’t believe her descendants have appreciated what she did for them.
I’ll say this for her: she’s been as true as steel, even if she hasn’t
always kept her temper so well. It’s a fact that after that first little
unpleasantness she always kept a broomstick handy for any peddler who
might come along trying to sell ‘nice eating apples,’ but consider
the provocation! There we were, nicely settled in the garden, no work,
nothing to do but step out in the yard and help ourselves to all the
fruit and vegetables in sight. All the trees and vines were of the
self-cultivating variety. We’d never even heard of the high cost of
living. No family to support. No neighbors to scrap with. No money, and
no pockets to put it in if we had had, but, glorious thought! No bills
to pay. We had our little disagreements, of course. The first day she
arrived, Eve said I’d been doing the dishes the wrong way, letting ’em
all go until the end of the month and then turning the hose on ’em out
in the front yard; she insisted on washing ’em after every meal. But, as
I said, who was there to know the difference? She had to learn the names
of all the animals, and she was especially glad to hear about the bear,
so that she could tell me what I was as-cross-as when I got the grip that
first winter.
“Yes, life is real and wife is earnest, but, as I said, ours was very
happy. The first quarrel? I don’t know that I remember just what it
was about. I recall a dispute over Eve’s new bathing suit, which was
intensified by my innocent remark that it was an exceedingly small thing
to quarrel about, but I think our initial serious disagreement occurred
when I respectfully declined to go into hysterics over Cain’s first tooth.
“And this reminds me: our first social event in Eden was little Cain’s
inaugural bawl. I’m sure you’ll pardon me for getting that off my mind at
this stage of the interview. If I tried that joke on Eve once I tried it
fifty times, and every time I was met by the same blank stare. I’ve been
waiting seven thousand years to tell it to somebody who would appreciate
it. Thank you for smiling. I was the originator of the saying that women
have no sense of humor. Man was made to mourn, and he never realizes it
so keenly as when he hears a woman try to tell a funny story. I could
talk to you all day about Eve, the only girl I ever loved—because there
wasn’t any other. It didn’t take us long to get out of the Garden that
time—principally because Eve didn’t have to wait to dress. Today it would
be a different story. If clothes had been in vogue in the year one I
suppose I might have waited two hours down in the front hall while Eve
was getting ready and packing the trunks—and then probably I’d have had
to go back two or three times for something she thought she’d forgotten
after we got outside. Well, what I started to say was that little Eve
bore up bravely under her misfortunes. She put up a splendid bluff.
I’ll say that for her. Why, do you know, instead of sitting down and
bewailing her hard fate after being put out of the Garden, she actually
gave a coming out party! I certainly admired her nerve, one day, when
I overheard her telling the new neighbors that Eden was all very well
for young couples just starting housekeeping, but the neighborhood was
getting so crowded and it was so near the zoo that we just really had to
move. And then she remarked that she had never been able to get me to
take enough exercise anyway and she thought gardening would now be just
fine for me. It takes a woman to carry a thing off like that. Women are
the world’s champion bluffers and yet we men think we know how to play
poker. Why—”
“Excuse me, Mr. Adam, but I was asked to get an interview on feminine
fashions of 1922, and whether you think they have changed for the better.”
“Oh, beg pardon, I’m sure. But when I get talking about Eve my tongue
runs away with me. I suppose all married men are that way. It’s so
delightful sometimes to have the chance of talking without feeling that
you’re interrupting anybody. Feminine fashions, eh? Well, I’ve seen some
changes in the last seven thousand years. I thought nothing could shock
me any more, but I’ve had a few stiff jolts the last few months. I guess
I’m not as strong as I used to be. Back in the old days, in the garden,
fashions weren’t so much. That was before the trouble, but after we
moved, plain, simple fig-leaves became passée, hopelessly old-fashioned
and out-of-date. I read a book the other day entitled ‘How to Dress on
Nothing a Year.’ That described our case exactly, in the early, happy,
carefree days. There wasn’t a dressmaker in the world. If anybody had
mentioned the word ‘modiste’ I’d have thought it was some new kind of
animal I’d overlooked in taking the census. I wouldn’t have known what he
meant. Ever have a sewing woman come to your house and stay a week at a
time and always sit down with the family at table and be a damper on the
conversation? Well, that’s one trouble we never experienced. Eve never
came home from a walk in the woods and remarked carelessly that she’d
just seen a hat downtown that could be bought for a song, and then it
turned out that the song was ‘Old Hundred.’ Not for a minute. Nobody gave
a hang in those days what others might be wearing as the latest style.
We knew they might wear more, but they couldn’t well wear any less. When
anybody wanted a Spring or Fall outfit, all he had to do was to go out
in the woods and pick a new suit off a tree. If you were getting a bit
shabby and resolved to dress better in the future, you just turned over a
new leaf.
“Then came moving day, and what a change! First crack out of the box
the girls all began clamoring for clothes, real clothes. I remember one
hot day—the thermometer would have been registering about ninety-five,
if there had been one—the girls all set up a howl for furs—furs, mind
you, with the sun hot enough to boil a cold storage egg. I tried to
reason with ’em. ‘You don’t mean furs,’ I said, ‘you mean bathing suits
or peek-aboo waists or mosquito netting. This is summer, the hottest
weather since the year one. The heat has affected your brains. Go take
a swim in the Euphrates and cool off.’ But they insisted that they knew
what they were talking about, and so there was nothing for it but I must
shoulder my old club and go off and kill a bear and a couple of foxes and
a mink and fit ’em all out with a set of furs to wear while most folks
were busy trying to dodge sunstrokes. That was the start, I believe, of
this modern movement of the girls, wrapping themselves up in ‘summer
furs’ just as soon as the weather gets hot enough. That next winter Eve
and the girls started going around in the snow and ice in low shoes and
short, open-work stockings and wish-bone waists and pneumonia sleeves,
and defying the doctors. And that’s the worst of it, that’s what makes me
mad. The girls do defy every last rule of health when it comes to dress
and get away with it. The strongest man that ever lived couldn’t do it
without a call from the undertaker, but the girls seem to thrive on their
foolishness.
“The fashions of 1922! Well, looking at them pro and con, without
blinders or smoked glasses or anything at all, I may say that they have
nothing on the fashions of the year one. And the fashions of the year one
(I am merely stating the naked truth) had nothing on anybody. One word
more, and I trust you are strong enough to stand it: It’s all right for
the women to be eager rivals, but they ought to draw the line at trying
to outstrip each other.”
The next thing I knew I was in the ambulance headed for the Olympus
Homeopathic Hospital. Old Adam had done his worst.
XII
CAPTAIN KIDD ON TAG DAYS